The universe was created by a God who is holy and righteous.
It is also governed and ruled by such a God, and if this God is holy and if He is righteous, how in the world can He tolerate so much evil in it? Skeptics challenge the consistency of the Christian worldview. They argue that evil could not have originated in a universe created by a good God.
They reason that since evil does exist, the universe could not have been created by God. This challenge is not new. So today and all this week on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. R.C. Sproul and several other trusted teachers tackled the tough questions that Christians face. Today's message is, What is evil and where did it come from? I have been given two questions to address, each of which would be worthy of a lengthy series to consider, but we'll give you a little introduction to these questions. And the first of the questions is, What is evil?
The second question is, Where did it come from? But the first part of the question is, What is evil? And my immediate response to that in presidential fashion is to say, It depends upon what the meaning of is.
Now, that's really not a joke. I'm serious about that because there are different ways in which we use the verb is as a verb to be, and when we're dealing with the question of what is evil, we face immediately the issue of whether evil really is at all. And that might seem strange to you, but my first assertion this morning is that evil isn't. That is, it is not. Why? Because evil is nothing.
Am I going too fast? Evil is nothing. Now lest you think that I've fallen into Christian science, a religion that's neither Christian nor science, where the reality of evil is denied altogether and considered to be an illusion, I want to clarify what I mean when I say evil is not or that evil is nothing.
Before I do that, let me tell you a story of an occasion where I was asked to debate a spokesperson for Christian science on this question of the nature of evil, and the position of my opponent that day was that evil is an illusion. And so in the course of that discussion, I asked him a question, did he think that I was an illusion? Was I a Fig Newton of his imagination? And he declared that he did not think that I was an illusion. He considered that I was real. And I said, remember, we're really having this discussion here, and I am saying that evil is not an illusion, and you are saying that it is an illusion. And my simple question is this. Do you think it's good that I am saying that evil is not an illusion? He said, no. I said, well, if it's not good that I'm saying that, it must be bad, and so here's one example of an evil that is not an illusion.
And it sort of went downhill after that. But what do I mean when I say that evil is nothing? What I mean by that is I'm taking the word nothing and resting upon its etymological derivation where the term nothing comes from the combination of a negative prefix and a subject, and the word nothing really means no thing. And the reason I want to stress that point is so that in the culture, we get the idea that evil is some kind of independent substance, something that is in your drinking water or in the clouds somewhere, some force or power that is independent that exists in and of Himself and influences the affairs of your life and of this world. And so the first thing we have to say about what evil is is what it is not. It is not a thing that has that has existence. Evil has no being.
It has no ontological status. Rather, evil is an action of something that is a thing. I am something.
You are something. And when I do something that is not good, then I am doing something that is evil. But evil then is an activity of some being. It has no being itself. Now that may seem like a pedantic point and of no immediate concern to the second question of where evil comes from, but later on, God willing, I'll try to indicate why our definition of evil is so important to the deeper question of where it comes from.
Now back to the idea of its nothingness. Historically, the two great theologian philosophers in the history of the church who have addressed the question of what is evil were, of course, Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine before him. And both Augustine and Aquinas used two Latin words to describe the nature of evil, and those two words were negatio and privatio. And you can guess the translation of those two Latin words.
Privatio comes into the English language with the word privation, and negatio comes into the English language with the word negation. And so historically and classically, the nature of evil has been defined in terms of negation and privation. In philosophy and in theology, one of the most important ways in which we try to give definitions to things that are mysterious is by using the method called the way of negation, and that method talks in terms of what something is not. For example, when we talk about the character and the being of God, we say that God is infinite.
What does that mean? Well, that means He is not finite. And so what Augustine and Aquinas were getting at is that to discuss the nature of evil, we have to first understand it by way of negation, by what it is not. Now evil in this sense can only be defined against the backdrop of what is good, and in biblical terms, evil is defined by words like this, ungodliness, unrighteousness, injustice, for example, so that the term is used as the negation, the opposite of the positive thing that's being affirmed, so that injustice or unjustness can only be understood against the previous concept of justice.
