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MATTHEW D. LUNDBERG
Introduction
The most perplexing conceptual dissonance in Christian theology likely comes from
the problem of evil. David Hume, borrowing from Epicurus long before him, gives
what is perhaps the classic formulation of this problem: “Is [God] willing [to pre-
vent evil] but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able but not willing? then is he
malevolent. Is he both willing and able? whence, then, is evil?”1 What we have is a
puzzling aporia—a constellation of affirmations that at best rest uneasily with one
another and at worst are contradictory.2 On the one hand, Christian faith professes
that God is characterized by omniscience, omnipotence, and perfect goodness; and
on the other hand it admits that evil is real.3 It seems as if one of these affirma-
tions, either the existence of God, or one of the divine attributes, or the reality of
evil itself, has to be abandoned if the inconsistency is to be resolved. Though this is
the procedure by which many aporetic clusters are resolved, theology at its best
has proven unwilling to sacrifice any of these convictions, since all are integral to
Christian belief.4 Thus the theodicy question stands: How can we reconcile the exis-
tence and character of God with the grinding reality of evil and suffering in a
world that Christianity affirms as the good result of a loving God’s creative
activity?
Matthew D. Lundberg
Calvin College, Department of Religion, 3201 Burton Street SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546, USA
Email: mdl4@calvin.edu
1
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company,
Inc., 1990), chap. 10.
2
See Nicholas Rescher, Aporetics: Rational Deliberation in the Face of Inconsistency (Pittsburgh, PA: Uni-
versity of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
3
Though “real” in a nuanced (i.e., privative) way in the Augustinian tradition, as will be discussed
below.
4
While Rescher often talks about the “abandonment” of one of its elements as the usual way of rea-
soning through an apory (his preference over aporia), he also states that in philosophical inquiry (under
whose canopy theology can be temporarily placed) it is the “modification” of a proposition that often
does the trick (see Aporetics, 120–132).
Philosophers and theologians have often drawn a threefold distinction as they ana-
lyze the problem.5 First, there is the so-called “logical” or deductive problem of evil.
This version of the problem claims that the involved premises simply don’t add up;
it is logically impossible for God to exist, be omnipotent, and be omnibenevolent if
there is evil. Or, conversely, it is impossible for there to be evil if God really is what
Christianity has claimed. A somewhat softer version of the problem, secondly, is the
oft-named “evidential” or inductive problem of evil. This version of the problem
suggests that the existence and amount of evil, especially the most horrifying vari-
eties thereof, count as weighty evidence against the existence (or power or goodness)
of God; in other words, it seems improbable that there is a being of perfect benevo-
lence sovereignly superintending a world that includes hefty portions of child abuse,
torture, genocide, and so on. A third variant of the problem is often called the
“existential” problem of evil, namely, the challenge of living as a believer, of trusting
in the triune God, and of bearing up in the face of evil and suffering.6
Christianity’s most well-oiled response to the problem is probably the free will
argument, which received one of its classic statements in the work of Augustine of
Hippo but goes back even further in the early church.7 The kernel of the free will
argument is that the good and all-powerful God must have recognized that a world
populated by (at least some) free creatures—even though freedom involves the risk
of its misuse—would be a richer, more noble world than one in which creatures
were pre-programmed, as it were, to do only what is good. If sound, the free will
argument goes a significant distance in defeating the logical or deductive version of
the problem of evil. It would not be, in a word, impossible for there to be a good and
powerful God even though the world contains much evil—for God may have rea-
sons for not using the divine power to render evil impossible, reasons that are
webbed into the divine wisdom and goodness. And if the free will argument short-
circuits the logical problem of evil, then it would also seem to provide significant
help in responding to the evidential problem, perhaps by shaping the extent to
which evil is instinctually seen as counter-evidence to the existence and character of
God. A more difficult question to gauge, to be sure, is how much help the free will
argument provides for the existential form of the problem.
It is possible, though, to say that there is a fourth variant of the problem, one that
is closely connected to the existential problem. We might call this the “doctrinal”
problem of evil—the question of how evil fits, both conceptually and experientially,
within the systematic matrix of Christian convictions. Quite apart from apologetic
concerns in the face of atheological arguments, there are difficult questions about
how and where to explain evil in relation to a Christian metaphysic informed by a
high view of God and the fundamental goodness of creation. That is to say, the free
5
For one among numerous examples, the anthology of texts on the problem of evil edited by Michael
L. Peterson employs this set of distinctions in its main section analyzing the problem: The Problem of Evil:
Selected Readings, Library of Religious Philosophy 8 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1992), 89–187.
6
The “existential” dimension of the problem is closely linked to the “evidential” expression of the
problem, since experience shapes what is perceived as evidence. Both elements are subtly combined, for
example, in what Stephen T. Davis calls the “emotive problem of evil.” See “Free Will and Evil,” in
Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, ed. Stephen T. Davis, second edition (Louisville, KY: Westmin-
ster John Knox, 2001), 74, 79–81.
7
As we shall see in what follows, there is a debate about the extent to which Augustine really
endorsed the free will line of thought.
will argument is not only called upon in response to challenges from without, but is
also invoked for reasons internal to Christian theology.
