Evil

Evil is not a substance or a rival power alongside good, but a privation: a lack of the good a creature ought to have. Moral evil (sin) is the absence of the conformity to God’s law a rational creature owes him; natural evil (suffering, death, decay) entered the created order as a consequence of that first sin. Scripture never traces evil’s origin to God himself, who “cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man” (James 1:13) and “is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).

Confessional Witness

The confession holds that God’s providence extends even to sinful acts without his ever being their author: his “determinate counsel extendeth itself even to the first fall, and all other sinful actions both of angels and men… yet so, as the sinfulness of their acts proceedeth only from the creatures, and not from God, who, being most holy and righteous, neither is nor can be the author or approver of sin.”¹

Biblical Basis

God pronounced everything he had made “very good” (Gen. 1:31); evil entered only when Adam, tempted by the serpent, transgressed God’s command (Gen. 3:1-7). Evil’s sinfulness is never attributed to God: James insists that God himself “cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man” (James 1:13), and John states plainly that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).

Historical Development

Manichean dualism and Augustine’s answer

In the fourth and fifth centuries, Manes and his followers taught that evil was itself a substance, an eternal power set against good. Augustine, writing against them, denied this: since everything God made is good, and evil is the opposite of good, evil must be the opposite of being itself, a negation or privation of being rather than a thing in its own right.² Hodge credits Augustine with refining this into something more precise than a bare absence: “That a stone cannot see, involves the negation of the power of vision. But it is not a defect, because the power of vision does not belong to stones… The absence of love to God in a rational creature is sin, because it is the absence of something which belongs to such a creature, and which he ought to have.”³ On this account, evil is a real privation of a real good owed, not merely a lesser degree of being.

Bavinck develops the same doctrine from an independent angle: sin cannot be explained by tracing its causes back to some antecedent factor, because “if sin were ‘understood,’ that is to say explained as a necessary consequence from antecedent factors, it would no longer be sin.” Quoting Augustine directly, he affirms that a sinful act’s causes “are not efficient but deficient,” so that sin “has no origin in the true sense of the word, only a beginning.”⁴

Objections and Responses

Calling evil a mere “privation” makes it sound less real or serious than it is. Hodge answers this by distinguishing Augustine’s own account from a cruder version of it. Some who followed Augustine’s language reduced evil to “mere privation” or “simply defect,” as if any lack whatever were sin.³ But blindness is a defect in an animal without being sin, since sight was never owed to a stone or denied by any fault. A rational creature’s want of love to God is sin precisely because love is what such a creature owes; the privation is real because the good withheld was genuinely due.³ Calling evil a privation, in the true Augustinian sense, is not a way of minimizing it but of denying it any independent existence or power alongside God.

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 5, “Of Divine Providence,” para. 4. ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter VIII. Sin,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 156. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter VIII. Sin,” 157. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 12, “The Fallen World.” ↩