Three Fundamental Objections

For many, however, three fundamental considerations could disqualify this spiritual warfare perspective on evil at the outset. Therefore we need to address them before we begin to flesh out the warfare thesis.

First, the apologetic need for a warfare perspective on suffering and evil will not be seen if there is an insufficient appreciation for the radicality of evil in our world and the radical nature of the problem this poses for the classical-philosophical understanding of divine sovereignty as meticulous control. Many times this radicality is not appreciated in contemporary discussions on the problem of evil, a fact that contributes to a pervasive willingness to accept shallow explanations for why evil occurs.

Second, this thesis requires a willingness to think about the power of God, the reality of evil and the influence of Satan in some rather untraditional ways. This point is disturbing to many more traditionally minded believers.

Third, the warfare thesis requires, as a central component, a belief in angels, Satan and demons as real, autonomous, free agents, as well as a belief that the activity of these beings intersects with human affairs, for better or for worse. Many modern people, including many Christian theists, find this belief inherently implausible.1

Before discussing the biblical material, therefore, we need to address these three obstacles. Hence in this chapter I first attempt to present the problem of evil in a concrete, as opposed to an abstract, form. Evil cannot be adequately conceptualized in the abstract. It can be experienced only in particular forms. The plausibility of a warfare worldview within our naturalistically inclined culture, however, hangs upon an ability to realize the full horror of evil, which means acknowledging it on a concrete level. Radical solutions are plausible only as solutions to radical problems. When considered concretely, the classical-philosophical problem of evil is a radical, indeed an unsolvable, problem for the understanding of God’s power and providence that has prevailed within classical-philosophical theism. Though it may indeed appear radical to believers who are strongly influenced by the classical-philosophical perspective, I believe that the cosmic warfare perspective on evil constitutes the only orthodox theistic approach that avoids this unsolvable problem.

Following this discussion, in response to the second obstacle I attempt to lay the groundwork for a subsequent revision of the classical-philosophical approach to understanding evil by noting several peculiar features of its formulation of the problem of evil. These unusual features suggest that something is askew in the manner in which the problem of evil has been construed as a search for a divine reason behind each and every particular evil. This point further suggests that perhaps the understanding of providence which lies behind this formulation of the problem is mistaken.

Finally, in response to the third obstacle, I examine various features of our rapidly changing Western culture that suggest that, while many may still find a belief in angels, Satan, demons and the like to be implausible, our culture as a whole increasingly does not. The Western church, and the whole of Western culture, is now embarking on a postmodern age in which most of the features of the classical-philosophical theistic worldview, and certainly fundamental features of the rationalistic Enlightenment worldview, are being jettisoned. While this “new age” presents unique problems for the church to address, it also presents many unique positive opportunities—if the church is willing to seize them.

One of these opportunities is the chance to reappropriate and render intellectually viable a largely lost dimension of the biblical worldview: the dimension of spiritual warfare. This warfare worldview not only contributes to the resolution of the intellectual problem of evil by providing an ultimate context in which radical evil is not unexpected; it also, for this very reason, inspires believers to take on the problem of evil at a spiritual level—at the level of spiritual warfare—which is by New Testament standards where the real “problem” of evil lies.

The Concrete Problem of Evil

Historian Philip Friedman provides the following eyewitness account of what happened to a young Jewish girl living in the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation.

While philosophers argue endlessly about how precisely to define “evil” in abstract terms, none of us has difficulty recognizing this concrete nightmare as an example of it. At the very least, evil consists of the fact that for far too many people—as for Zosia and her mother, along with six million other Jews during the Holocaust—life becomes a horrifying nightmare from which they cannot awake, a nightmare as full of pain as it is devoid of meaning.

Radical evil of this sort cannot be captured in abstract definitions. Indeed, “abstractions . . . distract us from that immediate reality [of evil] and reduce evil to a statistic,” as Jeffery Burton Russell suggests.3 The essence of evil transcends words, for words are always one step removed from concrete reality. Evil cannot be adequately grasped in a detached, neutral, abstract way. It cannot be known through faceless, nameless statistics or abstract theorems. All approaches to the problem of evil that do not go beyond these will be in danger of offering cheap and trite solutions. Radical evil can be known only when incarnated and experienced concretely.

For our purposes, then, evil is the concrete picture of Zosia, her mother and a million other similarly unthinkable atrocities. We must entertain concrete pictures like this when we discuss the problem of evil, if our discussion is to be authentic. As Russell again observes: “Only when the abstractions are put aside can we see the face of the Devil gloating over suffering. The modern experience of evil is the reek of burning children. Every honest view of reality must confront the immediate, personal, physical reality of the burning child.”4

Hence when I speak of “evil” throughout this work, I am not referring primarily to some abstract “absence of goodness” (Augustine) or any other merely theoretical definition of evil. I am, rather, referring to Zosia, her mother and the unheeded cries and unpunished laughter that rose up to heaven on that day. By extension (but not abstraction!), I am referring to every concrete horrifying experience that in various ways looks and feels like this one.

The fact that real life is often demonically nightmarish is a problem for all humans on at least emotional, psychological and practical levels. It is the problem of staying sane in a world where little children can be treated as Zosia was treated. It is the problem of understanding how humans can sink to the level of the mindless Nazi pack that tortured her. And it is the problem of devising ways of protecting the Zosias of the world from the Nazis of the world.

But evil is a problem on a metaphysical level as well for people who believe that God exists, at least as “God” has been defined in the classical-philosophical tradition of the Christian church.5 This philosophical and theological tradition, represented most forcefully by such towering figures as Augustine and Aquinas, and in my view expressed with the most logical consistency by Calvin and the Reformed tradition, formally holds that God is among other things altogether above time, change and passivity (viz., the capacity to be influenced by another). Without usually intending to deny free will, this tradition also held that God exercised absolute sovereignty over the world, which entailed that he directly or indirectly exercised a meticulous control over things. Most importantly for our purposes, this view at the very least held that all things, even bad things, have a specific divine purpose for their existence.6

Now, when these divine attributes and this view of meticulous providence are combined with the biblical understanding that God is altogether loving, then a significant problem arises. For it seems that, within this sort of divine providence, innocent little children should never have to suffer as Zosia suffered. If God is all-loving and perfectly good, he must want to protect Zosia. And if God exercises total control over the world, he must be able to protect Zosia. Yet Zosia suffers an unspeakable ordeal, then is murdered. This makes no sense and constitutes, in its starkest form, the intellectual problem of evil.

The occurrence of one nightmare like Zosia’s is thus an intense intellectual problem for classical-philosophical theists. But to fully grasp the problem that evil poses to a theist, we must consider, as concretely as possible, that history is awash with unimaginable nightmares like Zosia’s. Indeed, while we believers frequently wax eloquent in declaring how the intricate design and grand beauty of the cosmos are evidence of an all-good Creator, in honesty we must also confess that the world is full of occurrences that evidence either the nonexistence of a good and all-powerful God, or the existence of a very powerful, competing, evil god.

Adrio König certainly expresses an impression shared by many: “Anyone who refuses to idealize or romanticize reality, but looks it straight in the eye, sees around him more signs of the demonic than of the true God. Indeed, there is more pain and misery, injustice and violence in this world than love, prosperity, justice and joy.”7

Hence, the intensity and scope of radical evil in the world is a significant problem for classical-philosophical Christian theists. If we consider it concretely and do not retreat to romanticized abstractions and sheltered idealizations, the macabre dimension of reality seems to require some alteration in the classical-philosophical Western understanding of God. How can we intelligently and morally believe that an altogether loving God is altogether sovereign over the world when the world he is supposedly meticulously controlling is in so many ways an obvious abomination?

Hymns of praise and screams of terror. Even this statement of the problem of evil is too abstract, however. It does not yet capture the sharpness of the antinomy created by radical suffering for belief in an all-loving, meticulously sovereign God. Like the problem of evil itself, the antimony must be made as concrete as possible to be adequately grasped.

Nothing expresses the faith and trust of the church in the controlling sovereignty of God more concretely than its traditional hymns. With a view to attaining a ruthlessly honest perception of the problem we are up against, consider the following very real possibility: While Zosia was being held down and tortured, while she was screaming and the guards were laughing and her mother was going mad, at that very moment, in other corners of the earth—and perhaps just around the block—Christians were gathered together and were singing traditional hymns of praise to the Lord, hymns that exalt the Creator for his faithfulness, his loving care for the world, and his providential tender protection of his children.

For all we know, a congregation just down the road from Zosia’s hell was singing Sandell’s famous hymn “Day by Day.”

The hymn captures poignantly the church’s traditional theology of God’s character, his meticulous providential care, and thus the pious resignation that, according to the classical-philosophical teaching, should characterize believers who truly trust in their heavenly Father. Following the admonition of Augustine, we ought to consider all the harm inflicted on us by others, however painful, as coming from our Father’s hand. For, the teaching goes, no one can do anything to us except as he “allows”—and allows for a good specific reason.9

Hymns like this one have provided peace and security to countless believers throughout the ages. But if we do not cover our ears, our singing must be haunted by Zosia’s screams and the Nazis’ laughter. Was Zosia not “God’s treasure”? Why was she not protected?

What is more, can anyone really regard the “toil and trouble” she and her mother endured as coming from “a father’s hand”? If so, what kind of father are we singing about? Or, some might even dare to wonder, was Zosia (and her six million kinfolk) perhaps not included in God’s loving care because she was Jewish? Isn’t such a suggestion—all too frequent in the church’s history—as thoughtlessly shallow and non-Christian as it is demonically insensitive?10 Didn’t we all crucify Christ? Didn’t he already pay the price for all sin? Don’t Christian children sometimes suffer nightmarishly too?

