Where is God in a World Filled with Evil?: Collin Hansen | Episode 286

[00:00:00] In the West, we are just conditioned to think that our circumstances dictate our satisfaction with life. And that is only true to a certain extent and not true to the most significant extent. So what we can do is recognize that life is not going to magically get better when I just get through this thing. Because you know what happens after you get through this thing? Another thing.

[00:00:27] And then another thing. Because that's just life. And yet what else happens? The Lord is with us. When tragedy strikes or we see massive suffering, we may doubt God's justice and goodness. Hello and welcome to Candid where we never settle for less than the truth. I'm your host, Dr. Jonathan Youssef.

[00:00:52] Each week we'll tackle tough issues, answer your hard questions, and take a candid look at the Christian faith. Today we're discussing one of the most challenging questions we all face. Where is God as we face the evil of this world? My guest today is Collin Hansen, author of the new book, Where is God in a World with So Much Evil?

[00:01:16] This short but powerful book explores suffering through the lens of Job, Jesus, and the Holocaust, offering a thoughtful and compassionate perspective for those struggling with these questions. Collin is the vice president for content and editor in chief of the gospel coalition and the executive director of the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics.

[00:01:39] His background in history, cultural apologetics, and theology gives him a unique lens for approaching this complex topic. Today we will have an honest, engaging, and hopefully encouraging conversation about faith, doubt, and God's presence in the midst of suffering. Welcome to Candid Conversations, Collin. Thanks, Jonathan. Glad to be here. Your background is diverse and you've written on a lot of different topics.

[00:02:06] I've read a lot of your work and you and I have been in contact over the last year or so. And you've written on a lot of aspects of faith and culture, but what led you to write about a question like the presence of evil in the world and its relationship to God? So, there's something I do in my course on cultural apologetics I teach here at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama.

[00:02:32] For the final project, every student writes a sermon, 30,000 words, that incorporates what they regard to be the hardest objection to Christianity. So, part of what I'm helping people to understand that even as Christians, we have questions, we have doubts sometimes, we have a lot of concerns.

[00:02:54] And part of what I'm trying to do in this book is help them to see that the Bible itself is actually full of a lot of these questions from these inspired, inherent authors. But as I went through this process with my own course, I wanted to do something for my students to model my own questions. And I think for me, it's both a mega question and meta question. Mega question is how in the world could something as horrific as the Holocaust have happened?

[00:03:24] How can you begin to account for that degree of evil? And then the meta question for all of us together, but individually, existentially is, and how do I account for the evil that I suffer or even the evils that I perpetuate actively and passively? So, and then you come down to in the end this simple question of why doesn't God stop the suffering of innocent people?

[00:03:54] And specifically, when you look back with Elie Wiesel's work that I respond to in this book, I went all the way back to Fyodor Dostoevsky's work and the brothers Karamazov. It's the question of children in particular. And maybe because I'm the dad of three, 10 and under, I'm not sure, but it just sort of acutely brings together the basic question of the problem of evil that people have wrestled with forever.

[00:04:20] How can God be both fully sovereign, but also fully good if things like this happen in the world? You bring up an interesting subject and we're going to get to the meat of the issue. But there's this issue I've found recurring in a lot of the interviews that I've been doing over the years with Candid. And it's this issue of it seems like Christians have this fear of asking questions.

[00:04:45] They think that asking questions implies that there's a lack of faith or that it implies that there's doubt in who God is or that you should know these things. And the problem is everyone's running around assuming that someone else knows and we're all in the same boat. Like you said, divinely inspired scripture actually says it's good to ask questions. Kind of help us unpack a little bit of that and kind of even what you've seen with some of your students.

[00:05:14] Well, isn't the person we ask questions to the person that we would trust to have some answers or at least wisdom or at least perspective with us? It's a sign of trust, in fact. We pray, we ask questions because we believe that God has purposes behind these things or he can change things or he can stop things. What I come back to, though, is once again following the biblical pattern.

