In 1927, Thornton Wilder wrote The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a book about a bridge that broke and killed five Peruvians in July 1714. The story centers around a Francis can priest, Father Juniper, who convinced that nothing in God's universe happens by accident determined to study the lives of the five to show the providence and wisdom of God, even amid tragedy.
"It seemed to Brother Juniper that it was high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences and he long intended putting it there." 1
Father Juniper was doing what theologians for centuries have done, and that is to try and establish a theodicy, to show the justice and goodness of God despite evil and suffering. To borrow the words from Alexander Pope, he was seeking to "vindicate the ways of God to man"2 or (from John Milton) to "assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to man."3 Scripture, too, touches on the theme, such as when David asks the Lord for forgiveness in order that "you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge" (Ps. 51:4).
The great controversy motif is, meanwhile, also a theodicy. "Evil must be permitted to come to maturity," wrote Ellen White. "For the good of the entire universe through ceaseless ages Satan must more fully develop his principles, that his charges against the divine government might be seen in their true light by all created beings, that the justice and mercy of God and the immutability of His law might forever be placed beyond all question."4
Central to my understanding of theodicy, of the vindication of the character of God despite human suffering, is the idea that all our questions about evil will be answered with the kind of certainty and finality found in algebra or geometry. I always believed we would get definitive answers that would explain, with perfect logic and clarity, every instance of evil anyone ever faced.
Now, though, I'm not so sure. Maybe all these things won't be answered because, given the nature of evil itself, they can't be. Maybe we've been looking for explanations about what is, essentially, inexplicable.
To explain is to justify
What incited this shift in thinking was a line in Susan Neiman's Evil in Modem Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Though the section itself was about Karl Marx, and the line ("A theodicy justifies the happiness of the powerful and the suffering of the powerless"5) was in the context of economics and class warfare, the sentiment immediately made me think of Ellen White's statements: "It is impossible to so explain the origin of sin as to give a reason for its existence. . . .Sin is an intruder, for whose presence no reason can be given. It is mysterious, unaccountable; to excuse it, is to defend it. Could excuse for it be found, or cause be shown for its existence, it would cease to be sin." 6
Though her words deal with the origin of sin and evil, doesn't the principle still apply? Can evil be excused any more than can sin, the foundation of evil? Would not explaining evil, like sin, be to excuse or justify it?
Imagine this: A woman gets to heaven. After an explanation has been given for all the evil she suffered, she replies, "Oh, Jesus, yes, now I know why my 16-year-old daughter was raped and murdered before my eyes. It makes perfect sense. Thank You so much for explaining it all!"
Or someone else, "Oh, yes, Lord, now I understand why my whole family was machined gunned in the war. How sensible and clear! I wouldn't have had it any other way now that I know why."
That's obscene. Yet what other choice exists if we assume, as I always did, that a reason and rationale must be behind all evil? If everything is to be answered, then everything must be answer able, explicable, even justifiable.
Did God arrange for three thousand specific individuals to be together in order to die on September 11? Either He did, and it was all part of His providence, or there was no rationale, reason, or justification for the tragedy. The second alternative seems easier to accept, and more plausible, than the first.
Does this position imply, then, that God doesn't have an explanation for all evil? Yes. If something is, by definition, inexplicable, then it can't be explained, period. If God can explain it, then it's not inexplicable and are we limiting God by the assertion that the inexplicable can't exist in His universe? Omnipotence doesn't mean the ability to do what's logically impossible, and if something is by nature inexplicable, then even God can't explain it.
Theodicy
Fair enough, but does God not give that woman whose daughter was raped, or the person whose family was machine gunned, or the one who lost a spouse in 9/11 answers? Are they just left with nothing? What kind of theodicy is that?
The key is found (I believe) in the definition of "theodicy." Theodicy means the justification of God, not the justification of evil, a crucial distinction. Sin and evil won't be justified; God will, and central to that explanation is the Cross. Only under the overwhelming reality of Christ crucified, of the Creator in human flesh suffering with suffering humanity, can we begin to understand how God could stand vindicated in the eyes Of all the universe, including the part that has suffered so greatly from sin and evil.
Ellen White, in the context of the great controversy ended, gets to the heart of the answer: "Never will it be for gotten that He whose power created and upheld the unnumbered worlds through the vast realms of space, the Beloved of God, the Majesty of heaven, He whom cherub and shining seraph delighted to adore humbled himself to uplift fallen man; that He bore the guilt and shame of sin, and the hiding of His Father's face, till the woes of a lost world broke His heart and crushed out His life on Calvary's cross. That the Maker of all worlds, the Arbiter of all destinies, should lay aside His glory and humiliate Himself from love to man will ever excite the wonder and adoration of the universe." 7
Notice, "the woes of a lost world" crushed out the life of the "Maker of all worlds." Isaiah, talking about the Cross, says that Jesus bore "our griefs and carried our sorrows" (Isa. 53:4). The Hebrew word translated "griefs" (holi) is "sickness, disease," while the word translated "sorrow" (makov) is "pain, physical pain, mental pain." Whose pain, whose sickness, disease, and woe did He bear at the Cross? The whole world's, of course. Thus, what we know only as individuals, our own pain, our own sickness, our own woe, He carried in Himself corporately.
These implications are crucial to theodicy. One of the notes to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land reads, "My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside."8 In other words, human pain is within a closed circle, known only to each individual sufferer. No one can feel anyone else's pain; we know only our own, and never anyone else's.
