God’s View of Evil, Schaeffer on Materialism, and a Question About Evil’s Definition

AN IDEA FROM ME

In Scripture, God is honest about evil. Evil is real, because goodness is real. And goodness is real because God is real. And the good God who made us has a good plan for our lives and for the world. He is the final Authority over what is allowed to happen in this world, and He has total control, to make sure that all things work together for good in the end. Most comforting of all, He is the gracious God who dwells with us and walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death, so that we need fear no evil.

For more on the Problem of Evil, which I consider to be the hardest challenge to Christianity today, check out the latest episode of our podcast. Get that here: https://thethink.institute/articles/the-problem-of-evil-an-answer-from-christian-philosophy 

A QUOTE FROM SOMEBODY ELSE

“It’s only our foolish generation (and I am using ‘foolish’ in the same sense it has in Romans 1) that lives in a universe which is purely material, everything being reduced to mass, energy, and motion. Thus we find that the Jews left the true God for false gods, just as the Greeks, the Romans, etc., had false gods, but they were not as far from the truth as our generation. Our generation has nobody home in the universe, nobody at all. Eventually. Let us understand this: only a personal comforter can comfort man who is personal, and only one Comforter is great enough: the infinite-personal God who exists—that is, the God of Judeo-Chrstian Scripture. Only He is the sufficient Comforter.”

—Francis Schaeffer, Death in the City (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2002), 43. 

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT

What is evil? Is it a lack of goodness, a corruption of goodness, or something else?