In any event, we must wonder what sort of God would inflict, or “allow,” anything like this hideous savagery on an innocent little girl for any reason—let alone for something her remote ancestors supposedly did. Such “explanations” simply express and exacerbate the problem in need of explanation. The childish screams and Nazi laughter of Zosia and her predators haunt whatever solace hymns like “Day by Day” bring us. To be sure, if we follow König’s advice and refuse to “idealize or romanticize reality” but look it straight in the eye, it becomes questionable whether the lyrics of this hymn, and all hymns like it, continue to provide any real comfort. To some of us, it has become questionable whether they are even meaningful in light of nightmarish experiences like that of Zosia.

Another hymn that nicely captures the classical-philosophical theology of God’s providence, a hymn that, for all we know, was being exuberantly proclaimed while Zosia’s mother was being driven mad, is Lloyd’s famous hymn “My Times Are in Thy Hand.”

Again, if we have the courage to allow the antinomy between the lyrics of this hymn and Zosia’s tortured screams to engage us on a concrete level, the antinomy borders on the unbearable. What does it mean to assert that the hand of the all-powerful and all-loving Father “will never cause his child a needless tear” when asserted in the vicinity of a child who just had her eyes plucked out and of the screams of Zosia’s terrorized mother? In this concrete context, does not suggesting that this event came from the hand of God, and that it came about “as best it seemed to thee,” come close to depicting God in Hitlerian terms? What is more, would not such a conception significantly undermine the godly urgency one should have to confront such evil as something that God is unequivocally against?12

And so it is with a hundred other hymns that Christian congregations around the globe sing routinely, and indeed could have been singing at the moment of Zosia’s torture. Ascending up to heaven alongside the screams and sinister laughter could have been the sung proclamation that “Behind a frowning providence [God] hides a smiling face,” or “His purposes will ripen fast, Unfolding every hour. . . . The bud may have a bitter taste, But sweet will be the flow’r.”13 Zosia’s torture, we are apparently to believe, was but the bitter-tasting bud of a beautiful, divinely ordained flower. Behind the apparent divine frown here (the Nazi guards) is, we are supposed to affirm, God’s hidden, sovereign, smiling face.

Divinizing the nightmare. Such conceptions, I submit, simply add a divine dimension to, and thus infinitely intensify, the enormity of the barbarism under consideration. It is no longer simply the purpose of the Nazi guards we must struggle against—that is nightmarish enough. We must now intellectually struggle with the supposed purpose of a sovereign smiling God using them to achieve his own beautiful providential ends. The Nazis’ agenda somehow here seems to receive divine approval. Yet while we are to view the Nazis’ agenda as being diabolically evil, we are apparently supposed to accept that God’s agenda in ordaining or allowing the Nazis’ behavior is perfectly good.

Within the classical-philosophical theology expressed in many traditional hymns, such a conclusion seems unavoidable, however unpleasant it sounds, and however contradictory to our reason it seems. For the foundation of the classical-philosophical portrait of God’s relationship to the world is the conviction that whatever happens must somehow fit into God’s sovereign plan. All things must ultimately follow a divine blueprint that is, in detail, foreknown and willed by God. Thus whether we speak of God “ordaining” or “allowing” the evil to occur, there must always be a divine purpose for it occurring. It is all decreed by God because “all things work together for good” (according to one common interpretation of Rom 8:28). In classical theological thinking, events may occur “against” God’s will, but paradoxically they can never occur outside God’s will.14

R. C. Sproul well presents the classical-philosophical reasoning behind the understanding of omnipotence as omni-control:

Among a host of other problems, this “all or nothing” line of reasoning seems oblivious to contemporary quantum theory, which successfully operates with a purely statistical understanding of natural regularity.16

But our present interest concerns the problem of evil. While this omni-control model of divine sovereignty may provide a sense of security to many believers, it functions as something of a cosmic megaphone for the macabre screams of the Zosias of the world—if we do not run from the concrete world into the realm of romanticized abstractions. When we do not flinch from gazing upon evil in its concrete manifestations, all such talk begins to ring hollow and borders on becoming meaningless if not positively immoral, as Ivan suggests in The Brothers Karamazov.17

Evil and faultfinding. Nevertheless, the theology of God’s sovereign, all-controlling providence, expressed throughout the Western church’s hymns, has permeated Christian theology and Western culture in general. With such a view, it is hardly surprising to find believers and nonbelievers alike, past as well as present, instinctively attributing various evils to the “mysterious will” of the all-holy God of the Bible.

To mention a few examples I am personally acquainted with, a local newspaper recently quoted a mother of a twelve-year-old girl who had years before been kidnapped, raped and killed by an evil person. In the course of speaking about the killer’s soon release from prison (on good behavior!) the woman sorrowfully admitted that she had never forgiven God for taking her child the day she was murdered. She lost her faith, she confessed, when she lost her daughter.

But what, we must ask, could have led this poor woman instinctively to blame God for her daughter’s diabolical death? What could have inspired her to implicate God for what a twisted, evil person freely chose to do? Was it not the widespread cultural assumption, derived from the classical-philosophical theology and traditional hymnody of the church, that believing in God means accepting all things as coming “from the Father’s hand”? Was it not the entrenched belief that somehow all events, however horrifying, fit into God’s plan, and thus that this young girl’s vicious suffering must somehow serve a divine purpose? Indeed, if God the Father’s hand oversees every event in world history, and if, as the hymn says, “the Father’s hand will never cause his child a needless tear,” was not this woman correct in thinking that it was ultimately God’s will, not just the will of her daughter’s killer, that caused her daughter to endure such an unthinkable ordeal?

Such thinking is widespread both inside and outside the church—outside often in the form of rage, as with this tormented mother; inside often in the form of clichés. It is expressed in the young man’s rage against God for paralyzing him in a freak rugby accident as well as in the televangelist’s shallow and insensitive assurance to the people of Oklahoma City, the day following the tragic bombing of their Federal Building in the spring of 1995, that God is “up to great things” in Oklahoma and that all the people of this good city should “expect a miracle!” (One wonders what consolation this “word of encouragement” ministered to the dozens of parents of the murdered children.) It is expressed in one man’s indignation toward God for taking his loving young wife with leukemia, as well as in another man’s assurances to this distraught husband that “God knows what he is doing,” “God’s ways are not our ways,” “God is still on his throne,” “There’s a silver lining in every cloud,” “All things work together for the good,” and the like.

Christian orthodoxy, of course, has always taught that God is omnipotent, and for good reason. Scripture is unequivocal on this point. But the question that needs to be asked is this: Does this omnipotence necessarily entail that God is all-controlling, as the classical-philosophical tradition after Augustine has been inclined to assume? Does affirming that God is omnipotent commit one to the view that a good divine purpose lies behind all particular events, as the above hymns suggest? If it does, then it seems that we must consider both the rage of the unbeliever and the shallow, trite piety of the believer to be essentially correct. Zosia’s torment, then, is indeed from her heavenly Father’s loving hand.

In what follows, however, I propose an alternative understanding, one that I believe characterizes both the Bible and the early pre-Augustinian church, and one that avoids the unacceptable consequences of the Augustinian model.18

Perhaps even more disturbing, however, has been the church’s tendency to go beyond merely supposing that God has a mysterious reason for allowing suffering to specifying what this reason is: God’s desire to punish us for our sin. While the Bible certainly teaches that God sometimes uses suffering to punish or to discipline people, this motif did not attain the status of a universal explanation for evil until Augustine.19 Since Augustine, it has constituted the most frequent explanation in the church, and in Western culture in general, for why people suffer. Though it directly opposes the standard Protestant understanding of the atonement (in which all sin has already been atoned for), and though an entire book of the Bible is devoted to its refutation (Job), and though Jesus himself teaches against it (Lk 13:1-5; Jn 9:1-5), it has nevertheless dominated the church’s thinking on this subject throughout history and continues to exercise a strong influence today.20

Whenever we respond to misfortune with the question, “What did I do to deserve this?” we are echoing this traditional theodicy. Whenever we ask (as our culture incessantly asks), “Why do bad things happen to good people?” we are reflecting the widespread assumption that bad things are supposed to happen to bad people.21 That is how God “gets even” and sinners learn their lesson.

When well-intentioned Christians sometimes attribute a person’s sickness or failure to get healed to their supposed lack of faith, this assumption is also at work. When various people try to explain AIDS as God’s punishment for homosexuality, or the Midwest’s floodings or California’s earthquakes and fires as God’s retribution for sin, or when anti-Semitic believers follow the darkest tradition of the church in explaining Hitler’s attempted genocide of the Jewish race by appealing to their complicity in crucifying Christ, this traditional Augustinian assumption is at work. People suffer, we are to believe, because they deserve it!