In what follows I examine how well the free will argument fares in relation to the
doctrinal problem of evil. While I maintain that it is an important resource, especially
in relation to strident antitheistic claims, I also argue that it faces significant difficulty
when understood within Christian theology and its web of beliefs, especially in view
of the Augustinian tradition’s conception of true freedom and the nature of the
eschaton. In taking us into eschatology, however, the limits of the free will argument
remind us of Christian faith’s most vital theological resources for grappling with
faith in the face of evil.
8
One of the more notable earlier theologians is Origen. See, e.g., On First Principles, trans. G. W.
Butterworth (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 1.5.5.
9
In this section I will be offering a rather conventional reading of Augustine’s version of the free will
argument, one that is problematized somewhat by his reflections on freedom in hamartiological and
soteriological contexts, as scholars like Rowan Greer and Jesse Couenhoven have shown (see below).
While these complexities will inform the discussion below, it will also become clear why I nevertheless
hold to the basics of the conventional account.
10
For a nuanced analysis of Augustine’s account of evil in relation to the doctrine of God, see Rowan
Williams, “Insubstantial Evil,” in Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner, eds. Robert
Dodaro and George Lawless (London: Routledge, 2000), 105–23. On the problem of evil as the unifying
question of Augustine’s overall theological project, see Robert M. Cooper, “Saint Augustine’s Doctrine of
Evil,” Scottish Journal of Theology 16 (1963): 256–76.
11
For his own autobiographical account of this philosophical/theological shift, see Augustine, Confes-
sions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), bk. 7.
12
Augustine, The City of God, XI-XXII, trans. William Babcock, ed. Boniface Ramsey, The Works of
Saint Augustine I/7 (New York: New City, 2013), 12.3.
13
Ibid., 12.5.
of choice: “And when we ask about the cause of the misery of the evil angels, what
rightly comes to mind is that they have turned away from him who supremely is
and turned to themselves. . ..”14
Augustine maintains, moreover, that there is no more primordial “cause” of this
evil choice than the evil choice itself.15 After a long and tortuous discussion of what
could possibly lead a good will to choose evil, in which he attempts to avoid attribut-
ing the blame for evil to God or somehow intimating that good is the cause of evil,
Augustine claims that it is misguided “to look for an efficient cause for an evil will.
For it is not an efficient but rather a deficient cause, because the evil will itself is not
an effect but rather a defect. For to defect from what has supreme existence to what
has lesser existence is itself to begin to have an evil will.”16 The evil thing that hap-
pens, then, is dependent only on the choice of the chooser; it is voluntary and could
have been chosen otherwise.17 Thus God is not the cause of evil, even though
Augustine is happy to affirm that God knew that free beings would misuse their
freedom and allowed it anyway, due to its foreseen role in helping good to shine
forth with greater clarity18 and precipitating the even more glorious miracle of salva-
tion.19 And as we shall see below, the fuller picture of Augustine’s theology also
requires him to acknowledge the deep mystery of evil in relation to creaturely free-
dom and divine sovereignty.
One of the most influential modern renditions of the free will argument is the ver-
sion offered by Alvin Plantinga in a number of different writings.20 Clearly locating
his work in the lineage of Augustine,21 Plantinga nevertheless stipulates that he is
only engaged in the project of offering a defense (rather than a theodicy) against athe-
istic uses of the deductive problem of evil. Rather than specifying, as he thinks
Augustine does, that freedom is the reason why God allows evil (thus making
Augustine’s approach a theodicy, on Plantinga’s understanding), Plantinga simply
thinks that it is logically possible that God allowed evil in order for there to be free-
dom. His is a defense of the plausibility and rationality of belief in God, not the
much more ambitious justification of God involved in theodicy.22 Here I am attempt-
ing to ascertain whether the elements of Plantinga’s free will argument transfer when
14
Ibid., 12.6.
15
Ibid., 12.6. For a discussion of Augustine’s own straying from this point and the difficulties that it
created, see Robert F. Brown, “The First Evil Will Must Be Incomprehensible: A Critique of Augustine,”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 46 (1978): 315–29.
16
Augustine, City of God, 12.7.
17
Ibid., 12.8.
18
Ibid., 11.18.
19
Ibid., 12.23.
20
I will base my account primarily on Plantinga’s God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B.
Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1974). But also of relevance are God and Other Minds, Contemporary Phi-
losophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967); and The Nature of Necessity, Clarendon Library of
Logic and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974).
21
Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, 26–27, 58.
22
Ibid., 10, 25–29. Plantinga’s preference for a defense (over a theodicy) stems not only from his focus
on the deductive problem of evil, but also from his standpoint of “Reformed epistemology,” which claims
that belief in God is “properly basic.” It does not require a foundation in self-evident principles, but only
requires defense against criticisms brought against it—for example, the problem of evil. On this connec-
tion, see Michael L. Peterson, “Introduction: The Problem of Evil,” in Peterson, ed., Problem of Evil, 9. On
Reformed epistemology more broadly, see Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, eds., Faith and
Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983).
viewed in terms of the internal concerns of systematic theology. There may be issues,
then, that appear in such theological consideration of the argument that are not
immediately germane to Plantinga’s native purposes.
