The Incarnation: God's Solution to the Problem of Evil

The following was an essay I wrote for a class on T. F. Torrance, a recently deceased Scottish Reformed Theologian. I won the Alberta Swanson Prize for it (though I might have been the only one who entered).

The Incarnation: God's Solution to the Problem of Evil
T. F. Torrance's doctrine of Providence

By Travis Stevick
The Trinitarian Theology of T. F. Torrance
Fall 2009

Christocentrism

It is clear that Thomas Forsyth Torrance’s favorite theologian is Athanasius. One Athanasian statement that he liked to quote frequently was, “It would be more godly and true to signify God from the Son and call him Father, than to name him from his works and call him Unoriginate.” The unbroken bond of being between the incarnate Son and God the Father (the homoousion) is absolutely central to Torrance’s theology. It is the backbone of his entire “scientific” approach to the discipline. If one hopes to understand any of Torrance’s theology, not least his doctrine of providence, this key point must be grasped.

Torrance phrases it this way. “Since the Father is never without the Son, any more than the Son is ever without the Father, all that the Father does is done in and through the Son and all that the Son does is identical with what the Father does.” Because of this, all theological reflection and articulation must be worked out with constant reference to the reality of the incarnation of God as the man Jesus of Nazareth. Any attempt to think abstractly about God, or to arrive at any theological conclusion that is not Christologically rooted, is to silently sever the connection between the Father and the Son. When this happens, the best one can hope for is some form of Arianism.

Once this groundwork is laid, it should come as no surprise that Torrance works out his doctrine of providence in an entirely Christocentric way. Because we take our cue about how God interacts with humanity by how God has actually interacted with us in the Incarnation, we can come to some basic convictions, the most important of which is that God’s providential care of creation must be thought of as personal; just as personal as God is in Jesus Christ. This means that, contrary to many other Christian thinkers, providence cannot be thought of as impersonal or deterministic.

Another key insight that must be appropriated from the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ is that, as it is the same God who has both redeemed humanity and also guides it providentially, these two concepts must be intimately related. Providence is soteriologically significant. It is above all in the cross that we see providence in action, because it is in the cross that we see just how far God was willing to go to redeem us, which must influence how we think of God’s providential care of the world. We must think out our understanding of providence in light of the love and compassion evident in the cross. Anything less is unworthy of the gospel.

Because Torrance’s understanding of providence is Christocentrically grounded, as various sub-topics are explored below, inferences from the life, death and resurrection of Christ will be frequently brought to bear on the discussion. It is important that, as we examine the concepts of evil and divine omnipotence, we define our terms in light of Christ because, if we allow our concepts to determine how we think of God rather than allowing God to determine how we think out our concepts, we tacitly admit that we really believe our concepts to be greater than God.


The Problem of Evil

We are meaning seeking beings. Throughout our lives, either in our personal experience or by witnessing that of another, we see evil in the world and we want to know “why.” Evil is always a problem because it is always understood as something that is not commensurate with human happiness; however, it only becomes a “problem” in the philosophical sense when the conditions are right. There are some conditions that solve the so-called “problem of evil” in one fell swoop.

If one’s concept of deity is that God (or the gods) are not all-good, or perhaps not even good at all, the answer to the question, “Why is there evil” is easy. God (or the gods) is simply not good. Evil would not only not be prevented by God, but might even be inflicted by God. On the other hand, God can be all-good, but if God is not all-powerful, evil can be explained away just as easily. If God is not all-powerful, like in Process theology, for example, the answer to the problem is evil is simply that God is doing the best that God can, but is struggling along just like we are.

It is only when God’s almightiness and God’s goodness are both absolutely asserted that the classical statement of the problem of evil arises. “If God is all good and if God is all powerful, why is there evil in the world?” Since the Judeo-Christian tradition has always asserted both of these two concepts to be true, this has caused no small degree of mental anguish. And yet, Torrance will not have us consider evil, or God’s goodness and power in an abstract way, divorced from the reality of Jesus Christ. Indeed, as we shall see, if we think out the nature of evil and God’s power in light of what we actually see in the Incarnation, the problem of evil as traditionally stated should never arise and God’s goodness would never be brought into question.


Divine Omnipotence

That God is omnipotent, or almighty, cannot ever be in doubt. The Old and New Testaments both bear witness to this fact. The question that we must ask if we are to be engaged in responsible theology is, “What does divine omnipotence look like?” All too often, we take our cue of omnipotence in by an a priori, logical process. We look at human power, posit its perfection (often by multiplying it by a million or so), and assume that this must be what God’s almightiness is like. However, when we do this, we are reading our own subjective motives and insecurities back into God. Instead, if we look at divine omnipotence through the lens of the Incarnation, we end up with a radically different understanding. Indeed, like all theology, this can only be done by probing into the reality of God as revealed in Christ, which is inescapably a posteriori.

