Dr Iain Provan addresses the problem of evil and suffering
The biblical story that makes sense of all our stories has a lot to say about the questions of evil and suffering.
On the Thursday night of Bible Week, Dr Iain Provan addressed these big issues and also held a question and answer session in the Micah Centre.
Iain began by distinguishing between two kinds of suffering. He asserted that not everything that we call suffering arises from the entrance of evil into the world. “Quite a bit of it actually has to do with the fact that God chose to create this kind of world – this material, physical, embodied kind of world – and not some other kind of world. Some suffering is intrinsic to the very goodness of Creation”.
He believes that Scripture, reason and experience confirm this, however many of us would appear to hold the ‘wrong Big Picture’, which is really a Christianised Platonism.
Iain suggested that the Bible paints a ‘correct Big Picture’ of reality where God created a good world, already heading to a destination that was different from its beginning before anything went wrong.
He said: “Change, decay, growth, and progress are built into the fabric of creation, and so is some of the suffering that accompanies it. What we sometimes call “natural evil” is not regarded as evil at all in Scripture.”
“Human beings in Scripture are designed to cooperate with God in bringing this good world to its rightful, flourishing end,” he continued, “but moral evil intervenes, distorting all the relationships that exist among God and his creatures, and deeply damaging everything else as a result.”
We do live in a damaged world from a Scriptural point of view, but it is still a world that belongs to God and when Jesus enters it, he puts right only what has genuinely gone wrong in the Fall.
Iain then examined the account of the Fall in Genesis 3 and went on to conclude:
“In writing in this way about the Fall, Genesis clearly means to tell us at least two important things about evil in the world, both of which are important aspects of the Big Biblical Picture.
“The first is that evil is not an eternally existing reality alongside and equal to God – a “dark side of the Force” that balances its light side (as in Star Wars). Biblical faith is not ‘dualistic’. ‘In the beginning’ there was not good and evil, but simply one omnipotent, transcendent, creator God who is wholly good (Genesis 1–2).
“And the second thing Genesis wants to say is that evil is not created by this one God as an intrinsic aspect of the cosmos. God is good, and creates only what is good – the good in the world comes from God, but the evil in it comes from God’s creatures, who turn away from what is good. Evil comes from those who hide from God, distrusting his goodness and his generosity. So we live in a fallen world. Evil walks among us, and it produces suffering.”
Iain, however, did not end on this note but, reading Romans 8:31–39, reminded us that God is for us and that ‘we are more than conquerors through him who loved us’.
We’re very grateful to Iain for giving of his time at the Q&A afterwards. Thanks also to QUB chaplain, Revd Barry Forde, for expertly chairing the session.
Please take the opportunity to listen again to Iain’s talk: ‘Of Evil and Suffering: God Saves’. You can download it here.