Collin Hansen on the Problem of Evil

The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

Kendra Dahl
Why doesn’t God speak up about evil? Why won’t he assure us of His presence when the universe feels cold, dark and threatening, where is he when evil seems to triumph? These are likely questions you’ve heard before, perhaps even ones you’ve asked yourself, and they’re the very questions Colin Hansen helps us address in his excellent new booklet published by TGC and crossway, where is God in a world with so much evil? I’m Kendra Dahl, and I work for the gospel coalition, and I’m excited to be your guest host of gospel mountain today. Pound today, we’re gonna hear from Colin about his how his love for history, Russian literature and cultural apologetics coalesced in his approach to this heavy topic, and in the process, we’ll also discuss how looking honestly into some of the darkest moments of history can help us see God more clearly. Thanks for turning the mic over to me today, Colin,

Collin Hansen
glad to glad to Kendra. Wouldn’t, wouldn’t want it with anybody else.

Kendra Dahl
Tell us, first of all, what compelled you to write on this difficult topic?

Collin Hansen
I don’t know. I do not have an answer to that question. You know? I will say that I teach a class on cultural apologetics, and I ask the students, in the end, as their final project, final sermon, write, write a sermon that incorporates the hardest objection to Christianity. Now they can choose whatever they want. It’s not a predetermined outcome. It’s their sermon. It’s their it’s their answer, but I think it probably has to be, for me, the problem of evil. But not just the problem of evil in general, but the problem of evil specifically with the Holocaust. And then that extends Kendra to what you did such a good job of explaining in your introduction. That goes back to a historical question and then a cultural apologetics question, which is, what is the point of Christianity, if, in one of the most Christianized places on earth, they might have authored one of the greatest travesties and tragedies and genocides of all time, which just happens to coincide, or perhaps is caused by or or contributes to the causation of a rapid decline and a widespread decline of Christian observance across the West, but especially in places like Germany, where the Holocaust was was planned. So yeah, a lot of those questions, I guess at at some level, they’ve been with me for, I guess you know, going on 26 plus years, because what I had written about in college as a European history major was Dietrich, Bonhoeffer, Martin niemoller, Karl Barth, all these Christian leaders who had been persecuted by the Nazis and Bonhoeffer, of course, having been killed by them. So I guess in some ways, it had been a question all along. But what possessed me to actually sit down and write this one? I got to say, Kendra. I was having some doubts. I was writing a lot of this while I was staying with my family at Tyndale house in Cambridge, England a couple years ago. And there’s a special moment when the visiting scholars come out at 11am for tea and and I would try to describe this booklet to people, and I’d get these quizzical stares from the visiting scholars at Cambridge. And I thought, Hmm, this is an interesting topic to explore, if the Cambridge scholars are wondering a little bit, why would you undertake this project? So I hope the result is more beneficial for the readers, but it’s been quite a journey for a little book. Absolutely,

Kendra Dahl
I figured it was just a topic. You could rope in some Russian literature. That’s

Collin Hansen
also true. It’s also true.

Kendra Dahl
No, it is a very helpful little booklet, and one thing I hadn’t thought about as I read it is, you observe the way the definition of morality shifts after World War Two in the Holocaust. Can you say a little bit more about that? How does Hitler become this new standard of morality?

