Biblical Christianity makes two indisputable affirmations, yet not without generating fierce controversy. First, God controls in some sense all that transpires in time, space, and history, including the course of human lives. Second, human beings are responsible moral agents who freely choose the direction that their lives take. Our ability to make meaningful choices that impact history as it unfolds is what separates us from every other creature.^[1] On the surface, these two truths appear to be in conflict with each other. How can God direct the path of human history and yet humans remain free to choose their own course of action?

This question has plagued philosophers and theologians throughout the ages. The problem perplexes us no less today. Even popular culture has tuned in to the vexing question. Anyone who has watched the Matrix trilogy or Groundhog Day is confronted with daunting notions about free will and whether events are predetermined. The comic strip Foxtrot by Bill Amend tackled the matter with a dry wit befitting the ponderous nature of the subject. In the first frame of a strip composed in 2003, the main protagonist of the comic, ten-year-old Jason Fox, holds a football over his head. He calls out to his best friend, Marcus Jones, to “go deep.”^[2]

Marcus deadpans, “How can free will coexist with divine preordination?”^[3]

In the next frame, Jason silently ponders the question. In the third frame he replies, “Too deep.”^[4]

Marcus then alleviates the moment with lighter fare: “If Batman died, would the Joker be happy?”^[5]

Is Reconciliation Possible?

Since free will and divine sovereignty seem irreconcilable, one or the other is usually denied or limited in some degree. Historically, some Christians say that God has purposely limited his sovereignty in order to uphold man’s free will. This is most often associated with Arminianism and the teachings of the theologian Jacob Arminius (1560–1609). Other Christians have emphasized God’s sovereign determination of what transpires while either limiting human freedom or denying it altogether. This is generally associated with Calvinism, a term derived from the Protestant Reformer John Calvin (1509–64). Of course, both views date to the early history of the church.^[6]

The matter seems straightforward. Either man has a free will that limits God’s sovereignty or God is absolutely sovereign and man is not really so free. But is it possible to somehow reconcile God’s sovereignty with human freedom? It is my quest to answer that question in the affirmative.

This is no easy task, for several reasons. First, the issue has generated no small amount of controversy within the history of the church, including the present. Second, confusion is often generated by the controversy because of caricatures on both sides of the debate. Third, the issues can get complicated, especially because of the apparent contradictory nature of the two basic propositions. Fourth, the claim that we have free will is usually assumed to be true and its meaning self-evident. But if pressed, few are able to articulate a definition. The idea of free will becomes muddled very quickly. Finally, Scripture itself doesn’t provide straightforward answers to questions about free will.^[7]For that reason alone, one must approach the subject with great care.

My purpose is to try to clear up some of the murkiness that is commonplace and to provide biblical answers to the questions that free will raises. Most Christians have no problem accepting God’s control over the big picture of history. When it comes to God’s preordaining our actual choices, however, we often entertain a different perspective. Many assume that God’s actions have little bearing on our personal choices. We like to reserve a degree of autonomy for ourselves. God’s sovereignty provokes nightmares “that we are like puppets being jerked around against our wills by a malevolent master puppeteer.”^[8]

For many, to deny free will is anathema—we have no choice (!) but to believe in free will. This is understandable. It appears intuitively obvious that we make our own independent choices.^[9] They are usually made unhindered and seemingly apart from any outside causes other than our own freedom to choose. This is where confusion sets in. Many readily accept that God chooses us for salvation and directs our lives for his purposes, but don’t we freely choose what we want as well? How can both notions be true? The burden of this book is to answer such questions.

Why Bother?

Does it really matter what one believes about such a contentious subject? Why is it so important? Well, it certainly generates lively debate, but there are reasons why believers need clarity about the matter. A biblical view of divine sovereignty and human freedom highlights a host of important matters in the Christian life. It helps us in the following ways:

• Sorting out God’s role and our role in matters of salvation.
• Making sense of how regeneration, conversion, and sanctification work.
• Understanding how we should engage in evangelism and discipleship.
• Building greater confidence in God’s providential purposes for both history and our individual lives.
• Navigating crucial questions about the existence of evil and whether God or man or even Satan is responsible for it.

The questions can be quite personal:

• If God determines the course of events in my life, how can I be responsible for my actions?
• How can I have a meaningful relationship with God? Doesn’t his sovereignty undermine my choice to freely love him?
• Why should I pray, if God has already determined the future? Can my prayers change God’s mind? Do my choices have any bearing on the course of the future?
• Do God’s commands really matter? If he is sovereign, can’t I do whatever I want?
• Isn’t divine determinism—another way of speaking of God’s absolute sovereignty—really fatalism, so that it doesn’t matter what choices I make? Shall I resign myself to “what will be will be,” since I can do nothing about it?
• How can I know whether my choices are in or out of the will of God?

The questions are endless, and the unbridled speculation about the answers threatens to wreak havoc on our limited brain capacity.