“Explanations” like this obviously accomplish something, otherwise they could not have survived so long. At the very least, they express a confidence in God’s absolute sovereignty (defined here as “control”) that seems to provide many believers with a great deal of security. However bad things may appear, this view says, everything is under God’s control. Everything is proceeding as divinely planned. Everything somehow fits together. In the words of Boethius: “God, the author of all natures, directs and disposes . . . all things towards goodness. . . . Everyone thinks that evil is so prevalent on earth; but if you could truly see the plan of providence, you would perceive that evil has no place left for it at all.”22

Undoubtedly most people would like to think that this belief is true—hence the mass appeal of the classical-philosophical Augustinian theodicy. Such “explanations” themselves become the problem in need of explanation, however, when it becomes painfully obvious that life is simply not okay. In the vicinity of Zosia’s screams—that is, when it is our spouse who dies, or our child who is kidnapped, or our relatives who were gassed in Auschwitz—such explanations ring hollow at best. More probably, they sound positively abusive. How can God not see this as evil? What could you (as opposed to someone else?) have done to deserve this? What kind of God would even consider punishing you, for any reason, by torturing your child? What good and wise divine purpose could lie behind any child’s kidnapping?

There comes a point when even suggesting such an overarching “good” scheme becomes as cruel as it is ridiculous—if we continue to think concretely about the reality of evil. If we do not flinch from the concrete horror, there comes a point when the notions that God has a purpose for everything, that things always go his way, and that nothing can genuinely oppose him get stretched to the breaking point. Then we are ready to consider abandoning the Augustinian divine blueprint model of divine sovereignty and seriously reconsider the pre-Augustinian, biblical understanding of the world as involved in cosmic war. Aside from its biblical grounding, no other view of the world really makes sense in the vicinity of Zosia’s nightmare.

The Problem with the Problem of Evil

This intellectual problem of evil constitutes the single most difficult challenge to classical-philosophical Christian theism. Not surprisingly, then, the church’s theological tradition has often been obsessed with this issue, at least since the time of Augustine. Volumes upon volumes have been written with the express purpose of rationally reconciling the belief in an all-good and all-powerful God with the reality that life is frequently an inescapable nightmare. Indeed, it is not overstating the case to claim that no single theological problem has occupied more intellectual energy, time and ink than this one.

This way of formulating the problem of evil has, however, three rather curious features that call into question the assumptions that give rise to it. First, at least according to the thinking of many theists (including some classical-philosophical theists), this way of posing the problem seems to render it logically unsolvable. This is odd if the classical-philosophical theistic view that gives rise to this problem is indeed a true view of God. Second, in sharp contrast to the history of Christian reflection within the classical-philosophical tradition, Scripture shows no awareness of this problem, a point that further suggests that Scripture reflects a conception of God (and perhaps the cosmos in general) different from that of the classical-philosophical tradition. Third, not only is the classically formulated problem of evil absent from Scripture, but the view of evil that is found in Scripture runs directly counter to the view of evil presupposed in this formulation of the problem.

All of this suggests that there is a serious and fundamental problem with the problem of evil as it has been formulated in the classical-philosophical tradition. In what follows I shall flesh out each of these three features in their respective order.

The unresolvability of the problem of evil. Despite the enormous amount of intellectual energy poured into this problem by the church’s most brilliant minds, as well as by people outside the church, the problem of evil, as it has been formulated within the Western classical-philosophical tradition, has not been solved. According to many thinkers, this is because this problem, as it is here formulated, is simply logically unsolvable.23

The core problem seems to lie in the classical-philosophical equation of power with control, and thus omnipotence with omnicontrol, an equation that forces the problem of evil to be seen as a problem of God’s sovereignty. If it is accepted that God is all-loving and all-powerful, and if maximum power is defined as maximum control, then by definition there seems to be no place for evil. If goodness controls all things, all things must be good.

Yet Zosia and her mother experienced an unthinkable nightmare. How is this possible? The reality of our experience and the assumptions of our theology seem to contradict one another here. Though classical-philosophical theologians have valiantly, and at times ingeniously, attempted to resolve this contradiction, many believe that it has not been and cannot be removed.

I have already alluded to the possibility that one could remove the contradiction while retaining the view that God is all-loving and all-powerful by simply denying that the world is evil. Remarkably, this view has exercised a strong influence on the church’s reflections on theodicy throughout history. Some of the church’s most weighty authorities, such as Boethius and Augustine, explicitly embraced it.

This view in essence maintains that what looks like evil does so simply because of our limited perspective on “the universal good.” If we could but view any “evil” event from God’s transcendent, panoramic, timeless perspective, we would supposedly see how any given event “fits” in with the God-ordained harmonious cosmic whole. However horrifying the event may appear to our limited perspectives, from God’s universal perspective, and in accordance with God’s meticulous universally controlling will, the “evil” event actually contributes to the beauty of the whole.

Hence as both Augustine and Boethius admit explicitly, for God there is, quite literally, no evil. “Evil does not exist at all,” Augustine says, “and not only for you [God], but for your created universe, because there is nothing outside it which could break in and destroy the order which you have imposed upon it. But in parts of the universe, there are certain elements which are thought evil because of a conflict of interest.”24

What seems evil, because it conflicts with our finite interests, is actually a dimension of a higher harmony. For Augustine, therefore, we ought to regard everything as flowing from God’s sovereign loving hand. Even when an innocent person suffers unjustly at the hands of another person, Augustine maintains, “he ought not to attribute [his suffering] to the will of men, or of angels, or of any created spirit, but rather to His will who gives power to wills.”25

The Nazi guards, we are apparently to believe, could do to Zosia only what God explicitly empowered them to do to her. Thus she and her mother, together with the rest of us, are apparently supposed to attribute her tragedy not so much to the evil will of the diabolical Nazi guards as to the will of Zosia’s Creator. Why would Zosia’s Creator will such a thing? Again, Augustine declares,

Zosia’s torture, and all the pain of the cosmos, is divinely “arranged” because the cosmos, like a poem, is more beautiful when it is “set off with antitheses.” The “opposition of contraries” renders God’s creation all the more “exquisite.” In this sense, there is ultimately no evil.

Such an approach has some appeal when evil is considered merely at an abstract level, as “the absence of the good.” As said above, it is certainly comforting to believe that there is a silver lining in every cloud. But when evil is considered in all its dimensions at a concrete level, the supposition that there is a higher perspective that harmonizes all the conflicting parts of this sometimes nightmarish earthly existence simply becomes unacceptable. As Ivan cries out in Brothers Karamazov, “I renounce the higher harmony altogether. . . . It’s not worth the tear of . . . one tortured child.”27

Affirming that what happened to Zosia was, from any perspective, not utterly evil sounds not only shallow but also as if it partakes in the evil of the deed itself. However much theologians may protest, the affirmation, if thought through consistently, seems to make God out to be a Nazi, and the Nazis’ butchering of Zosia to be in some mysterious way godly. Hitler and most Nazis believed that the extermination of the Jews was “good” only in the sense that it was a necessary step toward “the greatest good.” If this classical-philosophical Augustinian approach is correct, the only mistake the Nazis made was in determining just what “the greatest good” was.

If we further consider that this divine panoramic view within which all evil is supposedly a “secret good” is held by a God who, according to Scripture, has a passionate hatred toward all evil, the “solution” becomes more problematic still. For it is certainly not clear how God could hate what he himself wills and sees as a contributing ingredient in the good of the whole. If all things ultimately play themselves out according to a prescripted divine plan, how can God genuinely hate anything?

Yet in scriptural terms God is all-holy at least in part precisely because of his holy hatred toward evil. Evil is evil precisely because God hates it. For example, we read:

Hence too, all who love the holy God are enjoined to hate evil with him (Ps 97:10; Amos 5:15). Indeed, “the fear of the LORD is hatred of evil” (Prov 8:13).

This central scriptural theme, however, presupposes that evil exists for God as well as for humans, that God does not will it, and thus that some beings (those who are evil) have the ability to act against God’s will. It requires the understanding that it is possible for some beings (angels and humans at least) genuinely to resist, and even to thwart, whatever blueprint God might wish their lives to follow. It requires accepting the view that God, for whatever reasons, designed the cosmos such that he does not necessarily always get his way, and may in fact detest the way some things are turning out. It requires the view that God does not monopolize power, and hence that omnipotence cannot be equated with meticulous omnicontrol. It therefore requires that we do not find solace in any view that would try to reduce evil down to an aesthetic antithesis that secretly contributes to the higher harmony of the cosmic whole.

But it is precisely this view of omnipotence as omnicontrol that the classical-philosophical theistic perspective logically implies and has often explicitly affirmed. Hence it has always leaned strongly in the direction of affirming that evil ultimately fits into God’s beautiful sovereign plan, even though he (paradoxically) hates it. As Augustine teaches, evil may go against God’s will, but it does not occur outside it. The unresolvability of the classical-philosophical problem of evil lies precisely in the unintelligibility of this position.

Freedom and providence. This is not to say that the classical-philosophical tradition explicitly denied that humans, and even angels, have free will. To the contrary, except in a few extreme forms of Calvinism, the freedom of creatures has in some fashion always been affirmed. Therefore the ability of these creatures in some sense to go freely against God’s will has always been affirmed as well.

Unfortunately, this trajectory of reflection that centered on the self-determination of angels and humans, a line of reflection implicit in the biblical narrative and explicit in the pre-Augustinian early church, was severely compromised with the increasing influence of Platonic and Aristotelian categories, climaxing in the Neo-Platonic/Christian synthesis of Augustine. For now, all things, including free actions, were subsumed within the sovereign divine will. This rendered the freedom of the actions in question ambiguous, to say the least.29

Hence while both Augustine and Boethius (not to mention Aquinas, Luther and indeed most theologians in the classical-philosophical tradition) affirmed that evil originated from the freedom of creatures, not from God, they nevertheless also held that there was a transcendent divine purpose behind the creaturely willing that, we have seen, meant that the evil performed by the creature ultimately contributed to some higher good. For these authors, the blame for evil attached to the creature, though the evil as a preordained constituent to a higher good was credited to God. For example, these theologians would generally want to affirm both that the Nazi guards were to blame for the evil they freely inflicted on Zosia and her mother, and that the event was nevertheless ordained by God for a greater good.

