I thought long and hard about the angle with which I'd approach the topic of Blog Action Day. I considered a post about how I, an upper-middle class white male living in the United States and having essentially little or no dealings with "the poor," am utterly unworthy to even speak of such an issue.

I decided ultimately to incorporate that unworthiness into my topic, and to allow someone to speak on the issue who, in my humble opinion, is worthy and has earned the right to do so.

So here's a snippet from N.T. Wright that concerns, generally, the presence of evil in the world and how the Gospel of Jesus Christ speaks to that general issue. It, I believe, is the proper angle from which to view a biblical response to "The Problem of Evil" (and you can replace the term "Evil" here with "Poverty," "Starvation," "Oppression," "Genocide," "Injustice," etc.), i.e., the question of why a good God would allow "evil" (or poverty, or oppression, or injustice, etc.) to exist.

Theologies of the cross, of atonement, have not in my view grappled sufficiently with the larger problem of evil, as normally conceived. Conversely, those who have written about “the problem of evil” within philosophical theology have not normally grappled sufficiently with the cross as part of both the analysis and the solution of that problem. The two have been held apart, in a mismatch, with “the problem of evil” on the one hand being conceived simply in terms of “how could a good and powerful God allow evil into the world in the first place?” and “the atonement” on the other hand being seen in terms simply of personal forgiveness. Much modern Christian thought has accepted the framework offered by the Enlightenment, in which the Christian faith rescues people from the evil world, ensuring them forgiveness in the present and heaven hereafter. The Enlightenment-based wider world has then accepted that evaluation of the Christian faith — not surprisingly, since it was driving it in the first place — and so has not thought it necessary to factor in Christian theology to its own discussions of “the problem of evil.”

How, after all, does a hymn like “There is a green hill far away” have anything at all to say to a world dumbstruck in horror at the first world war, at Auschwitz, at Hiroshima, at 9-11?

With this in mind, we need to re-read the Gospels as what they are. People often observe that there is not that much “atonement-theology” in the Gospels. Mark’s “theology of the cross” often seemed to be reduced to one key verse, 10:45, which speaks of the Son of Man coming “to give his life a ransom for many.” The Lord’s Supper gave hints towards an atonement-theology, and the crucifixion narratives, especially in their evocation of biblical allusions, provided some further elements. But for the most part the Gospels, as read within the mainstream tradition both of scholarship and of church life, had little to contribute, except as a general narrative backcloth to an atonement theology grounded elsewhere, in Paul, Hebrews, and 1 Peter.

But when we read the Gospels in a more holistic fashion, we find that they tell a double story, drawing together the themes I have spoken of so far. They tell the story of how the evil in the world — political, social, personal, moral, emotional — reached its height; and they tell how God’s long-term plan for Israel — and for himself! — finally came to its climax. And they tell both of these stories in and as the story of how Jesus of Nazareth announced God’s kingdom and went to his violent death. The Gospels, read in this way, offer us both a richer theology of atonement than we are used to and also a deeper understanding of the problem of evil itself and what can and must be done about it in our own day. The Gospels have more to say about terrorism and tsunamis than we might imagine.

Watch as they tell how all the varied forces of evil are involved in putting Jesus on the cross. They tell how the political powers of the world reached their full, arrogant height: Rome and Herod stand in the near background of the story, and so, too, does Caiaphas and his corrupt Jerusalem regime. All three come into focus as the cross comes closer. So, too, the Gospels tell the story of corruption within Israel itself. The Pharisees offer a hard-edged interpretation of Torah which excludes the inbreaking of God’s kingdom through Jesus. The revolutionaries try to get in on the act of God’s inbreaking kingdom, but they, the terrorists of their day, try to fight violence with violence and so merely collude with the real problem of evil. The death of Jesus, when it comes, is the work not only of the pagan nations but of the Israel that has reduced itself to saying that it has no king but Caesar.

The Gospels also tell the story in terms of the deeper, darker demonic forces which operate at a supra-personal level. These forces operate through all of the human elements I’ve mentioned, but cannot be reduced to terms of them. The shrieking demons that yell at Jesus, that rush at him out of the tombs, are signs that a battle has been joined at a more than personal level. The stormy sea, the miniature but deadly tsunamis on Galilee, evoke ancient Israelite imagery of an evil which is more than the sum total of present wrongdoing and woe. “The power of darkness” to which Jesus alludes immediately before his betrayal suggests that on that night evil was being given a free rein to do its worst, with the soldiers, the betrayer, the muddle disciples and the corrupt court its mere instruments. The mocking bystanders as Jesus hangs on the cross (“If you are the son of God . . .”) echo the taunting, tempting voice that had whispered in the desert. The power of death itself, the ultimate denial of the goodness of creation, speaks of a force of destruction, of anti-world, anti-God power being allowed to do its worst. The Gospels tell this whole story in order to say that the tortured young Jewish prophet hanging on the cross was the point where evil, including the violence of terror and the non-human forces that work through creation, had become truly and fully and totally itself.