The woman whose daughter was raped, the person whose family was machine gunned (not to mention the daughter or the family), or the three thousand killed in 9/11 all of them suffered no more than an individual could suffer. Though we're stunned by the sheer numbers in calamities, each victim's pain is uniquely his or her own, as if only he or she died. More so, each one's pain is always hemmed in by the limits of individual humanity.
At the Cross, though, the woes of a lost and fallen world, the sickness, dis ease, pain, and suffering all of it! fell at once on the Christ, which meant that He has suffered more than any single human being ever has or could. Who can accuse God of indifference to, or being distant from, our pain when He knows it more acutely than any of us because He has experienced it more than all of us?
Albert Camus (of all people!) wrote, "Christ came to solve two problems, evil and death, which are precisely the problems that preoccupy the rebel. His solution consisted, first, in experiencing them. The god-man suffers, too with patience. Evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to Him since He suffers and dies."9 Camus got it almost right. "[S]ince He suffers and dies worse than any human being could ever suffer or die" would have been the better answer.
The Job slant
A key element is found in the book of Job. Remember the ending? God didn't give Job a long explanation about why his property was destroyed, or why his children were killed, or why his body erupted in boils. Instead, the Lord gave Job a glimpse of Himself as Creator ("Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? . . . Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades? . . .Hast thou given the horse strength?"), and that revelation was enough for job, even amid such personal calamity, to exclaim, "I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes" (Job 42:6).
In contrast, after the Second Coming, we will have not just a glimpse but a clear view of God (1 Cor. 13:12), and we will see Him as Creator and Redeemer. Hovering above every human tragedy will be the eternal reality of Jesus, "the Maker of all worlds," having suffered Himself corporately what we know only as individuals. Perhaps in light of the Cross, which puts everything in a new perspective, we won't ache for answers as we do now. Maybe the love of God will be so apparent and overwhelming when seen through an unobstructed view of Calvary that His goodness and mercy will be thoroughly understood even when every instance of evil isn't.
But what about such texts as "We know that all things work together for good to them that love God" (Rom. 8:28)? Or, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (1 Cor. 1 3:12)? Or what about these lines: "All the perplexities of life's experience will then be made plain. Where to us have appeared only confusion and disappointment, broken purposes and thwarted plans, will be seen a grand, overruling, victorious purpose, a divine harmony." 10
What are we saying? That all evil will be explained, or justified? Sure, God can bring good out of evil, and behind all the bitterness and suffering God is work ing out His plans in the most just and merciful way possible to end the era of sin. But these promises are not the same as asserting that every evil will be explained, or that there was a good and rational reason for every evil. All things working for good doesn't mean that all things are good; it means only that God can bring good out of all things.
To know as we are known doesn't mean to know the unknowable; to see a "grand, overruling victorious purpose" isn't the same as having every incident of pain and suffering and injustice thoroughly parsed and explicated. We can expect to see one day the overriding goodness of God revealed through His solution to sin and evil. That isn't the same as having the purpose, reason, and rationale for every instance of that sin and evil explained as if somehow they were crucial components of God's overarching plan. In some cases, such as the Cross, they might be; but that isn't the same as saying that, in all cases, they must be.
The one who coined the word theodicy, Gottfried Leibniz, once described the earth as "the best of all possible worlds" (a notion that left him open to the vicious mocking of Voltaire). Leibniz, though, was close. Instead, he should have written that this is the "best of all possible fallen worlds" in that, despite the ravages of the Fall, God has done all that was possible to end sin and suffering in a just and merciful way. And the heart of that solution is the Cross.
Conclusion
How often I would ask, in the face of one tragedy or another, Why, God? What possible reason exists for this? What purpose is served? But now I have found it liberating to realize that, perhaps, I was asking the wrong questions. Maybe I was looking for what can't be found; there is no explanation for the inexplicable. And, I might add, it's a great relief to stop looking for it too.
Also, how often in the face of calamity people try to justify horror. My child's sickness has made me more compassionate, or God allowed my wife to die in order to make me spend more time on my knees... and so forth. Positive things can result from tragedy, but how cost-effective is having a child get sick, or even die, in order to make a parent more compassionate or to pray more? Somehow, I don't think God works that way.
All I can do with evil, which so of ten makes no sense, is go back to the Cross, which tells me even in the face of unrequited tragedy that God loves the world. And there, clinging to that cross, and all that it represents, I get the courage and faith to trust God despite things that, like Job, make us cry out in an anguish made worse when we seek explanations for what is, in the end, in explicable.
Father juniper, after years of delving into the lives of the dead, came up with no rational explanation for the tragedy. He could see no purpose served by those five deaths on the bridge of San Luis Rey. For his trouble, the priest was hauled before the Inquisition, which condemned him to death. As he sat in jail, waiting to be burnt at the stake, he tried "to seek in his own life the pattern that escaped him in the five others" 11 and found nothing.
1 Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (New York- Perennial Classics, 1998), 7.
2 Alexander Pope, Ewiy on Man and Otlm Pot'in\ (New York- Dover Publications, 1994), 46.
3 John Milton, Paradise Lost (New York W W Norton Company, 1975), 9
4 Ellen White, The Great Controversy (Nampa, Idaho Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1943), 499.
5 Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton, N.J.,: Princetoon Univer sity Press, 2002), 105.
6 White, 492, 49.1
7 Ibid., 651
8 T S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967), cf. 412, 54.
9 Albert Camus, The Rebel An Essay on Man in Revolt Tr Anthony Bower (New York. Knopf, 1956), .32
10 White, Education (Nampa, Idaho Pacific Press Pub. Assn , 1952), 305
11 Wilder, 1, 116.
