Jeremy L. Berg

In Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy, Greg Boyd attempts to answer the question: “How are we to conceive of an all-powerful God creating beings who to some degree possess the power to thwart his will, and thus against whom he must genuinely battle if he is to accomplish his will?”  In the process, he questions the viability of the traditional Augustinian view of God’s sovereignty that has shaped the majority opinion of Christians down through the centuries.  He calls the traditional view “the blueprint worldview,” because it assumes “everything somehow fits into God’s secret plan—a divine blueprint” (13).  There is “a specific divine reason for every occurrence in history”—even the most horrific experiences of suffering (14).

Against this Boyd argues that the world in which we live is a cosmic war zone between God and free moral agents, both human and angelic.  He argues that evil is the result of free moral agents rebelling against God’s good purposes and therefore suffering and evil is not to be blamed on God but on Satan, his angelic cohorts, and humans who act contrarily to God.  In order to make this argument viable, he must wrestle with many significant theological issues along the way: God’s omnipotence, God’s foreknowledge, human freedom, natural evil, hell and more.  The bedrock of Boyd’s argument, the factor that remains foremost among his convictions, is that God is love and desires to have a bride who freely chooses to live in covenant with Him.

Boyd’s argument can be summarized into the following six theses: (1) Love must be freely chosen; (2) love therefore entails risk; (3) love, and thus freedom, entails moral responsibility; (4) the power to influence for the worse must be roughly proportionate to our power to influence for the better (corruptio optima pessima); (5) this freedom must be, within limits, irrevocable; and (6) this self-determining freedom is finite in scope and duration.  After supporting these theses in the first half of the book, he draws out some further implications in the latter half dealing with the issues of efficacious prayer, natural evil, and hell.

Boyd’s argument draws from vast resources to bolster his claims.  He traces each issue masterfully through the Old and New Testaments, draws support from the post-apostolic fathers (pre-Augustinian thinkers), as well as pulling from the latest studies in the sciences (e.g. chaos theory, quantum metaphysics, etc.) and measuring his claims against general human experience.  Perhaps, the greatest strength of this book however is that Boyd is not content to merely expound his argument in a vacuum.  Instead, he forcefully interacts with the opposing views along the way, showing both their strengths and weaknesses, and then responding to their strongest objections.

The most contentious claims of Boyd are (a) that the future is partly open to God, made up of possibilities instead of certainties and (b) that God takes risks and genuinely wars against Satan and other free agents who oppose him.  Yet, Boyd is strong in his defense of neo-Molinism and responds to those who would accuse this God of being less powerful saying that “they criticize as ‘diminished’ a view that God is intelligent and powerful enough to confidently move into the future and accomplish all his objectives without have to act like a human would, that is, without controlling, or at least knowing in advance, every detail” (130).  In the end, he would argue, this view exalts God if anything.  Such a God is not limited to meticulously controlling every molecule of the universe.  Furthermore, Boyd maintains throughout that God is ensured of the ultimately victory.

In evaluating this book, I am convinced that Boyd has pulled no strings or evaded any of the pressing questions at stake (and they are very big questions!).  Whether or not one agrees with every detail of his argument, one can at least appreciate his core conviction that any Christian theodicy must be built on the sure foundation of God’s lovingkindness.  Yet, I think that his argument succeeds overall.  I am most appreciative of a couple bold moves he makes in his argument.

First, I whole-heartedly agree that our post-Enlightenment worldviews have significantly withheld from our minds the deeply pervasive, complex, unseen reality of spirits in the cosmos.  Boyd helpfully opens our eyes again to this reality by bringing us back to the spiritually-laden mindsets of Jesus, the biblical writers, the post-apostolic writers, and other third world cultures where the spiritual realm is just as real as the physical.  In doing so, he exposes our tendency to leave out ‘the Lucifer principle’ when considering the war-torn world we find ourselves in and the naturalistic explanations we often give to make sense of it.  I, personally, have long been open to the influence that angelic forces (Satan or otherwise) might have on human beings in bringing personal evil to the world; but I have never shed my modernist lenses enough to consider that similar spiritual forces may be behind the natural evils in the calamitous environment in which we live (e.g. earthquakes, tornados, etc.).   I often leave these events to the Newtonian laws of physics and such.  In this sense, I live in a split world where the intimately personal Creator God rules human beings while the Deistic clock-maker God rules the natural environment.

Secondly, I find absolutely essential Boyd’s repeated claim that any mysteries we may encounter in our attempts to understand the problem of evil must be attributed to “the complexity of creation and the warfare that engulfs it, not in the arbitrary sovereignty of God” (224).  When suffering confronts us in ways that leave us clinging for life and crying for an explanation, we should not doubt the character of God but question the infinite number of unknown variables in the world that we live.  This observation has immense pastoral value.  Boyd draws from personal experiences with victims of suffering as well as from the biblical account of Job to convincingly show that those who blame God or human sin for the evils that befall them are mistaken.  According to Boyd, “Peace comes to Job only when he learns that, though his suffering is a mystery, he can and must nevertheless humbly trust God.  His suffering is not God’s fault, and God is not against him.  God’s character is trustworthy” (226).

Third, while many are infuriated by the bold and cavalier position Boyd takes on God’s sovereignty and his foreknowledge, I found his honest approach and courage to question long-held theological presuppositions on such matters refreshing and healthy.  Boyd clearly shows that many so-called ‘orthodox’ views of God are based more on Augustinian concepts than on the biblical tradition and the early post-apostolic perspectives.  By going back to Jesus himself, we have an ample foundation to rethink such central Christian commitments through more radically christocentric lenses.  Most importantly, however, is that one comes away from this book with a clear sense that Boyd does not write with an attitude of academic snobbery, with some agenda to disrupt the status quo or cause unneeded controversy.  Rather, Boyd writes with a pastoral spirit and a desire to bring those who are faced with concrete evil and suffering to a place where they can find peace in knowing that God is not the cause of their grief, that he is wholly loving and trustworthy, that he is doing all that he can at the moment to fight for their life, and that “the moment the kingdom is ushered in, all of us who have eagerly anticipated it will know in an instant that is was worth it” (357).