This approach, then, wanted to hold both to the freedom of creatures and to the absolute sovereignty (defined here as meticulous control) of God. They wanted to accept the morally responsible freedom of creatures, but also to retain the belief that all events, including morally responsible free actions, follow a divine blueprint and thus fit into God’s ultimate will for his creation.

Unfortunately, however, the maneuver simply cannot be rendered logically coherent, despite the best efforts of some of the church’s best minds to make it so. While it lies outside the scope of this present work to attempt to make this case, the postulation of a preordained divine blueprint logically undermines the force of seeing creatures as genuinely free, and vice versa. In the end, therefore, I would argue that the paradoxicality of this “solution” simply repositions the paradoxicality of the problem of evil it is designed to solve. Indeed, it is the problem of evil all over again, but restated from a different direction.

Some theologians within the classical-philosophical tradition, however, have been somewhat more logically consistent in working out the implications of the concept of freedom and have therefore significantly qualified the classical-philosophical understanding of God’s omnipotence as entailing omnicontrol. Especially in the post-Reformation era many have explicitly rejected the Augustine assumption that the will of God can never be thwarted. These theologians (traditionally labeled Arminians) have seen that the affirmation of creaturely freedom entails that God might not always get his way.

This approach, if carried through consistently, removes the earlier mentioned contradiction between the experience of Zosia screaming and the classical-philosophical theology of God’s power precisely because it removes the classical-philosophical equation of ideal power and maximum control that gave rise to it. Unfortunately, however, this view has rarely been carried through consistently. More specifically, four problems have tended to surround the traditional Arminian approach to understanding freedom and evil, all of which concern the fact that it has not removed itself far enough from classical-philosophical assumptions about God.

First, Arminian theologians have not generally followed through the logic of their insight into the nature of creaturely freedom to its logical (and biblical) conclusion. For example, despite their view of freedom, Arminian theologians have on the whole still accepted the classical-philosophical understanding of God’s immutability, timelessness, impassibility and so on. These attributes, I have elsewhere argued, derive more from Hellenistic philosophy than from the Bible, and they render genuine freedom on the part of created beings impossible.30

Second, and closely related to the first point, even though they affirm that creatures have power to act over and against God, Arminian theologians have nevertheless usually rejected the possibility of strictly gratuitous evil. That is, despite their view of creaturely freedom, they have nevertheless usually wanted (inconsistently, in my view) to affirm that God allows specific evil events to transpire for a specific divine purpose.31 They would, for example, still be inclined to say that “God had his reasons” for at least allowing Zosia’s torture to transpire.

Traditional Arminian theologians, therefore, have actually had their own qualified “blueprint” understanding of providence, despite their emphasis on human freedom. In this respect they have remained within the classical-philosophical theistic tradition. But just this traditional understanding largely undermines the advantages their understanding of freedom has for a cogent theodicy. We are still left with the unsolvable theodicy question of what a specific “loving” reason might look like for God “allowing” Zosia’s eyes to get plucked out.

Third, and again closely related to their classical-philosophical view of God, Arminian theologians have generally wanted to affirm that God possesses exhaustive, detailed knowledge of what shall occur in the future. This view may further call into question the integrity of creaturely freedom within their theological framework.32 Affirming that what shall transpire is eternally known by God in exhaustive detail presupposes that the future is in some way eternally “there” in exhaustive detail. But this understanding of the future, I suspect, is unbiblical on the one hand, and perhaps undermines the openness to possibilities that is the sine qua non of morally responsible, free decision-making, on the other. Unless the future really consists (at least in part) in possibilities among which free creatures choose, and thus unless the future is known by God as being (at least in part) a realm of open possibilities (for God’s knowledge always perfectly corresponds with reality), then self-determining freedom, it seems, cannot be consistently maintained.33

Put otherwise, if God’s knowledge of the future eternally consists exclusively in a knowledge of “this and not that” (viz., it is exhaustively definite) rather than including elements of “possibly this or that” (viz., it is indefinite), then it is difficult to understand how free creatures can have the genuine power to choose between “this and that.” Nor is it easy to come to grips with the clear meaning of many passages of Scripture that speak of God changing his mind or that speak in hypotheticals (“perhaps”) and conditionals (“if . . . then”).34

It is this understanding of the future as eternally definite in God’s mind that largely contributes to the assumption that there must be a divine reason for why God allowed, or explicitly ordained, a particular evil event to transpire. For if God has exhaustively definite knowledge of what shall transpire, then it seems that he, being all good, must have a particular good reason for choosing to create this particular world in which he knows that this particular evil will certainly occur. For example, we must wonder why God created Adolf Hitler when he supposedly knew with absolute certainty—and eternally—exactly what monstrosities Hitler would carry out. God, it seems, unleashed a rabid pit bull on humanity, knowing full well exactly what this pit bull would do, and to whom he would do it. Since God is all-good, it seems that he must have had a specific good reason for unleashing this (and every other) pit bull on his children. But this is obviously the classical-philosophical problem of evil all over again. We still must wonder, what might this higher good reason look like?35

In my estimation, classical-philosophical Arminian theologians have provided no adequate answer to this question. But the very way the question is posed requires that there must be some such higher reason, if indeed the future is there for God to exhaustively foreknow. As I have said, it is this supposition of a particular divine reason behind all particular evils in the world that generates the classical-philosophical unresolvable formulation of the problem of evil.

Finally, and for our purposes perhaps most importantly, the traditional Arminian theodicy has been significantly weakened because it has on the whole restricted its understanding of freedom to human freedom. At the very least, it has not made a robust appeal to angelic freedom in its theodicy reflections, and thus has attempted to wring an explanation of evil almost entirely out of the exercise of human freedom (and from an inconsistent view of this freedom at that). When measured against the vastness of the cosmos and the enormity of evil in need of explanation, however, human freedom seems remarkably small and quite incapable of bearing the cosmic weight that the classical Arminian approach has usually wanted to place on it.36

If, however, we are willing to suspend for a time the classical-philosophical conception of God as altogether above time, change, passivity, and as exhaustively controlling; and if we are willing to think through the implications of creaturely freedom in a consistent, logical and biblical manner; moreover, if we are willing to consider the possibility that spiritual forces exist, some of whom are perhaps major cosmic forces who possess morally responsible free will just as we do, then, I believe, we are on our way to a perspective of God and his relationship to the world in which evil does not constitute an unsolvable intellectual problem. We are, in short, on our way to embracing a warfare worldview.

The absence of the problem in the Bible. Thus far I have spoken of the peculiar unsolvability of the problem of evil as one indication that something is perhaps amiss in the way this problem has been formulated within the classical-philosophical tradition. A second peculiarity of this problem that further calls into question the classical-philosophical assumptions about God which generate it is that the problem seems to be wholly absent from the New Testament, and arguably from the whole Bible.

To be sure, individuals throughout the biblical narrative occasionally express convictions that come close to the classical-philosophical formulation of the problem of evil. Why do the righteous suffer and sometimes feel forsaken? David wonders (Ps 10:1; 22:1; 42:9). What wrong has Job done to deserve the suffering he is going through? his friends inquire. Why has God brought starvation and disaster on his people? Jeremiah cries out (Lam 2:20-22). Why was a certain man born blind? Jesus’ disciples wonder (Jn 9:1-5). What divine purpose might have been served by a tower falling on a crowd of Gentiles? others ask (Lk 13:1-5).

What is interesting about all this, however, is that Scripture itself never teaches that these questions are based on an accurate understanding of God! To be sure, some narratives clearly teach that affliction is sometimes brought about as a punishment or as discipline from God, as mentioned earlier (e.g., Gen 18:20—19:29). Several passages are even sometimes misinterpreted to teach that Yahweh is himself the cause of evil (see chapter four). But never does Scripture teach that suffering is always, or even usually, a form of divine punishment.

Indeed, as mentioned earlier, in a number of places Scripture seems to directly refute this position. The book of Job, I later argue, is a prolonged assault on just this erroneous “moralistic accountant” conception of God (see chapter four). The false dichotomous assumption, reflected throughout this poetic dialogue, that Job’s sufferings are either Job’s fault or God’s fault is refuted by both the prologue of this book, which ascribes the afflictions to Satan (Job 1—2), and the divine monologues in which Yahweh does not take responsibility for Job’s afflictions but rather refers Job to the vastness and complexity of the creation, a creation that includes forces of chaos (such as Leviathan [chap. 41] and Behemoth [40:15-24]) which need to be tamed).

Similarly, Jesus undermines his disciples’ erroneous assumption that the cause of blindness had anything to do with the ethics of the blind man or his parents (Jn 9:1-5; cf. chapter eight). He explicitly teaches that catastrophes are not necessarily indications of the victims’ sinfulness or of God’s judgment (Lk 13:1-5). Indeed, as we shall see in chapters six and seven, whenever Jesus does identify a spiritual agenda behind an evil in the world, he identifies it as Satan’s, not God’s.