[00:05:40] This goes all the way through Jesus' own experiences praying in places like the Garden of Gethsemane is we do not always get the answer from God that we want. And we sometimes don't get any specific answer at all. You go back to the book of Job. That's a pretty clear takeaway from there. Where, yes, the Lord, in some sense, seems to rebuke Job or at least show Job up of like, hmm, you're asking a lot of questions. Let me ask you some questions now.

[00:06:08] But Job is still a man like you would describe David as, which is consistent throughout all of his questions in the Psalms. This is a man after God's own heart. And so it's not inconsistent. In fact, God seems to invite us to use his own character, his own revelation, his own promises to ask questions back to him. Now, there is a threshold here that you can cross. And one example would be Job's wife.

[00:06:36] Why don't you just curse God and die? There is a way to ask questions that is an act not of faith but of a lack of faith in God. But there's no precedent we see in Scripture of us having legitimate questions of confusion, of frustration, of perspective, of, God, how can you allow this to happen?

[00:06:58] And I think maybe, Jonathan, one reason I love studying the prophets so much is because this is the issue that preoccupies so much of the exilic period. And as a church, we're in a kind of state of exile right now between we know who we belong to, we know our future home, but we're not there yet. So I go back to these exilic prophets, the Ezekiels, Jeremiah's, the book of Habakkuk would be a really good example of this.

[00:07:27] And it's the same question throughout. Like, God, this is pretty terrible. I don't know how to reconcile what's happening right now with the character of who you revealed yourself to be. And then God does respond and reveals himself in holiness and judgment and things like that. A while ago, I was reading the Psalms, and I thought, why didn't everybody tell me that the Psalms are full of a bunch of questions about friends who betray you? That's like every Psalm in here.

[00:07:56] Well, of course, different stages of life, we see different things as our experiences begin to draw out certain perspectives in the Scripture. Well, sure enough, then another question you see all over the place in the Psalms, just to take one example, would be all these questions, especially, but it's like Psalm 22. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Which Jesus, of course, famously quotes on the cross. So you see this all over the place in Scripture, different places.

[00:08:22] And so, in fact, there is no better model for us of how to ask God questions than the Scriptures. Well, and in the beginning, you sort of opened up the door because your book really engages with some of the different philosophical attempts to answer this question. So break down the argument for us in which you're trying to get to a narrow point.

[00:08:45] Yeah, so the basic question that Elie Wiesel deals with in Knight, and it's – many people have read this book at some portion during school. It's one of the most famous books of the 20th century. It's probably also the most famous book that I'm – popular-level book that I'm familiar with in making an atheistic and anti-God argument. Elie Wiesel was not an atheist himself, but you could be forgiven for thinking that he is by reading this book.

[00:09:11] In many ways, I think he's actually channeling the atheistic arguments that Dostoevsky in the 19th century puts in his character Ivan Karamazov's mouth, his accusations toward God. So the essential question is, can we sit in judgment of God for his moral evil? I mean, at least what he allows.

[00:09:34] And so Elie is going through this absolutely horrific experience of the concentration camps, watching these from babies all the way through preteens and teenagers just being murdered by the Nazis. And he's just saying, you cannot reconcile the idea or reality of God with what's happening here. So the question then you come back to is, well, God seems silent. Elie Wiesel, we are crying out, this is not okay, but God is nowhere to be found.

[00:10:04] So the essential question from there is, is God actually silent or is he testifying to the injustice of this through people like Elie Wiesel who's made in the image of God? And the rest of us who cry out because after all, Jonathan, we're the only created beings who have that sense of justice. This isn't something the eagles do or the giraffes do or anything like that. So this is part of what it means to be made in the image of God.

[00:10:32] And then you work backward down to what does it mean for us to judge God morally? Does he have to account himself to us? And there you're looking through Job. But then you come back and say, well, if God doesn't have to answer our questions, though they are perfectly fine for us to ask as people made in the image of God, then what does God offer us? And that's where in the end you work through Isaiah 52, 53.

[00:10:59] You work through those prophecies. You work through the testimony of Christ himself. You come full circle and you say, well, God, the consistent theme here is that God, Jesus specifically in this case, is silent. Silent before his killers, silent before his accusers. But what is he doing?