As we have alluded before, since the Incarnation demonstrates that God’s interaction with the world is intensely personal, God’s omnipotence cannot be thought to be any less personal than what we see in Christ. Since the providential power and activity of God is personal, we cannot think of it in “logical-causal or deterministic categories.” Both of these would presuppose that how God is toward us (personal in the Incarnation) is somehow different than God is in God’s own life (deterministic and detached).

As soon as we ask the question, “What can God do,” we have ventured firmly into abstract speculation. The only way we can get our minds around divine omnipotence is to examine what God has actually done in Jesus Christ. Again, we need to allow omnipotence to be defined in light of God, not vice versa. Only when we do this do we have some kind of a firm foundation upon which to build. Indeed, we will go astray if we look only to the mighty acts of creation, because the relation of God to creation is external to God, whereas the relation between the Father and the Son is internal to God’s being. When we allow what God has actually done to shape our thoughts about divine omnipotence, it breaks down our speculative categories but proves to us that God is more powerful than we ever imagined.

The Incarnation shows us concrete examples of how we must think of divine omnipotence. For example, we see the power of God when God becomes a human being as an infant. When God became a human being, God was doing something that was new, even for God. Such an idea would have been seen as unworthy of God by Greco-Roman philosophy, which considered such an idea to be “irrational and impossible.” God’s omnipotence flows from a being that is dynamic, not static and impersonal. God was free to become creator, and to become Incarnate (though, of course, God was always able to do these things). “God is so wonderfully and omnipotently free that he is able [to] do things and bring about events that are new even for himself, all in fulfillment of the purpose of his measureless Love not to exist for himself alone but to bring other beings into coexistence with himself that he may share with them his triune fellowship of Love.”

Throughout his life, Jesus continued to demonstrate God’s power, particularly in God’s power over the forces of evil. When God became a human being, an attack was launched on evil. As Jesus preached the word of God, the enemies of God (both human and demonic) were assaulted; as he proclaimed the forgiveness of sins and healed the sick, he liberated humanity “from enslavement to the power of Satan, the prince of evil.” In doing this, God shows that he does not wage war with evil simply in the spiritual and intangible realms, but also in and through humanity. As humanity had been invaded by evil, God entered the battlefield of human flesh, which had been occupied by the enemy, and restored humanity to “its truth and right as God’s creation.” We will examine the significance of this for understanding the nature of evil and the human condition below. Above all, the Incarnation shows us that God’s omnipotence (and thus, God’s providential activity) is not worked out from a distance in a deistic or dualistic sense. We see that, even though God maintains his transcendence over the world, God is not hindered in being “directly present and active in creation, even in its fallenness.”

The most astonishing display of divine power is the cross of Christ. It is true that God’s power is such that God can “take hold of that which resists God’s will (including evil and death) and make it bow down and serve God’s love,” but this cannot be thought of in an abstract way. When we think about how this overcoming of evil actually takes place in the Incarnation, we find that we must think this out in light of the cross, as the decisive event whereby God overcame evil in a personal way.

This is the key point for reflection because it is at the cross more than anywhere else that God actually moves in a way that is radically different than we would expect. We would expect God to prevent the crucifixion. We would expect that, if God would want to stop any act of evil, surely it would be the most evil action ever done by human beings, and yet this is clearly not the case. What God actually does is something greater than we could think. Instead of preventing the crucifixion, God uses the evil motives of humanity to accomplish God’s plan. By taking this action, God shows us that even the greatest evil that human beings can muster cannot stop God from accomplishing his purposes. God’s omnipotence over evil manifests itself, not by stopping evil with a snap of the fingers, but by allowing evil to run its course and forcing evil to serve the will of God.

Indeed, this way of overcoming evil is not something new in the cross, but is brought to its fullest expression there. Torrance has pointed out that God has repeatedly taken the sin and failure of his people to become the means by which they are bound to him. God took the failure of Israel and used it to draw them closer to himself. He takes our sins upon himself, eternally implicating us in redemption, even if we damn ourselves. In the cross, we see, all at the same time, the greatest act of human evil, the greatest example of divine love, the most awesome display of divine omnipotence, and the intense evil of sin. In light of the cross, we see that God’s power is the power to make the “worst things that happen to us serve God’s design and the purpose of God’s grace in our lives.”

The cross overthrows our desire to have a God who overcomes the evil in the world by a sheer display of brute force. The only God there is brings his power to bear on evil through suffering love. He has invaded humanity, bringing the conflict between God and humanity to its apex and overcome the evil lodged in the hearts of men and women from the inside. Torrance says that the power of God is brought to bear “through submitting to the violence of the violent and thereby storming his way by meekness and passion into the ultimate citadel of evil in order that by atonement he might bring about redemption and emancipation.” God’s astonishing power is manifest in the cross because it is there that God enters even into our death. The power of God is so great that the immortal is able to take on mortality, the strong can take on weakness, and the loving can endure hatred.


