Problem of evil

The problem of evil is the question of how a good, all-powerful God can be reconciled with evil’s real existence in the world. An attempt to answer it is called a theodicy. Christian theology has no single answer to this question: Reformed, Arminian, Molinist, and open theist theology all affirm God’s goodness and evil’s reality, but differ over how much of what happens, including evil, God directly ordains, and how creaturely freedom relates to his sovereignty.

The Reformed answer: the decree and concurrence

Reformed theology holds that God decreed whatsoever comes to pass, evil included, while remaining himself neither the author of sin nor party to it.¹ Bavinck states the positive claim this rests on plainly: “the providence of God does not cancel out secondary causes or human responsibility, a doctrine usually referred to as ‘concurrence.’”² God is genuinely active in every event as its first cause, including sinful ones, without displacing the creature’s own agency as a real second cause. On this account, God decrees that a sinful act will occur without decreeing the sin in it, since the sinfulness belongs to the creature’s own will, not to God’s.³ The fuller case for both halves of this claim belongs to concurrence and the decree of God.

The Arminian answer: libertarian free will

Arminianism answers instead that God permits evil because he has given creatures a libertarian freedom he will not override: a real ability to do otherwise, which even God’s own knowledge does not determine.⁴ On this account, God’s goodness is vindicated because he does not himself will evil to occur; the explanation for evil’s occurrence rests with the creature’s own free choice, not with any divine decree.

The Molinist answer: middle knowledge

Molinism proposes a third position between these two. God does not decree a creature’s free choice, but he does know, by “middle knowledge” (scientia media), what every possible free creature would freely choose in every possible circumstance, and he decrees only which circumstances to bring about.⁵ Evil occurs, on this view, because God actualized a world in which creatures who he knew would freely sin were placed in the circumstances of their sin, not because he decreed the sin itself.

The open theist answer: denial of exhaustive foreknowledge

Open theism goes further still: rather than locating a creature’s free choice logically prior to God’s decree, “open theists are those who say the future is open to God; he does not know what will happen” until it occurs.⁶ Evil, on this account, is a risk God takes in creating free creatures, one whose occurrence he did not, and by the nature of the case could not, determine or foreknow in advance.

Barrett judges these last three positions to share a single underlying structure despite their real differences from one another: each “conditions God’s knowledge and his ability to act on that knowledge upon human libertarian freedom, a freedom that can always do otherwise and is never necessitated.”⁴

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 3, “Of God’s Decree,” para. 1. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 10, “Creator of Heaven and Earth.” ↩
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 15, “The Will and Affections of God,” 340-41. ↩
Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 10, “Is God All-Powerful, All-Knowing, and All-Wise? Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnisapience.” ↩ ↩²
Van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, chap. 13, “The Intellect, Knowledge, and Wisdom of God,” 308-9. ↩
Barrett, None Greater, chap. 7, “Does God Have Emotions? Impassibility.” ↩