[00:11:22] He's offering himself as a sacrifice for sin and ultimately as a way of being able to reconcile us with his father. So in the end, he may be silent, but he offers us something even better than an answer, which is himself. So that's kind of a four-step progression of 65 or so pages for my work through in this book. I mean, the thing about the problem of – I've had some people say to me, really, you think you can solve the problem of evil in 65 pages?

[00:11:51] And I say, no, I don't, but I don't think you can solve it in 6,500 pages either. So I'm not sure the difference. The topic has been covered ad nauseum, but it seems like what you're tackling particular aspect and giving a biblical perspective. I mean, it's interesting. Even as you were describing that, what was being witnessed in the Holocaust and crying out, God, where are you in all this? I mean, like you said, that is actually the story of the Exodus, right?

[00:12:21] Where is our covenant God who made all these promises to our patriarchs and what did he do? I mean, he showed up, which is kind of the shadow of the Christ in Moses. But he does show up in his timing, and that's part of what is so difficult for us to be able to handle, is that we want him to act on our terms, and for whatever reason, sometimes only known to himself, he just does not act on our terms.

[00:12:46] So you have 400 years in Israel, you have 400 years of silence of the prophets. I mean, you just have hundreds of years of these gaps in there. And sometimes now, of course, we're all still, as I mentioned earlier, that exilic position of, God, it's been 2,000 years. Like, where are you? Why haven't you showed up yet? Obviously, can't you see what's happening here? Is the time not right for Jesus to come back again and to judge and to bring the new heavens and the new earth?

[00:13:15] No matter where you are in all of human history, we're still in the same basic boat of, we are waiting on the Lord, and yet the Lord is not bound by our understanding of time. And, you know, one day is like a thousand, and a thousand like a day to him. And so that's ultimately part of how you cope in this life is a trust in God and a patience that, in the end,

[00:13:39] because of who we know him to be in his character from the exodus, from the exile, from the cross, and ultimately as Christians from the resurrection, that he's trustworthy even if he doesn't work on our timeline. In the book, you write that morality shifted after World War II and how Hitler became sort of the new moral benchmark. Unpack that idea for us and how that shaped our modern understanding of good and evil,

[00:14:07] because he's the one we all compare to, right? Yeah, that is something that's probably different in this book in terms of this theodicy or this problem of evil, even in a short little volume. Alec Ryrie, as a professor at Durham University in the UK, wrote a book called Unbelief, An Emotional History of Doubt. And he makes what I think is a compelling argument that in Christian civilization in the West leading up to World War II,

[00:14:32] the essential question that predominates is, do I arise to the moral standard of Jesus Christ? And we fall short, and that's obviously where God's grace intervenes. But that is no longer a question that people are commonly asking or answering in Western civilization. It coincides with a precipitous decline of church affiliation and attendance and overall belief, especially across Europe and Canada and Australia and to a certain extent the United States.

[00:15:00] But I think most of us can relate to this. If you're having an evangelistic conversation with somebody today, and you use the famous line from Evangelism Explosion and D. James Kennedy back in the 1970s, that's still popular among many today, the question is simply, if you're asked, could you go to heaven today, do you deserve to go to heaven today, what would you say? Now, as Christians, we're wanting them to say, I don't deserve to go to heaven, but by the blood of Christ.

[00:15:29] But that's not how most people answer. Most people answer and say, I would say that I was a pretty good person. I tried pretty hard. And when you unpack that, when you dig deep with people, their response is, I mean, I wasn't as bad as Hitler. That's the essential moral revolution that Alec Ryrie is talking about and that I engage in this book. And so, if you extend that then to today, we have this, I'm okay because I'm not as bad as Hitler.

[00:15:58] Hitler, that's the way we've redefined evil to be something that happens only in these tremendously terrible situations like the Holocaust, not something that's inside each of our hearts. So, then you get a situation, and understand, I'm not trying to make some sort of overt political statement here, I'm just saying that when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, they'd be like, okay, that seems like an odd thing for you to do, what's going on? He says, I'm denazifying Ukraine.