Plantinga argues that there is no clear logical contradiction involved in holding
that a good, powerful God and evil both exist.23 For it is possible that an omnipotent
being would be unable to eliminate evil if evil is “included in some good state of
affairs that outweighs it.”24 A good state of affairs that somehow involves evil—or at
least the risk of evil—is the possibility of moral good. For moral good may require
libertarian freedom—the ability to choose between alternatives in morally significant
decisions.25 Yet it may be the case, in the sense that there is no logical contradiction
involved, that freedom involves the possibility of its wrongful use. As Plantinga
writes, “The heart of the Free Will Defense is the claim that it is possible that God
could not have created a universe containing moral good (or as much moral good as
this world contains) without creating one that also contained moral evil. And if so,
then it is possible that God has a good reason for creating a world containing evil.”26
In other words, if freedom is part of the condition of the world, then it is quite
possible that God’s omnipotence does not include the ability to actualize just any
possible world, since the worlds that God can actualize logically depend, at least in
part, upon human choices.27 Plantinga develops the concept of “transworld
depravity” to suggest the logical possibility that free creatures would use their free-
dom wrongly in any possible world.28 If so, then it is at least possible that God,
despite being omnipotent, could not create a world with a balance of less evil with-
out doing away with the possibility of moral good. For in so doing, God would have
to do away with freedom.
Showing the logical possibility of such a state of affairs, Plantinga’s work problem-
atizes the deductive/logical argument against God on the basis of evil.29 If successful,
it is simply not the case that there is any logical contradiction committed by the
believer in affirming the existence of God and the existence of evil. Plantinga has also
argued that the basic logic of the free will defense similarly makes it difficult to argue
23
It is not only the free will defense that defuses the logical/deductive problem of evil, but also the
related philosophical difficulty of actually demonstrating that there is a logical contradiction involved in
asserting theistic belief and the existence of evil. See Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, 12–24; God and
Other Minds, 115–130.
24
Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, 22. An analogy that suggests the logical possibility of such a prop-
osition is that of heroism, a good that presupposes some kind of evil that must be overcome (23).
25
Ibid., 29–30. Plantinga insists that the basic logic of the free will defense holds on other views of
freedom, such as compatibilism, even though his own leanings tilt toward the libertarian view. See Alvin
Plantinga, “Ad Walls,” in Problem of Evil, ed. Peterson, 335–38. Regardless of whether Plantinga is correct
in this judgment, it is worth noting that most discussions of the free will argument hold (or assume) that
it fits best with libertarian freedom. On the supporter side, see Timothy Pawl and Kevin Timpe,
“Incompatibilism, Sin, and Free Will in Heaven,” Faith and Philosophy 26 (2009): 400-401. On the detractor
side, but with the same assumption, see Jesse Couenhoven, “The Necessities of Perfect Freedom,” Interna-
tional Journal of Systematic Theology 14 (2012): 405 n.33.
26
Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, 31 (italics Plantinga’s).
27
Ibid., 34–44, 53.
28
Ibid., 47–53.
29
As with any such claim, of course, there are those who disagree. See, for example, Steven Bo€er,
“The Irrelevance of the Free Will Defence,” Analysis 38 (1978): 110–112; Robert McKim, “Worlds Without
Evil,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 15 (1984): 161–170; Eleonore Stump, “The Problem of
Evil,” Faith and Philosophy 2 (1985): 393–395; Bruce Langtry, “The Prospects for the Free Will Defence,”
Faith and Philosophy 27 (2010): 142–152.
that the presence of vast amounts of evil in the world renders the existence of God
unlikely—that is, the inductive or evidential problem of evil.30 Of course, Plantinga is
the first to admit that the existential payoff of the argument is hard to measure.31
Some of the same conceptual moves, but with a different purpose, are often made
by theologians exploring what I have called the doctrinal dimension of the problem. A
good example is the Lutheran theologian Douglas John Hall. Drawing upon Luther’s
theology of the cross, Hall takes issue with the presumption of a conception of divine
omnipotence that he thinks may be at odds, both materially and methodologically,
with the cross of Christ—that theological event that tells us the deepest truth about
God. The fact that God is in relationship with creation, says Hall, “qualifies—
radically—the nature and deployment of power on God’s part.”32 Thus it initially
seems as if Hall is going to cut through the aporia by abandoning or at least severely
reducing the divine power.33 But it is here that Hall, with internal theological consid-
erations in mind, approximates what Plantinga developed for apologetic purposes:
If suffering is inextricably bound up with human freedom (not that all suffering
is a direct and obvious consequence of freedom’s misuse, but it is nevertheless
impossibly intermingled with it) then through power God could only eliminate
suffering by eliminating freedom. But if freedom is of the very essence of the
human creature, as the tradition has generally maintained . . ., then the elimina-
tion of freedom would imply the virtual elimination of humanity.
