The Problem of Evil in Theology

The Ancient Sages, classical Greek philosophy, and the early church fathers would have all been confronted with the problem of God being all powerful (Omnipotent), everywhere (Omnipresent), and all knowing (Omniscient) without God being the cause of evil or without God being evil himself. My case will thus be that with my theology of evil God the Trinity can be understood to be descriptive of God without God being evil. Overall, in the process of explaining why God is not evil I will develop a unique perception regarding the personalities of God from a social Trinitarian perspective, and I will accomplish such a task through evaluating the context of God's experience in terms of causality, time, and space.

Many early philosophers and theologians would deal with the metaphysical and epistemological questions of God from a observational, contemplative, or transcendental perspective. Many that sought to develop a theology of God from a completely observational perspective would come to the conclusion that God is nature (pantheism), and this view unfortunately would often come to the conclusion that no such thing as evil exists or that many Gods exist (polytheism) as part of nature. Both pantheism and polytheism can emerge from seeing God through a view of the world that is often able to identify unique distinct objects, their relations to one another, and their unity in their many parts, but pantheism and polytheism fall short of explaining the problem of evil and fall short of recognizing how one intelligent force could be separate from and distinctly different from creation. We can see from the Academy of Plato that many that approached the subject of God and evil from a completely contemplative perspective often began to come to the conclusion that monotheism (the belief in only one God) was considered a potential for being a correct doctrine. The problem with many people in both ancient Greece and in ancient Israel who had been leading monotheists is that because they often approached the subject of God from a completely contemplative perspective thus God became unknowable personally in terms of his desires, interests, and purpose, but this is not to say that such great thinkers had been incorrect about God or even incorrect about evil. People that approached God from a completely transcendental perspective (such as the Gnostics) may have been able to describe God in terms of his desires, interests, and purpose, but those observing the Gnostics that would not have the same revelation could come to the conclusion that many of the Gnostics had been under the influence of evil transcendence. Overall, the value thus of the doctrine of the Trinity as well as the understanding of evil presented in the Christian scripture is that observational, contemplative, and transcendental experiences all together can testify to both evil and the Trinity in a way that brings about a very personal understanding of God as well as moral agents of evil.

In Christian doctrine God is outside of creation, God can interact with creation, God can involve himself in creation by being part of creation without being created, and God possesses the qualities of being Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and Omniscient without being unknowable in his personality and his emotions. The doctrine of the Incarnation teaches that although God the Son exited prior to creation he was born into creation through a human woman and thus has a divine nature and a human nature as one joint substance that is unable to be parted into one nature or the other. This doctrine emerged from the challenges of the church to define Christ in terms of his nature in the midst of Nestorianism and monophysitism and thus the teaching that the two natures of Christ are in Hypostatic Union emerged as the Chalcedonian theses of the Fourth Ecumenical Council. The point is that Christ is fully God and fully man with one unified personality that is not swayed by one nature or the other because both natures are united as one in what is known as Hypostatic Union.

The Incarnation thus brought about the experience of Christ personally, and through him it brought about the transcendence of God the Father personally as well. For example the gospel of Matthew 16:15-19 records that Christ asked the disciples who they say that he is, and Peter replied that Jesus is the Christ and to this Jesus confirmed the promise of building the Church upon Peter because Christ identified that Peter's revelation had come from the Father in heaven and had not been revealed by man. Not only that but also prior to the crucifixion of Christ he says the following in regard to the Holy Ghost, "But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come." John 16:13 (NIV) The point to be made is that God the Trinity as the persons of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are contemplative, observational, and transcendental, and this is true because Christ could clearly be observed by people of his time, the words of Christ could be considered in contemplation, and the personalities of the Father and the Son could be transcended through the experience of Christ.

The fact however that Christ could grow from in infant to a full grown person and then be killed on the cross means that he had the quality to change like in the case of age and development. Christ thus is and could be fully Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and Omniscient by possessing all the qualities of God but by holding himself back from expressing and experiencing his full true nature, and thus Christ could grow from a infant to an adult and could make decisions based upon reason instead of decisions based upon complete perfect foreknowledge. If this was not the case, then Christ would be unable to judge people for placement into the kingdom or the fire of hell because all he could say would be for example, "Sorry, Sue their is nothing I can do because I know that you could never do before I made you."

The experience thus of Christ in both time and space caused many things to hold sway over him until he could grow into the full person that he already was. In terms of the crucifixion of Christ he was able to for example identify that if Pilot was not given power from above (from the Father), then Pilot would be unable to crucify Christ. The Father thus was instrumental in guarding Christ from evil all throughout the growth of Christ to fully experience and express his nature. The fact that the Father was not in time and space because he never became incarnate like Christ tells us that the Father's expression of his divinity and his experience of his divinity are much more different than Christ.

The Father thus could be fully without time and without space such that nothing is related by cause and effect for him because all of time and space exist as now. In other words the Father could make and view creation not by cause and effect but instead by relations in his will such that all of creation points back to him. In other words God the Father could plan all of space like an artist views a painting in his mind before it is made, and then God the Father could plan all of time like an artist plans how he will paint before he paints. God the Father thus would have this plan perhaps as an 'eternal now', and Christ becomes the artist that paints the painting by the Father's perfect plan. The plan of the Father being implemented by Christ would give Christ free will through his holding back from complete experience of being God so that Christ can always have a purpose for doing work because he would always be gaining something that he is lacking to fulfill himself since he holds himself back from those things so that he can obtain them.

The existence and experience of time and space thus fully rely on God the Son to make them. The Holy Ghost however would provide the creative process to produce all of creation since he is considered as the Spirit of Truth that leads Christians into all truth. The Holy Ghost thus would dwell in creation itself, and would have direct experience with both the Father and the Son in order to unify the family of God through Christ taking on increasingly more elements until the believers as the members of the body of Christ develops into a full and complete Christ by being filled with the Holy Ghost as a kingdom of priests. God the Trinity thus provides us the ideology, experience, and fruit of God in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost and thus in the Ten Commandments, manna that came down from heaven, and in the staff of Aaron that had budded even though it had been cut off respectively (all three contained in the ark of the covenant).

Evil thus is the darkness that existed prior to creation that is the nothingness that has no existence of anything, and this evil is what God the Son is making reality into. When God the Trinity created everything in existence, God did not banish evil but instead evil fled as the light entered the darkness. The fact that Christ can hold himself back from experiencing his divinity fully is like having a infinitely bright light that is purposely being restricted while the aria within the restriction is growing.

What we are thus taught by the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is that God is transforming evil (the nothingness) into good through creation by entering a new aria of darkness like a candle and then turning reality ablaze in creativity and production. Even when moral agents of evil work to snuff the fire out like in the case of the death of Christ it becomes ablaze in even greater intensity until the entire world is on fire like in the case of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.