[00:16:29] And you're thinking, well, gosh, invading a neighboring country unprovoked in Europe seems like about the most Nazi thing you could possibly do. But he was saying, no, I'm not as bad as Hitler because I was the, you know, my country, Russia, was the victim of Hitler. And a lot of those Ukrainians had sided with Hitler against the Soviets back in the day. So, he's trying to reframe that whole thing morally saying, whatever we do is justified because we're not as bad as Hitler.

[00:16:58] So, whether it's an individual thing or a collective political thing, you can see how the way we just talk morally, our language has changed significantly because of the trauma of what it was endured in World War II. You talk about how, and we've hit on this a little bit, how evil is, it's often externalized. We see evil is out there. But then we don't understand the perspective of where do I see it in myself.

[00:17:25] And tragically, I think often churches are guilty of this. And it's often those major issues are the real evil. We're all in church. We're all doing the moral thing. Good for us. Pat us on the back. Let's not worry about the self. But the biblical worldview is opposite of that. Help us kind of reframe and understand that.

[00:17:47] Yeah, so throughout the book, I'm trying to work with the most helpful literature that I know of a country that has truly encountered and been the perpetuator of horrific evils. That'd be Russia. And you've got a lot to work with there in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the 19th century. You've got a lot to work with Vasily Grossman, one of my favorite writers amid the 20th century. And you also have another titan of the 20th century in Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

[00:18:17] Solzhenitsyn suffers as a Christian in what's called the Gulag Archipelago. You know, these terrible death camps and work camps from the Soviet Union throughout the 20th century. And it was his observation that has been most salient. And I've heard it quoted by a lot of different people, but it's no less true for how many people constantly invoke it. It is that the line of good and evil does not pass between me and you, but inside every one of our human hearts. And that is a very Christian impulse.

[00:18:47] That does not mean that inside of us is a madman who's going to murder six million Jews, but it does mean that what Jesus was saying in the Sermon on the Mount, that we have all, you know, acted murderously through our thoughts toward other people that we hate. And that's part of why we have this sin nature that can only be dealt with by the blood of the cross, the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

[00:19:12] And so, I do think that one of the most predominant temptations for Christians is to follow the widespread cultural norm of believing that sin or bad things are the things that those people out there do, not the things that we do. Our culture is only the evil thing that we fight against. It's not the thing that affects us and steers us away from a fully orbed biblical obedience.

[00:19:41] And I just go back to people and I say, I don't think it's more complicated than this. Read the Sermon on the Mount again and again and again. And if you don't feel like the Sermon on the Mount is judging you, then I'm not sure what we're reading here because all of us stand condemned apart once again from the grace of God of that moral standard laid out by Jesus.

[00:20:06] What are some of the modern cultural narratives about justice and suffering that you think Christians need to be aware of as they engage with seekers, skeptics? Well, I do think that one of the most predominant related to suffering is increasing and it's especially afflicting younger people.

[00:20:32] And that is that if something is hard, it must be wrong. If something is difficult, there must be something bad. Inherently wrong with it. Yeah. Exactly. So there's a lot of ways that this has been described. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in their book dealing with the coddling of the American mind, call these variations on safetyism or just this mentality that we need to be cocooned or bubbled,

[00:21:00] raising young people not to have resilience, but instead to have this perspective that if something is wrong, if there's friction with me, then it must be bad. And I need to differentiate from that. I need to separate from that. There, of course, is some truth in terms of boundary setting and learning to cope with anxiety through effective differentiation and things like that.

[00:21:25] But generally speaking, it's very hard to understand the human experience, the biblical narrative, and discipleship if you see suffering as something that God always wants to deliver you from rather than deliver you through. Delivering you through suffering is certainly the method of the cross. It's the method of the exodus.

[00:21:48] I mean, everything that you see, it's paradigmatic, saving you through and from ultimately sin. And that's what Christ is going to come on back, you know, back one day to be able to judge and to vindicate and to renew all things. But until then, it's thorns and thistles. Not in all ways at all times, but by the grace of God, the rain falls in the just and unjust alike, and he is even now renewing creation.

