God Never Meant for Us to Die

The Emergence of Evil in the Light of the Genesis Creation Account

Pierre Gilbert

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781532699627, 9781532699634
• eBook ISBN: 9781532699641
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The most incisive indictment against Christianity resides in the notion of a God who created a world in which there is untold suffering and death. Is this the best God could do? In response, most Christians will mutter something about free will or the necessity of evil to bring about God's plan for humanity. Theologians often reply by challenging the very legitimacy of the question; God only requires that we persevere. Biblical scholars, who might otherwise be expected to offer a scriptural perspective, nervously denounce any suggestion that the presence of evil may have had something to do with a primordial couple and a fruit tree. Is it any wonder that most people believe that evil must surely be an intractable component of human existence introduced, perhaps, by the very God Jews and Christians worship?This book is a response to the problem of evil that unconditionally affirms the goodness and power of God. Based on a new assessment of the Genesis creation story, one of the greatest texts ever to have emerged in human history, the author contends that God never intended for humanity to experience suffering and death.

1

Making Sense of Pain, Death, and Evil

Pain is intrinsic to human existence. It is universal. It often appears with no warning and strikes indiscriminately. For all our romantic notions about Mother Nature as the great giver of life, she is equally at ease in her role as purveyor of death and destruction. Tsunamis and tornadoes roll over cities and towns as carelessly as a riding lawn mower over an anthill. For those who should manage to avoid natural disasters, there is ultimately no escape. Like an ominous predator, silent, calculating, and implacable: Death awaits.

As “natural” as pain may be, men and women continue to anticipate and experience it with as much anguish, despair, and puzzlement today as they ever did in the past. Suffering and death may be natural, but they do not feel natural. Unless we are facing a debilitating illness that sucks out our will to live, we never quite shake off the feeling that we were never meant to die.

One of the fundamental attributes of the human mind is its relentless drive to make sense of reality. History is one long and uninterrupted attempt at making sense of the human condition.

Before we examine what the Bible says about this issue, it is essential to explore, even if briefly, some of the major answers that have been articulated in the past in order to get a sense of where the edges are, whether there are elements common to some of them, and whether any of these responses provide a comprehensive response to the presence of evil in our world. Such a survey is an important step as it may in fact provide critical insights into the nature of evil and our perception of it.

In a pluralistic society, pastors, counselors, and chaplains increasingly interact with men and women of other faiths, atheists, New Age spiritualists, as well as nominal and committed Christians. While it may not be necessary to have an in-depth knowledge of every religious and philosophical perspective on evil, it is helpful to have at least some sense of where a person may be coming from in terms of providing adequate pastoral care and proclaiming the Christian hope. Sharing the gospel and addressing the human condition are intrinsically linked. Sharing the good news requires bridges, and building bridges requires some familiarity with the most basic elements of a person’s beliefs. In this respect, some sense of how various religious and philosophical systems view evil may prove to be particularly useful.

Before we get into this brief tour, it is imperative we understand that the presence of suffering in the world is fundamentally a Christian problem. The notion of evil as a “problem” is unique to Christianity and remains, for that reason, a formidable objection to the intrinsic goodness of the Christian God and the validity of the Christian faith. But we will get back to this a little later.

Doing such a survey entails two major difficulties. First, no such exercise can completely do justice to the complexity of the concepts involved. The purpose of this chapter, however, is not to parse all the subtleties of each possible position but to provide a map that shows the broad outlines of how evil is framed in various traditions. The second difficulty relates mainly to the “instability” or ambiguity of evil as a concept. Whereas we all seem to recognize evil when we see it, providing a universal definition is a much more slippery task than it may seem at first. This fluidity in how evil is defined needs to be acknowledged and taken into account in any overview of the problem.

Surveys dealing with the problem of evil customarily organize the material according to religious or philosophical categories. Because similar understandings of evil often overlap religious and philosophical lines, I chose to organize the material in a manner that more clearly highlights substantive distinctions in how evil is defined and managed.

Evil as Intrinsic to the Fabric of Reality

The Gods Are Evil

In some traditions, evil is viewed less as a problem than as a fundamental part of reality. In such a perspective, while evil may be viewed as real, it is not perceived as an intractable theoretical problem. It is merely perceived as an intrinsic part of the fabric of the universe. Evil is not so much a problem as it is an unfortunate characteristic of the world in which we live. Such a view of evil is found, for instance, in ancient Mesopotamia.

For ancient Mesopotamians, evil is real. No attempt is made to deny or put a positive spin on it. It is not, strictly speaking, an intellectual riddle to resolve as much as a disturbing fact of human existence that needs to be addressed and managed. Much of ancient Mesopotamian mythology and wisdom writings are profoundly preoccupied by the reality of pain and evil.1 In ancient Mesopotamia, the origin of human suffering is directly linked to the gods themselves. Its presence can be accounted for in terms of functional and ontological causes.

According to ancient Mesopotamian myths such as the Enuma Elish or the Atrahasis,2 human beings were created to relieve the lower gods, the igigi, from the task of serving and feeding the higher gods, the annunaki. In Mesopotamian thought, human beings play a utilitarian role. Humans are slaves who are at the mercy of deities who have nothing but contempt for them.3

In ancient Mesopotamia, suffering is rooted in a strict cause-and-effect mechanism. Human hardship is always the result of an offence committed against the gods. In some sense, pain is always deserved. But as anyone who is familiar with ancient Near Eastern literature knows but too well, the problem is that the rules governing this presumed cause-and-effect mechanism are not transparent. Because ancient Mesopotamian religions are essentially empirical systems in which nature serves as the ultimate barometer of the will of the gods, divine will always remains fluid and without a solid baseline.

Mesopotamians believed they could gain the favor of the gods through the sacrificial system. Unfortunately, there could never be a perfect correspondence between ritual and divine satisfaction, as the two major areas of concern, climactic conditions and international relations, which were believed to be under the control of the gods, were in...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Making Sense of Pain, Death, and Evil
• 2. The Creation Story: Myth or History?
• 3. God’s Purpose: A Special Kind of Creature
• 4. Life and Death: The World as We Experience It
• 5. A New Equation to Resolve
• 6. Parsing Out a Biblical Theology of Evil
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: Hope
• Bibliography