Collin Hansen
Yeah, so I gotta credit a British scholar, Alec Ryrie, for this observation. And he wrote a little book that I found tremendously helpful and challenging in my faith. It’s called unbelief, a history of doubt. And he made this observation that I just had not fathom before it in my leadership at the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics, we look very closely at what are the contributing factors to widespread de churching, and what can the church do to reverse those trends? But he had used an argument from world war two in particular to argue of this Copernican shift in morality, starting in Europe but spreading across the West, where you have the most resonant figure in Western history being Jesus Christ, our very calendars obviously are turning on his birth. But then in the standard then for all this time is, how can you live up to but ultimately fall short of Jesus? So the problem is, essentially, how can anybody live up to God’s standards? But with Hitler, that clearly begins to shift, and he occupies a kind of place in history that is analogous to few people in terms of the influence that he had. Of course, a pernicious influence, the opposite of of Jesus. But the the influence that brings about this revolution is that now no longer do people say I’m trying to live up to the standard of Jesus, but now people are saying I’m okay because I’m simply not as bad as Hitler. And in fact, Kendra, I was just reading a book on moral questions related to World War Two. And as I as I do, and one of the things it’s only normal thing for people to stay up late into the night doing all the time, but one of the questions that was raised in that book that I just not thought about before was that in Allied propaganda, United States and Great Britain, In particular, Germany and Japan were treated very differently when people wanting to personify evil. For the Nazi regime, it was Hitler. But that was not done in the same way. There were prominent leaders in Japan like Hirohito, the Emperor Tojo, the Prime Minister, but when people would turn to Japanese evil, they would look at the entire Japanese people as a race, but it was personified in Germany by Hitler. So I think that helps to contribute to our way of coping with the unspeakable trauma of everything that happened in World War Two, as saying this is a kind of aberration because of this one person. And there’s another factor, just to get into a little bit of historical political nuance and complexity. On this one, there was an overwhelming need to reintegrate the German people into the Allied cause because of the Cold War. So there’s a pretty quick turn if you can say, well, Hitler is uniquely bad. Then all of a sudden, the German people, they’re not really at fault for what happened. And we can, we used to, we were trying to kill them a few minutes ago, but now they’re among our best friends. So that’s one of the ways that Hitler became, you know, that moral revolution happened where now? And I don’t know if you see this Kendra, but this put words to something I’ve heard a lot, which is people saying, I’m good. Why should you go to heaven? Not as bad as Hitler? I think that’s like, that’s the most common response that I’ve gotten to that question for decades.

Kendra Dahl
Yeah, I’ve heard that before, but never thought about the way that that’s a shift in this comparative dynamic. Instead of looking at myself in comparison to Jesus, it’s looking at myself in comparison to the most evil person that I can consider. And I think the best line in your book is you say, I’m not as bad as Hitler. Is too low a bar for the justice that we expect. And you go on to say this anti Nazi morality also fails, because it shifts evil from something inside us to something out there among our enemies. It leads us to sanctify ourselves and demonize our enemies, moving us from defendant to judge, as if we become righteous merely by virtue of being born after Hitler’s death. Can you even say more about that? I mean, how do you see that playing out in some of the dynamics and interactions around conflict today?

Collin Hansen
Yeah. So there’s two answers to that question, and no surprise, both come out of Russia. The first one there is I, and I use this illustration in the book. We’re not giving everybody everything away in the book, but we’re covering quite a bit of ground in there. Vladimir Putin is the number one I’m not Hitler sort of spokesman out there, because the great mythology of Russian life and culture is the defeat of the Nazis. So when he comes in and says, I’m going to invade Ukraine, which is just about the most Nazi thing a person can possibly. Do an unprovoked, aggressive war against a European neighbor. He says, I’m doing it to denazify Ukraine. So this idea that we’re going to be fine as long as we’re not Hitler, well, that’s what Putin thinks. So that clearly can’t work that regard. But so that as a negative Russian example, let’s go to a positive Russian example. That line there is is for people who are perceptive, connecting these back to a lot of these moral questions throughout the 20th century. Who comes from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of the Gulag Archipelago and number of other works. And his observation was the line between good and evil runs between within every human heart. But it’s always the case Kendra that to self justify, to see ourselves as righteous. We want to create those categories of the good people and the bad people, the black hats, the white hats, and we want to pretend like we’re okay just because we’re on the right side of that ledger, that we wouldn’t commit those evils ourselves or or even if we had done something bad, it must have been for a good must been for a good reason, and that’s one reason why World War Two lingers as such a moral framing for us, and things like Star Wars, To give one obvious example of that, because it’s perceived as being so clear, good guys, bad guys, we’re on the side of the good guys. They’re the bad guys. And so you can see this, that just when you look at movies and whatnot, and how we tell these stories, our world war two movies are pretty clear, like Saving Private Ryan, there’s good guys, there’s bad guys. And I mean, in the end of Saving Private Ryan, the the protagonist gets killed because he had done a good thing of letting a German go who comes back and kills him. So I mean that that’s kind of how that story runs. But interestingly, this analogy clearly does not hold, because now when you start talking about Vietnam movies now, you’re getting closer to Solzhenitsyn, because they are much more clear to depict that some American soldiers did good things and some Americans, American soldiers did really bad things. That’s more realistic in terms of how something like war functions. But really, I mean, as we know Kendra is how our whole lives work, but it really comes down to that sense of, how are we justified before Christ, or by just being not as bad as somebody else? And I think, as you alluded to in your question, that’s how so much of our morality functions today. Online. Doesn’t matter what I believe. It just matters that I’m on the right team by the right team. I hate the right people on the other side, and that’s why I’m righteous well,