What argues for the same point in a more general way is the simple observation that biblical authors on the whole seem largely unaware of any antinomy between their faith in an all-good and all-powerful God, on the one hand, and the reality of intense suffering in the world, on the other. As Walter Wink notes specifically about the New Testament: “The early Christians devoted a great deal of energy to discovering the meaning of Jesus’ death, but nowhere do they offer a justification of God in the face of an evil world. They do not seem to be puzzled or even perturbed by evil as a theoretical problem.”37

Indeed, following Wink, we may go even further: Whereas the later church’s intellectual problem with evil consisted in the seemingly obvious fact that evil is not what one would expect in a world run by an all-good and meticulously sovereign Creator, the earliest disciples, including the earliest postapostolic fathers, seemed to think that evil was precisely what one should expect in this world. Nowhere is there the slightest hint in the New Testament or in the early postapostolic church of anyone asking the earlier mentioned question modern people instinctively ask: “Why do bad things happen to good people?”38 To the contrary, these early Christians rather teach that suffering in this world is precisely what a person should expect, especially if they are “good.”39

But why is there this radical difference between the view of evil held by the New Testament and early postapostolic church and the later post-Augustinian church, especially since the church is supposed to be doctrinally rooted in Scripture? How could the later church be so obsessed with something that the New Testament virtually ignores?

The answer is obviously not that Jesus or his disciples were unacquainted with real suffering. Nor is the answer that they lacked the intellectual astuteness to see that a belief in an all-good God who exercises exhaustive control over the world is inconsistent with the prevalence of unjust suffering in the world. As suggested earlier, the answer is rather that one works within a warfare worldview, which expects evil, whereas the other does not.

Put otherwise, in contrast to the later church, neither Jesus nor his disciples seemed to understand God’s absolute power as absolute control. They prayed for God’s will to be done on earth, but this assumes that they understand that God’s will was not yet being done on earth (Mt 6:10). Hence neither Jesus nor his disciples assumed that there had to be a divine purpose behind all events in history. Rather, they understood the cosmos to be populated by a myriad of free agents, some human, some angelic, and many of them evil. The manner in which events unfold in history was understood to be as much a factor of what these agents individually and collectively willed as it was a matter of what God himself willed.

For example, Paul’s inability to reach Thessalonica had nothing to do with either what he willed or what God willed: in his mind, it was simply the result of Satan hindering him (1 Thess 2:18). Similarly, a person’s deafness or muteness had nothing to do with either what that person willed or what God willed: it was, for Jesus, at times at least the result of demons (Mk 9:25). Or, to cite an Old Testament example, the delay in heavenly assistance in response to Daniel’s desperate prayer had nothing to do either with Daniel or with God: both wanted the prayer answered! According to this inspired work, it rather had to do with a menacing demonic power that interfered with the whole process (Dan 10; cf. Ps 82).

All of this brings us to the third and most important questionable feature of the classical-philosophical formulation of the problem of evil: its failure to express the central role Satan and evil angels play in the New Testament’s understanding of evil in the world.

Satan in the New Testament and later church. The central difference in perspectives between the New Testament and early postapostolic church on the one hand and Augustine and the later church on the other is that the former almost unanimously locates the ultimate reason for why there is evil in the world in the evil will of Satan, while the post-Augustine church and the whole of the classical-philosophical tradition following him tends paradoxically to locate the ultimate rationale for evil within the mysterious, omnibenevolent, all-encompassing will of the Creator. “Providence,” writes Boethius, “is the unchangeable direct power that gives form to all things which are to come to pass.” It is a “definite order [which] embraces all things,” for “the Creator of all nature . . . directs and disposes all things for good.” Thus, Boethius concludes, a believer should “reckon naught as bad of all the evils which are held to abound upon earth.”40

Hence instead of combating an evil agent who is believed to inflict evil upon the earth, in Boethius’s writings we are encouraged to accept all that is reckoned as bad as coming from an all-good agent—the “Creator of all nature . . . [who] disposes all things for good.” Augustine argues in the same fashion. To put the contrast in its most terse form: the classical-philosophical problem of evil is constituted by the difficulty of conceptualizing God’s reason for ordaining, or at least allowing, particular evils to occur, while the New Testament everywhere assumes that the ultimate reason behind all evil in the world is found in Satan, not God.

The later church thereby acquired an intellectual problem with evil that the New Testament simply does not have. For a variety of reasons, the later church attempted to understand evil as a function of God’s all-good and all-controlling providence rather than as a function of Satan’s evil, controlling rule over the world.41 The former is problematic while the latter is not, assuming (as the New Testament does) that angelic free will is intelligible. If a self-determining, supremely evil being rules the world, then it is hardly surprising that it is deluged with nightmarish evil, despite having been created by an all-good, omnipotent Creator.

To be more specific, Satan is portrayed in the New Testament as being the “god of this world,” “the ruler of the power of the air,” and “the ruler [archon] of this world” (2 Cor 4:4; Eph 2:2; Jn 12:31; 14:30; 16:11). He is portrayed as possessing all the kingdoms of the world, and is explicitly said to have control of the entire world (Lk 4:6; 1 Jn 5:19). He is portrayed as being ultimately the one behind murder, lying, persecution, and even physical sickness and disease (Jn 8:44; 1 Jn 3:12; Lk 13:16; Acts 10:38; Eph 6:12-13). Moreover, he and his fallen army are portrayed as having supernatural capabilities to obstruct kingdom work, manipulate crowds, choke faith, demonize people and even keep little children in spiritual bondage (2 Thess 2:9, 18; 1 Cor 2:8; Mt 13:19; Mk 7:25; 9:17-22).42

Indeed, the general assumption of both the Old and the New Testament is that the earth is virtually engulfed by cosmic forces of destruction, and that evil and suffering are ultimately due to this diabolical siege.43 As we shall subsequently explore in depth (chapters six to eight), Jesus most centrally defined himself and his ministry in terms of aggressively warring against this Satanic kingdom. Both he and his disciples recognized that he had come to destroy the devil and his works, thereby redeeming his people from the realm of darkness and setting them free for the kingdom of God (Jn 3:8; Col 1:13; Heb 2:14; Col 2:13-15). Indeed, as I shall show, all the various aspects of Jesus’ ministry—his healings, teachings, exorcisms, death and resurrection—attain a thematic unity only when viewed against the background of this cosmic warfare.

In the light of all this, it is quite peculiar that after Augustine, throughout the church’s history up to the present, very few thinkers conceived of Satan as being in any way relevant to, let alone central to, the solution to the problem of evil.44 It is remarkable that the one who in Scripture and in the earliest postapostolic fathers is depicted as the ultimate originator of evil and the one ultimately behind all the world’s horrors has been thoroughly ignored in discussions on the problem of evil.

To be sure, the figure of Satan continues to permeate the thinking of the church in other respects throughout history, at least up until the time of the Enlightenment. As was said, the church retained at least an echo of the warfare worldview. But in terms of arriving at an ultimate explanation for evil, after Augustine the question always gets filed under the category of God’s providence instead of under the category of spiritual warfare, that is, under the topic of what Satan, rebel angels and fallen humans freely choose to do against God’s will. With Augustine it becomes a problem of understanding evil as part of God’s will.45

By contrast, the New Testament and early postapostolic church always thought of the problem of evil in the context of spiritual warfare. The world is caught up in a cosmic battle and thus is saturated with horrifying suffering and diabolical evil. That is the final explanation for evil. No one prior to Augustine (except, in a peculiar way, Origen) suspected that above this freely generated warfare there existed an even more fundamental explanation: an all-good and all-determinative blueprint in the mind and will of God.46

It is, I contend, this undermining of the explanatory ultimacy of the free agency of angelic and human beings, and thus this undermining of the explanatory ultimacy of the cosmic war for the sake of preserving a particular Hellenistic view of divine omnipotence and providence (viz., as meticulous control), that more than anything else generates the unsolvable intellectual problem of evil we have been wrestling with throughout the ages. For now we must wonder how we (and angels) are genuinely free while yet inevitably following God’s will; how God somehow wills, or at least “allows” with a definite purpose, what he says in Scripture he positively hates; why we are called to actively resist what God himself ordains; how what appears to be grotesquely evil is actually a contributor to a greater good; and how there must ultimately be a good and holy reason for everything Satan does.47 If one admits that angelic and human beings are ultimately free agents, however, and thus admits the ultimacy of the cosmic war that has resulted as a consequence of this freedom, then the contradictions disappear.

A warfare versus a providential blueprint worldview. To say that the New Testament and early postapostolic church regarded the appeal to the free will of angelic and human beings as an ultimate explanation for all the evil in the cosmos is not to suggest that these authors construed Satan, angels or humans as being metaphysically ultimate alongside God. They never approached the dualistic heresy of construing the forces of evil as coeternal and coequal competitors with God.

To the contrary, New Testament and early church fathers unequivocally taught that the Lord God alone is eternal, alone almighty, and alone the Creator of all things.48 In this sense, God was seen as the final “why” as to the existence of all things and all beings. But no one before Augustine unequivocally assumed that God was the final “why” for how these things and beings existed.

While the early church never provided a detailed philosophical justification of this view (though they were moving in this direction), they assumed that free beings provide their own ultimate explanation for their behavior, and thus for why things they affect for better or for worse are affected the way they are.49 In this view free beings can and do genuinely affect the flow of history. When they affect the flow of things, for better or for worse, there is no necessary higher reason than what can be located within their own self-determining free decision to explain why the flow of history was affected the way it was.

In this light, it still makes sense to attempt to render intelligible the concept of freedom as self-determination; it still makes sense to inquire why the Creator would have created a risky world with such radical freedom as opposed to a world without it; it still makes sense to probe what all this entails about God’s control, or lack of it, in history; and it still makes sense to worry about how this openness to contingency squares with Scripture’s guarantee that God’s ultimate purposes for creation shall in the end be accomplished. Indeed, I shall apply myself to just these questions in my forthcoming volume (Satan and the Problem of Evil).

