Evil

Since the Arminian blogosphere's argument du jour happens to be "Calvinism makes God the author of evil" I thought I would come at it at a slightly different angle than the one that Steve has already taken. The problem with throwing around a phrase like "author of evil" is that it's kind of important that two words ("author" and "evil") get defined, yet Arminians seem to think such a step is too burdensome to enact. Steve has recently focused a great deal on what "author" means, so I want to look at the other term. This also ties in to my recent posts on Divine Command Theory, and I must point out in passing that for some strange reason we never see Arminians attempt to ground morality in a like manner to how I have argued for it in DCT.

With that said, what do we mean by evil when we ask if God is the author of evil?

Well, evil could mean simply those things as natural disasters—hurricanes, famines, floods, etc. Indeed, these are often called "natural evils" for that very reason. But most Christians would have no problem saying that God is the "author" of natural evils given the myriad examples of God causing/sending/creating disasters. A few specifics from Scripture will suffice to validate this point:

"For in seven days I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground" (Genesis 7:4).

"And I will heap disasters upon them; I will spend my arrows on them; they shall be wasted with hunger, and devoured by plague and poisonous pestilence; I will send the teeth of beasts against them, with the venom of things that crawl in the dust" (Deuteronomy 32:23-24).

"Then they will say, 'Because they abandoned the LORD their God who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt and laid hold on other gods and worshiped them and served them. Therefore the LORD has brought all this disaster on them'" (1 Kings 9:9).

"I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the LORD, who does all these things" (Isaiah 45:7).

Because of how plentiful such descriptions are in Scripture, most people who contend that God is not the author of evil ought not mean evil in the sense of natural disasters (although given the state of inconsistency that plagues a certain branch of theology, I am hesitant to be dogmatic). Instead, they should mean it in the sense of immorality, unrighteousness, sinfulness.

When we are talking about moral evils—sins—then we have to have some kind of moral framework in place. That is, we have to have a proper frame of reference to determine whether something is good or evil in the first place before the question "Is God the author of evil?" is even meaningful.

Now as I've argued before, since I am a Divine Command Theorist, God is the standard of good. There is nothing else that God can point to other than Himself to say "This is what the definition of good is." As such, anything God does will be, by definition, good. That means that it is ruled out by definition that God could ever do anything evil Himself.

But saying that God is good isn't the whole picture, for that does not tell us how we ought to behave in order for us to be good too. Thankfully, there is something that tells us what the standard of behavior we ought to uphold are: God's commands (i.e., laws).

Now of God's commands, the apostle Paul writes:

What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, "You shall not covet." But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good (Romans 7:7-12).

Now there is a lot to this passage that addresses the issue we are looking at. First, Paul states that "if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin." Indeed, he insists "apart from the law, sin lies dead." Therefore there is no sin if there is not first a commandment from God. That means that if we are to look at evil as a function of immorality instead of natural evil, then evil can only exists because a commandment first exists. Consequently, Paul says "I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, 'You shall not covet.'"

The logical conclusion of this must therefore be that it is impossible for any immorality to come about if God does not issue any commands. Yet despite this, Paul maintains "the commandment is holy and righteous and good." We can ask rhetorically: How can it be anything but good? God is, after all, the definition of good, and His commands must be good too even if evil cannot come about unless they exist. This doesn't mean the commands are sufficient for evil to occur, but it does mean that the commands are necessary for evil to occur.

Let us then examine the scope of the commandments. It is one thing to say that men are under the commands of God; but is God bound by those same commands? I merely point back to the above natural evils that God authors and ask, "If you did that would you be doing evil?" If you flooded the Earth and killed all but 8 people, would such genocide by considered good or evil? If you sent famines and plagues on people, would you be good or evil? Obviously you would be considered evil, yet God is not evil for doing so.

That's because God is not under His commands but rather He issues those commands. This is why James says: "There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?" (James 4:12). God has the right to judge while you do not. That is why along a similar vein Paul writes: "Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls" (Romans 14:4). We who have been created by God do not have the same rights as He who created us. God does not have to obey the commands that He gives us, and therefore even if we think we have seen a conflict between what we are not allowed to do and what God is allowed to do, that is not grounds for us to say that God has committed evil.

Finally, God can also use instruments of evil without Himself being evil. We read, for instance: "Now therefore behold, the LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; the LORD has declared disaster for you" (1 Kings 22:23). We see that God is the one who "put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these…prophets." We read Jeremiah's words: "Then I said, 'Ah, Lord GOD, surely you have utterly deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying, "It shall be well with you," whereas the sword has reached their very life'" (Jeremiah 4:10). And if it weren't enough for Jeremiah to say God deceived fallen Israel, he also says: "O LORD, you deceived me, and I was deceived" (Jeremiah 20:7).

While this last passage is part of a lament of Jeremiah, it is nevertheless evidence that Jeremiah didn't have any problem with the concept of God deceiving people for His own reasons. Yet Hebrews 6:18 says that it is impossible for God to lie. How would it be possible for God to deceive someone without lying? One way would be by putting "a lying spirit in the mouth of [false] prophets." For in that case, God is not the one who lies (the lying spirit lies), but God does put the lying spirit in the position where it will be believed. We see this again when Paul asserts "Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false" (2 Thessalonians 2:11). The thrust of the passage cannot be ignored: God is the one who sends the delusion so that sinners believe what is false even though God Himself does not lie.

In other words, when God uses evil instruments that does not mean ipso facto that God Himself is evil. If God uses evil people with their penchant to lie in order to deceive other evil people that does not mean God is evil. And just as God can use a liar to establish His purposes without being evil, so too can He use other types of sinners for the same reason.

So let us take stock of where we are. Is God the author of evil? Well, He is obviously the author of natural evils, and He gave the commands without which there could be no evil at all. So yes, He is the author of evil (when the term is properly defined). The reason why so many hesitate to accept this is because they believe it would make God evil, but I have shown that despite God being the author of evil (again, as properly defined) He is not evil, for 1) God is good by definition; 2) God's commands are for us and not for Him; and 3) we have Biblical examples when God used evil instruments that increased sin without being evil Himself.

Given this, it is improper for Arminians to claim that "God is the author of evil" is a defect of Calvinism. They must show how God's authoring of evil actually makes God evil, and that requires them to A) ground morality somewhere and, B) deal with the Scripture I have presented above showing God using evil to increase sin without being culpable.