Day 30 – suffering and bad choices
I once heard a Holocaust victim asked if her experience of a death march and forced labor camp hadn’t destroyed her faith in God. “Of course,” she said, adding, “but only for a time.” She had come to the conclusion that what she and so many others had endured was not God’s doing, but was due to human beings having chosen to do evil. –KATHLEEN NORRIS
God has given us the Moral Law. He has also given us the freedom to choose whether or not to obey it. All too often we disobey, and adverse consequences follow. We and/or others suffer in the aftermath of our bad choices. This explains some of the suffering that enters our world. To prevent it from happening, God would have to withhold freedom of choice from us. This He would and will not do. He refuses to coerce our obedience. Yet, in the midst of the suffering caused by our bad choices, God remains all-powerful and in control. In fact, He has taken this very suffering and made it the vehicle through which our redemption is wrought. One day in the future He will reestablish His perfect will and consummate His redemptive plan. Suffering will be no more.
The paragraph above summarizes one of the most common explanations given for sin and suffering. It states that much of the misery we experience is self-inflicted, the aftermath of our bad choices. It absolves God of direct responsibility, for suffering is seen as the by-product of our free will. Sin and its consequences enter our world because God has given us the freedom to choose and we have chosen badly.
Some theologians, however, claim that this argument is not air-tight. They say it has a serious loophole, one explained by Winfried Corduan this way:
The question is this: Was evil really unavoidable? Did God have to pay the price of allowing evil in order for us to have freedom? The answer, as surprising as it may seem, is no There is another way of making sure of the desired outcome, namely by limiting the circumstances within which we choose... Parents do so with children. They teach them to exercise their capacity for choices within restricted options. At some time as a teenager, a person may have to decide whether to smoke. Parents would not expect a four-year-old to make that choice. They would protect the child from making the wrong decision. That does not mean that the child does not have freedom of choice within the range of choices available to him or her; but, because the parents know the child would choose poorly, they do not allow him or her to make choices beyond his or her capacity. God could have done the same thing with human beings. There is no logical reason why He had to let us free creatures lapse into disobedience. God could have arranged our available choices in such a way that we would be free but would only freely choose to obey Him. An omniscient and omnipotent being should have been able to do that.1
My former neighbor’s management of his dog should help us better understand what Corduan is saying. Andy, just a puppy, became a member of our subdivision a few years ago. To ensure his safety and keep him out of trouble, his owner, Brian, erected an invisible fence along the boundaries of his lot. This restricted Andy’s domain, but it did not seem to affect his happiness. Every day I saw him frolicking freely in Brian’s yard, where he had been given free canine reign. But he did not set one paw into mine. What Brian did with Andy is what Corduan says that God could have done with us. He could have restricted our freedom yet still given us abundant choices and much happiness. He could have “fenced us in,” making it impossible for us to go astray, yet still have given us free reign within those boundaries. In this way, God could have prevented sin, evil, and suffering from entering the world.
This line of thinking claims that God could eliminate the possibility of us choosing badly by arranging our lives in a way that guarantees our obedience. But if this is the case, do we really have a choice? In my opinion, to protect us from any possibility of bad choices is the same as giving us no free will at all. Granted, God is both omnipotent and sovereign. He certainly could have limited our freedom to choose, just as my neighbor limited his dog’s and those parents limited their son’s. He could have played it safe and removed any possibility that we would go astray. But to what end? That we have no real choice but to obey Him? That we have no true test of our devotion? That we have no real depth to our love? God, forbid!
Take the time now to reread today’s first paragraph. After answering the above objection, it still rings true to me.
1Winfried Corduan, No Doubt About It, 137-38.
Daily Quotation
Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, 103.
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