I am not writing another book about the doctrine of predestination or the problem of evil and suffering. It will become necessary to touch on these topics, but full treatments of them are to be found elsewhere.^[10] Yet few books treat the issue of free will exclusively, especially from a distinctively biblical perspective. Older treatments on the topic are so ponderous that they leave the average reader bewildered—works such as Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Willand Martin Luther’s The Bondage of the Will. Other treatments of free will engage in discussing heavy philosophical concepts that make matters worse.

Compatibilism and Libertarianism

I approach this subject from what I believe the Scripture, rightly interpreted, teaches. Nonetheless, it corresponds historically to what Calvinism has taught. Furthermore, the approach taken here is often labeled compatibilism. Although the term compatibilism is part of the parlance of modern philosophical discourse on this issue, it accurately reflects what the great American colonial pastor and theologian Jonathan Edwards taught. He was the first to thoroughly articulate the ideas of compatibilism in his magisterial tome Freedom of the Will, written in 1754.^[11] The common alternative view to compatibilism held among theologians is known as libertarianism, which is in no way related to the political ideology of the same name. This is the view held by Arminians and open theists.^[12] This subject matter is not confined to the domain of theology. Secular philosophers engage in these discussions as well, and the viewpoints span a wide and complicated spectrum.^[13] Generally, I will not concern myself with non-Christian viewpoints, even though some significant overlap in ideas occurs.

A distinctly biblical form of compatibilism holds that there is a dual explanation for every choice that humans make. God determines the choices of every person, yet every person freely makes his or her own choices. Thus, divine sovereignty is compatible with human freedom and responsibility. In this model, people are free when they voluntarily choose what they most want to choose as long as their choices are made in an unhindered way. In either case, what people actually choose, whether hindered or not, is determined by a matrix of decisive causes both within and without. Biblical compatibilism says that our choices proceed from the most compelling motives and desires we have, which in turn is conditioned on our base nature, whether good or evil. The more voluntarily and unconstrainedly our choices are made, the more freedom and responsibility we have in making them. Sometimes this is called the freedom of inclinationbecause a person is always inclined to make particular choices.

Conversely, libertarianism teaches that free will is incompatible with divine determinism (i.e., God’s meticulous decreeing of all things), since this undermines human freedom and responsibility. It should be noted that Arminians do not espouse the incompatibility of human freedom with divine sovereignty. Rather, they hold that divine sovereignty is exercised so that God does not causally determine human actions.^[14] Libertarian freedom of choice comes about when we have the ability to choose contrary to any prior factors that influence our choices, including external circumstances, our motives, desires, character, and nature, and, of course, God himself. If these prior influences decisively determine choices, then the freedom and responsibility of those choices are hindered. God is in control of history, but he exercises that control so as not to interfere with man’s free will. Libertarian free will is often called the freedom of contrary choice.

If the libertarian definition of free will is correct, then God is limited in his sovereignty. On the other hand, if the compatibilist view of man’s will is correct, then it not only is compatible with a robust view of divine sovereignty, but also preserves human freedom and responsibility. I will seek to show how the libertarian view of free will falls short of making sense of human experience and what Scripture teaches. Throughout the book, the main object of my critique is classic Arminianism and its appropriation of libertarian arguments. In contrast, I will devote the larger part of the book to defending a compatibilist perspective on the human will, which I believe is more faithful to Scripture and makes far better sense of our actual experience.

In making the case for compatibilism and against libertarianism, I run up against some unavoidable philosophical concepts and arguments. But my primary goal is not to assess all the complex philosophical arguments, but to show that a broad compatibilist framework better fits the scriptural evidence. The Bible is our decisive authority for judging ultimate truth claims.^[15]

The organization of this book is as follows: Chapters 1 and 2 will lay out the libertarian viewpoint and its shortcomings. Chapter 3 will examine what the Bible teaches about God’s absolute sovereignty in determining human affairs, including our choices. This chapter precedes the overview of compatibilism in chapter 4, since God’s sovereignty is foundational to understanding biblical compatibilism. Chapters 5 and 6 will look at two prominent sets of compatibilistic patterns in the Bible to demonstrate the truth of this perspective. The chapters that follow will seek to flesh out the compatibilist view of the human will, freedom, and responsibility. Along the way, I will discuss how this perspective makes sense of many theological and practical issues that affect our everyday lives. The book is designed to facilitate further study of the topic. With that in mind, I close each chapter with a chapter summary and study questions. Most chapters also include a glossary of terms^[16] and resources for further study. There is also a full glossary of terms at the end of the book, as well as two appendices. The first appendix is a chart that compares libertarian beliefs with compatibilist beliefs. The second appendix is a review of Randy Alcorn’s recent book hand in Hand: The Beauty of God’s Sovereignty and Meaningful Human Choice, which tackles the same topic. Although Alcorn promotes a compatibilist position, I seek to point out that his perspective differs considerably from traditional biblical compatibilism.

