Where Does Evil Come From?

I’m always happy to consider suggestions for blog articles. I received this one just last week. As so often is the case with ‘big questions’, it’s rather more complicated than it might at first appear.

Let’s start with the Genesis creation narrative, which is perhaps where many evangelicals would begin their answer. Here we see a personified enemy, pictured as a talking serpent, tempting Adam and Eve to doubt what God has said to them and ‘do their own thing’. Arguably, the serpent’s initiative is the first wrongful act that we see in Scripture—indeed, the first in the human story.

It may be somewhat superfluous to ask whether a snake has moral agency, but Christian tradition has identified it with a personified being that we know as the devil, or Satan. It would be easy to conclude that this creature was the originating source of evil entering the world, and—in relation to the human race—passed down to us like a mutating virus as a result of Adam and Eve’s original sin (the event that Christians have tended to refer to as The Fall).

And yet, for many people this will be too simplistic.

Firstly, it only ‘works’ for Christians—or more specifically, Christians who are predisposed to grant Genesis explanatory authority concerning human origins. In particular, that kind of reading requires a combination of literality and cause-and-effect that, for many, will be unpersuasive. To the extent that Genesis is offering a theological explanation presented within the context of a story—a ‘teaching story’ that operates rather like a parable—it can make good theological sense. It is much less persuasive to try to argue for it being an anthropological explanation.

But let’s start with the problems inherent in a literal reading. The self-evident problem with “the devil made them do it” is this: where was God when all this was going on? Every classical attribute that Christians claim for God—all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient), ever-present (omnipresent), and always-good (omnibenevolent)—would seem to be absent in this episode.   

The first problem is, of course, that someone must have created the serpent/devil character in the first place—either creating him as evil or at least knowing what he would become. Had there been no evil creature to lie to Adam and Eve and tempt them, there would have been no Fall (one might assume). Wouldn’t that have meant the world would be a happier place?

If God is the creator of all things, the serpent/devil character must be included. Hence, by creating the serpent/devil character and permitting him to do his thing with Adam and Eve, logic would suggest that God is to blame for what happened.

God’s omniscience would surely mean he would have known what would happen; his omnipotence would surely mean he could have prevented what happened; and his omnipresence would surely mean he was there when it happened. But how do we square such a terrible outcome with God’s omnibenevolence?         

At this point, some might point to a traditional understanding of the devil/Satan character as a fallen angel who rebelled against God and took a third of the angels with him (now serving as ‘demons’). I say, ‘traditional understanding’ insofar as it’s quite likely you will have heard this stated as fact in many evangelical sermons. The reality is that it comes from synthesising proof texts from sources as diverse as the apocalyptic Book of Revelation, a statement of Jesus in Luke 10:18, the non-biblical texts of 1 Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, and The Life of Adam and Eve and, in no small measure, by how Satan is presented in John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Nonetheless, this has been enough for one charismatic evangelical organisation (Vineyard Churches) to declare all this to be a required belief in its Statement of Faith:

“We believe that Satan, originally a great, good angel, rebelled against God, taking a host of angels with him. He was cast out of God’s presence and, as a usurper of God’s rule, established a counter-kingdom of darkness and evil on the earth.”

To see how evangelical logic progresses in relation to the origins of evil, we need only read on in this same Statement of Faith:

“Under the temptation of Satan, our original parents fell from grace, bringing sin, sickness and God’s judgement of death to the earth. Through the fall, Satan and his demonic hosts gained access to God’s good creation. Creation now experiences the consequences and effects of Adam’s original sin. Human beings are born in sin, subject to God’s judgement of death and captive to Satan’s kingdom of darkness.”

Answers on a postcard, please, as to how this extremely powerful evil creature is allowed to wreak such havoc in God’s good creation. That same Statement of Faith also says that God “created, upholds and governs all that exists.” How are we supposed to reconcile Satan's apparent freedom to act in these ways with divine omnipotence?

These are not merely academic questions. And lest you think I’m just picking on a soft target with the Vineyard SoF, they’re precisely the kinds of questions any coherent theology needs to address (and pastoral sermons need to be able to explain).