“There is,” Hall contends, “no sword that can cut away sin without killing the
sinner.”34
It is not without reason that the free will argument has enjoyed such popularity in
the Christian world. At the intuitive level, there is something simply persuasive
about the linking of evil to the free decisions of rational creatures, such that they,
rather than God, are to blame for the evil that ravages our world. What Plantinga
offers in the sense of freedom as a condition for the possibility of moral good can
also be articulated—with considerations of systematic theology in mind—in terms of
love. In its highest form, love, it would seem, cannot be coerced or pre-programmed.
A robot—at least at this juncture in our history—cannot love, for true love is the free
response of one to another, of lover to beloved, of I to Thou.35 Perhaps, then, God
risked the misuse of freedom because the availability of love—creature to creature,
creature to Creator—was worth the likely advent of evil.36
30
See Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, 59–63.
31
Ibid., 63–64.
32
Douglas John Hall, God and Human Suffering: An Exercise in the Theology of the Cross (Minneapolis,
MN: Augsburg Press, 1986), 97; also see 70–71.
33
There is a trivial sense in which Plantinga appears to do this as well, as he often denies that an
omnipotent God is free to actualize just any possible world. But in his case, the limitations are logical in
nature, and end up being akin to the commission of logically contradictory acts such as drawing a square
circle, which is no diminishment of God’s power at all.
34
Hall, God and Human Suffering, 97–98 (italics Hall’s).
35
On this point, see Robert Francis Allen, “St. Augustine’s Free Will Theodicy and Natural Evil,” Ars
Disputandi 3 (2003): 88.
36
Cf. Fred Berthold Jr., God, Evil, and Human Learning: A Critique and Revision of the Free Will Defense in
Theodicy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 65–66.
In short, if love is the telos of freedom, we can see the deeper theological and expe-
riential logic of the free will argument. Something rings true about God risking evil
in order to make love possible. And here we see one of the decisive advantages of
the free will argument over other historic theodicies. In their well-intentioned effort
to specify what God’s good reason is for allowing evil, it has been easy for Christians
to describe evil itself as some kind of ironic and intended good. Whether evil plays
the role of adversity facilitating “soul-building,” or of an aesthetic contrast that ena-
bles the knowledge and appreciation of the good, or of a good that is only known to
God and must be accepted in faith, many theodicies verge on justifying evil as a
byproduct of their attempt to vindicate God.37 The free will argument is one impor-
tant step removed from such strategies. Its claim is not that evil is good; rather, free-
dom is good, as the condition for the possibility of love.
37
For a fuller statement of this point, see Richard J. Plantinga, Thomas R. Thompson, and Matthew D.
Lundberg, An Introduction to Christian Theology, Introduction to Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2010), 214–216.
38
For a discussion of the argument’s difficulties, some of which are echoed here, see Berthold, God,
Evil, and Human Learning, 33-35, 45–46.
39
See, for example, David O’Connor, “A Reformed Problem of Evil and the Free Will Defense,” Inter-
national Journal for Philosophy of Religion 39 (1996): 33–63.
40
Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, 57–59. Allen, “Augustine’s Free Will Theodicy,” also endorses this
approach. A different approach is taken by Kenneth Boyce, “Non-Moral Evil and the Free Will Defense,”
Faith and Philosophy 28 (2011): 371–384.
Suffering, predation, death, and pain were there before the arrival of the human.”41
However, despite his matter-of-fact statement of this point, Vorster nevertheless
attempts to preserve a rather traditional doctrine of the Fall by endorsing the sugges-
tion that the advent of human sin had retroactive cosmic effects, such that natural evil
can still be caused by human freedom, even though it chronologically preceded the
latter.42 Given the conceptual difficulties of such a move, a more promising route
may be simply to admit that what we label natural evils antedated the human spe-
cies, that they may have been somehow appropriate to a creation that is genuinely
other than God. Not only were predation, extinction, and the powerful forces of
nature present in the history of the world long before human beings were on the ter-
restrial scene, but they seem to be part of the ordinary (and ultimately good) opera-
tions of our planet.43 These may rightly be seen as what Karl Barth called the good
creation’s “shadow” side.44 It may nevertheless be worth holding onto the label natu-
ral evils in light of the excruciating suffering caused by the world’s natural forces
(e.g., the 2004 Indonesia tsunami or the 2010 Haiti earthquake) and their absence in
the biblical images of the eschaton.
Today’s dominant evolutionary understanding of humanity also creates problems
for the free will argument’s traditional dependence upon a historical first couple. As
we shall see, for Augustine, given his view that later human beings all descended
from Adam, from whom they inherited original sin and were thereby predisposed
toward sinfulness, it was important to affirm that the first couple at least had some-
thing approximating libertarian freedom. Adam had the capacity to use his freedom
rightly or wrongly; the fact that we later human beings lacked the same robust free-
dom to avoid evil can be blamed on our original ancestors rather than God.
The portrait of humanity offered by contemporary genomic studies, however,
gives little support for a literal Adam and Eve. Furthermore, newer disciplines such
as evolutionary psychology may suggest that a range of “evil” behaviors were quite
“natural” to the earliest evolved human beings due to the presence of such behaviors
(presumably amoral) in the pre-human animal world. Self-assertion, it is sometimes
said, may be written into our very DNA.45 On the other hand, it is plausible to
41
Nicolaas Vorster, “The Augustinian Type of Theodicy: Is It Outdated?,” Journal of Reformed Theology
5 (2011): 31.