To sort through all the thorny questions and befuddled ideas that surround this topic is daunting, but the rewards are worth the effort. When we enhance our understanding of God’s role and our own roles as his plan unfolds for history and our personal lives, it gives us confidence and hope that God is good and wise and powerful and that our choices have meaning and purpose. We are a vital part of what he does in the world. Our choices matter, and what makes this true has everything to do with the manner in which his sovereignty manifests itself in our lives. I trust that this book will be a faithful guide in understanding this truth.

Glossary

Arminianism. A theology associated with the teachings of Jacob Arminius (1560–1609). Arminianism teaches five basic ideas. First, God has predestined to save those whom he foreknows will exercise faith in Christ. Second, Christ’s death was an atonement for all mankind regardless of who believes on Christ for salvation. Third, humans in their natural state do not have free will or the capacity for saving faith. But, fourth, God has supplied prevenient grace to all humans so that they can recover free will and exercise saving faith. This prevenient grace enables them to either cooperate with God’s saving grace or resist it if they choose. Fifth, the grace of God assists the believer throughout his life, but this grace can be neglected. Subsequently, the believer can incur the loss of salvation.

Calvinism. A theology that embraces a broad spectrum of ideas associated with the teachings of the Protestant Reformer John Calvin (1509–64). Calvinism, however, is often identified by the five points of Calvinism, traditionally represented by the acronym TULIP. The T stands for total depravity, which indicates that humanity is in bondage to sin. The U stands for unconditional election, which indicates that God chooses people for salvation wholly apart from anything they do. The L stands for limited atonement, which indicates that Christ’s death secured atonement only for the elect. The I stands for irresistible grace, which indicates that God draws chosen sinners to salvation irresistibly. The P stands for perseverance of the saints, which indicates that the elect will certainly persevere in their salvation until the end.

compatibilism. The biblical view that divine determinism is compatible with human free will. There is a dual explanation for every choice that humans make. God determines human choices, yet every person freely makes his or her own choices. God’s causal power is exercised so that he never coerces people to choose as they do, yet they always choose according to his sovereign plan. People are free when they voluntarily choose according to their most compelling desires and as long as their choices are made in an unhindered way. While God never hinders one’s choices, other factors can hinder people’s freedom and thus their responsibility. Furthermore, moral and spiritual choices are conditioned on one’s base nature, whether good or evil (i.e., regenerate or unregenerate). In this sense, one is either in bondage to his or her sin nature or freed by a new spiritual nature. See also soft determinism.

divine sovereignty. The biblical doctrine that God controls time, space, and history. Calvinists usually hold that God meticulously determines all events that transpire, including human choices. Arminians teach that God limits his sovereign control of events, giving humans significant freedom of choice, which is defined as libertarianism. See also determinism.

free will (free agency). The idea that humans are designed by God with the capacity for freely making choices for which they are responsible. Most Calvinists and Arminians agree that some kind of free agency is necessary for moral responsibility. But each branch of theology defines it differently. Arminians embrace a libertarian notion of free agency. Many Calvinists embrace a compatibilist notion of free agency. See also compatibilism and libertarianism.

human responsibility. See moral responsibility.

libertarianism. The view that free will is incompatible with divine determinism (i.e., God’s meticulous decreeing of all things), which undermines human freedom and moral responsibility. God’s sovereignty is exercised so that he does not causally determine human actions. Freedom of choice comes about when one has the ability to choose contrary to any prior factors that influence the choice, including external circumstances, one’s motives, desires, character, and nature, and, of course, God himself. If these prior influences decisively determine choices, then the freedom and responsibility of those choices are undermined.

moral responsibility. Humans’ culpability for their moral choices. A person who does good deserves praise or reward. A person who does evil deserves blame or punishment. Most Calvinists and Arminians believe that some kind of human freedom is necessary for moral responsibility. Also termed human responsibility.

Resources for Further Study

F. Leroy Forlines, Classical Arminianism: A Theology of Salvation (Nashville: Randall House, 2011). A very readable defense of Arminianism.

Roger E. Olson, Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006). One of the better defenses of Arminianism.

R. C. Sproul, Chosen by God (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1986). A classic defense of the Calvinist view of election.

R. C. Sproul, Willing to Believe: The Controversy over Free Will (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997). A survey of the debate over free will in the history of the church.

David N. Steele, Curtis C. Thomas, and S. Lance Quinn, The Five Points of Calvinism (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2004). An excellent source for Scripture’s defense of the five points of Calvinism.

Sam C. Storms, Chosen for Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007). An engaging defense of the Calvinist view of election. Also treats libertarian and compatibilist views of free agency.

Jerry L. Walls and Joseph R. Dongell, Why I Am Not a Calvinist (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004). A popular defense of Arminianism and critique of Calvinism.

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Scott Christensen is the author of What about Evil? A Defense of God’s Sovereign Glory and What about Free Will? Reconciling Our Choices with God’s Sovereignty.

