{"id":2196,"date":"2023-09-28T18:45:17","date_gmt":"2023-09-28T18:45:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/2023\/09\/28\/the-universe-not-a-terrifying-spectacle\/"},"modified":"2023-09-28T18:45:17","modified_gmt":"2023-09-28T18:45:17","slug":"the-universe-not-a-terrifying-spectacle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/2023\/09\/28\/the-universe-not-a-terrifying-spectacle\/","title":{"rendered":"The Universe: Not a Terrifying Spectacle"},"content":{"rendered":"


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This piece was adapted from Russell Moore\u2019s newsletter<\/a>. Subscribe here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I<\/span> rarely frequent the app formerly known as Twitter for long enough to be angered by anything, but I was last week.<\/p>\n

A friend of mine posted a prayer request for her son, hospitalized for schizophrenia, with which he\u2019s been grappling a long time. Most of the responses were what one would expect\u2014expressions of love and concern.<\/p>\n

One, though, was from a Christian man telling my friend that she could solve this problem quite easily: by taking away \u201csecular\u201d TV and music and video games. That response would be repulsive enough, but then I went and looked at some of this person\u2019s other posts.<\/p>\n

One of them, from some time past, warned people about thinking about matters such as the Holocaust. He cited a famous Christian musician who went to Auschwitz and lost his faith in Christ. It\u2019s better to think instead, this man recommended, about things that are lovely and pure.<\/p>\n

Even Job\u2019s friends had better counsel. Yes, many people have lost their faith\u2014or never come to it\u2014because they could not reconcile a good God with the atrocities and suffering they see in the world. Think of Dostoevsky\u2019s chilling arguments from the mouth of Ivan Karamazov, for instance. The sort of willed ignorance to grave evil is hardly, though, a Christian response to such questions.<\/p>\n

If this posture were just the ramblings of some random person online, I wouldn\u2019t have given it much thought. But the sentiment expressed on that account\u2014albeit crudely and rudely expressed\u2014is one that many people unwittingly take: If I just remain very still and don\u2019t think about what\u2019s lurking out there, it will go away.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, some friends and I were discussing the Book of Job, having read together Robert Alter\u2019s translation<\/a>. I mentioned to them something I noted in one of the very first issues of my newsletter: how the Book of Job fired the imagination of a young Stephen King.<\/p>\n

King\u2014perhaps the most famous American writer of horror fiction since Lovecraft\u2014said in a 2020 National Public Radio interview<\/a> with Terri Gross that, growing up in a Methodist church, he was fascinated by how much of what happens in Job takes place \u201coff-stage.\u201d You and I as readers can see the conversation between God and the Adversary about Job\u2019s life, but he cannot.<\/p>\n

That reading prompted King to ask whether there is, in fact, an evil outside of us or beyond what we create for ourselves. \u201cThe Bible tries to have it both ways,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

As a Christian, I would argue that the Bible tries to have it both ways because it is <\/em>both ways. There is an evil outside of us\u2014and sometimes we see the repugnant enormity of that evil. We intuitively seem to know this, which is why every culture tells horror stories and attempts to come up with ways to distract us from seeing that horror. We also know there is evil within us\u2014which is why every culture has categories of guilt or shame or injustice or atonement.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s more than just this. The Bible has it both ways in that it speaks in seemingly contradictory ways about the cosmos around us. \u201cGod saw everything that he had made, and it was very good,\u201d Genesis tells us (1:31). The apostle John, on the other hand, writes that \u201cthe whole world is under the control of the evil one\u201d (1 John 5:19).<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t all of us\u2014even those who reject the idea of supernatural revelation\u2014intuitively seem to know that both of these realities are true, and that if we deny either one of them, we are lying to ourselves?<\/p>\n

Some Christians dismiss the problem of evil by so emphasizing the decrees of God that they, as I heard one Calvinist pastor put it over 25 years ago, \u201cend up pushing evil all the way back into the heart of God,\u201d directly contradicting that the God we know is revealed in Jesus Christ, \u201cfull of grace and truth\u201d (John 1:14). Others\u2014wishing to protect God from charges of injustice\u2014attempt to explain away evil in ways awfully reminiscent of the counselors of Job, the very people that God himself repudiated.<\/p>\n

In our group\u2019s discussion of Job, one of our number\u2014a wise Jewish thinker\u2014responded to the critiques of those who have written over the centuries that the book does not provide a satisfactory answer to the problem of evil. He noted that the Book of Job isn\u2019t about the problem of evil; it\u2019s about the limits of human wisdom. God does not respond to Job\u2019s complaints with a syllogism, but with his presence.<\/p>\n

Evil is real. Suffering is real. We cannot comprehend it, which is perhaps why it is called \u201cthe mystery of iniquity\u201d (2 Thess. 2:7, KJV). The question, though, is whether evil is normal<\/em>\u2014or if our affections and imaginations are right to signal to us that this is not the way it\u2019s supposed to be.<\/p>\n

Novelist John Updike once wrote<\/a>, \u201cIf God does not exist, the world is a horror show.\u201d He admitted that there is ample evidence for the world being a horror show: \u201clandslides and plagues and massacres and falling airplanes and incessant carnivorousness,\u201d not to mention the universality of death.<\/p>\n

In the end, Updike was convinced not just of the horrors of the world, however, but of the existence of God:<\/p>\n

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Yet this and all bad news merits reporting because our general expectation is for good; an instinctive vision of health and peace underlies our horror stories. Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we only have to be still to experience. Habit and accustomedness have painted over pure gold with a dull paint that can, however, be scratched away, to reveal the shining under-base. The world is good, our intuition is, confirming its Creator\u2019s appraisal as reported in the first chapter of Genesis.<\/p>\n

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What Updike says is true. On the flip side, the ultimate goodness of the world and of God cannot mean we disregard the evil. The earth is not only the site of the bygone habitats of Eden and Bethlehem. It is also the site of Golgotha.<\/p>\n

The apostle Paul did not tell us that life in Christ would involve tranquil ignorance of the cruelty and horror of the world. As a matter of fact, he told us that creation itself groans, and that, by the Spirit, we also \u201cgroan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies\u201d (Rom. 8:23, ESV). Sometimes this is in groanings \u201ctoo deep for words\u201d (Rom. 8:26). In fact, what the Spirit prompts is itself a scream\u2014a scream of \u201cAbba<\/em>, Father\u201d (Rom. 8:15).<\/p>\n

Jesus does not deny that we walk through the \u201cvalley of the shadow of death,\u201d nor does he give us a detailed roadmap and timetable for that journey. He merely tells us that he will be with us.<\/p>\n

He does not tell us that there is nothing scary out there. Rather, he says that we will find, ultimately, what\u2019s chasing behind us is goodness and mercy (Ps. 23).<\/p>\n

We can\u2019t usually see that, in a world that does indeed often look like a horror story. But, as Paul says, if part of what it means to be conformed to Christ is to hope, \u201cwho hopes for what he sees?\u201d (Rom. 8:24).<\/p>\n

We live in a world haunted by sin and death and suffering. We live in a world that is a signpost of a glory too great for us to imagine. Both are true. If we forget either, we\u2019ve become a people of something other than the Cross, of someone other than the Christ.<\/p>\n

Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today<\/span> and leads its Public Theology Project.<\/p>\n

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