Full disclosure: The
following is a review of What About Evil?
by Scott Christensen. I am friends with
Christensen on Facebook, although I cannot remember precisely the details of
how we became Facebook friends. I suspect it’s either because of Triablogue or
because of Steve Hays directly. I also received a review copy for free. However, the following views are my own and
are an honest assessment of Christensen’s book.
- - -
Christensen’s writing style is one that definitely connected with me. When reading some authors, you can get the
sense of overwhelming intellect. They use large words and technical phrases
with skill, and you learn a lot from them but it also takes a lot of extra thinking
to parse out those sentences. Christensen’s
style is the opposite. It’s not that his
writing is simplistic—far from it—but rather that he writes in such a manner
that it is effortless to take in what he is writing about. In other words, his meaning is plain, not
convoluted. His metaphors are obvious, not strained. And the end result is that reading a
paragraph from his book is effortless.
Unlike reading a massive tome where it is a chore to grind out every sentence,
Christensen’s style lends to quick, and enjoyable, reading.
Where this becomes a
bit unusual is in instances where Christensen lists examples of what he is
referring to. For instance, when giving
a list of natural disasters in his introduction (page 2), he includes “...the
European Black Death (1347–51), Chilean earthquakes (1647), Krakatoan volcanoes
(1883), Spanish flu pandemics (1918), Indonesian tsunamis (2004), Chinese
coronavirus pandemics (2020), and endless twisters in Tornado Alley.” Because I
am used to reading many technical treatises, my mind immediately asked “why do
tornadoes not have any dates listed? And
why did he suddenly move from specific examples to the general example of
tornados? And why only tornadoes and
not, say, hurricanes?”
But of course,
Christensen wasn’t trying to make any extra point by including tornadoes
there. He’s simply listing some common
examples of natural evils, and the “oddity” of having tornados at the end, not
fitting the format of the other items in the list, fits into Christensen’s folksy
style. This is the sort of list someone
would make if they were talking extemporaneously in a conversation.
I hope none of that is
taken as a criticism. In fact, I think the style of the book helps make it
easier for a lay person to read. And by
pointing out the style is “folksy” that in no way means that the arguments
Christensen puts forth have no weight.
Instead, it means that (in my opinion) more people will be able to
benefit from this writing than if Christensen had used a more academic style.
Christensen quickly
gets to the point in the book. He is looking into the various theodicies
presented to oppose those who question the existence of God based on the
existence of evil. He looks at some of
the more common theodicies, such as the “Free-Will Defense”, “The Natural-Law
Defense”, and the “Greater-Good Theodicy” (among many others), concluding that
while there are some good things in most defenses, for a Biblically-minded
Christian, the view that is most faithful to Scripture is a version of the “greater-good
theodicy” with “the best-of-all-possible-worlds defense.” He dubs his own view the “Greater-glory
theodicy”, in his words, “because it seeks to resolve the problem by examining
what brings God the greatest glory” (p. 7).
The reason I like
Christensen’s method is because he is geared so closely to holding to what the
Bible teaches, and using that as the foundation for all else. It places Christ, and His work in defeating
evil, at the center of the entire context of evil in the first place. As he writes, “[…]Christ is no conventional
hero, and the cross is no conventional weapon. We do not naturally associate a
hero’s victory with his death. … Yet surprisingly, in the cross, Jesus defeats
evil. Jesus defeats death by dying…. He
becomes our hero by being treated as a villain” (pp. 8-9).
If you feel I’m giving
away too much of the book, perhaps the low value of those page numbers will assuage
you. Christensen fully tells us all of
this within the very introduction of his book!
This isn’t something he’s trying to hold off for later, to bait you in
before revealing where he’s going. As is
keeping with Christensen’s “folksy” language, he has no reason to obscure
anything with rhetoric and seems almost excited to get through the background information
to get to the main point: the glorification of Christ.
Honestly, as someone
who’s read a lot of philosophy on theodicies—and many of them quite well
reasoned and argued—it’s nice to have one where the focus is so clearly on the
majesty of Christ.
This is why I especially
enjoyed that while Christensen took several chapters to discuss evil from a historical
and philosophical standpoint, including discussing how the term can even be defined, he so quickly delves into what would even constitute a theodicy that honors God,
especially in light of how secular the world is in modern days. He examines the strengths and weaknesses of
the common arguments in Chapters 5 and 6, (the weaknesses being where they lack
Biblical support, and the strengths being where they have sufficient Biblical
support), and then spends chapters 7 and 8 discussing the nature of God Himself
and how the Bible discusses evil. It is
that Biblically-centered focus that I very much appreciated, and that’s not
even getting into the section that Christensen himself identifies as the “heart”
of his book: Chapters 10 – 13, where the redemptive theme of Scripture is seen
as a monomyth—“one universal storyline that evokes a human longing for
redemption.” And if you’re looking for
shortcuts, first of all I suggest not doing so.
But if you really want to get to the main argument, Chapter 12 of the
book (specifically, beginning on page 281) presents the “greater-good theodicy” in detail.
Much more could, and
should, be said about this work by Christensen.
There is a treasure of introductory-level Reformed theology throughout all its pages,
and his defense being grounded in Scripture is definitely a breath of fresh air. The Bible is the strength of the Reformed
position, and Christensen does a wonderful job pulling together the various
threads to support his view: philosophical, historical, and most of all
theological. While I am more
intellectually driven and love the logic of the Reformed view, Chapters 10 and 11 (where Christensen spends time talking about the entire story of the Bible) was
a nice change of pace. As a dabbler in
fiction, the purpose and intent of stories also speaks to me, and it’s nice for
someone to remind me that God is an Author, just as much as He is an Architect or Mathematician.
My only regret is that
when I read the majority of this book, it was during an unexpected foot surgery
I had, and as a result the experience was not as physically pleasant as I wish
it could have been. I hope in another
couple of months to re-read the book, from a new (unmedicated and pain-free)
point of view to get another take on it.
It will be well worth reading again, and I highly recommend this to
anyone who wants to increase their theodicy arsenal. I rate this a solid A+, or 5 stars if we go
by the Amazon scale, because it is well written, well researched, well
informed, and, most of all, Biblically grounded.