Kendra Dahl
and it just speaks to our human propensity to want to draw neat lines, like you’re describing and you point in your book to to Job’s friends, and trying to explain, Well, if you’re suffering this way, there must be a clear explanation for it. And rather than being willing to acknowledge the complexity and nuance of evil and suffering that exists within all of us.

Collin Hansen
Had you, had you heard that before I picked that up from my friends, Bill and will kinds about job, I never quite understood the dynamic with the friends that the reason the friends are pushing so hard for an explanation to Job’s suffering is because if they can find an explanation, then they can know that it won’t happen to them. And as soon as I understood that, then all of a sudden, so many different things happened. And somebody at one point said our culture is is scared of death. And I looked around, I’m like, Well, gosh, all these movies are about death. They’re like, Well, yeah, because they’re seen as unusual, the obsession with it is actually about it being unusual as opposed to a normal thing that is going to happen to all of us. And so that’s exactly what they’re trying to do in job. The friends are trying to do is like, well, we’re going to be okay, right? Because you must have done something to deserve this, and we didn’t, so we’re going to be okay, right, right? And obviously, that calculus doesn’t work,

Kendra Dahl
sure. Well, that’s, I mean, you get at that pastoral dimension. And I’d love to talk a little bit about your cultural apologetics background, and just, you know, how that, how you brought that to bear on your writing of this book. Because I think of standard apologetics being, you know, just arguments for God versus actually getting at the heart of what someone’s struggle is, where it’s not just, do I believe God exists, but actually, do I even like this god? Do I care if he exists? Can you say more about how you approach that and what you brought into this book? Well,

Collin Hansen
I do think, once again, as you joked earlier, this is where the Russians can help us, and especially comes back to the Russians. This is Dostoevsky in particular. And I just, I’m pretty firm on this point. I just don’t think there’s ever been a better argument against God than the one that Dostoevsky puts in them. Mouth of Ivan Karamazov in his chapter, rebellion and and the the moment there is, it’s a kind of straight from the headlines back in 19th century Russia, horrific story about the death and suffering of children. And Ivan Karamazov is, is arguing. I just, here’s the thing about God, a God who allows this. Let’s say he even invited me to live with him in paradise forever. I would respectfully reject the ticket. I’d reject the invitation to heaven. Oof. I mean that. And then, of course, you connect that to the Grand Inquisitor scene, where Jesus is literally put on the witness stand, and a cultural apologetic recognizes that the essence of modernity is how we presume to judge God as our moral inferior we have the morality God is in the witness stand, and he does not live up to our standards. Now, in some ways, we might just take that for granted, because we think, of course, all of us have an innate morality and ability to tell right from wrong, and I don’t need that to come from God. Well, that is a figment of modernism. That is clearly not how people thought for most of human history, until the last couple 100 years. So in cultural apologetics, we’re trying to investigate and explore what are those different, deeper cultural and historical dynamics that have contributed to these radical change of how we conceive things, and then you, you just bring it practically, just like I was saying earlier, about about you talk to people about Jesus, how would you know you go to heaven? I’m not as bad as Hitler. Well, similarly, just look at this situation. You’d say, Well, what was the problem of evil? Well, that we know what’s right and wrong, but God obviously doesn’t we tell him a thing or two, and this just came up in a book we reviewed this last year by a couple Divinity School professors who wrote an entire book arguing that God learns his morality from watching us, of course, then God becomes nothing more than a figment, of course, of our projections, which is what Freud and others had argued. So that’s kind of what you do with a cultural apologetic, is that people are really asking the questions a little bit less now of is it is the gospel true, but more about, is it good? And that’s what Ivan Karamazov was doing. And Dostoevsky comes back and he gives an account for that by saying, without a standard of good that comes from without, without, then we feel justified in perpetuating evil so that good would result that then connects back to crime and punishment and the concept of an Uber Mensch or which goes back then to, you know, to Nietzsche, and that then gets us back to Hitler. He didn’t think he was not some sort of self understood, I’m just doing this for evil. He’s couching it as this is a good thing that I’m doing to be able to cleanse the world. Obviously, it was, you know, practically the height of evil. But that’s that I was couching it. He saw it at a higher morality. So he was trying to do and believe that he was higher than everybody else’s little peasant morality. That’s the exact issue that Dostoevsky anticipated, and unfortunately, it was proven right with both fascism as well as communism in his native Russia. Well,