Scott Christensen (MDiv, The Master’s Seminary) worked for nine years at the award-winning CCY Architects in Aspen, Colorado: several of his home designs were featured in Architectural Digest magazine. Called out of this work to the ministry, he graduated with honors from seminary and now serves as the associate pastor of Kerrville Bible Church in Kerrville, Texas.

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^[1] Mark R. Talbot, “All the God That Is Ours in Christ,” in Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, ed. John Piper and Justin Taylor (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006), 56.

^[2] FOXTROT © 2003 Bill Amend. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL UCLICK. All rights reserved.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] Ibid.; also reprinted in Peter J. Thuesen, Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 222.

^[6] For the history, see R. C. Sproul, Willing to Believe: The Controversy over Free Will (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997).

^[7] John S. Feinberg, No One Like Him (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), 679.

^[8] Gerhard O. Forde, The Captivation of the Will: Luther vs. Erasmus on Freedom and Bondage (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 31.

^[9] Jerry L. Walls and Joseph R. Dongell, Why I Am Not a Calvinist (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 104; Clark H. Pinnock, “Responsible Freedom and the Flow of Biblical History,” in Grace Unlimited, ed. Clark H. Pinnock (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1975), 95.

^[10] Good accessible treatments of the doctrine of predestination include R. C. Sproul, Chosen by God (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1986); Sam C. Storms, Chosen for Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007); and David N. Steele, Curtis C. Thomas, and S. Lance Quinn, The Five Points of Calvinism (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2004). Good accessible treatments of suffering and evil include chapters 6 and 7 in John M. Frame, Apologetics to the Glory of God(Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1994); D. A. Carson, How Long, O Lord? Reflections on Suffering and Evil (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006); and Joni Eareckson Tada and Steven Estes, When God Weeps (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997). For a more advanced philosophical and theological treatment, see John S. Feinberg, The Many Faces of Evil: Theological Systems and the Problem of Evil (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004).

^[11] Jonathan Edwards, The Freedom of the Will, vol. 1 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Paul Ramsey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957). On Edwards as a compatibilist, see Paul Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 164–71; Paul Helm, “Edwards and the Freedom of the Will,” available at http://paulhelmsdeep.blogspot.com/2011/02/edwards-and-freedom-of-will.html. Compatibilist beliefs are not monolithic. One need not follow all that Edwards taught to be a compatibilist.

^[12] Open theism is a radical brand of Arminianism that has been rejected as unorthodox by Calvinists and many Arminians. Open theists virtually deny God’s sovereignty as clearly spelled out in Scripture, including his omniscience and other attributes accepted by orthodox Christianity. See the treatment of this movement by Bruce A. Ware, God’s Lesser Glory: The Diminished God of Open Theism (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2000); John M. Frame, No Other God: A Response to Open Theism (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2001).

^[13] See Robert Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Joseph Keim Campbell, Free Will (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011).

^[14] Steve W. Lemke, “A Biblical and Theological Critique of Irresistible Grace,” in Whosoever Will: A Biblical-Theological Critique of Five-Point Calvinism, ed. David L. Allen and Steve W. Lemke (Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2010), 150–51.

^[15] Many philosophers believe that the arguments for various views on free will and determinism have reached an impasse. But philosophical argumentation is not our final recourse—Scripture is (John 17:17; Col. 2:8).

^[16] Most italicized terms in each chapter’s glossary are cross-references to other entries, either in the chapter glossary or in the full glossary at the end of this volume.

Untold evils lurk in the ever-present darkness of our disturbed world, a world that is not what it ought to be, a world that is often cold and inhospitable, where pain and suffering seem to be the rule of the day. Consider the story of Louis Zamperini.^[1] Louie was a promising young American track champion who ran in the 1938 Berlin Olympics. But the outbreak of World War II brought unimaginable misery to Louie. Drafted as a bombardier, he inexplicably lost control of his B‑24 and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. He managed to survive in shark-infested waters for a record forty-seven days before being captured by the Japanese navy. He was transferred to several POW camps over the course of the next twenty-seven months.

Louie’s first experience as a POW was to be shoved into a filthy little wooden shack infested with rats, lice, and the stench of human urine and feces. Beatings were regular, and the food was usually leftover slop full of rat droppings and maggots. Scurvy, dysentery, and beriberi were common killers in the camps. The Japanese strategy for POW treatment during the war was to dehumanize their victims, stripping them of every ounce of dignity, to take away their will to live.

