We ask “Why?” people in the Bible ask “How Long?”

Books about the problem of evil can be extremely frustrating because you know at the outset that, from a Christian point of view, the answer (if we can call it that) will involve the word “mystery.” N. T. Wright in Evil and the Justice of God says that his intention in that book is

“not so much to give answers to impossible philosophical questions as to bring signs of God’s new world to birth, on the basis of Jesus’ death and in the power of his Spirit, even in the midst of ‘the present evil age’” (p. 11).

So when I read books on this subject like N. T. Wright’s, I am not really looking for answers, but I hope that the author will help me think about the issues in a way that will help me conform my thinking to the to way the Bible thinks about them. When I read a book about the problem of evil, I hope to gain wisdom more than understanding, hope more than assurance that things will work out in this life. For I know that, sooner or later, my reflections will be tested by the hard reality of suffering or the sheer evilness of evil at a personal level. You cannot go for very long just thinking about evil and suffering without experiencing them.

I think this part of Chris Wright’s book The God I don’t Understand serves as a guide to thinking biblically about these things. That does not mean sweeping the nasty stuff under the rug; it means coping with the hard questions with the conviction that a Christian worldview is the best way for us to traverse through them.

If I were to summarize this part of the book, I would say that Wrights wants us to understand that God in His wisdom did not think it was necessary to reveal to us where evil (he makes a distinction between moral and natural) came from. This does not mean that the Bible has nothing to say about when evil first came into the world, but its origin is something it does not bother to explain. Since this raises the question about what the Bible DOES say about evil, Wright spends some time talking about the Bible’s diagnosis for moral evil which basically says that sin effected both humanity and creation and “puts the blame of suffering and evil where most of it primarily belongs, namely, on ourselves, the human race” (35). It then makes sense to talk about the devil or Satan and the fall of the angels. Although Wright spends a few pages on this aspect of evil, the conclusion is that the Bible tells us very little, so at the end our most common questions about the fall of the angels and preexisting evil go unanswered. It is simply not for us to know.
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Kirk, J. R. Daniel. Unlocking Romans: Resurrection and the Justification of God. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2008.

Unlocking Romans first came to my attention in a post by Foolish Tarheel Daniel Kirk’s New Book: Unlocking Romans. Although I was not planning to read anything on Romans now (since I had spent some time on it last year), I was impressed by FT’s recommendation of Daniel Kirk as a person and his work. FT thinks that Kirk’s exegesis is “careful and sensitive” and whose sensitivity spans from “historical, cultural, communal, and theological issues of the first century to missional, practical, theological, and pastoral concerns for both then and now.” With this recommendation and the fact that Daniel Kirk would probably interact with the New Perspective on Paul, I decided to read the book. I was not disappointed.

Starting with the question of “Who is God?,” Kirk says that “no question is more central to the study of Paul than to determine at the outset which God we expect to find as the topic of his letters” (2). Can God be defined in universal terms without reference to the story of Israel? His answer is no.

If this is true, then we need to start asking questions about how God will fulfill his promises to Israel and be faithful to His covenant. Therefore the following statement gets to the heart of the thesis of the book:

“In Romans, the resurrection of Jesus becomes Paul’s key for demonstrating that the promises contained in the Scriptures have been fulfilled in the Christ event…Because Paul’s God is the God of particulars, the God whose righteousness is tied to a particular story in which God has promised to act in a particular way and to bless a particular people, Paul must show that his gospel message makes sense as the fulfillment of that God’s actions fulfilling precisely those promises and blessing that particular people” (8).

Basically, Jesus’ resurrection is the hermeneutical key for understanding Romans. In a sense, this book is proposing that Paul’s hermeneutics is a hermeneutics of resurrection.
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