Kendra Dahl
I’m curious to hear more. And when you think about, you know, entering into conversations with people who are struggling with these questions, like, would you say the goal is for them to be able to see the Christian underpinning of their value of good and evil? Or is it to see, actually, I am just as evil as Hitler? Or is it to see, you know, God is actually good. I mean, you know what? When you’re guiding the conversation and engaging with these hard questions and even these more like internal personal struggles, somebody is looking upon this evil and saying, How can a God allow this that I would want to worship? You know, where are you trying to take them?

Collin Hansen
There’s a couple different different areas. I think for Christians especially, I’m trying to take them beyond the ability to rationalize and being able to explain and to be able to justify the evil that they experience. I think Kendra, it’s it’s our natural disposition to want there to be something that will make all of this worth it. There must be some reason. There must be some some plan, well, yes, in the absolute sense, in the objective sense, but in the subjective there isn’t necessarily that kind of payoff. And that’s one of the things we see throughout Scripture. Uh, these unresolved tensions. This is simply a fact of what life is like in a fallen world. As we await Christ’s Second Advent, we await His Second Coming, where he makes all things new and restores all things to glory. So part of that that tension is just what it means to live in the already of the Kingdom having come, but the not yet of the consummation of the kingdom. So that’s what I’m trying to do there. What I’m trying to do with non Christians is we don’t tend to have an intuitive sense for how we’ve fallen short of God’s standard. That’s the problem. Going back to I’m not bad Hitler, but we do have a strong intuitive sense that the world is messed up horizontally, not vertically, but horizontally. Well, then you start to realize, well, what can break the cycle of recrimination? Because if I’m justified by just not being those bad guys, well, this way lies things like the Holocaust. This way lies things like the, you know, the Gulag Archipelago we’ve seen in the 20th century. What happens here if I’m okay because I hate the right people? That justifies anything, and it contributes to a lot of the recriminations and cruelties more commonly that we see on social media now today. So but if you recognize that that good and evil is an absolute standard from the outside, and one that we seek to pursue as we are justified by Christ and we have the Holy Spirit indwelling us, and we’re fighting against the flesh. Now Satan, our temptations in there, the world of flesh, the devil. Well, then we recognize that all of us have a responsibility toward contributing to a better society, a better world. And ultimately, because it’s it starts with the vertical and then extends to the horizontal. But I’m basically trying to say, you feel the you feel the horizontal. You just need to recognize the vertical. So I don’t think I need to convince everybody that they’re as bad as Hitler, but I do think people can recognize how they are tempted, at the very least, to contribute to a world that is that is full of blame, full of more mundane evils, slights, or, I think maybe more appropriately, even if we don’t understand sin in terms of commission of what we do to other people, that’s wrong when we start to begin to see the world in terms of the sins of omission, of what we don’t do to repair the world. Hopefully we can then see how we fall short and we contribute to the problems, but God has grace for that.

