The Problem of Evil: Decree, Permission, and the Goodness of God¶

The problem of evil is usually stated in the abstract: if God is good and all-powerful, why is there suffering? The version that matters here is more specific. It is not about evil in general but about this evil — a child abused and killed — and about what God's relation to it is. The question is whether what a theology says here is believable in the presence of the sufferer.

The Reformed position¶

The Reformed answer is a careful construction, and it should be stated at its strongest.

God's decree is all-comprehensive and unchangeable, but executed through "second causes" — creaturely agents acting according to their natures. The Westminster Confession puts both halves in one sentence: God ordains "whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures" (III.1). On this account the murderer acts freely and culpably; his malice is his own; and yet his act does not fall outside the decree. Joseph's words to his brothers are the paradigm: "you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good" (Gen 50:20). Peter's Pentecost sermon says the same about the crucifixion: Jesus was "delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God," and yet "you crucified and killed" him (Acts 2:23).

The philosophical engine is compatibilism. Edwards and his heirs argue that a will is free when it acts according to its strongest inclination, and that this is compatible with that inclination being certain. Frame puts it that God's causation and creaturely causation operate on different levels, so that God can determine an act and the agent remain responsible. Helm defends meticulous providence on the same basis.

The theodicy that goes with this is a greater-good theodicy. God ordains evil because it serves ends that could not otherwise be reached: the display of his justice and mercy, the glory of the cross, the maturation of the saints. Frame argues that God could not have created a world with these goods without permitting evil, and that the actual world is therefore the best available one. Piper makes the same move homiletically: God's glory is displayed in the cross, and the cross required betrayal and murder. Calvin states the raw form and does not flinch: the decree is "dreadful," he admits, and yet God "not only foresaw the fall of the first man... but also at his own pleasure arranged it" (III.23.7).

A Reformed reader should recognize this. It is the tradition's serious answer, defended by able philosophers.

The tension¶

1. Secondary causes describe the mechanism; they do not absolve¶

If the decree is exhaustive and its execution infallible, then the secondary cause is not an alternative to the decree but its chosen instrument. The distinction tells us how the atrocity happened — a free creature did it — but not why God willed that it happen. Calvin saw the problem clearly and refused the shelter: "why do we say that he permits, but just because he wills?" (III.23.8). Permission, in this system, is a mode of the decree, not a limit on it. That is coherent, but it means the appeal to secondary causes does no moral work: it describes the chain, it does not defend God's goodness.

2. The free-will defense is not available¶

The most influential contemporary theodicy — Plantinga's — turns on the claim that God could not actualize a world in which significantly free creatures always choose the good, because their freedom would be overridden. A determinist cannot use it. If God decrees the specific act, the act was not merely foreseen as one possibility among others; it was secured. The determinist must therefore justify God's intention of the evil, not merely his permission of a risk. Frame and Helm know this, which is why they argue for the greater good instead. But that route has its own cost.

3. "For his glory" makes the atrocity necessary¶

If evil is ordained as a means to a greater good, then the specific evil is instrumentally necessary: no cross without Judas, no display of mercy without misery. The argument is coherent, but its consequence is hard to preach. It means that in the mind of God the child's terror was a component of a plan whose value outweighed it, and the sufferer is invited to accept that her agony was a means to someone else's good — including God's glory. That is not obviously good news to her, and the system cannot make it so without adding that her good is included in the glory. Sometimes it is; often the Bible does not say so.

4. The decree/command distinction does not rescue God's goodness¶

The standard reply is that God commands what is good and decrees what he will accomplish. But if God commands one thing and decrees another about the same act, which reveals his heart? On the system's own account the decree is his "good pleasure" — eternal, unchangeable, effective — while the command is a disclosure of creaturely duty. It is difficult to see how the deeper thing is not the truer revelation of God's attitude toward the act. At minimum, "God hates this sin" becomes a statement about his preceptive will only, while his decretive will is that it happen.

5. The cross cuts both ways¶

Reformed theodicies often center the cross: God is not a distant spectator but enters suffering. That is true and important. But on the same logic the cross was decreed as necessary, so the betrayal and execution were necessary. If that is compatible with God's goodness, so is every other atrocity that serves the plan; the cross stops being a unique answer to evil and becomes an instance of the general rule.

How Reformed theologians have tried to resolve it¶

Calvin refuses to soften the decree and appeals finally to God's incomprehensible right over his creatures; the "dreadful" admission is the honest center of his account. Turretin distinguishes a decree of permission from bare permission, insisting that God's will is involved even where he does not produce the sin. Owen grounds the permission of sin in the glory of God's justice and mercy, and treats the fall as subserving redemption. Hodge uses "permissive decree" language more confidently than Calvin, and treats sin as permitted for ends God secures without being its author. Warfield treats the problem as insoluble and calls for trust in a wisdom we cannot fathom. Murray insists on the goodness of God as the frame within which the decree must be read. Packer argues that God's purpose in pain is to make us like Christ, which a world without suffering could not produce. Piper locates God's glory in his ordaining of "spectacular sins" that display the worth of Christ. Frame argues that God could not have achieved the best world without permitting evil. Helm grants the problem's hardness, defends providence's coherence, and points to the cross as the place where God's goodness is identified rather than explained.

These are serious answers. Each of them, however, either justifies evil by its results or retreats to mystery. Neither move is available only to the Reformed, and both are available to the non-Calvinist.

Why the tension remains¶

The tension is not that the Reformed have no answer. It is that their answer comes at a price: the specific evil is willed by God as a means. The non-Calvinist alternative is that God permits what he does not will — a permission that is genuine, that grieves him (Gen 6:6; Eph 4:30), that he opposes with his commands, and that he overrules for good without having intended it. On that account the atrocity is not a component of the plan but an intrusion God will judge and repair. The cost is that sovereignty is defined as God's ability to guarantee his purposes despite evil rather than through his decree of it. The gain is that "God hates this" is true without qualification.

What this does and does not prove¶

This does not prove that God does not exist, nor that suffering is meaningless, nor even that the Reformed answer is false — mystery is a legitimate category.

It does prove that the determinist's theodicy is not morally superior to the permission account, and that it buys coherence with a claim about God's intention toward specific evils that Scripture's language of grief does not support. It also proves that the appeal to secondary causes is not an answer at all.