But if the reality of human and angelic freedom is granted, it does not make sense to look for a higher divine “why” to explain the particular actions of any one of these free agents. It therefore does not make sense to seek for a higher “why” in God’s will to explain the occurrence of any particular evil in the world. From a warfare worldview perspective, this quest is misguided, and the unsolvable problem it generates is in fact a pseudoproblem. The only “why” that can be found is located in the free agent who freely does what it does.

In any event, the fact that the New Testament locates the ultimate “why” of evil actions in the angelic or human beings who bring about those actions, and the fact that it therefore directly or indirectly attributes the responsibility for the world’s evils to the wills of free agents, and especially to Satan, should be strong indications that the Western preoccupation of wondering how evil fits into God’s sovereign will is misguided. From a biblical and early church perspective, evil “fits” in the cosmos only by constituting that which God is unequivocally against, and that which God shall someday ultimately overcome.

Satan and Postmodernity

The above-mentioned curious difficulties with the classical problem of evil, when combined with the radical seriousness that the concrete experience of nightmarish evil creates for a belief in God, argue strongly for the conclusion that the classical-philosophical identification of divine power with divine control, and thus the classical-philosophical meticulous blueprint model of providence, is seriously mistaken. This conclusion, in turn, suggests that we need seriously to reexamine and reconsider the motif of spiritual warfare in Scripture and in the early postapostolic church as an alternative model for understanding evil.

In contrast to the classical-philosophical, post-Augustinian model of providence, the warfare worldview implicit in Scripture and the writings of the earliest church fathers presupposes that the power to affect things is not monopolized by God but is by God’s own design a shared commodity throughout his creation. The cosmos is, by divine choice, more of a democracy than it is a monarchy. The warfare worldview thus presupposes the reality of relatively autonomous free creatures, human and angelic, who can and do act genuinely on their own, and who can and do sometimes go against God’s will. It thus presupposes the reality of radical contingency and of genuine risk. It further presupposes that this risk has sometimes gone bad, even on a cosmic scale, and that this has turned the earth into a veritable war zone.

For just these reasons, the warfare worldview “fits” the perverse reality of concrete evil we experience in our sometimes horrifying world in a way the classical-philosophical blueprint model of providence does not. If the earth has indeed been besieged by a controlling diabolical force (Satan) who commands legions of hostile demons, as I argue the New Testament teaches, then, but only then, it is not surprising that we see around us “more signs of the demonic than of the true God,” as König says. Then, and only then, are we not surprised to find that in this war-torn land, “there is more pain and misery, injustice and violence . . . than love, prosperity, justice and joy,” as König further observed.50

For this is exactly what war looks like. If we grant the intelligibility of the war itself, there is simply no further problem in intellectually understanding why any particular atrocities occur. In a state of war, bullets fly, bombs explode, mines are stepped on, and children are maimed. War is hell. This is expected. The only real problem is in confronting the evil and in overcoming it. Hence this worldview at once frees us from futilely asking questions we cannot answer and empowers us and motivates us to fight battles we can win.

Despite these advantages, however, the warfare worldview is admittedly not a worldview that many modern people find easy to accept. To many contemporaries, the notion is preposterous that real, semi-autonomous, self-determining and invisible spirits exist that can and do influence our lives. The whole thing sounds to them more like something out of a Star Wars movie than like serious contemporary theology. This brings us to the third and final fundamental obstacle to accepting Scripture’s warfare worldview.

Satan and mythology. We must take seriously the claim that one simply cannot ask modern people to entertain the possibility that angels might actually exist, let alone ask them to believe that the behavior of these supernatural beings might explain features of our physical and social world. For it is true that, until recently (see below), Western culture had been going down a track of increasing secularism. Our perspective of the world had been increasingly colored by materialistic presuppositions, and this had been leaving less and less room for a belief in such things as angels and demons.

Hence Walter Wink’s diagnosis of our culture must be taken seriously (though not necessarily accepted) when he writes concerning angels and demons:

For this reason, many modern theologians, following in the footsteps of Rudolf Bultmann, have thought that the New Testament needs to be to some extent “demythologized” if its existential significance is to be salvaged for modern people. At the very least, this means that the Bible’s talk about angels and spiritual warfare and the like has to be translated into modern naturalistic categories. The principalities and powers perhaps referred to social institutions, as Schlier, Berkhof and many others have suggested.52 Or, more recently, and less reductionistically, perhaps all the Bible’s talk about angels and the like could be taken to refer to something like the corporate “interiority” of social groups, as Wink suggests.53

The intelligibility of the warfare worldview, however, requires us to reject all such attempts to render the New Testament’s conceptions more palatable to modern people. Not that we can expect modern people to accept any literal view of the Old Testament’s talk about cosmic monsters (see chapter two), and not that we can or should accept the Victorian portraits of cherubic angels or the traditional caricatures of the devil. As C. S. Lewis recognized concerning the demonic, and Barth saw concerning angels, such caricatures are more pagan than they are biblical, and actually lead to a trivialization of the spiritual world.54 But insofar as any modern revisioning of the “powers” entails a denial that these beings are real beings who have an autonomous existence and free will, the warfare worldview requires their rejection. For the notion that angels can and do genuinely fight against God, against each other and especially against us presupposes at the very least that they have a real self-determining existence over against God, each other and us.

Nonetheless, there is a significant element of truth, judged by scriptural standards, to Wink’s identification of “the powers” with the “interiority” of social wholes. Wink’s trilogy is in many respects a masterful demonstration of just how closely both good and evil “powers” are linked with good and evil structures of human society, both in our experience and in Scripture. Thus combating the evil “powers,” Wink and others have shown, is not just a matter of prayer but also a matter of social activism.55

But never does the New Testament strictly identify the powers with these social structures, or even with a spiritual dimension of these social structures. The social structures are under the power of these forces, and the structures are held together by these forces, but they are not themselves these forces. Rather, in New Testament thought the principalities and powers exercise a power over these structures precisely because they transcend these structures.

According to Wink and others, however, this latter affirmation is no longer possible for modern people. Against this, I argue below that it is rather the denial of the autonomous real existence of these cosmic powers that is quickly becoming an implausible belief, even for us “modern” people.

Other people may have little problem accepting the real autonomous existence of a spiritual society between humans and God, but may be inclined to reject the warfare thesis at the start on altogether different grounds. The warfare worldview, these people may argue, “robs” God of his sovereignty and grants angels and humans far too much power. For many of these people, influenced as they are by the classical-philosophical tradition, God’s greatness and his control are correlative concepts: a maximally great deity entails a maximally controlling deity. Hence any view suggesting that creatures have enough autonomy to operate outside, and even against, God’s universal and meticulous control must be rejected at the start. It leaves “no place for sovereignty.”56

In some respects these two fundamental objections to the warfare thesis can only be answered at the end of a thorough development and defense of the warfare worldview on biblical and philosophical grounds. That is, such objections can only be thoroughly addressed by presenting the thesis as a completed whole and by then asking, “Isn’t this credible to you modern people?” and “Isn’t this view of God more, not less, praiseworthy than the view of God as all controlling?”

Still, I can say a few preliminary words to help assuage these objections somewhat at the start and to lay the foundation for what is to follow. In concluding this chapter, therefore, I offer four considerations which suggest that, despite these and other understandable criticisms, the church today and our culture as a whole are not only ready for a statement and defense of something like the warfare thesis but are in dire need of it.

The postmodern awakening. First, while Western culture as a whole, including the Western church, has certainly been under the strong influence of naturalistic assumptions the last three hundred years, it is doubtful that the oft-repeated objection that moderns are simply incapable of believing in the supernatural any longer is or was ever entirely accurate. In truth, this objection seems to be more a confession of secularized academic professionals, reflecting their own unbelief and perhaps the unbelief of their own academic circle, than an accurate description of Western culture as a whole.

Even if the claim was once largely accurate, however, it is certainly no longer so. As many cultural observers have noted, Western culture has recently, and with remarkable speed, moved out of the modernist period into what many are now calling a “postmodern” period. On the issue of what is and is not credible, this move is all-important.57

What this shift means, at the very least, is that the dominance of Enlightenment rationalistic and naturalistic assumptions concerning the nature of reality and the means by which we know it is rapidly waning. There is now an increasing openness to, if not explicit awareness of, “nonordinary reality.” Or, stated more accurately, there is an increasing awareness of how arbitrary the standard Enlightenment definition of “ordinary reality” was. All perspectives on reality, the postmodern perspective is saying, are jaundiced and relatively myopic, including (perhaps especially) the Western rationalistic perspective.

This observation can be, and often has been, pushed to the point of total relativism in which all truth claims are “deconstructed” in order to reveal their noncognitive dimensions (usually related to an assumed quest for power).58 Beyond being philosophically problematic, such a position is disastrous for Christianity for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that Christianity is inextricably rooted in a number of objective historical and metaphysical truth claims.59

At the same time, however, this postmodern perspective has served to expose the narrowness and arbitrariness of the Enlightenment assumption that reality can be exhaustively defined and understood by empirical categories. Postmodernism has been helpful in revealing the arrogance involved in the modern, Western, chronocentric, elitist, intellectual tendency to dismiss every other worldview that has ever existed as “primitive” and “superstitious.”