42
Ibid., 42–46.
43
It may be that “aesthetic” lines of thinking are more compelling here. For example, in Confessions
Augustine reflects upon natural evil in the following way:
[I]n the parts of the universe, there are certain elements which are thought evil because of a conflict
of interest. These elements are congruous with other elements and as such are good, and are also
good in themselves. All these elements which have some mutual conflict of interest are congruous
with the inferior part of the universe which we call earth. Its heaven is cloudy and windy, which is
fitting for it.
It is far from my mind now to say, “Would that those things did not exist!” If I were to regard them
in isolation, I would indeed wish for something better; but now even when they are taken alone, my
duty is to praise you for them. (7.13)
However, for some misgivings about the characterization of Augustine’s view as “aesthetic,” see
Williams, “Insubstantial Evil,” 106–110.
44
See especially Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. III/3, eds. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F.
Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley and R. J. Ehrlich (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), 296-302, 349–368.
45
This perspective often includes the rejection of human freedom on the theory that a whole gamut of
factors conditions our choices in such a strong way that it amounts to determinism. Since we don’t
understand those influences, we operate under the delusion of freedom. If we could isolate those factors,
however, we would see that what we think is freedom is actually little more than a mirage.
suggest that emergent humanity somehow (through God’s revelation, perhaps) had
sufficient capacity to follow God. This possibility we (the earliest human beings and
all later human beings—adam in the collective sense) rejected.46
In relation to these challenges, then, it seems quite possible to salvage and sustain
the basic insight of the free will argument. But the more significant difficulties have
to do with the coherence of the free will argument in relation to other more central
Christian doctrines. In Plantinga’s influential account, the free will argument
depends heavily on the philosophical imagination. That is to say, we can imagine a
logically consistent state of affairs that includes both God and evil because of what
may be true about freedom, with the result that the deductive problem of evil fails.
But other deeply embedded doctrinal convictions of Christian faith create additional
possibilities that can quite naturally and appropriately be imagined by the Christian
reflecting on evil in relation to God. Some of these convictions stand in noticeable
tension with the assumptions of the free will argument.
46
Something resembling this scenario is developed in different ways by George L. Murphy, “Roads to
Paradise and Perdition: Christ, Evolution, and Original Sin,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 58
(2006): 109–18; and John Polkinghorne, Science & Theology: An Introduction (London: SPCK, 1998), 64.
47
Davis, “Free Will and Evil,” 82, articulates a similar point, although in slightly different terms. He
also recognizes that at this point the Christian is forced to deal with the problem of evil using other
resources from Christian theology.
48
As we shall see, the Augustinian tradition has in fact resisted the idea that there is moral good pos-
sible in every situation, since human beings are (apart from the grace of Christ) enslaved to sin. For some
of these tensions in Augustine’s own account, see Fred Berthold, “Free Will and Theodicy in Augustine:
An Exposition and Critique,” Religious Studies 17 (1981), 525–35.
49
See Ian Markham, “Hume Revisited: A Problem with the Free Will Defence,” Modern Theology 7
(1991): 281–290.
50
Bo€er gives examples that suggest the possibility of God’s intervention stopping evil consequences
but not evil choices (“Irrelevance of the Free Will Defence,” 111).
51
A similar example is developed by Steven B. Cowan, “Compatibilism and the Sinlessness of the
Redeemed in Heaven,” Faith and Philosophy 28 (2011): 420.
toward the street when a car was coming, or one son preparing to thump his brother
over the head, I overrode their freedom in order to save them, at least in that
moment, from themselves. In the process, did I turn them into robots? Did I wholly
destroy their freedom and nullify the possibility of moral good and genuine love in
them? Of course not. If there is anything to this analogy, it raises the question of
why God, being good and powerful, would not intervene more frequently to save us
from ourselves.52 Couldn’t God do so without totally obliterating our freedom? Is
freedom a seamless garment—we either have it fully in every situation or not at all?
52
In his discussion of the free will argument, Allen (“Augustine’s Free Will Theodicy,” 84–90) assumes
that a person might want others’ freedom to be restricted, so as to reduce evil and suffering, but not her
own. But it would be perfectly reasonable to wish that one’s own freedom also be (occasionally) restricted
if it meant that evil (to others and oneself) were significantly minimized.
53
Later in his career, Augustine worked to balance the importance of freedom in exonerating God
from complicity in evil and yet (as came to the fore in the Pelagian controversy) acknowledging that all
true good must be attributed to the grace and power of God. For an interpretation that suggests strong
continuity and coherence in Augustine’s career, see Eugene TeSelle, Augustine the Theologian (London:
Herder and Herder, 1970), 158–159. Also see the nuanced study by Eleonore Stump, “Augustine on Free
Will,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, eds. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzman (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 130–142, esp. 139–142.
54
Augustine, The Perfection of Human Righteousness, in Answer to the Pelagians, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans.
