Evil and the Short Run

About a year ago I was hospitalized in poor condition. The diagnosis was, and remains, an inoperable and probably terminal brain tumor. At the time I was not overjoyed to have visitors. The people who came to see me almost invariably said the wrong things. I do not question their motives. I appreciated their efforts, and I believe they genuinely tried to encourage and comfort me. They just were not successful.

Comfort, as I came to see it, has two components, the long run and the short run. The long-run aspect is far easier for the Christian to deal with, because he is assured that all present troubles will seem like small stuff when we are finally in the presence of God, in eternity. This is the message of, for example, Romans 8:18 ff. The long run presents no special difficulties.

The short run is where the problem is for many of us sick people, and generally for anyone who experiences any kind of evil. One’s attention is drawn repeatedly, and with great force, to the disease or other evil, to what is happening in the short run. For anyone entirely caught up in an evil situation, the events of the short run swamp everything else. The long run simply does not count for much.

It might be argued that blotting out the long run and all but a particular aspect of the short run is inappropriate for a Christian. Some of what follows is an attempt to see its legitimacy. In addition, we seem to have an important precedent. When there was sufficient psychological distance between Jesus and the corpse, Jesus was able to talk quite calmly about the death of Lazarus. When he was in the cemetery he was overcome.

The short run is a rather complicated matter. There are some short-run assurances. For example, we are promised that the grace of God will be sufficient for the immediate situation. This kind of promise should not be minimized, but it does not answer the questions that many people have when overtaken by evil. The “Why me?,” “Why now?,” “Why like this?,” and “Why here?” queries are almost always agonizingly asked and left unanswered. These are short-run questions and legitimate questions. Any attempt to make them into long-run questions or to give them long-run answers is bound to fail. Any attempt to give a short-run promise that, though actual, is inapplicable will fail, too. Most of the comments made to those overcome by bad things are answers to questions they did not ask.

Certain suggestions are made to afflicted people of God’s possible purpose in the situation. (These hypotheses regularly seemed very hollow to me, and I would guess that my experience was not unique.) Maybe God is trying to get the attention of the person; maybe God is trying to teach him something; maybe God is trying to correct him somehow; and so on. This type of suggestion does not appeal to many unfortunate people, nor do they see how it could be applied to them. It is not that they think they are already perfect and do not require changes. They are quite aware that they are sinners. It is just that they can usually see no purpose in the events happening to them and feel that if there is some purpose it is bought at a very high price. In general it is a mistake to think that the class of afflicted people is especially hard to teach and recalcitrant. It appears that if severe misfortune were God’s way of getting the attention and allegiance of people, he could accomplish those ends in a less dramatic and deadly way.

Second, the usual theodices are out of character with the New Testament. We are told that Jesus went about doing good. There is no indication that to give some physical benefit was damaging to anyone’s spiritual condition. (Try to imagine Jesus saying, “I refuse to heal you, feed you, or make you whole because that would stunt your spiritual growth.)

Notice that even if the adversity were relieved, there would still be a gap in explanations of the events of the short run. We might still wonder why people get brain tumors, why there are earthquakes, why some things have evil characters. I think it is not accidental that the questions we would most like to have answered seem to get lost in that gap.

What we are up against is the enemies of Christ. The New Testament makes clear that one of these enemies is death. The natural evils are good candidates for the enemy list. The enemies of Christ are not a long-run problem, because in the long run all enemies will be destroyed. But they are a short-run problem because the enemies are real and only partially escapable.

This is the point that I wanted some visitor to express. All things are not “all right”; we are dealing with the enemies of God. The appropriate Christian response to a situation of physical lack or decay is “Damn death and disease to hell.” The same for all evils. We ought to indicate to the unfortunate that we know the seriousness of it all and that we will stick with him to the end. But we should not pretend that everything is all right. Everything is not all right, according to the Saviour of the world. In the long run everything will be all right. In the short run it cannot be. In the short run we should cry. To fail to do so indicates existential and theological confusion.

What I wanted in my need was assurance where it could be given, or promises repeated, and the explicit realization that assurance is not promised and cannot be given in all respects. This is the kind of balance I was looking for. To make believe that there is complete assurance, to say that everything is okay, is really to fail to take brain tumors, or whatever, seriously. Anyone who does take the enemies of Christ seriously is bound to be saddened by them. Even though there is ultimate victory, the enemies of Christ are still real enemies. Even though in the long run what happens in the short run will decrease in importance, the enemies are still important.

At times God’s favor is evident. Only he can bring good out of evil. We should be glad to watch him, but the good outcomes are by-products of his redemption. The evils themselves would not happen if God had his way in the short run.

Not much progress has been made here on the classical problem of evil. It could be asked, in the vocabulary used so far, why God tolerates enemies in the short run when he does not tolerate them in the long run. To this problem I have attempted no answer here. However, the recognition of the enemies of Christ is not only a very useful foreword to good theology and philosophy, but it is crucial in the matter of counseling. People who do not want to talk about their illnesses or other afflictions are not just exhibiting a common psychological trait; they are also making a theological error. Good and effective counseling means using good psychology and good theology.—ALLEN J. HARDER, assistant professor of philosophy, Iowa State University, Ames.

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