Unrighteousness can only be recognized as unrighteousness against the background of righteousness as the standard by which unrighteousness can be recognized and can be defined. I think that's pretty easy to see that the way in which negative language is used to describe evil. In this sense, the great theologians would indicate that evil is parasitic. It's like a parasite.
It can't be known in and of itself as some independent being, but can only be known and understood against the positive standard. And like a parasite, if the host dies, the parasite dies with it, because the parasite depends upon the host for its own strength and existence. And in like manner and in an analogical way, the same thing is true of evil as that you can't really describe it, you can't really define it except against the background of the good. Now the other word that is used by Augustine and Aquinas is the word privation. And what a privation is, is some sort of lack or some sort of deficiency.
If you don't get something that you want, that doesn't mean that you're experiencing deprivation, but if you don't get something that you need, then it can be properly said that you have been deprived, that you are lacking something that is necessary and essential to your very being. If we go to the Westminster Confession of Faith, the seventeenth-century Reformed Confession, and its catechetical formulations in the Westminster Larger Catechism, and then in the shorter catechism, you have the simple question that is asked, what is sin? What is sin? Sin is any want of conformity to or transgression of the law of God. So there, confessionally, sin or moral evil is defined in terms of a lack, of a probation, of a want of conformity to. Righteousness involves conforming to the law of God, doing what God commands. But sin enters in when we fail to do what God commands, and we fail to conform to His standards of what is righteous. And so on the one hand, the catechism says that sin is a want of conformity to, which is a kind of privatio, a kind of privation, or transgression of the law of God. Now we're moving out of simple privation and simple negation to another element, an element that the Reformers of the sixteenth century added to the classic definition of evil. They agreed that evil is negation and is privation, but lest anyone should think that because evil has no being, no independent status, is not a thing, and lest because of that we come to the conclusion that evil really is an illusion, the Reformers said that yes, sin is negation or evil is negation, evil is privation, but they added another Latin term.
Don't they always? Huh? They added the term actuosa. That is to say, evil is privatio actuosa, meaning that though evil is not something that exists in and of itself, it is real, and its effects and its impact are devastating. There is an actual privation.
That is an activated privation, an activated disobedience to the Word of God, and because real beings act out real evil, though evil is not independent, nevertheless it is real. Am I making sense? Are you getting that? Are you understanding that point? Is it too obscure?
Of course not. You all get it, don't you? So that's where we start with this question of what is evil and where does it come from.
That's the easy part of the two questions. The second part of the question has to do with the origin of evil and how evil could intrude into a universe created by a God who is altogether holy, altogether righteous, and not only is this universe created by such a God, it is also governed and ruled by such a God, and if this God is holy and if He is righteous, how in the world can He tolerate so much evil in it? The origin of evil has been called the Achilles' heel of Christianity, and that analysis or that analogy goes back to the Iliad and to the Battle of Troy where Achilles could only be wounded in one place, and that was at the back of his heel, which was the only part of his body that was not protected by his armor. And so when we say that something is the Achilles' heel, we mean that it is the supreme point of vulnerability, and critics of Christianity have said where the Christian truth claim is most vulnerable is at this point of the presence of evil in a world allegedly made and governed by a good and holy God. Now sometimes as Christians we fail to feel the weight of that problem. The philosopher John Stuart Mill put it this way, the presence of evil makes the very existence of God problematic because in the Christian view of God we say that on the one hand God is omnipotent.
He possesses all power. On the other hand, we say that God is loving and good. And Mill looks at the pain and the sorrow and the suffering and the moral evil in this world, and he said, wait a minute, these two ideas, the goodness of God and the omnipotence of God in light of the reality of evil cannot logically cohere or coexist.
