Evil and the Problem of the Fractured Body

The problem of evil is a problem. Anyone who doubts this should consider the wrenchingly haunting protests of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Ivan in the Brothers Karamazov. Reading it again today, I was struck by the reasonableness of it all. He accepts as just the sufferings of "grown-up people," for they have eaten of the apple and has the knowledge of good and evil. And of course there's the promise that the wrongs will be righted, that the lion will lie down with the lamb, that there will be no more tears or pain. But, Ivan protests, "If all must suffer to pay for eternal harmony, what have children to do with it...?"

He shares a couple ghastly stories to bolster his point. There's the Turkish soldiers throwing babies up in the air and catching them on their bayonets--all in front of the mothers. Or the five year old child whose parents beat her for no reason, smearing her face and filling her mouth with excrement, and leaving her alone in the night to her groaning and misery. How does the meaningless suffering of even just that one child justify the creation of a world where sin abounds?

Listen to Ivan's protest: "Do you understand why this infamy must be permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs him so much?" And, "It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpected tears to 'dear, kind God'! It's not worth it, because those tears are unadorned for...if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price."

Ivan accepts God. He accepts that God could have created the world, given us free will, and allowed suffering and evil as a necessary condition for free will to truly exist. But it's too high a price, he insists. "And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket...It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket."

Those are haunting images accompanied with a haunting conclusion: most respectfully return Him the ticket. His protest demands the Christian's full engagement. But here is the curious and perplexing further problem: just where the Christian is confronted with so massive a problem, the Christian community has at least two responses with different premises. I am, of course, thinking of the Calvinists and the non-Calvinists response to Ivan. Thus, the problem of evil is compounded by the Christian community's own unique problem: just where a unified, coherent response is most needed, it has church divisions; just where the church should be a witness to God's shalom, it demonstrates conflict.

Whatever the case, the piquancy of Ivan's protest shows why the debate between Calvinists and non-Calvinists (what exactly are we to call them?) is so often heated and contentious. The beauty and truth of our Christian witness is at stake. Dostoevsky’s response to Ivan's protest is not an intellectual argument (as important as that is), but the incarnational, Christ-like living of Father Zossima and Alyosha. And this is why the real problem right now may well be the problem of the fractured Body.