The Gospels tell the story of the downward spiral of evil. One thing leads to another; the remedy offered against evil has itself the germ of evil within it, so that its attempt to put things right merely produces second-order evil. And so on. Judas’s betrayal and Peter’s denial are simply among the last twists of this story, with the casual injustice of Caiaphas and Pilate and the mocking of the crowds at the cross tying all the ends together.

Once we learn to read the Gospels in this holistic fashion, we hear them telling us that the death of Jesus is the result both of the major political evil of the world, the power games which the world was playing as it still does, and of the dark, accusing forces which stand behind those human and societal structures, forces which accuse creation itself of being evil, and so try to destroy it while its creator is longing to redeem it. The Gospels tell the story of Jesus’ death as the story of how the downward spiral of evil finally hit the bottom, with the violent and bloody execution of this man, this prophet who had announced God’s kingdom.

The Gospels thus tell the story of Jesus, and particularly of his death, as the story of how cosmic and global evil, in its supra-personal as well as personal forms, are met by the sovereign, saving love of Israel’s God, YHWH, the creator of the world. They write intentionally to draw the whole Old Testament narrative to its climax, seeing that narrative precisely as the story of God’s strange and dark solution to the problem of evil from Genesis 3 onwards. What the Gospels offer is not a philosophical explanation of evil, what it is or why it’s there, but the story of an event in which the living God deals with it. Like the exodus from Egypt, or the return from Babylon, only now with fully cosmic reach, God has rescued his people from the dark powers of chaos. The sea monsters have done their worst, and God has vindicated his people and put creation to rights. And he has done so through the suffering of Israel’s representative, the Messiah. This is what it looks like when YHWH says, as in Exodus 4, “I have heard the cry of my people, and I have come down to set them free.” This is what it looks like when YHWH says “Behold, my servant.” As Isaiah says later (chapter 59), it was no messenger, no angel, but his own presence that saved them; in all their affliction he was afflicted. God chose the appropriate and necessarily deeply ambiguous route of acting from within his creation, from within his chosen people, to take the full force of evil upon himself and so exhaust it. And the result is that the covenant is renewed; that sins are forgiven; that the long night of sorrow, exile and death is over and the new day has dawned. New creation has begun, the new world in which violence will be overcome and the sea will be no more.

The Gospels thus tell the story, unique in the world’s great literature, religious theories, and philosophies: the story of the creator God taking responsibility for what’s happened to creation, bearing the weight of its problems on his own shoulders. As Sydney Carter put it in one of his finest songs, “It’s God they ought to crucify, instead of you and me.” Or, as one old evangelistic tract put it, the nations of the world got together to pronounce sentence on God for all the evils in the world, only to realize with a shock that God had already served his sentence. The tidal wave of evil crashed over the head of God himself. The spear went into his side like a plane crashing into a great building. God has been there. He has taken the weight of the world’s evil on his own shoulders. This is not an explanation. It is not a philosophical conclusion. It is an event in which, as we gaze on in horror, we may perhaps glimpse God’s presence in the deepest darkness of our world, God’s strange unlooked-for victory over the evil of our world; and then, and only then, may glimpse also God’s vocation to us to work with him on the new solution to the new problem of evil.

In other words, we are all responsible, morally responsible, for poverty, which is why I feel so unworthy to speak about it. The innocent kid starving this morning in sub-Saharan Africa is not God's fault, it's my fault, and your's, and Uncle Harry's...

But Someone has done something about it. The One, the only one, who was not responsible for it, has done something about it.

And the amazing thing, the baffling, mind-numbing thing is that He now invites us, us, the ones responsible for the problem in the first place, to work with Him on implementing the solution that He has inaugurated.

Redemption?

Salvation?

Forgiveness?

Mission?

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!!

Grace and Peace,
Raffi

NOTE: For a fresh, new word on this issue from the mind and mouth of N.T. Wright, stay tuned. I'll be heading up to San Francisco tomorrow morning to catch a debate (dialogue?) between N.T. Wright and Bart Ehrman on the topic of The Problem of Evil. I'm gonna try to record the event and post that recording here on Friday (if I figure out how this whole podcasting thing works by then). See you back here on Friday, then...God willing.