Reviews
Is God to Blame?
By Gregory Boyd
Kingsway. 211 pages. £7.99
ISBN 1 84291 177 5
What shall we do
with the problem of evil and suffering? Answer One: Accept that the loving and
holy God is sovereign over all things, including evil and suffering. God does
all things well; he must have his perfect reasons for allowing the evil and
inflicting the suffering that he does; as finite creatures we may not
understand what those reasons are and in any case they are not to demand that
God explain himself just as and when we want. We are called to trust that our
loving, holy, sovereign Father really is a loving, holy, sovereign Father. To
some, this feels as though 'God is to blame'.
Answer Two: Deny that
God is sovereign over all things including evil and suffering. This way you
have let God off the hook - 'God is not to blame' either because he doesn't
know about it or because he would love to help but can't. God doesn't know
everything; he refuses to intervene in large areas of human life and history
(for what he considers good reasons), and is, in any case, battling with the
forces of chaos, the enormity of which we cannot possibly comprehend.
Is God to Blame?
by well-known open theist Gregory Boyd is a depressing attempt to state and
explore Answer Two. It is neither much of an explanation nor much of a comfort
to be told that God would love to help but can't because he has tied his own
hands in deference to a view of freedom which he himself does not live by. And
yet this view of freedom determines Boyd's book as though the sinner's free
will were the paramount value of the universe and the dominant theme of the
Bible. (According to Boyd, freedom to love involves freedom not to love, and
freedom not to sin involves freedom to sin. We need to ask him, Is the Father
free to 'not-love' the Son? Is God free to sin? Can the saints in glory sin?
Surely not. Yet we would want to assert, wouldn't we, that God and the saints
in glory enjoy real love and real freedom?)
This book is bad
in two other ways, too. First, it is riddled with self-contradictions, with
poor handling of Scripture, with numerous misunderstandings of and/or
misrepresentations of Answer One above and with sloppy argumentation.
Second, in spite
of (rightly) highlighting the cross as the key revelation of God's character
and purpose, the author fails to build his answer to the problem of
evil/suffering upon the cross. If he had done so then he would have arrived at
the following undeniable statements (or would he deny number 3? I'm not sure):
1. The crucifixion
of Jesus, the holy Son of God, was the worst sin ever committed in all history.
2. The crucifixion
of Jesus subjected him to the greatest suffering endured by any human being in
all history.
3. God planned,
intended, purposed, ordained, brought about the crucifixion of Jesus.
4. God is not the
author of, and indeed hates the sinfulness of the human actions which comprised
the crucifixion of Jesus.
5. God is
all-knowing, all-powerful, all-wise, all-just, all-holy and all-good.
6. God, therefore,
must have had good reasons (good enough for perfect love and holiness!) for
allowing the evil and inflicting the agony of the cross.
7. The crucifixion
of Jesus accomplished the greatest good imaginable.
8. The innocent
sufferer, Jesus, experienced, for at least a part of the time on the cross, the
additional agony of not understanding what was going on.
Once we have
these in place then we may proceed. If the God of infinite perfections had - as
I know he had - good enough reasons (for perfect love and holiness) for
allowing the worst evil ever and inflicting the greatest suffering ever and if
he brought out of that the greatest good ever then I can believe that he must
have good enough reasons for allowing all lesser evils and inflicting all
lesser suffering. And, however miserable, intense and mysterious that evil and
suffering is, I know that none of it is worse than the cross. Meanwhile, I
recognise that God is not obliged to tell me what those reasons are (although
he certainly explains many of them) and that between now and resurrection day,
when all suffering will end and all mystery will be cleared, I am called to
walk by faith - trusting the goodness and wisdom of my sovereign Father.
Is God to Blame?
tries to help us through the painful entanglements of evil and suffering by
telling us about the thwarted love of a limited God, the overriding value of
human free will and the dark chaos of a complex universe. But that way leads
only to greater grief. Understanding, comfort and ultimate deliverance lie only
one way - the way of a holy, loving, sovereign God who does all things well and
asks us to trust. This is the way of the cross of Jesus.