[00:22:14] But that's the essential problem that we deal with now is that suffering is inevitable and death is coming to all of us, whether we like it or not. Obviously, we don't like it, but that doesn't make any difference. So, at some level, death is paradigmatic that we will be saved through death ultimately for eternal life. So, I think that's the one that's predominant. Justice is also a major challenge because, going back to the previous question,

[00:22:42] we think that justice is what those people out there deserve, not us. And we tend to be fairly selective about this. So, justice for thee and not for me. And ultimately, that's the kind of justice that Paul was warning us against in Romans 12. Vengeance is mine. Do not take, you know, says the Lord. It is not ours.

[00:23:05] So, kind of justice that creates the good people and the bad people, the black hats and the white hats in this world, is one thing that vindicates us in enacting whatever measures we deem necessary to root out the injustice in others. That is what they call totalitarian terror. That's where it ultimately leads because if you don't recognize that that's exactly what the communists said they were going to do, the communists were all about justice.

[00:23:36] It's all about those people out there who are terrible, i.e. the middle classes, the upper classes. So, if we just kill them, then we'll have justice or, you know, or take all their money or things like that. It doesn't work. So, justice has to be something that is external to us but that all of us are accountable to and ultimately belongs to the Lord and not to us.

[00:23:59] So, justice is something that we do enact properly understood in government, ordained by God, as we see in the book of Romans. The sword is not borne in vain by the government, but it's enacted by those proper authorities and best enacted and only effectively enacted when it's enacted according to God's justice. So, those are two areas where our perspective on suffering and justice both go pretty haywire when they're not connected back to their biblical groundings.

[00:24:29] It's interesting in that what you kind of opened the door to there on the particularly the suffering aspect and the younger generation. I mean, I even think about the shift in parenting from the mentality of the helicopter parent to now the lawnmower parent, which is clear out any kind of potential block, you know, so that the path is… Snowplow parenting. Right, right. Yeah.

[00:24:54] I mean, if I clear that path, that anything that ruffles you is wrong, has some evil character to it. This just feels like new territory. I don't know. Is this a repetition of something that happened previously? No, it's merely an illusion. I would say there is a philosopher working in this area named Hartmut Rosa.

[00:25:17] He's published a book called The Uncontrollability of the World, and his essential observation is that the anxiety of modern life is the misconception that we can control it. So, technology gives us the illusion that we can control the world. When the world does not cooperate with us, it produces tremendous anxiety.

[00:25:38] The way we enact that anxiety is through intense blame of others, especially, as he calls it, inept acts of political aggression. We go and we blame other people for it, once again, externalizing the problem. So, you've got to work backwards to say, what is the initial conceit? Initial conceit here is that you can control the world. You can't.

[00:26:06] And so, what he commends, I think as Christians we have grounds to be able to meet him here. He commends something called resonance, which is learning to kind of resonate or go back and forth with life as it is. He thinks of things like hiking. You know, hiking is a wonderful experience because you don't control it. He talks about the game of soccer. You could add a number of the games. It only works because you don't control it.

[00:26:32] You have to learn to flow with it, essentially. I think to translate it into Christian terms is a way of understanding that these two simultaneous things exist, that we are responsible and accountable for our actions, and God is sovereign. We can trust him, but our trust in him does not mean that it doesn't matter what we do. It does mean what we do matters. Justice matters, all these sort of things.

[00:26:58] So, that's how you learn to say that suffering is something that it's not good, and it will not be the case in the new heavens and the new earth. But it is something that we have to learn to live with, and it is a means that God nevertheless uses to be able to produce sanctification and ultimately even glorification for us. So, I think it's a widespread human impulse, but technological advance increases the conceit, which increases our struggle.

[00:27:27] What do we do here? We've got the problem of evil. We've got people riddled with anxiety because they can't control their environments. There's so much that could look like a mountain, and we feel like we're just shaking in the shadow. Isn't it interesting, Jonathan, that the earlier generations did not ask as many questions about the problem of evil as we do?