Kendra Dahl
Well, you you draw out the theme of silence in a few different ways. And I don’t mean to give it all away. You talk about when God feels silent. And you know, I would commend to our listeners, go read this booklet. It’s one of my favorite things about it is that it’s so short that you can read through it, and then you could read through it again and sort of meditate on the rich truths that are there. But there were two aspects of silence I thought would be fun to discuss. One is just, you know, as you’re describing sort of how to engage in these cultural apologetics questions. You point out how Job’s friends, you know their first mistake was that they started speaking. So when do you remember silence Exactly? The silence was right. So how do you, you know? How do you wrestle through that tension as someone who wants to engage well with people who are wrestling, but knowing sometimes silence is the better option.

Collin Hansen
Yeah. We just had a small group last night, and we were doing confession of sin, and we had some ground rules that our church shares, and one of them is that resist the urge to be quick, to offer advice and to into sort of correct in there. And I said, I don’t know who they wrote these rules for, except for me, definitely like that is, that is, by far my biggest instinct is to want to jump in and say, All right, well, let me, let me teach you this. Let me offer you this perspective. Maybe you could correct this in there. And I, I do think that people sometimes want you to be able to do that. But the the ministry of presence is not merely something that is practical, as in, this is something that counselors will commend you for with people who are grieving, show up and shut up. Okay, so, but at the same time, it’s also something that’s pretty clearly patterned through Scripture. And so the ultimate place of where I end up in this booklet is God may not give you answers, but he gives you himself, gives you his son, and ultimately, that’s you. His presence with us. Yes, there are purposes to these things. Yes, he is providentially overseeing all these things. But if you, if you have a standard by which you explain that you expect God to defend and justify himself, you’re not probably going to get that. You’re going to have silence. But if you see, in God’s word, his own ministry of presence, through His Spirit, through his through His Son, then you will experience tremendous comfort, in fact, the only kind of comfort that truly lasts, and that’s why, also not in a corrective tone, but one of the Ministries of presence that we can offer amid suffering is the word itself. If you feel like you want to speak, go to places like the Psalms, where these emotions are so clearly raw and and relatable so many different ways. So, yeah, I hadn’t, I mean, of course, kind of the, well, I don’t know if you’ll, you’ll ask this one in there, but that’s one of the most important points that I try to get to in the book, is the way Dostoevsky himself teases out the ministry of silence with the with the Son of God on the witness stand. And after all these accusations and hurling this at him, it’s reminiscent of the scene at the cross. Jesus comes down and offers nothing except a kiss. And you’re like, wait a minute, defend yourself. Well, look what he did at the cross. The same thing. And of course, Isaiah 5352 53 tells us the same thing. He opened not his mouth. Silence again. Yeah.

Kendra Dahl
And yet, what I thought was so sweet is how you turned that to show how God doesn’t demand our silence in exchange. You know that he’s not standing over us saying you keep sucking up, keep your mouth closed. You know that he welcomes our questions. I wonder, what would you say to someone who’s listening, who is feeling the weight of this season of suffering and and feeling like God is silent in the midst of it, but what would it look like for them to cry out to God in their distress?

