An enemy hath done this: Cosmic conflict theodicy¹

The assurance that we are connected to a power mightier than any of its foes, and any of our foes, can be an immense source of comfort and strength.

 One of my favorite college teachers was a professor of biblical studies. As a ministerial student I took a number of classes from him, more than from any anyone else on the faculty. He taught Greek, Hebrew, and a number of other courses that required a knowledge of these languages. My professor loved the topics he was teaching. He was a good communicator and enjoyed being with students. He had a great sense of humor. Perhaps most important, he was an excellent scholar. During the years I was his student, he pursued his doctorate and completed all the requirements except the dissertation.

A couple of years after I graduated, I heard that this professor was having some health problems. Although he was a private person, the diagnosis soon became known. He had multiple sclerosis. I lived not far away, and the school asked me to cover one of his classes for a few weeks while he decided what to do. He managed to return to the classroom and teach from a wheelchair for a couple of years, but the progress of the disease eventually made that impossible. He took a medical retirement and lived in the community, where his family looked after him for a long time afterward. One day during a visit from the church pastor, he reflected on his predicament. “Every war has casualties,” the professor observed. “There’s a great war going on in the universe between good and evil, and I am one of the casualties of this conflict.”

The presence and pervasiveness of suffering in the world poses a persistent challenge to religious belief and religious believers. If God is perfect in goodness and power, philosophers ask, how could God allow suffering to exist? And if God truly cares for me, almost everyone asks, sooner or later, why would God allow me to suffer? Over the years, people have responded to these questions in a number of ways. Some believe that God’s plans are perfect, and even though we may not understand it, suffering has its place in God’s design. Others believe that suffering is not something God wants, but resulted from the mistakes that some of God’s creatures made. And some hold the view that suffering has its benefits, and we can learn and grow in response to it. These and other ways of responding to suffering, theodicies as they are often called, have all received extensive scholarly attention. Each has its strong points, each raises certain questions, and, most important, suffering people somewhere have found in each of them a source of personal encouragement.

Cosmic conflict theodicy

My professor drew strength in the face of his great loss from what some call “cosmic conflict theodicy,” the concept that human beings are involved in a raging controversy between superhuman forces of good and evil. At the center of this conflict stands the towering figure of God’s archenemy, the one being, more than any other, responsible for all that is wrong and painful in the world God created. This figure appears here and there in a number of biblical passages. One well-known example is the prologue to the book of Job (Job 1; 2). The Lord gave Satan permission to test His faithful servant. Also, the devil appears as Jesus’ great adversary in the Gospels, tempting Him in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13). And the book of Revelation contains vivid portrayals of superhuman conflict: “And war broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, but they were defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven" (Rev. 12:7-9, NRSV).

For many who suffer, like my esteemed professor, the idea of a cos­mic conflict is personally helpful. They believe their suffering does not come to them from God, but from something utterly opposed to God and is caused by a diabolical power that is doing everything it can to thwart God’s will for us and make our lives miserable. So, instead of wondering why God sends, allows, or intends to use their suffering, their response is to say, “‘“An enemy has done this” ’ ” (Matt. 13:28) and put the blame on him.

In recent years, the figure of the devil appears infrequently in philosoph­ical discussions of evil. But for some thinkers, the idea of God’s archenemy is indispensable to an adequate approach to suffering. One is Gregory A. Boyd, whose “trinitarian warfare worldview” places responsibility for the sufferings of the world squarely on the devil.² 

To the question Is God to blame for suffering? Boyd responds with an emphatic No.³ God has enemies, Boyd argues, and these enemies have great power. So, they bear responsibility for the world’s sorrows and woes. Satan and his cohort of once angelic, now demonic, followers are the forces behind the strife and bloodshed that riddle human history. And their inter­ference with the processes of nature has transformed the world from the perfect home God intends the world to be into an ominous and threatening environment, marked by pain, disease, and death.⁴

According to Boyd, the concept of cosmic warfare dissolves the familiar questions that suffering raises—How can a perfect Being allow it? and Why in particular do I have to suffer? The pervasiveness of suffering was not bewildering to those who lived during the eras of biblical history, he observes, nor to those in the centuries that directly followed. To the contrary, they were keenly aware of the presence of evil powers, and they attributed the ills of life to them, not to God. If the universe is populated by a host of beings opposed to God and bent on wreaking death and destruction, it is hardly surprising that we suffer; it would be surprising if we did not.