[00:27:54] Now, again, we're saying that in the Bible they do, but generally speaking, we have a bigger problem with it in modernity because we believe technologically, number one, that we can control things, and then number two, we believe that the self is at the center of all things. Therefore, we are more moral than God. We know more about how the world should work than God. We have to just start by recognizing these things are not true, and ultimately what they deliver for us is a world that is unlivable.

[00:28:23] It does not work the way that it should work as God ordained for it to work. So, what it comes down to is that resonance I was just mentioning there. It's a matter of learning to accept what it means to live in a fallen world and not have an over-realized eschatology, to borrow from the theologians here, to expect too much of this world, and yet to look forward more to the next.

[00:28:49] And so, when you go back and you look at – if you talk to people around the world today as Christians who are undergoing some of the worst suffering, they're often the most hopeful people. In the West, we are just conditioned to think that our circumstances dictate our satisfaction with life. And that is only true to a certain extent and not true to the most significant extent.

[00:29:19] So, what we can do is recognize that life is not going to magically get better when I just get through this thing. Because you know what happens after you get through this thing? Another thing. And then another thing. Because that's just life. And yet what else happens? The Lord is with us. And I mentioned, of course, Psalm 22. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

[00:29:46] How amazing that those are the very words that Jesus himself speaks to on the cross. And what happens? Of course, he's not ultimately forsaken. He's raised. And that's our hope. If we live each day in light of the hope of the resurrection, then we can endure whatever suffering is in this life and whatever evil is inflicted upon us or even finding forgiveness for the evil we inflict on others. And that's just back to Romans 8.

[00:30:16] So, maybe the last thing I say on that question is read Romans 8 over and over again and then go to Romans 12 and then go back to Romans 8. Romans 12. They're both really good on these topics. Yeah. The confidence of how the Lord is operating or at least what he's revealed to us and then what he's put in us in calling us to not return evil for evil but to love and to live that out, I think.

[00:30:45] But you can only do Romans 12 if you believe Romans 8. Yeah. That's what I'm trying to get at there. Romans 12 is a beautiful, like, a church, an individual, a family, a church, a community, a nation, a world that lives out Romans 12 is the world that we are heading toward as Christians. It's not the world we have now, but we still have the power of Romans 8, the spirit at work within us to be able to live out Romans 12. And so, we can do that. There's nothing stopping us from doing that except the sin, the flesh, and the devil. Right. Exactly.

[00:31:15] There's so much here, and this has just been so wonderful. And I know that the book is part of a series that Gospel Coalition has put out entitled Hard Questions. There's seven books in the series dealing with timely questions and timeless questions. So, you got the most difficult one, I think. I can't even blame anybody else, Jonathan. I mean, I oversee this series, so I can't even blame you.

[00:31:44] You had to put your hand up. Who wants the problem of evil? One of my editors volunteered me, and for some reason I said yes. You missed that meeting and got volunteered. That's the real moral. Moral lesson in this story. Don't skip meetings. Right, right. The book is Where Is God in a World with So Much Evil? My guest is Colin Hanson. Colin, anything else you want to share with our listeners?

[00:32:11] Well, I do hope that if people get a chance to pick this up, Jonathan, I'm sure you'll attest to this, that everybody is dealing with something. If it's not them, it's somebody that they love. And we're usually dealing with something that's far more difficult than we're even willing to share with others.

[00:32:31] So, I hope that what people might find in this book would be a companion for maybe some of those secret places where we have some of those questions that we don't feel like sharing with our small group or sharing with our Sunday school or with our pastor or even our spouse.

[00:32:49] Hopefully it would be a safe place for them to wrestle with some really big questions and find that the best minds, not mine, but the people I quote, the best minds have thought through these things and they're good guides for us. So, that's what I hope people get out of it. Excellent. Well, Colin, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time to join me on Candid Conversations. Thanks, Jonathan. Really appreciate you.

[00:33:15] Candid is a podcast from Leading the Way with Dr. Michael Youssef. Don't forget to connect with our social media pages on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. And subscribe to Candid Conversations on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode. While there, please leave a review. It does help people find us. As always, thank you for listening to and sharing this episode.