Roland J. Teske, The Works of Saint Augustine I/23 (New York: New City, 1997), chap. 9. I will use the
older chapter numbers for references to Augustine’s anti-Pelagian texts, even though the newer Works of
Saint Augustine translation often provides more sensible divisions of the text.
55
Augustine, On the Gift of Perseverance, in Four Anti-Pelagian Writings, trans. John A. Mourant and
William J. Collinge, The Fathers of the Church 86 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press,
1992), chap. 13.
56
Augustine, Grace and Free Choice, in Answer to the Pelagians IV, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Roland J.
Teske, The Works of Saint Augustine I/26 (New York: New City Press, 1999), chap. 4.
the other hand, the children of Adam are bound by sin. Ours is a freedom ham-
pered by the debilitated state of our will. Indeed, Augustine can even use the lan-
guage of “necessity” to distinguish our situation from that of Adam. The previous
quotation from The Perfection of Human Righteousness stated that it was through free-
dom of choice (in Adam) that sin came to pass; as the quotation continues we see
that this sin resulted in what Augustine calls “a defective state that is a punish-
ment,” which “produced a necessity” that compromises our freedom: “either we
cannot know what we are to will or, despite our willing, we are unable to do what
we know.”57
Augustine is quite clear that the more libertarian freedom of the first couple is lost
through the Fall.58 While we can still formally choose between alternatives, from our
own resources we cannot choose between good and evil. Thus in order for us to do
what is materially good before God, our freedom requires divine assistance through
Christ. Augustine expresses the tension this way: “We would not be commanded to
do [God’s commandments], if our own will did nothing at all, and we would not
need prayer, if our will alone was sufficient.”59 In his view, God’s grace
re-establishes freedom: “Free choice is not done away with by grace, but strength-
ened, because grace heals the will by which we freely love righteousness.”60 What
we encounter here in Augustine appears to be a growth or shift in human freedom.
Depending on one’s interpretation of Augustine,61 this is either a shift from a created
libertarian freedom to a redeemed compatibilist mode of freedom, or alternatively
from a sinful compatibilist freedom whose determinant is the sinful nature to a
redeemed compatibilist freedom whose determinant is the perfecting, sanctifying
grace of God. We shall revisit this question shortly.
Interestingly, Augustine applies nearly the same point even to pre-fallen Adam
and the unfallen angels. Though Adam had a more libertarian kind of freedom than
we do—with the possibility of successfully using it only for righteousness—it still
required God’s gracious action. Thus he writes in Rebuke and Grace:
The first man did not have [the] grace by which he would never have willed to
be evil, but he certainly had the grace in which, if he willed to remain, he would
never have been evil and without which he could not have been good even with
free choice, though he could have abandoned it through free choice. Nor did
God will that Adam whom he left to his free choice should be without his grace.
“For free choice is sufficient for evil,” Augustine summarizes, “but not sufficient for
good, unless it is helped by the omnipotent good.”62
57
Augustine, Perfection of Human Righteousness, chap. 9.
58
E.g., Augustine, Answer to the Two Letters of the Pelagians, in Answer to the Pelagians II, ed. John E.
Rotelle, trans. Roland J. Teske, The Works of Saint Augustine I/24 (New York: New City, 1998), chap. 5.
59
Augustine, Perfection of Human Righteousness, chap. 21.
60
Augustine, The Spirit and the Letter, in Answer to the Pelagians, chap. 52. Cf. Augustine, The Deeds of
Pelagius, in Answer to the Pelagians, chap. 21.
61
On the question of whether Augustine is a compatibilist or incompatibilist, see the summary of
views in Pawl and Timpe, “Incompatibilism, Sin, and Free Will,” 400 n.5.
62
Augustine, Rebuke and Grace, in Answer to the Pelagians IV, chap. 31. Cf. Augustine, City of God, 14.27.
Also see TeSelle, Augustine the Theologian, 314–15.
63
Augustine, Nature and Grace, in Answer to the Pelagians, chap. 72 (italics removed). This sentence is in
part a quotation of Romans 7:25.
64
Augustine, Rebuke and Grace, chap. 17.
65
Ibid., chap. 34.
66
In his discussion of Augustine’s view of freedom, Jesse Couenhoven also brings Augustine’s view
of Jesus’ perfect freedom into the discussion (“Necessities of Perfect Freedom,” 400, 406-408).
67
Augustine, The Grace of Christ and Original Sin, in Answer to the Pelagians, chap. 14. Augustine writes
elsewhere that “this second grace is so much greater, for it is not enough that a human being recovers by
it his lost freedom; again it is not enough that without it he cannot either attain the good or remain in the
good, even if he wills to, unless this grace also makes him will to” (Rebuke and Grace, chap. 31; cf. 34).
68
Augustine, Perfection of Human Righteousness, chap. 9 (italics added).
69
Augustine, City of God, 22.30. Later on in the same paragraph: “God himself certainly cannot sin.
But does that mean we should deny that he has free will?”
70
Ibid., 22.30.
