Wesley \Fellowship Annual Lecture, September 1992 (Occasional Paper no. 7) 26 pages £2.25
ISBN 0 860 713 865
“The presence of evil in the world appears to place the
doctrine of a just and loving God into a no-win situation.”
The author of this lecture offers this statement as a consequence, in summary form, of the thinking of the Greek philosopher, Epicurus (4th century BC), who believed that the senses were the one and only source of all our ideas and provided the sole criterion for all truth. Epicurus did not allow for revelation in the sense that Christians understand it.
The presence of evil in the world is one of the most important and direct challenges to Christian belief – theologians know it as ‘theodicy’, literally, ‘the justice of God’. The conundrum (if that is what it is) is not the preserve of theologians alone. Many people find it difficult if not problematic to reconcile the idea of a loving, good and just Supreme Being with the very clear existence of evil in the world. As Epicurus expressed it – “God … either wished to take away evils and is unable or, He is able and is unwilling or, He is neither willing nor able or He is both willing and able … from what source then are evils ?”
That is the crucial question which deserves an answer (and there are many).
The purpose of Dr Bryant’s lecture was to explore John Wesley’s many attempts to struggle with the problem, to give it a Biblical and reasonable explanation.
Without any semblance of impiety, Wesley sought to ‘\justify the ways of God to man’ and saw theodicy as an important attempt to explain God’s will to extract good out of evil.
Dr Bryant offers an analysis of Wesley’s thought on two fronts – the aesthetic theme and the moral theme.
The aesthetic theme considers such topics as the goodness of God, the goodness of creation, the ‘chain of being’ (God, angels, humans), good and bad angels.
To the believer in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the goodness of God and the goodness of creation are not controversial. The ‘chain of being’ (God, angels, humans) within creation serve as a channel of God’s grace to the rest of creation. To Wesley, angels with free will were the pinnacle of creation and the angelic fall recorded in Scripture (Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28) brought evil into the world and split the ‘chain of being’, resulting in a cosmological dualism – good and evil.
Wesley had to express this fundamental proposition against a widespread belief at the time – deism – which held that God had created the world but had then withdrawn or retreated from it and no longer had anything to do with his creation. Wesley firmly believed this was not the case – God was indeed involved in his creation, witness Biblical history.
One suggestion put forward in Wesley’s time was that the world was created imperfect. Free will was a necessary feature of humankind so that a choice between good and evil could thus be made. Wesley rejected this idea and held that evil was caused by the will – the free will given to created beings which, implicitly, gave them a choice.
Free will is then key to understanding and appreciating Wesley’s approach to the presence of evil in the world.
This may well be heavy going but it does shed some light on a real and present theological issue.
In his moral theme, Wesley argued that evil could not be accounted for simply by the perfection of creation itself (God saw that it was good). He thought evil could be completely derived or deduced from the abuse of free will – in Wesley’s words – ‘a power of choosing or refusing either good or evil’. In other words, once you grant the gift of free will to all created beings (angels included) then all created beings can choose to obey God or to refuse to obey him.
Disobedience is evil (sin); obedience is good (righteousness).
There is an important implication following from Wesley’s conclusion.
In Christian terms,obedience and disobedience are functions of the soul or spirit. It follows then that if one does not believe that a soul or spirit is part of the human make up, righteousness and sin have no firm grounding, that is from a Christian point of view. The theological explanation put forward by John Wesley is both coherent and well founded