Along the same lines, it has been helpful in heightening our awareness that the Western materialistic worldview is (as all worldviews to some extent are) a social construct.60 Indeed, it is a construct that seems to have in part been evolved precisely to censor out all aspects of reality that are not manageable by empirical techniques. It allowed us to live in a world we could “handle,” and handle well. But it thereby blinded us to those dimensions of reality that were beyond our control but that were no less (and perhaps more) important for that reason. The reality of the spirit world is a perfect case in point.

Things are now changing, however. While the dismantling of this socially constructed vision of reality is creating new challenges for the church, it is also having the positive effect of opening up our cultural vision to include the supernatural, and this cannot be bad for Christianity. There is now an increasing appreciation for and validation of the “commonsense” assumption of nearly every culture outside our own that the world is not simply physical. There are now fresh attempts at giving nonreductionistic interpretations to the nearly universal conviction that reality is both physical and spiritual, visible and invisible, and that these two dimensions are two sides of the same coin. There is increasingly a new openness toward and appreciation for the nearly universal worldview that sees the cosmos as inhabited by spiritual beings whose behavior influences our lives, for better or for worse.61

In short, without rejecting the value of Western science and technology, Western culture is in many respects beginning to relearn what many primitive people have, in however a distorted form, never forgotten: The cosmos is a veritable society of intelligent interacting beings, some of whom are not physical.

In this light, taking Satan, angels, demons, supernatural interventions and the like seriously meets with significantly less intellectual resistance in our culture today than it did fifty, twenty or even ten years ago. Indeed, as is obvious from a casual visit to any bookstore, Western culture presently seems to be undergoing an obsession with just such concepts, especially (but not exclusively) at a popular level.62 For this reason, I do not believe that asking contemporary people to consider the possibility that angels (and one fallen angel in particular!) might be centrally relevant to understanding evil in the world is either asking too much of them or is apologetically disastrous.

To the contrary, in this present climate such a postmodern (yet biblical) approach will, if anything, be prima facie judged by many as inherently compelling. Far from being a liability, the supernatural dimension within the warfare worldview may increasingly be one of its strongest apologetic features. Indeed, it is likely that future theologies and theodicies that persist in operating within the narrow structures of modern Western naturalistic categories will increasingly find themselves irrelevant to Western minds.

In my opinion, this is already becoming the case. The narrowness, arbitrariness, presumptuousness and inaccuracy of the Enlightenment worldview are increasingly being exposed. Christians should be the last ones to regard this exposure, with its resultant paradigm shift, as at all unfortunate. In my estimation, Christianity never had any business not taking the supernatural seriously!

Waking up to spiritual warfare. A second and closely related reason why I believe that a return to a New Testament warfare worldview with its Satan-centered understanding of evil is possible, and needed, concerns certain dramatic shifts that are occurring in the church today. Since the mid-1980s we have witnessed major segments of the Western church abandoning wholesale their previous modernist mindset, which held that spiritual warfare was at best peripheral to the life of the church. One has only to note the explosion of works published on spiritual warfare since that time to confirm this point.63 I would go so far as to submit that no single topic in the last several years has received more press within evangelical circles than this one. Christian fiction dealing with the subject has become extremely popular as well, as evidenced by the sales of Frank Peretti’s novels.64 Conferences on the topic of spiritual warfare have also enjoyed unprecedented success.

Perhaps even more significant, however, is that we are now witnessing more and more churches actually getting involved in overt spiritual warfare. We are increasingly hearing reports, from a wide variety of ecclesiastical backgrounds, of Christians engaging in “power encounters,” often with attendant demonic “manifestations” that look remarkably like what has for centuries been reported in other cultures, remarkably like what we read about throughout church history, and remarkably like what we find in the New Testament.65

Not all these cases are equally credible. Nor is all the attention that is now being paid to the topic of spiritual warfare and the deliverance ministry healthy, as some commentators have noted.66 When cultural pendulums swing, excess is usually the order of the day, and repeated calls for balance are necessary. The only point I am making here is that, for better or for worse, the cultural pendulum has swung. Christians are now moving quite decisively (and perhaps at times somewhat excessively) toward something like what I have been calling a warfare worldview. This opens up the possibility of plausibly integrating the warfare motif into our reflections on theodicy.

One can discern a number of causes for the paradigm shift Western Christianity is going through. One is that, owing to the new postmodern atmosphere we are living in, as well as the explosive growth of Christianity in the Third World and the development and popularity of liberation theologies, Western theologians have (finally) begun paying more attention to the perspectives of their Third and Second World sisters and brothers. Western theology is, in a word, becoming globalized.67 Indeed, whereas the Western church used to be generally regarded as the teacher of these other cultures—often to the spiritual detriment of these cultures68—we now understand that we are also, and perhaps even more so, the student of these other cultures. Among other things, we are learning from them how central the “world in between” (the world of spirits between humans and God) is for a vibrant Christianity.69

A second possible cause of this present paradigm shift, one that has been detected by multitudes of spiritually discerning believers but that obviously cannot be objectively demonstrated, is this: As our culture as a whole moves more and more in the direction of embracing a modified Third World perspective—as we move into “the New Age”—the reality of the spirit world, and more specifically of the demonic world, is simply becoming more and more evident.

It is no longer possible to dismiss, a priori, all the claims to supernatural phenomena being reported by people outside Christianity in our culture. From gardens supernaturally growing, to miraculous healings, to impressive “channellings,” to a bizarre assortment of other paranormal phenomenon, we are, as a culture, being barraged with claims that we simply cannot ignore.70 Nor is it possible any longer to dismiss as merely psychological the increasing number of cases of overt exorcism that Western Christians are involved in.71 All this has had the advantage of gradually waking up the Western church from its naturalistic slumber to the reality of the spirit world, and to the need for the supernatural dimension of the work of the Holy Spirit if Christianity is going to continue to be viable in our postmodern world.

We might say that “the war” has started to “come out of the closet” after three centuries of taking place mostly behind the closed doors of the western, naturalistic worldview. As a result, we Western Christians increasingly find ourselves in situations similar to that of the New Testament, the early postapostolic church and much of the church in Third World environments. However much it may grate our naturalistic intellectual assumptions, we find ourselves more and more in situations in which the reality and power of Satan and demons is increasingly manifested before our eyes as this dark kingdom competes with the kingdom of God for the hearts and minds of people.72 Where believers are open to it, we increasingly discover the Holy Spirit rising to the occasion and manifesting God’s incomparable power in these situations.73

The overall result of this new spiritual climate is that the parameters of what many Western believers have previously regarded as being “normal” Christianity are being stretched. In my estimation, this is a very positive development. It means, among other things, that the climate is ripe for a restoration of a New Testament model of the church as the supernaturally empowered body of Christ that carries on the work which the Son began during his incarnate ministry. And it means that the time is ripe for a return to a biblical perspective on the problem of evil that defines it more as a spiritual problem to confront than an unsolvable intellectual problem to ponder futilely.

The present atmospheric change we are experiencing at a spiritual level in our culture contributes to my conviction that both the culture and the church are ready to seriously reconsider appropriating, or at least recentering, the warfare worldview of the Bible, especially as played out in the New Testament and early postapostolic, pre-Augustinian church. But this reconsideration of the warfare worldview is needed for another reason as well. Despite the incredible volume of literature that has been published in the area of spiritual warfare in recent years, there has to date been no serious in-depth theological or philosophical attempt to sympathetically think through the implications of what much of this literature is saying about spiritual warfare, and hence about God, the world, the devil and free will.

To be sure, much of this literature is of immense value on a practical level, and some of it does a fine job of providing an exposition of what the Bible teaches on various subjects related to spiritual war. But the spiritual warfare movement itself has offered little on the topic by way of either a comprehensive biblical treatment or a systematic theological/philosophical treatment. Next to nothing has been done systematically to integrate the warfare motif with a doctrine of God, theological anthropology, soteriology, angelology and, for our purposes most importantly, theodicy.

While I cannot begin to provide extensive coverage of all these topics, my goal in this present work is to provide a foundation for such a coverage by engaging in a comprehensive exegetical and theological treatment of all scriptural passages that concern spiritual warfare. Building on this, I shall provide a thorough treatment of the last topic—the problem of evil—in a forthcoming work.

The move away from classical categories. Yet a third feature of our present postmodern age which suggests that an intelligent defense of a warfare worldview may be possible today concerns the demise of classical philosophical categories in our postmodern culture. One of the main reasons why the warfare worldview was gradually compromised in the thinking of the early apologists, especially in Augustine’s theology, and one of the central reasons why believers have to some extent resisted it since, is that this worldview runs counter to a particular model of divine perfection—a model that did not derive principally from Scripture, nor was it required by logic. It was, rather, derived mostly from Hellenistic philosophy.74

For example, from Plato, Aristotle and the subsequent Hellenistic tradition, the church arrived at the notion that God was altogether unmoved, impassible, immutable, nontemporal and purely actual. Yet it was precisely these features of the church’s doctrine of God that logically undermined the integrity of the warfare worldview. On the basis of this model of God, a meticulous, sovereign, divine blueprint was postulated to encompass all temporal events, including the cosmic war.

This had the effect, however, of rendering the war a sham. For a war that meticulously follows a blueprint that has been drawn up by one of the parties involved in the war (God) is hardly a real war. It was principally for this reason that the problem of evil stopped being the New Testament problem of confronting and overthrowing the enemy and started being the intellectual problem of figuring out how this enemy (and all evil) fits into God’s providential script.