From the perspective of cosmic conflict theodicy, then, we do not suffer because God wants us to, we suffer because we live in a war zone. We suffer because God’s enemies are active in the world, and we have made ourselves vulnerable to violence.⁵ So, it is futile to look for a specific reason or purpose for suffering.

The warfare worldview has another ramification. “When we accept the warfare worldview of Scripture,” Boyd says, “the intellectual problem of evil is transformed into the practical problem of evil.”⁶ Freed from the burden of explaining or comprehending suffering and empowered by the victory achieved by Jesus’ death and resurrection, we are called to join God resisting the forces of evil and relieving suffering.

The cosmic conflict of the ages

Boyd is not alone among Christian thinkers to give the devil a prominent role in his account of suffering. Another is Ellen G. White,⁷ who, in Boyd’s estima­tion, “integrated a warfare perspective into the problem of evil and the doc­trine of God perhaps more thoroughly than anyone else in church history.”⁸ The central theme of Ellen White’s theodicy appears in the title of her most influential series, The Conflict of the Ages, as well as the title of its most influential book, The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan. According to the preface, the book’s purpose was “to present a satisfactory solution of the great problem of evil.”⁹

Like Boyd, Ellen White places human suffering within the framework of a cosmic conflict. The conflict began with a revolt against God on the highest level of created beings, and it will end when God’s enemies perish and God’s loving purposes for creation are finally fulfilled. From this perspective, the devil is the source of all the world’s ills, and everything that makes human life miserable is ultimately attributable to our participation in his rebellion against God.

Like the great antagonist in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Lucifer before the rebel­lion was a majestic figure, a covering cherub, and head of the angelic host (see Ezek. 28:14, 15). In spite of his lofty position and great intelligence, Lucifer mysteriously, inexplicably, came to resent God’s authority. He aroused the suspicions of his fellow angels, and when their opposition ripened into open revolt, they were cast out of heaven.

When Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden tree, their disloyalty to God left them vulnerable to God’s enemies, and ever since Satan and his angels have been busy wreaking havoc on the earth. These sinister forces are ultimately responsible for everything that threatens human life and well­being, from natural disasters and organic diseases to personal sin in all its manifestations. Beneath the veneer of human activity, the course of history consists in the conflict between God and Satan as these great powers pursue their contrasting objectives for the earth, each attempting to counteract and undermine the work of the other. 

As Ellen White describes it, the central issue in the great controversy is the character of God or, more precisely, the creaturely perception of God.¹⁰ Lucifer’s persistent charge is that God is tyrannical and abusive, unworthy of creaturely devotion. To resolve the conflict, God provided a definitive revelation of the divine character. The gift of God’s own Son vividly displays God’s love and exposes the emptiness of Satan’s accusations. His dominion rests on cruelty and tyranny, not God’s. The Cross was the turning point in the great controversy. With Christ’s death, “the last link of sympathy between Satan and the heavenly world was broken.” So “all heaven triumphed in the Saviour’s victory. Satan was defeated, and knew that his kingdom was lost.”¹¹ When evil is finally eradicated from the universe the “terrible experiment of rebellion” will serve as “a perpetual safeguard to all holy intelligences, to prevent them from being deceived as to the nature of transgression.”¹²

Questions about cosmic conflict theodicy

No theodicy is more dramatic than that of cosmic conflict, spotlighting as it does the fascinating, enigmatic figure of Lucifer, the archangel who became God’s archenemy. But, like every attempt to account for evil in God’s world, this approach raises some important questions. One concerns its basic plausibility. Is there indeed a cosmic conflict raging all around us? Are we surrounded by invisible personalities? Do superhuman powers actually influence the course of nature and history?