The Nature of Evil

In order to understand Torrance’s doctrine of providence, we must come to terms with his understanding of evil. Often, throughout church history, evil has been understood to be primarily or exclusively privative, that is, the absence of good. Torrance does not think that this is adequate, calling evil, “directly negative in its character.” Indeed, it seems that thinkers have thought about evil as privation because they wanted to make evil not seem so bad (or at least not have a real existence). This, of course, is hard to reconcile with the narrative of the Fall; Adam and Eve are not portrayed as falling because they had the absence of good, but because they had done evil.

However, as we would expect, Torrance does not oppose the privative view of evil primarily on philosophical grounds, but in light of God’s self-revelation to us in Jesus Christ. For him, we only know how deeply evil has penetrated into the created order and how serious a thing it really is because of how God had to deal with it. “The fearful depth of evil has been exposed by the fact that in the incarnate life and death of his beloved Son God himself had to descend into the very heart of the world’s evil and into its terrible darkness and enmity, even into the depths of its ultimate domain in death itself and its fearful finality.” The death of Christ shows us that nothing less than the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of the second Person of the Trinity could wrench humanity out of the clutches of evil and death.

Though evil, as demonstrated through the cross, is far worse than we would care to admit, we also see through the cross that God does not deal with it in an impersonal way. God does not use coercion or brute force to overcome evil. Instead, God confronts the fullness of evil, penetrating to the depths of sin in the created order, and vanquishes it “from within through his own holy love.”
The Human Condition

For Torrance, the dreadful state of the human condition is a sub-topic of the kingdom of evil. There is not even a trace of the inherent goodness of humanity affirmed by so many modern thinkers. Again, the human condition is revealed in the cross. On the one hand, the cross shows us the glory of God because Christ did not remain in the tomb but was raised from the dead on the third day. However, on the other hand, the cross reveals to us the frightening condition of unredeemed humanity. It is in the cross that we see God’s judgment against sin brought fully to bear on Christ. Torrance contends that we simply cannot see the wretched state in which humanity finds itself through abstract and speculative means. We simply cannot understand the depth and gravity of sin in which we are implicated until it is “unmasked at the cross.”

Torrance points out that nowhere in the Old or New Testaments do we see a doctrine of sin developed independently from God’s decisive self-revelation and then, once the evil of humanity is established, present the grace and love of God against such a background. Despite the fact that this has often been used as an evangelism tactic, it is utterly absent from the scriptures. The Bible makes no further attempt to demonstrate the evil that is bound up in humanity beyond the crucifixion.

Perhaps this is the reason that so many modern theologians have promoted the intrinsic goodness of humanity. And yet, the strongest affirmation of the brokenness of humanity is latent in the single event of the cross, for it is in the cross that we are shown the terrible guilt of humanity: human beings are so sinful and opposed to God that they would kill him by nailing him to a cross. We desperately do not want to admit that we are every bit as evil as those who actually drove the nails into the Son of God, so we romanticize the cross and soften it in our artistic portrayals.

How is God related to all of this? If we operate with a deterministic understanding of providence, we are forced to conclude that God is so far from lamenting the sin in the world, he is in some sense the cause of it, seeing as nothing could happen unless directly from the hand of God. And yet, if we allow the reality of Jesus Christ to challenge our thinking, we find that God did not preordain our fallen condition but laments it. Indeed, our whole understanding of what God has done must start with the “vexation of the heavenly Father over the condition of his children.”

Part of the reason why God has such compassion on his children is because, in spite of the fact that we are willingly in bondage to sin, our condition is not entirely our own fault. During his ministry, Jesus never points his finger at those he is healing or forgiving. Instead, he “stoops to shoulder their weakness.” In fact, even this shouldering exposes the direness of the human condition. In the taking of our brokenness, sin and liability upon himself in his vicarious humanity, God in Christ reveals that we are completely helpless without such an utterly astonishing gracious activity.

Torrance was not in any way prone to theological speculation, determined to remain rooted in what God has actually revealed. However, there are times when what God has done is so astonishing that it seems as though it drives him to at least some degree of speculation. When this happens, he makes a point of acknowledging the radical nature of what he has to say and its disputable character. It is on precisely this topic that Torrance puts forward a conclusion that he feels is implied by the Incarnation, yet does so in fear and trembling, lest he should make an impious claim. In Christ we see God going to the cross, enduring death for our sake. “It is only when we see that in the incarnation, in the entry of the Son into our alienated existence under the determinism of evil, and even into our death…it is only when we see that the presence of God in all that means that God (and here we clap our hands on our mouth) has staked and risked his very being as God for our sakes, that we can begin to grasp the fearful gravity of our human condition.” Perhaps we must consider that human sin is so serious, that God, in his love, might have been in some kind of danger on the cross.

