Review: Evil and the Justice of God, Part 2

Credit: Baltimore Sun

Chapter 2 of Evil and the Justice of God is entitled What Can God Do About Evil? It is not a question that NT Wright seeks to answer within this Chapter so-much as it is a summary of a question that repeats itself again and again throughout the Old Testament.

The writers of the Old Testament, he tells us, do not think of evil  as a philosophical puzzle to be solved, but as a practical problem to be tackled. We are told not only that evil has infected God’s creation, but that Israel – the very people who were chosen by God to carry the solution to evil – became compromised to it as well. Worse yet, all individual humans find themselves subject to idolatry and rebelliousness.

It is this three-tiered problem of evil (that is, that evil exists in large social institutions, in the promise-bearers, and in individuals) that is bemoaned again and again by the writers of the Old Testament. God, they say, has made a commitment to root evil out of his creation, yet it continues to exist. Why hasn’t God acted yet? And when he does, what will he do?

There is no clear answer, but, Wright observes, part of the solution is linked – at least three times – to the concept of a suffering servant. His examples of the suffering servant come from the book of Job, in which the title character undergoes tremendous suffering, and asks God why it must be so, and from the book of Isaiah, which looks to Israel and to a coming person as the one who will suffer as a way of taking on the sins of the people. Wright also points to the ambiguous “son of man” in the book of Daniel, who is attacked by terrifying animals, but who defeats them.

How does this way of reading the Old Testament – as a cry for God to deal with evil, combined with brief hints that it is only by suffering of a righteous servant (or servants?) – change your perspective of what is happening in scripture? Do you think that the Old Testament riffs on any other themes that relate to evil?