In a prison camp named Omori, Louie met his nemesis, Corporal Mutsuhiro Watanabe, the disciplinary officer known as “the Bird.” Watanabe was a psychopath of the first order. His menacing black eyes told the story. “Decades after the war, men who had looked into those eyes would be unable to shake the memory of what they saw in them, a wrongness that elicited a twist in the gut, a prickle up the back of the neck.”^[2] The Bird would beat a man senselessly for hours and then bizarrely come to tears and apologize, hug him, and give him candy, beer, or cigarettes. Then in a moment he’d return to pummeling the poor soul in another fit of rage. “When gripped in the ecstasy of an assault, he wailed and howled, drooling and frothing, sometimes sobbing, tears running down his cheeks.”^[3]

Seeing Louie’s utter determination to survive this kind of hellish treatment, the Bird singled him out for his most malicious attacks. One day Louie’s leg was severely injured by a guard. Because he was unable to do the labor of the others in coal and salt mines, the Bird had him clean a pigsty, using no tools. He was consigned to crawl around, wiping excrement from the sty with his bare hands while secretly stuffing his mouth with pig food to keep from starving.

The Bird sometimes enlisted a line of prisoners to punch the faces of their fellow prisoners who were officers as hard as they could. Those who refused were subject to brutal beatings themselves. Louie was pegged for the worst of this kind of treatment. Each of the enlisted men reluctantly hammered him as he repeatedly dropped to the ground and then finally blacked out. When he regained consciousness, the Bird screamed for the men to resume their punches, which lasted several hours into the night. With every new blow, the Bird became increasingly enraptured with glee. Louie’s face was swollen like a basketball for days.

The climax of wills between Louie and Watanabe occurred when the Bird punished Louie for supposedly letting a goat die under his care. He was ordered to pick up a six-foot wooden beam and hold it straight above his head in front of the other prisoners. If he should lower his arms, a guard was instructed to hit him with the butt of his rifle. The Bird sat on the roof of an adjacent building, laughing and mocking Louie as he stood quivering in the baking sun. Louie was undeterred. He looked the Bird straight in the eyes with unflinching hatred.

Louie’s arms seared with pain. After ten minutes, they grew numb. He faltered slightly, and the guard jabbed Louie with his gun. He straightened up but started becoming disoriented, his thoughts turning hazy and his consciousness weakening. Nonetheless, he summoned a steely resolve: He cannot break me. After some thirty-seven minutes, the Bird was dismayed with Louie’s defiance. He jumped off the roof and rushed to his unyielding enemy, giving him a massive blow to the gut. Louie collapsed, the beam striking his head as he fell unconscious.^[4]

By now, Japan’s defeat was imminent, as the devastating B‑29 bombing missions heard and seen overhead made clear. The POWs entertained hope, but they also had every reason to fear that the guards would make good on the military’s “kill-all” orders for prisoners if the war were to end. Of the more than thirty-four thousand American POWs held in Japan during World War II, nearly 37 percent (13,000) died, compared to the 1 percent who died while being held by the German Nazis and Italian fascists.^[5]

Finally, Louie was liberated, but his ordeal was not over. He could not adjust to civilian life. Flashbacks brought the sounds and sights of war and prison rushing back. The wrong sound or a difficult recollection would elicit panicked outbursts. The Bird followed him, tormenting him almost nightly in his dreams. The line between reality and illusion became blurred. Sudden and unpredictable rage possessed Louie like a demon. He sometimes assaulted innocent bystanders in public places at the slightest provocation. He turned to uncontrolled alcoholic consumption to relieve his terror, but it was useless. He couldn’t hold a job. He made shipwreck of everything he tried to do. Even his return to the running track failed.

Louie then set himself to a singular objective. He would find the Bird and kill him, and all would be set right. But every wasted scheme on this front failed as well. Most of all, he failed his new bride, Cynthia. He treated her as though she were another enemy. She became frightened for him and then by him. During one nightmare, he found himself in a deadly match with the Bird. He had his neck in a death grip when suddenly he awakened and realized that he was strangling his terrified wife. Sometime later, Cynthia came home to see her drunken husband shaking their newborn baby with the same death grip. She had no choice. She and the baby left him. Louis Zamperini was in worse condition now than he had been in the prison camps.

Coming to Grips with the Problem of Evil

The story of Louis Zamperini is one of countless examples throughout history that expose evil in all its feral wickedness. A whole constellation of evils encompassed the life of Zamperini. Not only did he endure morally evil people, but his human vulnerability had to endure all sorts of natural evils. He was a victim of a malfunctioning aircraft. While adrift at sea, he endured an inadequate life raft, ravenous sharks, hunger and thirst, inedible fish and fowl, and unexpected typhoons. In the camps, he experienced scorching heat and bitter cold, muscle atrophy, delirium, repeated multiple contusions, malnutrition, and disease.

Theologians make a distinction between both kinds of evil. Moral evil refers to the unrighteous thoughts, words, and actions^[6] of all morally responsible creatures—angelic and human—in violation of a holy God’s moral commands and principles to whom all stand accountable.^[7] These evils cause pain and suffering for others. Natural evil refers to adverse conditions in the world that also cause pain and suffering. Such evil can proceed from (1) natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tornadoes, wildfires, or tsunamis; (2) accidents and mishaps due to the unfortunate consequences of the laws of nature, such as when someone drowns in a lake because he can’t swim or a boulder falls from a cliff and crushes a busload of schoolchildren; (3) sickness and disease, such as pancreatic cancer or COVID‑19; (4) physical and mental handicaps, such as paralysis or Down syndrome; and (5) physical toil that inhibits our bodies almost daily.