We are now living in an age in which the classical Platonic and Aristotelian categories are becoming less and less persuasive, if not altogether unintelligible, to people in Western culture.75 This gives further reason to believe that the church and the culture are set for a reappropriation of the biblical warfare worldview.

To speak in more detail, from the move to dynamic philosophical categories in Leibniz and Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century, to Einstein’s relativity theory and the rather bizarre discoveries of quantum physics, to the thoroughly relation- and event-oriented philosophies of Laszlo’s systems theory and Whitehead’s process thought, we have been witnessing a gradual but decisive abandonment of classical Western categories.76 For example, the classical Western assumptions about the nature of the physical world as consisting of enduring substances is now being replaced with an understanding of the world that places verbs over nouns and therefore understands events to be more fundamental than “substances.”

Indeed, the very notion of an “individual thing” is coming to be seen as an abstraction from a substratum of dynamic events, as quantum physicist David Bohm has argued.77 With this, then, the older mechanistic model of physical reality is being replaced with one which embodies spontaneity, contingency, interrelatedness and creativity at its center.78

What is for our purposes even more important, however, is that this demise of Hellenistic categories has been having an impact on the assumptions that have, since the early apologists, exercised such a decisive influence on Christian theology. As mentioned above, the notion that “divine perfection” necessarily implies changelessness, atemporality, pure actuality and impassibility is, at least in some quarters, no longer taken as self-evident. Indeed, it is now being radically called into question on biblical, philosophical and even sociopolitical grounds.79

This rethinking of the nature of God has been in process for some time within more liberal theological circles, but more often than not without any adequate biblical foundation. Recently, however, these Hellenistic assumptions have been subjected to critical scrutiny by conservative evangelical theologians as well. Most significantly, this scrutiny is being carried out principally on biblical grounds.

For example, the classical Western assumption that the Bible teaches that God is altogether unchanging, even in his experience, and that God therefore experiences the whole of reality as a completed “timeless block,” has taken some very serious blows recently. In its place, we are seeing an increasing number of evangelical Bible scholars and theologians affirming a more open view of God, a view that stresses the contingent, creative, open nature of reality and therefore of God’s experience of reality.80 In contrast to process theology, these Christian scholars are by no means denying the truths that God alone is eternal, that God is self-sufficient within his own triune identity apart from the world, that God is altogether omnipotent and omniscient, and thus that God is sovereign over world history.81 What they are saying, however, is that the way in which Augustine reinterpreted these concepts was more in line with Neo-Platonism and the broader Hellenistic philosophical tradition than it was with the Bible. Hence out of fidelity to Scripture, Augustine’s framework for understanding these truths needs to be seriously reexamined.

At the very least, all this questioning means that the classical-philosophical conception of God as necessarily possessing the traditional Hellenistic attributes of changelessness, timelessness, unrelatedness and so on are no longer regarded as self-evident. This, in turn, provides greater opportunities for theologians to openly investigate whether these attributes are really biblical. The more these attributes are questioned, the more theologians are moving toward an understanding of God and his relationship to the world that can include the sort of contingency, openness and risk that is essential to a genuine warfare perspective of the world. And the more they do this, the less the problem of evil will be perceived to be an intellectual problem, and the more it will be experienced as a spiritual, existential problem about which one is called to do something.

In any event, the fact that this classical-philosophical portrait of God and the traditional “timeless block” understanding of reality is now loosing its grip on thinkers today is certainly one more indication that we are now positioned to reconsider reappropriating Scripture’s warfare worldview. Despite the serious reservations modern “enlightened” culture might have had, and might yet have, regarding the autonomous reality of angels and demons, and despite the reservations traditional Christians might have had, and might yet have, regarding the reality of spiritual beings and cosmic forces who can genuinely war against God, the time is ripe for a systematic reconsideration of this warfare worldview. The biblical and common cultural conviction that invisible beings exist who have power to effectively fight against God, each other and us is simply not as far-fetched as it once was. Indeed, for an increasing number of us, it is an inherently plausible concept.

The experience of the demonic. A fourth and final dimension of our contemporary age that leads me to believe that we are ready for, and in need of, a spiritual warfare approach to the problem of evil concerns the intense experience of evil in the past century. Arguably, never before has humanity as a whole experienced the amount, the depth and the intensity of evil that we experienced in the twentieth century. Not only has the amount of suffering and the madness inflicting it been unprecedented, but because we now live in the information age, within an ever-shrinking world, the opportunity for people to know about and empathetically experience this evil is unprecedented as well. The result of all this is that the corporate human experience of the demonic side of reality has been unprecedented in recent decades.

This experience obviously has to affect our understanding of evil. Among other things, it makes simple answers and reassuring clichés harder to swallow. Consider, again, the Holocaust. If the sound of one innocent child screaming under torture calls into question all talk of a beautiful sovereign plan behind and above all events (and therefore this event), what does the ruthless slaughter of a million Zosias do?82 According to many post-Holocaust authors, writing yet “within hearing distance” of the unanswered cries of these Jewish children, this depth of evil not only despoils the myth of a beautiful divine blueprint lying behind all events but also requires that we reconsider the possibility of a demonic master plan behind events such as the Holocaust.

This depth of horror, this scope of barbarism, these authors contend, cannot be explained on strictly naturalistic terms. It can be rendered intelligible—in the type of perverse intelligibility such events are capable of—only by the category of the demonic.83 Just as certain experiences of the holy require that we postulate a transcendental category of “the holy,” as Rudolf Otto has argued in his classic work, so certain experiences of evil, such as the Jews’ experience of the Holocaust, require the postulation of a transcendental category of “the unholy,” “the demonic” or “the tremendum” to be understood.84 Hence some post-Holocaust theologians have judged the previous modernist assessment of Satan and demons as myth to itself be a modernist myth.

Emil Brunner, who was certainly no friend of theological conservatism, but who had himself witnessed the atrocities of World War II, expressed the fundamental basis for this reassessment well:

Brunner is hardly alone in this assessment. Even before, and certainly during and after World War II, a number of otherwise quite progressive thinkers observed that something was transpiring, or had just transpired, that they could only describe as demonic. In 1936, for example, Carl Jung wrote of Hitler: “One man, who is obviously ‘possessed,’ has infected a whole nation. . . . A god has taken possession of the Germans. . . . A hurricane has broken loose in Germany while we still believe it is fine weather.”86 It seems that Hitler and his Nazi regime incarnated the demonic in such an intense fashion that almost anybody who did not fall under his spell could see, and had to admit, the reality of a transcendent force of evil in their activity—even when their own theological convictions did not require it, and perhaps even when their previous worldviews did not even allow for it.87

What further confirms this is that shortly after the war some serious, high-level discussions were carried out among some of the world’s top theologians (e.g., Barth, Brunner) over whether Germany had become a nation possessed. A good number of these theologians were inclined to answer this in the affirmative. In my estimation, the evidence suggests they were right.

The point of all this is that the nightmarish experience of the demonic in Nazi Germany seems to have served to break a “stronghold” (if I may so speak, following 2 Cor 10:3-5) of Enlightenment rationalism which had previously gripped much post-Enlightenment Western theology and had caused it to dismiss the demonic as an outmoded piece of mythology.

The Holocaust was not alone in opening up modern people’s eyes to the reality of evil. The horror of World War I had already served for many (such as Barth) to undermine the unrealistic, hopelessly optimistic anthropology of nineteenth-century liberalism and to point in the direction of a reappropriation of the biblical categories of sin and the demonic.

Moreover, the experiences of Hiroshima, of Stalin, of the Korean and Vietnam wars, and of a host of barbaric leaders such as Idi Amin and Pol Pot (to say nothing of the more recent butcheries in Rwanda and Bosnia) have all served to suggest to many contemporary people that perhaps the Bible is not as altogether “primitive” as was once supposed in describing this world as under the bondage of an evil cosmic force (e.g., 1 Jn 5:19). Perhaps it is, after all, not the warfare worldview of “primitive” cultures that is unenlightened.

Not surprisingly, then, we see writers, and not just evangelicals, taking the categories of the devil and the demonic in general far more seriously than has been the case in the past.88 It is, I believe, a “sign of the times.”

Yet to date no one has attempted explicitly and consistently to integrate this new interest with the theological problem of evil—the very thing that, in the New Testament and early church, was most associated with Satan. Hence while I hold no illusion that the majority of people, and perhaps even the majority of Christians, are going to agree with every aspect of this work, I do not fear that it will be rejected on a widespread scale simply because it takes the Bible’s talk about “gods,” angels, demons and Satan seriously. On this score, I believe this work fits in well with the Zeitgeist that we are now as a culture and as a church entering into.

Conclusion

On the basis of these four considerations, I am convinced that our Western culture, and especially the Western church, is positioned to reconsider the warfare worldview of the New Testament and the early church—even though it runs contrary to certain fundamental aspects of both the Western church’s classical theological assumptions as well as our culture’s standard naturalistic orientation. As our culture acquires a more Third World perspective on reality, the naturalistic philosophical assumptions that supported the Enlightenment worldview and the Hellenistic philosophical assumptions that supported the classical theological worldview are both losing their dominance.

Having laid this foundation, I turn now to consider afresh the Bible’s teaching on God’s ongoing battle against spiritual forces—what constitutes what I call the Bible’s warfare worldview. What we shall find is that the notion of spiritual warfare in Scripture is far more central, and far more radical, than most believers have been able to appreciate. The next four chapters cover the warfare worldview as expressed in the Old Testament.