His argument is this. If God is all-powerful and has the power to create a universe without evil, or has the power to rid the universe of evil at any given moment, if He has the power to do it and He doesn't do it, then He's not good or He's not loving. Because what kind of being who has omnipotent power could stand by and observe the pain and the suffering and wickedness in a universe of His own creation and not eliminate it?
He can't be good. On the other hand, God is good, and God is loving, and wants to get rid of evil that brings so much of a blemish to His creation, like the BP oil spill that everybody recognizes is a disaster, and God would see it as a disaster, and He would love to see it cleaned up, but He doesn't have the power to do it. So do you see one way or the other, God's either not good or He's not all-powerful? Now I think there's an adequate answer to that question, but before I go any further to answer the question of where evil came from, I have to give my short answer to the question, my down and dirty answer to the question, where did evil come from? And my answer is this, I don't know.
So maybe it's time for me to just sit down and shut up. But what I want to do in the time remaining is to tell you why I don't know. Forty years ago, I was giving a lecture on this subject back in Pittsburgh, and in the audience was my mentor, Dr. John Gerstner, and he heard me say on that occasion these things. I said, I don't know how to explain the origin of evil, and what else I can tell you is that I'm sure that in this world I will never be able to answer that question.
I don't know of any philosopher or theologian who has answered it adequately, at least to satisfy my mind, and I'm sure I'm not going to go beyond the insights of Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Luther, Edwards, and the rest who have wrestled with this. When I was finished, my mentor took me aside, and he was somewhat pained and visibly irritated with me, and I said, What's the matter? And he said, What's the matter is your arrogance. I said, My arrogance?
What did I do? He said, You told these people that you didn't know where evil came from and that you couldn't explain the problem, and that's fine, but you're only thirty years old, and you assume that you have already reached the saturation point of all the knowledge that you will ever acquire in your lifetime. How do you know, R.C. Sproul, that you won't be able to solve this problem tomorrow? I said, Because Aquinas couldn't do it, Aquinas couldn't do it, and Augustine couldn't do it, and Edwards couldn't do it, and you can't do it, and these guys are so much more intelligent than I am, I'm trying to tell you I don't think there's much likelihood that I'm going to solve a conundrum that they were unable to resolve.
But I'll leave you with this thought. Though I don't know or fully understand the origin of evil, I do know the future of it. I do know that it has been overcome and that God will rid this universe of all moral evil, physical evil, and metaphysical evil as we grow up into the fullness of Christ and inhabit in a new heaven and a new earth.
And where there is no more crying, no more death, death shall be no more, no more pain, and no more sin. When we hear someone say that the existence of evil is the Achilles heel of Christianity, it can cause us to pause and take stock. Are we personally equipped to answer an objection like that?
We're thankful for Dr. R.C. Sproul's clear answer today here on Renewing Your Mind. All week we're featuring highlights of the 2010 Ligonier Ministries National Conference, where several speakers address the topic, tough questions Christians face. So how do we equip ourselves to give a reasoned defense of the faith? We must understand the things of God in order to understand the questions coming from our culture. That means a committed study of theology. Some might say, I don't need theology.
I just need to love God. Well, if you love God, you'll want to know as much as you can about Him, and that's what theology is. It's the study of God.
Dr. Sproul maintained that everyone's a theologian, and he even wrote a book by that title. He surveys the basic truths of the Christian faith, reminding us once more of what God is like and what He has done for His people in this world and the next. This paperback edition of Everyone's a Theologian is available to you today for a gift of any amount.
You can reach out to us and make your request online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us with your gift at 800-435-4343. And in advance, let me thank you for your generosity. Tomorrow, as we continue with sessions from our conference, Dr. Stephen Lawson answers the question, Is the Bible just another book? The rational argument should be known by each one of us here today. There needs to be more going in our heads than simply, I was raised this way, or I was brought up this way. There needs to be some strong pillars that uphold our convictions that the Bible is the very Word of God. I hope you'll join us Tuesday for Renewing Your Mind.
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