Natural evil is the result of the fall of Adam and Eve into moral rebellion against God whereby he brought about a perpetual curse on the creation, altering its favorable conditions (Gen. 3:14–19). We live in a broken world where things don’t function as they should. The laws of nature do not always work in our favor. Decay and corruption have spoiled the pristine goodness of the original creation. Gone is the order, beauty, and functional perfection of Eden.

Evil in a Fallen World

The collusion of all these heavy chains of pain and suffering can hardly be comprehended. The history of the world is the history of humanity’s faltering under the weight of unending systemic moral evils: greed, deceit, exploitation, sexual perversion, rape, racism, terrorism, slavery, murder, war, and genocide. Modern history has no shortage of examples. The Atlantic slave trade captured and sold some fifty million men, women, and children in the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. In the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler enacted the Final Solution to kill six million Jews. Eighteen million dissenters of Vladimir Lenin’s and Joseph Stalin’s tyranny suffered in their hellish gulags. Mao Zedong’s revolution starved, persecuted, imprisoned, or executed some sixty million innocents. From 1975 to 1979, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge exterminated over two million souls, most of them buried in the mass graves called the Killing Fields. Other harrowing examples could be recounted.

Contemplating the sheer numbers of such atrocities can become numbing, demonstrating our own desensitization to evil. Yet moral evil is not the only problem we face. We are ever threatened to be laid waste as well by a myriad of natural evils: earthquakes cracking the earth beneath our feet, hurricanes assaulting the cities on our shorelines, floods rushing through our docile subdivisions, tornadoes ripping our homes to pieces, and fiery infernos decimating our beloved forestland. Our physical bodies suffer under endless injury, sickness, disease, and threats of worldwide pandemics. Youth and strength give way to old age and an onslaught of incalculable bodily ailments. No sooner do we emerge bright and beautiful from our mother’s wombs than we are thrust into a storm-tossed sea of pain that pitches us toward death.

No human being is exempt. We all suffer evil. Our personal tragedies are sometimes unrelenting and unbearable. Life seems unfair. Injustice prevails. True acts of righteousness are rare commodities. Wickedness dominates the menu. The guilty flourish while innocent ones languish. All humanity cries out with Job, “But when I hoped for good, evil came, and when I waited for light, darkness came” (Job 30:26). Just when the future looks bright, evil comes roaring back to shatter our hopes. Even now, we seem to be entering a new and disconcerting age when evil is accelerating at a dizzying pace. This has caused no small amount of consternation, fear, and uncertainty about what lies ahead.

The nefarious thinking behind various Marxist-inspired critical theories has emerged to radicalize the world and marginalize any resistance, castigating those who don’t walk lockstep with its tyranny as bigots, racists, privileged upstarts, and truth-deniers who need to conform or be silenced.^[8] Its divisive and corrosive effects were first incubated in our universities, and have now infected nearly all our K–12 school curriculums. It is relentlessly pushed by Hollywood and our news media. The poison is injected into all forms of our entertainment, sports, and advertising. The largest and most influential corporations are colluding with government entities at all levels to utilize this radical ideology to deconstruct all the world’s cultural institutions and to reshape education, language, law, economics, entertainment, the arts, and so forth.

This is especially true in the realm of sex and family. The sexual revolution has all but destroyed the family—the fundamental communal institution that God designed for a society to flourish. Our hypersexualized age knows no bounds of perversion with its confusion about so-called gender and sexual identity. Who would have thought that The Walt Disney Company, known for producing family-friendly fare for nearly a century, would redirect its mission to the aggressive sexualization of our children?

Pornography is often a requirement for elementary-school education. Drag shows have become the new entertainment for kids. Genital mutilation is pressed upon young people confused about their gender identity. The purveyors of this abuse have the gall to call it gender-affirming care. Pedophilia is the next socially acceptable perversion, calling its perpetrators MAPs (Minor-Attracted Persons) to soften its heinousness. Sex trafficking is a multibillion-dollar industry. Unfettered promotion of sex for anyone with anyone or anything is increasingly part of the driving ethos of the age.

The moral landscape of the Western world has completely shifted as we are poised for collapse. We undoubtedly live in a post-Christian world where God has been “de-godded”^[9] and set aside as an outdated relic of a childish bygone era. The notion of unchanging, universal, objective morals has been relegated to the trash heap. If you ask the average person on the street how to distinguish between good and evil, most will have no clue. We live in an age of “expressive individualism”^[10]—an age reminiscent of the dark days of the judges, when “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judg. 17:6; 21:25).

