Not enough rocks (a pastoral response to the problem of evil)

“If God is God why would he allow me to be adopted into a family that would raise me to do terrible things?”

I was recently asked this by a former inmate of the Barron County Jail. He was adopted when he was three years old and according to him when he got older his adopted father forced him to do some pretty perverse things that now in his 50s he has great shame about. Why, he asked me, would God allow that? Why would God, he inferred, stand by and let that happen?

As a pastor of a small rural congregation, I don't sit around contemplating a good apologetic for God and the problem of evil. It's not that I have not encountered evil in my nearly twenty-eight years of pastoral ministry. I certainly have. I've buried a young woman who died of cancer way before her time and another who suffered from mental illness and later shot herself. My work as a volunteer for both our local food shelf and with the Salvation Army has brought me up close and personal to the ugliness that poverty can create in families and individuals. My service at the Barron County Jail as a chaplain has taught me the reality and power of generational sin. No, I may not live in the 'hood but in these idyllic woods in which we live sin abounds and scars and works havoc in people's lives.

Many years ago our neighbor's son was tragically killed in a car accident. Raised in the Baptist church, he had not been a part of fellowship for several years and at the time of his death he was living with his girlfriend in another community. He wasn't drunk. It was simple negligence on his part. He didn't look twice before he entered the median of the highway before a truck slammed into his car killing him instantly. It was, literally, an accident. At his funeral my neighbor's pastor said, “It was all part of a greater plan”, that God “allowed this to happen” and that even though we mourn we are comforted because “he's with the Lord now because when he was at Bible camp as a teen he had made his profession of faith.” I've never asked his mother if those words brought her comfort but admittedly sitting out in the congregation that morning my first thought was, “Are you saying that God willed for this kid to be killed by a truck?” To be fair, I'm not sure what I would have said if I had been the one presiding at that gathering but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be to opine that his death by truck was part of some greater plan of God's. Maybe at times like that it's better to be a Calvinist.

When we're born we don't start at zero. That is to say that none of us are a 'blank slate' when we come into this world. We are a born into a family, for better or for worse, that depending on the health of that family we will be nurtured or we will be corrupted. A few months back I sat in PV 1 at the jail listening to a 38-year-old guy I'll call CJ tell his story. He was a crack baby which means he was screwed even before he was born. The womb is supposed to be one of the safest places on earth but in his case his own mother caused him to be an addict long before he took his first breath. His father was no better and was long gone by the time CJ was a toddler. His mother was incapable of raising him (later dying of an overdose) and so he was brought up in the foster care system bounced around from one family to another. Somewhere along the way he became a user and then later a dealer. At the time of our conversation he was looking at the potential of over two decades of incarceration for his crimes.

As I listened to his story I was struck by the fact that though we were only sitting across the table from one another a great chasm of life experiences separated us. I was born into a nuclear family where both my parents were committed to their faith and to one another. I was born on a Friday which means by the following Sunday I was in church and no doubt baptized soon after. My parents loved me, provided for me, disciplined me when I needed it, made sure I went to school and church regular as clockwork. We went on family vacations and from time to time Dairy Queen on a Sunday night in the summertime. That's what I mean when I say we don't all start at zero. Compared to CJ, I was born at +50. Compared to me, CJ was born at -25. I was set up to succeed in life whereas he was set up to fail. Why me and not him? How is it that I was fortunate to be born into a good family while CJ a bad one (and the guy mentioned at the beginning of this post as well)?

Honestly, I don't know. But while listening to CJ's story I was reminded (again!) how fortunate and blessed I have been in being raised in the family I was. I won't for a second attribute my circumstances to luck and his to bad luck. “Sucks to be you” would be horrible commentary on CJ's condition. But mysteries abound in the life of faith and frankly most of the time I know better than to offer an opinion as to why bad things happen to good people – and, for that matter, bad. The thing theologically referred to as the Fall is enough answer for me. God created a perfect world and his original plan was to fill it with free-will agents who would willingly choose him. But that plan involved risk that those same free-will agents would choose to not follow him. And thus we have the command:

“You can eat from any tree in the garden, except from the Tree-of-Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil. Don’t eat from it. The moment you eat from that tree, you’re dead.” (Gen 2:16-17, Msg)

Of course, we know how that ended and thus we inherited the world we chose now full of sin and disease and heartbreak and death. We wanted to run the show ourselves – to be our own bosses – and the rest is history – and how sad that history has been at times. That some people live their whole lives relatively untouched by the world's sorrows I attribute to God's goodness. That others seem to experience trouble unlooked for or undeserved I'll attribute to man's propensity to lash out at his neighbor, the work of corrupted structures like government or just part of the reality of how “the rain falls on the just and the unjust” (Matt 5). As someone reminded me once, “We're not living in the Garden of Eden, you know. We're not even next door to it.”

...there is a distinction between the “pastoral”...problem of people

struggling to make sense of suffering and evil in their lives and the lives of others close to them, and the philosophical problem of showing the congruence (or at least compatibility) of the existence of evil with the existence, power, and goodness of God. These are not the same problem... William Hasker in God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views (p. 151)

I agree. Most of the people who come to me with their questions (when they do come at all) aren't really looking for me to give them a good answer when, in truth, good answers don't abound. They just want to be heard and have their pastor acknowledge that sometimes the math in life doesn't add up. I have learned to tread carefully in the presence of suffering. Pat answers won't do. And frankly, I don't usually feel like I have to defend God. He's a big God and he can defend himself if he needs to. Instead I try and mimic Job's posture who in the face of divine rebuke contritely responded, “I babbled on about things far beyond me, made small talk about wonders way over my head.” (Job 42). So, I simply try to listen and be a representative of the God who is Immanuel, “God-In-It-with-Us.” It provokes me to silently pray the biblical prayer, “How long, O Lord, how long?” while at the same time it reminds me something that Forrest Gump once said, “Sometimes, I guess there's just not enough rocks.”