Hearing Zosia The Problem With The Problem Of Evil

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.

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:

We moderns cannot bring ourselves . . . to believe in the real existence of these mythological entities that traditionally have been lumped under the general category “principalities and powers.” . . . It is as impossible for most of us to believe in the real existence of demonic or angelic powers as it is to believe in dragons or elves, or a flat world.51

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:

A generation which has produced two world wars, and a totalitarian state with all its horrors, has very little cause to designate the Middle Ages “dark.” . . . On the contrary, it is just because our generation has experienced such diabolical wickedness that many people have abandoned their former “enlightened” objection to the existence of a “power of darkness,” and are now prepared to believe in Satan as represented in the Bible.85

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.

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.