Such a view of things seems to fly in the face of our modern perspec­tive. Today, people instinctively look to science and technology for an understanding of the world we live in rather than to supernatural forces. People today seldom appeal to angels, demons, or other invisible personalities to account for things that happen. Perhaps this is why most philosophical treatments of evil today do without the devil.

Along with this general reservation, some people wonder about the very concept of cosmic conflict. The idea of a superhuman agent whose revolt engulfs the entire universe and poses a genuine threat to God’s government seems incoherent in light of traditional concepts of divine power and sover­eignty. How could any created being pose a serious challenge to God? After all, as Creator, God not only brought the universe into being; it is God’s power that sustains all that exists, moment by moment.¹³ But, if everything owes its existence to God, how could any created being, even the most highly exalted, pose a plausible threat to God? What would intelligent beings hope to gain from contesting God’s supremacy if they knew that God could instantly annihilate them?

The enduring appeal of cosmic conflict theodicy

Whatever the questions it raises, many people find the idea of cos­mic conflict not only plausible but personally helpful. Boyd insists that secularism, with its dismissal of the supernatural, is no longer as influential as it once was. With the “postmodern awakening” of the past few decades, the “narrow structures of modern Western naturalistic categories” are becoming increasingly irrelevant, and people are less willing to dismiss the perspectives of other historical eras and other cultures today as implausible, “primitive,” or “superstitious.”¹⁴

On a popular level, of course, the supernatural has never lost its attraction. Angels have been featured in motion pictures and television programs. And millions of people are intrigued by the devil. He is a familiar character in movies and novels. He figures prominently in a wide range of religious phenomena, evoking responses that range from fear, revul­sion, and defiance to admiration and even worship, and he has even made an appearance in popular psychology.¹⁵

Another factor points to a superhu­man source of evil. Certain forms of suffering are of such duration, intensity, or magnitude that they defy comprehension. Only a cause of superhuman, indeed, near-cosmic proportions, it seems, could possibly account for them. The Holocaust made the idea of the devil plausible for many in the twentieth century. We can all recall instances of cruelty and violence so outrageous, so beyond what humans alone could conceive, that they cry out for some cosmic explanation. They become remotely comprehensible only when attributed to a superhuman, supernatural, demonic source.

To speak of suffering on a grand scale with language freighted with cosmic connotations seems natural. And the idea that superhuman forces lie behind great moral conflicts speaks to us at a deeply intuitive level, as popular movies such as The Lord of the Rings and Man of Steel indicate. Behind the spectacles that entertain us lies a specter that haunts us.

Cosmic conflict and divine deliverance

A far more important reason to ponder cosmic conflict carefully is the powerful notion of divine deliver­ance it conveys. For this theodicy, God has become no detached executive, serenely presiding over the cosmos, like a CEO in the corner suite of a high-rise office building, far removed from the rough and tumble of the streets below. To the contrary, God is a powerful force within the world, challenging and resisting the agents of evil at every turn. This picture of God can be greatly reassuring to people who feel helpless before the forces arrayed against them.

There are those whose losses have the potential to leave them feeling utterly defeated and deprive their lives of meaning. There are people, like my professor years ago, whose devastating disease took away their health and ended careers they loved. Then there are people in the throes of enslaving habits, serious addictions that have so exhausted their energies and depleted their resolve that nothing in the sphere of natural remedies or conventional treatment can help. When recovery programs, self-help regimens, and medications all fail, people may feel that they are in the grip of an enemy possessing supernatural strength. And, for them, the idea of divine victory and divine deliverance may provide the only basis for hope. 

The assurance that we are con­nected to a power mightier than any of its foes, and any of our foes, can be an immense source of comfort and strength. So the notion of cosmic con­flict, with its assurance that God can defeat all that harms and threatens us and will eventually eradicate suffering entirely, can play an important role in a “practical theodicy.” It gives strength to many as they face the enormous challenges that suffering brings.