71
Couenhoven, “Necessities of Perfect Freedom,” 402: “Far from being an arbitrary or neutral power
or potential, freedom is the ability to understand and love in a manner proper to, and fulfilling for, a per-
son.” Thus, “necessity is far from inimical to a theologically central kind of freedom” (396).
72
Gaine, ‘Will There Be Freedom in Heaven?’: Freedom, Impeccability and Beatitude (London: T&T Clark,
2003).
73
Ibid., 120.
74
Ibid., 125. Cf. 127-128, 136.
made from nothing. Only by a kind of divinization can human beings be perfected to
such a degree that we escape the negative potentiality implicit in being created from noth-
ing.”75 Thus the perfect, impeccable freedom of God applies to humanity as telos.76
Couenhoven admits as much when he states that from the normative conception of free-
dom, a necessity that is actual for God and through grace a future possibility for us, “it is
not easy to say what follows for our understanding of lesser freedoms.”77 If this reading
of Augustine is correct, it seems, then, that some sense of the freedom of indifference
applies to humanity on this side of the eschaton. There is also, of course, the question of
this indifference being actually tilted toward sin, and therefore compatible with the
“necessities” that flow from a sinful human nature. Hence Augustine’s concern with
Adam and Eve having a fuller freedom of indifference.78 Incidentally, it seems that these
doctrinal considerations make it hard to avoid using the language of gradation (“more,”
“some,” “approximate”) to talk about the freedom of indifference, even though that is not
how the concept is typically employed in philosophical discussions.
What we have in Augustine, at any rate, is a kind of freedom that Christian faith
expects to be actual in the future, in which moral good and genuine righteousness are
possible, but which is beyond the possibility of evil. It is quite natural, then, to wonder
why God did not begin with that higher freedom in the first place, thereby preventing
human history from becoming a vale of tears. This is true, it seems, whether one holds a
compatibilist view of our current freedom or the view that our current libertarian free-
dom will be transformed into the freedom for excellence, since both views involve dis-
continuity between freedom now and the fuller eschatological freedom. Given the
theologic of asking such a question, it appears that despite its value in responding to
atheological arguments, the free will argument fares less well in relation to questions that
arise within Christian faith and its key doctrinal commitments. For theological reasons, in
other words, it is possible for the Christian to resist “the possibility that God is omnipo-
tent but unable to create a world containing moral good without permitting moral
evil,”79 for Christianity’s hopes, traditionally conceived, rest upon just such a future.
Indeed, it seems at this point that factors pertaining to sin, salvation, and eschatol-
ogy in the Augustinian tradition force the Augustinian free will doctrine to appeal to
some kind of “soul-building” line of thinking, despite the fact that it has usually
75
Couenhoven, “Necessities of Perfect Freedom,” 399-400.
76
Ibid., 402. Cf. 408-417 for his full exploration of God’s triune freedom.
77
Ibid., 418.
78
See Rowan A. Greer, “Augustine’s Transformation of the Free Will Defence,” Faith and Philosophy 13
(1996): 471-486. Elsewhere Couenhoven argues that Augustine adopts a compatibilist interpretation of Adam
and Eve (“Augustine’s Rejection of the Free-will Defence: An Overview of the Late Augustine’s Theodicy,”
Religious Studies 43 [2007]: 282-286). While somewhat persuasive, this interpretation is problematized by (1)
Augustine admitting that wrong choices can be made even before human nature was defiled, as with Adam
and Eve; and (2) Augustine’s unwillingness to point to the sovereign God as the author of sin, thus leading
to evil being (in Couenhoven’s words) “a kind of madness and nihilation” (285).
79
Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, 32. Stephen T. Davis writes that “there is a logical tension between
an agent’s being free vis- a-vis certain acts and that agent’s somehow being influenced by God always to
behave in a certain way regarding those acts. Again we see that given God’s decision to create free moral
agents, the condition of the world is in part up to those agents and not entirely up to God” (Davis, “Free
Will and Evil,” 77.) This claim, so basic to nearly all versions of the free will argument, does not appear
to hold when we place it within the hopes of Christian eschatology. Indeed, the idea that this claim also
holds eschatologically is a ghastly thought, which helps to explain why it has generally been rejected
throughout the Christian tradition. See Gaine, ‘Will There Be Free Will’, 1-13, for a helpful discussion of
the basic issues in historical perspective.
[T]here was a gradation in the divine gift that had to be preserved: man was first
given a freedom of will by virtue of which he would be able not to sin, and he
was ultimately given a freedom of will by virtue of which he would not be able
to sin. The former was suited to acquiring merit, the latter is suited to receiving
a reward. But, because man’s nature sinned when it was able to sin, it is deliv-
ered by a more generous gift of grace, so that it may be led to the liberty in
which it is unable to sin.82
80
Most famously, John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, revised edition (New York: Harper San Fran-
cisco, 1978).
81
On this line of thought see Pawl and Timpe, “Incompatibilism, Sin, and Free Will”; Gaine, ‘Will
There Be Free Will’.
82
Augustine, City of God, 22.30. He also writes: “For, just as the first immortality, which Adam lost by
sinning, consisted in being able not to die and the final immortality will consist in not being able to die,
so the first free will consisted in being able not to sin and the final free will will consist in not being able
to sin.”