So far we’ve identified some problems with a simplistic “it’s all the devil’s fault” version of where evil comes from. But there’s also the traditional (albeit contested) doctrine of original sin to deal with. Namely, that Adam and Eve’s first sin caused everyone born subsequently to be a sinner. As Vineyard puts it, everyone “now experiences the consequences and effects”—being “subject to God’s judgement of death and captive to Satan’s kingdom of darkness.”

Those who question this rather simplistic doctrine of ‘original sin’ (for which we have Augustine to thank in the 4th/5th century) point to its moral incongruity: how can a person be morally responsible for actions that they were effectively ‘predestined’ to commit from before they were even born, as the consequence of events that happened at the very dawn of time? How can an omnibenevolent God condemn a person on those grounds? Inevitably, conservative theologians do try to explain it, but once again that is likely to be unpersuasive for those outside their circles, for whom there must surely be more to it.       

I don’t want to be accused of just posing questions without answering them—or, for that matter, of pointing out self-evident irrationalities in Statements of Faith without offering something better to consider. So in the remaining word count, let me offer some thoughts.

It seems entirely reasonable to suppose that God could have created a world without evil—a world in which there was no Satan as the personification of evil. No evil would logically mean no sin. That being the case, any evangelical explanation that simplistically locates the entry of evil into this world in Satan (or, for that matter, in Adam and Eve) cannot escape the accusation that God effectively caused it to happen or allowed it to happen. We cannot on the one hand affirm the truths of the 'omnis' while on the other hand explaining evil so comprehensively in terms of Satan, as Vineyard seems to want to (but perhaps this is simply the inevitable consequence of an overstated “spiritual warfare” theology on the part of the SoF’s authors).  

But the question remains why God would allow evil. Let’s take a stab at it.

If the goal for God’s good creation is summed up in Jesus’ affirmation of the most important commandment as loving God and (its inseparable counterpart) loving people … and if God’s fundamental personal characteristic is love, then love must have been paramount in the objectives of the creation story.

So—stay with me on this—if loving God and loving people was the goal for his creation (made ‘in God’s image’ in that sense), how was that to be achieved? It could have been achieved by creating us as people who had no option—for whom nothing else was possible. But would that really be love? Does not love by its very nature need to be voluntary? Can it really be said that we truly love God (or for that matter people) if we are forced to do so?

This is where human free will comes into it. If love was God's goal, genuine freedom had to be part of the design. And this, of course, is where Satan comes into it. If there is no alternative choice—no alternative voice to listen to, no alternative story to choose to live in—there is no free will. Freedom requires genuine alternatives.

At the very minimum, therefore, any explanation of evil that relies upon a version of “We have Satan to thank for all this” needs to be far more nuanced.    

What, then, of original sin? To the extent that this doctrine suggests we were all doomed before we were even born—even leading the Calvinist Wayne Grudem to say that babies sin in the womb, would you believe?—it, too, requires far greater nuance.

We can affirm the truth of “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23) and “If we say we have not sinned, we make God a liar” (1 John 1:10) without having to believe that the direct cause of our sinning was one poor decision by our primaeval parents. Rather, we can work backwards and simply say, this is the way things are in human experience. The evidence is clear: everyone does, indeed, sin and fall short.

Genesis as a theological account of why the world is the way it is makes good sense. Genesis as a cause-and-effect explanation of how human sinfulness has been biologically transmitted makes far less sense.

The final problem with any theologies that blame Satan or Adam and Eve—alone or in combination—is that they divert attention away from us and our personal moral responsibility for good and evil. Evil is not just something ‘out there’, whether located in a serpent, a devil, or an original human pair. The more we locate blame somewhere else—or in someone else—the easier it becomes to overlook our own. It’s entirely feasible to believe that it’s “both/and” rather than “either/or.” And for us personally to be part of the solution by God’s grace, whatever the origins of the problem.      

It’s appropriate to end by saying that there is no fully adequate simple theological answer that we can offer or should be tempted to offer. I don’t offer these thoughts as the answer to a very difficult question—not least because of the appalling suffering that human evil (whatever its originating sources) has caused to fellow humans across so many millennia—but they may point towards a more satisfactory answer than those oft-cited evangelical explanations.