Raging with Compassion 3. Resisting evil and suffering love.

" Evil occurs when human beings or systems created and controlled by human beings carry out actions that deliberately or consequentially engender forms of suffering, misery, and death which are marked by the absence of hope that there is meaning and order in the world or a God who exercises providential care".

"The real problem of evil is not simply that evil and suffering exist, but rather its ability to separate suffering human beings from the only true source of healing and hope; knowledge of the love of God and a sense of providential meaning and hope. Evil is that which destroys hope in and love for God.." (Swinton, p.59)

There is considerable courage in defining evil in such theologically clear terms, and in separating human suffering from human evil except where human responsibility and accountability require such a causal connection. And while in practice, and in empirical evidential terms, it may be difficult to determine how far, if at all, one person’s suffering is related to their or another person’s evil, it is a crucial theological move to require that any suggested causal connection between suffering and evil be proven rather than assumed.

When Swinton goes on to describe proper forms of resistance to evil, it is precisely in terms of the quotations above – that is, if evil is that which destroys hope in and love for God, resistance to evil will involve patterns of behaviour and response that restore hope in God and encourage again love for God. The theological grounding for this view Swinton finds in the profound metaphysic of divine love expounded by Thomas Torrance, in his remarkable book, Divine and Contingent Order. Two lengthy quotes say much of what needs to be said to embed the theological imperative of resisting evil with good in the deepest truths of Christian faith. I’ve decided to quote both of them – one today – and one tomorrow:

This movement of God’s holy love into the heart of the world’s evil and agony is not to be understood as a direct act of sheer almighty power, for it is not God’s purpose to shatter and annihilate the agents  and embodiments of evil in the world, but rather to pierce into the innermost center of evil power where it is entrenched in the piled up and self compounding guilt of humanity in order to vanquish it from within and below, by depriving it of the lying structures of half truth on which it thrives and of the twisted forms of legality behind which it embattles itself and from which it fraudulently gains its power. Here we have an entirely different kind of and quality of power, for which we have no analogies in our experience to help us understand it, since it transcends every kind of moral and material power we know.

(Divine and Contingent Order, Oxford, 1981, p. 136)

As Swinton goes on to observe, it is the cross of Christ that demonstrates God’s response to evil  and models how ‘the church which follows and seeks to image such a God, should act in response.’ By rooting his developing argument in such assured traditional Christian doctrine, this non-traditional theodicy rests on a significantly strengthened foundation. Of which more later.