Does Good Depend on Evil?

I recently ran across the following quotation originally written by Jonathan Edwards:

If it were not right that God should decree and permit and punish sin, there could be no manifestation of God’s holiness in hatred of sin, or in showing any preference, in his providence, of godliness before it. There would be no manifestation of God’s grace or true goodness, if there was no sin to be pardoned, no misery to be saved from. How much happiness soever he bestowed, his goodness would not be so much prized and admired. …

So evil is necessary, in order to the highest happiness of the creature, and the completeness of that communication of God, for which he made the world; because the creature’s happiness consists in the knowledge of God, and the sense of his love. And if the knowledge of him be imperfect, the happiness of the creature must be proportionately imperfect.

Other quotations from other like-minded sources seem to agree with Edwards that evil is necessary for the fullness of God’s glory to be revealed. In other words, without evil, God’s nature could not be fully revealed.

This is similar to a common view that we need to suffer in order to be grateful for the good things we receive. In general, we can state this idea as “good is dependent on evil for its full realization.”

We should understand that this view violates a theological postulate regarding God: God is complete in himself, and does not require anything outside himself to be fully realized in himself. This is one of the arguments for the Trinity — because God is love, he must have relationality in his nature in order to be love.

The problem with Edwards’ view is that it sees God in negative terms. For example, God’s holiness is “hatred of sin” and so for God to be holy he must have sin to hate. But this mistakes the very nature of sin and of God himself.

It might help if we focus on the notion of justice. We are often told, when discussing the atonement, that “God is love, but he is also just,” and therefore he cannot simply forgive sin. In my view, this is a negative view of justice — it sees justice as inherently adversarial. But this is the wrong way to look at one of God’s attributes. Every attribute of God must be positive — it must affirm being; it must be good. And so with justice.

Justice, seen in its correct positive light, is God’s determination that every part of his creation should fully realize its being. In his wisdom he has set things up so this is possible. The fullest expression of my being will necessarily correlate with your fullest expression of your being. Creation is not a zero-sum game. We all add to the glory of creation and of the Creator by being what he made us to be.

Thus justice in the ideal is fully positive. There is no enemy to be opposed and punished. Justice only takes on a negative cast when wills opposed to God’s purposes appear. Such wills seek their own expression at the expense of others.

An example of this is slavery: I am enabled to live in luxury at the expense of someone else’s freedom. I seek the expression and fulfillment of my will in such a way that it prevents others from doing the same. My being becomes opposed to the being of others.

In the presence of wills opposed to his — what we call sin — things become complicated. Most importantly, God, having given free will, must deal justly with the consequences of the expression of that free will even when free wills seek to oppose his will. This must be seen primarily in positive terms: God, to be righteous, must “make it right” for those whom sin would harm. This is the fundamental issue of justice, and it brings the so-called “problem of evil” into sharp focus. I will discuss this a bit later.

Someone who exercises his will against God’s will (eventually) encounter God’s justice in negative terms. God opposes those who exercise their will to harm others. He does not oppose their being as such; nor does he remove their free will or ability to oppose him, except to the extent that their actions create self-destructive consequences. But he does intervene.

We see that God’s justice is oriented in a positive direction: he intends that everything he has made have the opportunity to be to the fullest what he made it to be. This is implicit in creation. But by making wills independent of his, he brought about the possibility that those wills might oppose his. Because his will is the ultimate good of every being, wills opposed to his can only make things worse.

This is the problem of evil. If God is all-powerful, and all-good, how can he allow wills independent of his own to make things worse?

As I already said, God takes upon himself the obligation to make things right in the face of wills opposed to his own. But this seems to be an inescapable dilemma. If he allows true freedom to the point of opposition, how can he make it so that evil does not work to the detriment of those who are harmed by it?

In order to see how this works, we must understand the following. First, evil is not a thing in itself. It is not a principle equal and opposite to good. Rather, it is a parasite on being, and gains all its power from being. If evil had nothing upon which to work, it could not act at all. Thus we see that evil is dependent on good (expressed as being). In fact, evil is simply the desire to unmake creation — to undo what God has done, to unsay the Word of power that brought all things into being. One sees that in doing so, evil opposes itself, effectively sawing off the branch upon which it sits. Thus evil as an ultimate goal can only be the quest for nothing.

Second, God’s response to evil’s challenge to being is the same as his response to nothingness in the first place: creation. This second creation we call redemption. The Bible speaks of it as “new creation”.

In redemption we see the many ways that God says his Yes in response to the no that evil says to being. God never says “no” to anything — even to the evil person he says “Yes, I will allow you to be what you choose to be even if it means your destruction.” Through redemption he offers at every point the possibility that his Yes might crash into a dead-end situation and transform it into life. The worst sinner, the man who has dedicated his life to opposing God, can hear God’s Yes and through it unsay the destruction that would otherwise be his fate.

We see the explicit way that God’s Yes swallows up evil in Joseph’s statement to his brothers that “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” God’s creative power and wisdom is seen in his ability to “re-purpose” evil. And of course the greatest example of this is seen in Jesus’ death on the cross. In that moment evil sought not only to unmake creation, but to strike at the very heart of God’s being. God fought that battle, not by denying the “no” of evil, but by taking that very “no” and making it part of his Yes. For at the cross Christ battled not just to overcome death, or to escape it, but to make it his own, and thereby make it a way for God to say Yes to the human condition. Through Christ’s death we die to and are freed from that which would kill us — sin, the world, the flesh, even the law — and we become alive to God’s new life.

It is clear that God is glorified through redemption. But was the evil that brought about redemption necessary for us to see God’s glory? I think not.

I think that, since redemption is an aspect of creation, all of redemption was implicit in creation itself. God did not change his way of dealing with things — he did not start saying “no” instead of “yes.” What we did see is the power of his Yes and the way creation can overcome the challenge of non-being that evil represented. But we see this in every moment of creation — every time that which is not becomes that which is. Rather than seeing new aspects of God’s character that would not be manifested without evil, we see the power of what God has been doing all along. And in eternity we will have time to appreciate God’s glory in all its aspects. Evil is only a brief detour; as Paul says, “this momentary light affliction is working for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” God’s Yes is always far out of proportion to the “no” that evil says. “Where sin abounded, grace superabounded.”

One final note. In spite of the glorious Yes that God says in the face of evil, there is still tragedy. The Bible gives every indication that there are still those who will say “no” to God in spite of it all. Jesus wept over Jerusalem and said, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! Behold, your house is forsaken. …”

As George MacDonald once said, “Heaven is where we say to God, ‘Your will be done.’ Hell is when God says to us, ‘Your will be done.'” Romans tells us that God’s wrath consists in his abandonment of us to the consequences of what we choose. While it is clear that God did everything to make repentance and redemption possible, there are still those who will not turn and be saved. This is the tragedy of evil, and it was not and is not necessary.