However, even when Torrance makes a statement like that, he does not mean to imply that such a risk is the result of an attack of evil but from the full exercise of divine judgment. It is because the utter wrath of God was being poured out on the Son of God that made the cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” so completely agonizing. In that moment, God was “bowed under his own judgement (sic) on sin, a judgement not mitigated but utterly fulfilled.”


Providence

Once Torrance’s positions on divine omnipotence, evil and the human condition are brought to light, it is clear that, for Torrance, the problem of evil as traditionally stated simply never arises. God’s power is not exercised over and against humanity in a coercive way and evil cannot be dealt with simply by a show of brute force, but must be conquered by a personal invasion of the very being of God, overcoming it from the inside. In light of the above reflection, we are forced to give up most of the standard ways of reconciling God’s goodness and God’s power because the tension never arises. It also allows us to see, with much greater clarity, the major motifs in Torrance’s doctrine of providence.

God’s providential care over the created order is intensely personal. It is so personal that God has pledged his very life and being for us. God has entered into our suffering in the vicarious humanity of Christ and has taken our suffering upon himself. God’s care for creation is so intense that God has been willing to become a real human being, with a nature like ours, and endure our condition. In order to care for us, the Creator has become a creature (while nevertheless remaining Creator).

Evil must be considered in light of three major points, “which in their interconnection,” Torrance claims, “have a bearing upon how we are to think of the ongoing activity of divine providence.” First, all of creation has been implicated in the Fall. Humans are impacted both my moral evil as well as physical evil. Our salvation is of both our bodies and our souls so we can maintain no body/soul dualism. In light of this, God’s providence “involves material as well as spiritual power.”

Secondly, evil is utterly irrational and yet, inexplicably, also personal. The scriptures do not simply have evil as an impersonal force, but, as Torrance points out, portrays “an organized kingdom of evil and darkness with a kind of headquarters of its own, the power house of an utterly rebellious will or spirit which the Holy Scriptures call Satan.” We cannot grasp how God overcomes evil but we see in the life of Jesus and in the resurrection that God does indeed overcome it.

Thirdly, evil has a kind of impossible reality. It is completely contrary to the being of God and yet seems to be confirmed in its existence by its very forbidden character. Somehow, God’s “No!” to evil gives it “a mode of reality which it does not have and cannot have of itself.” We can see how deadly real evil really is in the cross. We believe that, just as God uses even the cross, in its abject evil, to accomplish God’s good, holy and perfect purposes, God will do the same with the evil in our own lives. We can trust that no evil that we have been implicated in can overcome the love and grace of God because we have already seen God overcome the most evil act possible and transform it into the greatest example of God’s love for us.


Pastoral Application

Torrance’s doctrine of providence is far more helpful in pastoral care than ways of understanding that think of God as omni-causal. Depending on how such a view is interpreted, it would either result in evil not really being allowed to be evil or else there would be a serious division in God. Torrance’s view does not allow us to conclude that there is some dark, inscrutable deity behind the back of Jesus Christ. The only God there is has given God’s own life for us, pledging Christ for our redemption. We can look at the care that God has taken of humanity in the Incarnation, especially in the cross, and trust that, even when our experience might lead us to conclude otherwise, God’s love and mercy will indeed triumph over the evil in our lives.

The fact that God’s providential care is not simply a spiritual reality but manifests itself in and through the physical world in the vicarious humanity of Christ, shows us that God cares for our bodies as well as our souls. Moreover, we can participate in God’s providential care of creation by joining in Christ’s radical compassion and sacrifice. We are not the sources of providence, but we become vehicles for that providence, manifesting God’s love and compassion to those who are hurting.

Most importantly, Torrance’s doctrine of providence opens the door for real pastoral care. When a person has suffered evil, Torrance’s view allows us to acknowledge evil for what it is, tragic and contrary to God’s will. We can rely on God’s providential care, not because the evil that has happened to us is not really evil, but because God has condescended to join us in our suffering. God suffers in the midst of our suffering because God, in the vicarious humanity of Christ, has made our suffering God’s own. One who is no less than the God of the universe stands in solidarity with us in our trials.

God has penetrated into our humanity and we are implicated by the actions of God. Just as Christ has cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” on our behalf and in our place, in which we participate in the Holy Spirit, he has also cried, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” Though it may take some time to reach the point in the healing process where we can join Christ in that cry, Christ has cried in on our behalf and in our place nonetheless.

Torrance’s doctrine of providence is humanizing and personalizing. Jesus indeed goes bail (a phrase frequently used by Torrance) for God, so we can rely that the care shown by the Incarnate Son is the same care that the Father takes for his children.