83
Ibid., 22.30.
existential power, our other two forms of the problem. While the free will defense
depends upon the imagining of a logically conceivable state of affairs in which evil
and God are compossible, Christian faith can imagine a theologically conceivable
(because promised) state of affairs in which God, human freedom, and moral good
exist without any chance of evil.
This suggests that even the best arguments of Christian theology remain ambigu-
ous in the face of evil. The free will line of thinking is indeed one of the more com-
pelling arguments pertaining to the problem of evil, even if it may depend upon an
underlying soul-building logic. The soul-building argument, in turn, suffers from the
fact that it (at least in some of its articulations) characterizes evil as necessary to the
goodness of creation. Evil is the adversity that is necessary for humanity to overcome
in order to become the mature version of itself. Since it is natural to wonder whether
the massive quantity and barbaric quality of the world’s evil were really necessary
for “soul-building” to happen, it may be that some version of the free will argument
must be invoked at this point: evil may be the occasion for soul-building,84 but the
extent of evil depended on how free creatures employed their freedom. Perhaps the
two arguments are but two sides of the same coin, providing mutual support in rela-
tion to the theological aporia of evil and God’s nature.
But another possibility is that it should be expected that even the best arguments
ring theologically and existentially hollow in our world in light of its actual situa-
tion—of brokenness and laboring under sin, suffering, and evil, but (at least to the
Christian mind) under the promise that resurrection and new creation have already
dawned in Jesus Christ and will one day break fully into our world. It is notable,
incidentally, that Eleonore Stump finds one of the shortcomings of Plantinga’s free
will argument, qua defense, to be the fact that though it suggests possible reasons
why a good God would allow evil, it ultimately leaves evil unexplained, as a mys-
tery of sorts.85 This characteristic of Plantinga’s apologetic project is thus in keeping
with the internal tensions of systematic theology as they swirl around the question
of evil, as well as in keeping with what appears to be Augustine’s final say on the
matter. As Couenhoven writes, “Augustine argues that the Fall is fundamentally
inexplicable, a matter of deficiency.”86
One way to conceptualize this situation is through the metaphor of “Holy Sat-
urday.”87 God’s creation is now in a position analogous to the original followers of
Jesus on the Saturday after his crucifixion but before Easter Sunday.88 The threat of
evil and suffering looms large, which in the philosophical and theological realm
takes the form of the conceptual problem of evil being difficult to dispel. Yet Christi-
ans, as they journey through history’s ongoing Holy Saturday, are in a significantly
different position than the initial disciples, since the event of Jesus’ resurrection
(unknown to those disciples) provides hope to us that the promise of resurrection
84
While Hall focuses on suffering rather than evil per se, chap. 2 of God and Human Suffering provides
a promising development of this theme.
85
Stump, “Problem of Evil,” 394.
86
Couenhoven, “Augustine’s Rejection,” 287.
87
See Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids, MI:
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001).
88
See a more extensive development of this point in Plantinga, Thompson, and Lundberg, Introduction
to Christian Theology, 223-225; and Matthew D. Lundberg, “The Problem of Suffering and the Theology of
the Cross,” Covenant Quarterly 66, no. 1 (2008): 3–23.
will, given God’s faithfulness, eventually become actual in the renewed creation. In
the meantime, part of being true to the church’s doctrinal convictions in the situation
of Holy Saturday may be to honor the problem of evil, respecting the dissonance it
brings into Christian faith by resisting premature closures to the problem. Some the-
ologians, writing in a variety of genres, have conceived of this as allowing the prob-
lem to be the “open wound” that it actually is.89 Drawing upon the partial help of
various theodicy and defense arguments, while recognizing their limitations, may be
part of Christian theological and philosophical work in this context, especially in
relation to atheological claims from outside the church. But more than anything else,
the limitations of even our best arguments are a reminder that the Christian church’s
only truly compelling theological response to the problem will be the eschaton itself,
when freedom finally stands beyond the risk of evil.90
89
urgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions, trans. Margaret
See, e.g., J€
Kohl (Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 166; Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of
God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 49; Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a
Son (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987). Also see Hall, God and Human Suf-
fering, chap. 1.
90
See Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids,
MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991), 632–646. Even with this eschatological proviso, Pan-
nenberg nevertheless still develops a version of the free will argument (see vol. 2, 165-174). On this point,
also see the poignant conclusion to Gregory Walter, Being Promised: Theology, Gift, and Practice, Sacra Doc-
trina (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2013), 97.
Some might regard this tactic as overly “fideist” (see, e.g., Berthold, God, Evil, and Human Learning,
15). On the other hand, it may simply be the actual epistemic situation of Christian belief given a theolog-
ical understanding of the world. As such, Christian theology need not be ashamed of admitting that
“final intellectual vindication rests in the future, in the life to come” (William J. Abraham, Crossing the
Threshold of Divine Revelation [Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006], 55).
I am grateful to T. R. Thompson, Arie Griffioen, Suzanne McDonald, and two anonymous readers for
Modern Theology for comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.