Collin Hansen
Hey, God’s simply not threatened by our questions. It’s one of the most beautiful things we see through all of Scripture. And the book is built around engagement with Elie Wiesel’s critiques of God, and he’s crying out like this climactic moment in the death camps, where is God? Where is he? And I just try to reverse it to say, Ellie, you’re made in the image of God. You’re crying out for justice. That is, that is the Lord speaking to this world. This is not how it should be. So speaking out against injustice, not only to change and reform this world, but also simply in lament or simply identification Lord, this is not this is not right. This is not okay. This is not how it should be. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to say. And I can’t read the Psalms any other way, and I think we’re pretty clearly justified in taking our requests directly to our father, because that’s exactly the model that Jesus gave us at the cross. Elohim, Tani, My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me? Which many people know, of course, is a reference to Psalm 22 which itself has that same motif from David in there. So we have no better example than the Son of God Himself, taking those requests to the Father and then, of course, not getting the answer that he had been asking for, at least in that way, but through that process, experiencing the comfort and the presence of the Father to be able to do what he had to do to offer Himself as a sacrifice for sin. And so I think that’s what the Lord offers to us those moments as well, when we cry out. And I think it’s another reason Kendra, why Psalm 73 is one of my my favorites. The psalmist is simply working through this great challenge of it seems like in this world, God that the wicked prosper, the righteous suffer. What? What’s the story here? And then, of course, very famously, he says, Then I entered into the sanctuary of the Lord, and I discerned their end. Well, not necessarily in this world, Hitler in so many different ways, he evaded justice in this world, but the good news is that he did not evade justice in eternity that belongs to the Lord. And so Psalm 73 in crying out to God, why is this happening? He offers his word to say, hold up, you. Vengeance is mine. Let me help you discern their end. I can’t tell you, Kendra, how many times that Psalm, just thinking about the last decade or some of my life, that Psalm has just come up again and again and again, because if you expect perfect justice in this world, you cannot be but disappointed. And ultimately, I think it’s one thing that undermines Faith is an over realized eschatology, expecting that that justice to be perfect on Earth.

Kendra Dahl
And yet, even at that Psalm, the way he ends, God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. There’s this sustaining grace for the right now. I love that too, yeah,

Collin Hansen
in part, built off the discerning of the end warning backward from there to Yes, the Lord is with me, and heading back to Psalm 23 walks me through the valley of the shadow of death. I’ll fear no evil. Yeah, that’s a great addition.

Kendra Dahl
Well, I know for me writing, I have to write in order to think that’s the only way I learn things, right? So I’m curious for you in this process of writing this book, just what, what have you learned? What is something that you will take away from the process of of working through this topic?

Collin Hansen
What I most vividly remember was, was writing in the middle of the night in in Cambridge, my family’s asleep, and I’m just running through the Scriptures, especially the Old Testament, and was struck again and again. Everywhere. Everywhere are these, these questions, these, this anguish this God had. How would you allow this to happen? It’s kind of, I guess Kendra. I’d read the Psalms For decades before I started reading them again and realized, wait a minute, there sure is a lot in here about betrayal of friends, of all sorts of different things. I realized, huh? I guess I they didn’t resonate with me the same way until I had experienced more of that, and then when I went back through the Old Testament again and and, of course, this is a strong theme in books like lamentations, like Habakkuk, a lot of this in Jeremiah as well. I was just reading through lamentations not too long ago, and I was struck by, whoa. I mean, this language is more intense than probably any prayers I’ve heard offered by anybody on earth, and Habakkuk is pretty similar. Habakkuk has a better resolution, I think, than what lamentations offers us there in Habakkuk, three in particular. But I think that’s just what I learned. Was how vigorous that tradition of crying out to God, what are you doing? What is happening? How are you allowing this? And that’s what helped me to understand what Elie Wiesel was doing in his book night is I just thought he is in a long stream of Jewish voices that have engaged in this dialog. And to me, that’s not evidence against God, which is what the problem of evil is speaking to you, but evidence of God himself, that he leaves himself a witness through those prophets, that the world is not as it’s supposed to be,

Kendra Dahl
that’s really beautiful and just shows God’s, you know, strength and fortitude that he can handle our questions. I think of a little kid, you know, is mad, and it’s like dad can handle it. He can stand firm and and yet still be compassionate and gracious and patient with us. So I’m so grateful for this book, like clown. I know it sounds like maybe we talked about the whole thing, but believe it or not, there is more there, and you should pick up a coffee and and work through it yourself. You know, I loved it was so helpful to me personally, and just a comfort in thinking through, how to think about God’s presence in the midst of suffering, but also equipping me to think about, how can I better have these conversations with people who are wrestling with these big and really honest questions about God and His goodness. So thanks so much for writing it, and thanks for letting us have this conversation today on gospel bound.

Collin Hansen
Thanks, Kendra,