Perhaps the greatest problem of theodicy is the question why God, having created Satan in the first place, didn't simply wipe it out after its rebellion. The question presupposes that God could wipe anything out. It assumes that God can punish and kill. Perhaps the answer is that God gave Satan free will and that God cannot destroy; He can only create.
The point is that God does not punish. To create us in his image, God gave us free will...Yet to give us free will God had to forswear the use of force against us. We do not have free will when there is a gun pointed at our back. It is not necessarily that God lacks the power to destroy us, to punish us, but that in His love for us He has painfully and terribly chosen never to use it. In agony He must stand by and let us be. He intervenes only to help, never to hurt. The Christian God is a God of restraint. Having forsworn the use of power against us, if we refuse His help, He has no recourse but, weeping, to watch us punish ourselves.
The point is unclear in the Old Testament. There God is depicted as punitive. But it begins to become clear with Christ. In Christ, God Himself impotently suffered death at the hands of human evil. He did not raise a finger against His persecutors. Thereafter in the New Testament we hear echoes of the punitive Old Testament God, one way or another, saying that the 'wicked will get what's coming to them.' But these are only echoes; a punishing God does not enter the picture ever again. While many nominal Christians still today envision their God as a giant cop in the sky, the reality of Christian doctrine is that God has forever eschewed police power.
Of the Holocaust as well as of lesser evils, it is often asked, 'How could a loving God allow such a thing to happen?' It is a bleeding, brutal question. The Christian answer may not suit our tastes, but it is hardly ambiguous. Having forsaken force, God is [powerless] to prevent the atrocities that we commit one upon another. He can only continue to grieve with us. He will offer us Himself in all His wisdom, but He cannot make us choose to abide with Him.
...It may seem to us that we are doomed by this strange God who reigns in weakness. But there is a dénouement to Christian doctrine: God in His weakness will win the battle against evil. In fact, the battle is already won. The resurrection symbolizes not only that Christ overcame the evil of His day two millennia ago but that He overcame it for all time. Christ impotently nailed upon the cross is God's ultimate weapon..
pages 204-205
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...we are all in combat against evil. In the heat of the fray it is tempting to take hold of some seemingly simple solution - such as 'what we ought to do is just bomb the hell out of those people.' And if our passion is great enough, we may even be willing to blow ourselves up in the process of 'stomping out' evil. But...although evil is antilife, it is itself a form of life. If we kill those who are evil, we will become evil ourselves; we will be killers. If we attempt to deal with evil by destroying it, we will also end up destroying ourselves, spiritually if not physically.
...we must begin by giving up the simple notion that we can effectively conquer evil by destroying it...It is in the struggle between good and evil that life has its meaning - and in the hope that goodness can succeed. That hope is our answer: goodness can succeed. Evil can be defeated by goodness. When we translate this we realize what we dimly have always known: Evil can be conquered only by love.
So the methodology of our assault...on evil must be love. This is so simple-sounding that one is compelled to wonder why it is not a more obvious truth. The fact is, simple-sounding though it may be, the methodology of love is so difficult in practice that we shy away from its usage.
[It is as if God says:] 'Through the transforming power of my love which is made perfect in weakness you shall become perfectly beautiful. You shall become perfectly beautiful in a uniquely irreplaceable way, which neither you nor I will work out alone, for we shall work it out together.'
It is not an easy thing to embrace ugliness with the sole motive of hope that in some unknown way a transformation into beauty might occur thereby...How does this work?...
I don't know how because love can work in many ways, and none of them are predictable. I know that the first task of love is self-purification. When one has purified oneself, by the grace of God, to the point where one can truly love one's enemies, a beautiful thing happens. It is as if the boundaries of the soul become so clean as to be transparent, and a unique light then shines forth from the individual.
The effect of this light varies. Some on their way toward holiness will move more swiftly by its encouragement. Others, on their way toward evil, when encountering this light will be moved to change their direction. The bearer of the light (who is but a vehicle for it; it is the light of God) most often will be unaware of these effects. Finally, those who hate the light will attack it. Yet it is as if their evil actions are taken into the light and consumed. The malignant energy is thereby wasted, contained and neutralized. The process may be painful to the bearer of the light, occasionally even fatal. This does not, however, signify the success of evil. Rather, it backfires...'It was evil that raised Christ to the cross, thereby enabling us to see him from afar.'
...To quote the words of an old priest who spent many years in the battle:
'There are dozens of ways to deal with evil and several ways to conquer it. All of them are facets of the truth that the only ultimate way to conquer evil is to let it be smothered within a willing, living human being. When it is absorbed there like blood in a sponge or a spear into one's heart, it loses its power and goes no further.'
The healing of evil...can be accomplished only by the love of individuals. A willing sacrifice is required. The individual healer must allow his or her own soul to become the battleground. He or she must sacrificially absorb the evil.
Then what prevents the destruction of that soul? If one takes the evil into one's heart, like a spear, how can one's goodness still survive? Even if the evil is vanquished thereby, will not the good also be? What will have been achieved beyond some meaningless trade-off?
I cannot answer this in language other than mystical. I can say only that there is a mysterious alchemy whereby the victim becomes the victor. As C.S. Lewis wrote: 'When a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.'
I do not know how this occurs. But I know that it does. I know that good people can deliberately allow themselves to be pierced by the evil of others - to be broken thereby yet somehow not broken - to even be killed in some sense and yet still survive and not succumb. When this happens there is a slight shift in the balance of power in the world. pages 266-269