A Corrupted Christianity

Nowadays what usually passes for Christianity, even evangelical Christianity, is nothing more than what Christian Smith calls “moralistic therapeutic deism.”^[11] This man-centered religion has simply adapted the insipid values of the world to its belief system. Its namby-pamby deity sits aloof and allows us all to set our own course toward happiness so long as we tack a Bible verse to the end of our sentences and try to be nice to others. Its religious creed is “God helps those who help themselves.” God is no demanding deity but an easygoing and tolerant buddy, cheering us on from the sidelines so that we can feel good about ourselves while we pursue psychological wholeness and follow our hearts wherever they may lead us. Pay no mind to what the prophets of old declared concerning the deceitfulness of the human heart (Jer. 17:9).

This benign religion and its illusory notion of God obscures a looming problem. We have been programmed by our culture and by our own self-centered and self-deceived nature to put all our focus on the evil that lies outside us, thinking that we are basically good (however we define good). But alas, the true God who has revealed himself in his Word does not allow us such a truncated and distorted perspective. We are not merely victims of evil. We are also perpetrators of evil—all of us. We are violators of true good—good that is defined and exemplified by God himself, not by us and not by the culture.

Under the divine standard: “None is righteous, no, not one; . . . no one seeks for God. . . . No one does good, not even one” (Rom. 3:10–12). We are selfish glory-seekers, liars and deceivers, lovers of wanton pleasure (2 Tim. 3:1–5). We are willing to kill and steal to get our way (James 4:1–3). This does not bode well for us. Our intractable and inescapable bondage to our own personal sin (John 8:34) deceives us (Rom. 7:11). It generates no true happiness. Rather, it is a path to unrelenting misery.

Why, O Lord?

And so we are utterly dismayed by this black world and the hopeless conditions we find ourselves in. Unpleasant questions plague every soul under the sun. We cry out—why!? Why all the lies and deception, the dismantling of truth? Why the ugliness, the marring of what was once beautiful? Why the corruption and waste, the dissolution of what is good? Why all this murder and mayhem, the destruction of life itself? And why are we all helpless and impossibly obstinate accomplices in this cosmic catastrophe? Surely this is not the way that it’s supposed to be.

But most of all, we demand—where is God?

We cry out: “Why, O Lord, do you stand far away? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (Ps. 10:1).

Why couldn’t God prevent all this madness from unfolding? Why doesn’t he protect us from harm? Why does he allow us to continue unabated down the hellish trail that the devil has blazed for our darkened souls? Does God not love us? The Almighty One has already shown that he has all the requisite powers to stop the wind and stave off the waves with a simple word (Mark 4:39). What about all the other storms that afflict us? Surely his sovereign power could minimize our harm and maximize our safety. Why doesn’t he do more to prevent chaos and promote peace? Better yet, why does a supremely good and powerful God permit all this calamity in the first place?

Theologians and philosophers call this the problem of evil. It is, no doubt, the most difficult problem that humanity faces. But it is a particularly troublesome matter for genuine and thoughtful Christians, sometimes called the Achilles’ heel of the Christian faith. Why is this? Because Christianity alone among all the world’s religions and ideologies holds to the belief that God is supremely good, righteous, holy, wise, loving, and powerful—the Creator, Sustainer, and Governor of all that exists. His perfections are infinite, unchanging, and unassailable.

No other conception of deity or deities can possibly compare. In fact, the Bible is clear—there is no other God (Isa. 43:10–13). If this is true—and it is—then how can such an unfathomably glorious God permit his wonderfully designed creation and creatures to be decimated by the fall—to descend into this disconcerting darkness?

Tracing the Problem of Evil

Throughout the ages, many unbelievers have refused to acknowledge the God of the Bible directly; nonetheless, they know in their heart of hearts that such a God exists, as Romans 1:18–32 clearly teaches. Furthermore, they have surmised the basic contours of the problem of evil, yet doggedly insist that it proves that God does not exist. And yet, ironically, they intuitively know that if God did not exist, then there would be no problem of evil. Why?

Because we cannot avoid presupposing that a supremely wise God of perfect goodness, righteousness, justice, and truth alone sets the standard by which all things that fail to meet this standard must be measured. Without the sun, we’d never know that we lurk beneath the shadows. In other words, without a supremely good God, you cannot say that there is such a thing as evil. And you would have no basis to ask God the question “why?” when evil smacks you hard in the face.

Skeptical philosophers—going back to Epicurus (341–270 b.c.) and, famously, to David Hume (1711–76)—have tried to frame the problem of evil as a logical conflict between the existence of God on the one hand and the presence of evil on the other, as shown in the argument put forth below. Notice, however, that the argument does not target some generic version of God. Only the God of the Bible undergoes the sort of scrutiny that the problem of evil demands. In fact, we all know this as creatures made in his image. We don’t have to be skeptics to question how the one true God fares in the face of evil while it tests just how much faith we really have in him.

Here is the argument:

(1)  The God of the Bible is all-powerful (omnipotent).

(2)  The God of the Bible is all-good (omnibenevolent).

(3)  Yet evil exists.

(4)  Therefore, the God of the Bible cannot possibly exist.

The argument assumes that statement 3, “evil exists,” is not in dispute; and this is true. Rarely does anyone dispute this fact. What is in dispute is either statement 1 or 2. But notice that the argument has some hidden assumptions and can be reworded this way:

(1)  The all-powerful (omnipotent) God of the Bible can prevent evil.

(2)  The all-good (omnibenevolent) God of the Bible wants to prevent evil.

(3)  Yet evil exists.

This leads to some preliminary conclusions:

(4)  Therefore, either God is not all-powerful(he cannot prevent evil) or he is not all-good (he does not want toprevent evil).

The supposed conflict between these two preliminary conclusions leads to the same conclusion as before:

(5)  Therefore, the God of the Bible cannot possibly exist (because the Bible insists that God must be both all-powerful and all-good).

Let us examine this argument. Some suppose that statement 1 is false while statement 2 is true. This is what Rabbi Harold Kushner argued in his best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. The famed rabbi wrote, “I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it, more easily than I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die, for whatever exalted reason.”^[12] People who believe this must find themselves in a miserable quandary, believing in an impotent God who can do nothing more than cry with us when tragedy strikes.

On the other hand, many smug secularists are happy to concede that statement 1 is true while statement 2 is false; this way, they can claim that any God who allows evil when he could easily prevent it must be evil himself. But are these the only two conclusions that one can draw from the argument? Christianity does not need to cower in a dark corner when faced with the supposed conundrums here.

When this argument is closely examined, one serious problem is seen with it: statement 2. All orthodox theologians acknowledge that statement 1 is true, and the Bible itself is clear on this matter. God has all the requisite powers to prevent or stop any instance of evil. But it does not necessarily follow that God in his all-encompassing goodness wants to prevent or stop every instance of evil, as statement 2 suggests. The fact is, he clearly has not done so, and the Bible is also clear on this. The skeptics think this means that either he is evil or he cannot exist. But is it possible that the God of the Bible can be supremely good, having no possibility of evil in his being, and yet somehow have a sufficiently good and wise reason for allowing evil to exist? The burden of this book is to answer that question in the affirmative.

More than One Problem of Evil

There is more than one problem of evil. The mere existence of evil is not a sufficient reason for many people, especially Christians, to question the existence of God. Consider, however, the vast extent of evil or the horrendous nature of some evils. Does this not impugn God? The Holocaust serves as one of countless examples. Maybe one could forgive God if six or even sixty Jews had died at the hands of the demonically inspired Hitler. But what about six hundred? Six thousand? That seems to stretch our patience.

If sixty thousand Jews had died or, God forbid, six hundred thousand, Hitler would still be one of the greatest villains in the history of the human race, and many would demand that God has some explaining to do. Yet that is not what we are dealing with. We are confronted with the fact that nearly all European Jews—six million of them—were wiped off the face of the planet, regarded as vile creatures in the eyes of not only Hitler, but most ordinary, God-believing, hardworking, family-oriented German citizens (and many other ordinary citizens throughout Europe).

Can you see the problem that the Christian faces?

But that is not all. The vast extent of the Holocaust is one thing. Consider the horrendous nature of many of the crimes that were committed by the Nazis. No one has captured the horror of the Holocaust as Elie Wiesel has in his memoir Night. Wiesel survived both Auschwitz-Birkenau and Monowitz concentration camps during World War II. When he first arrived at Auschwitz, he watched helplessly as little babies were unloaded from the back of a lorry and nonchalantly tossed into a fire to be reduced to ashes.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.

Never shall I forget that smoke.

Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.

Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.

Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.

Never shall I forget these things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.

Never.^[13]

We look at such horrendous evil and we say that it is senseless, gratuitous, having no possible good reason to transpire. Why would God allow it? Later Wiesel and multitudes of other prisoners fixed their eyes on two men and a boy who were ordered to the gallows for sabotage in the camp.

The three condemned prisoners together stepped onto the chairs. In unison, the nooses were placed around their necks.

“Long live liberty!” shouted the two men.

But the boy was silent.

“Where is merciful God, where is He?” someone behind me was asking.

At the signal, the three chairs were tipped over.

Total silence in the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. . . .

Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing. . . .

And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.

Behind me, I heard the same man asking:

“For God’s sake, where is God?”

And from within me, I heard a voice answer:

“Where is He? This is where—hanging here from this gallows . . .”

That night, the soup tasted of corpses.^[14]

As Wiesel so poignantly illustrates, it is not just the extent and horrendous nature of evil that gnaws at us. It is the way in which evil impacts us directly, personally, powerfully, hauntingly, ripping its deadly claws through our tender souls and leaving us to cry out to God.

Does he hear us? Is he there?

If you are honest with yourself, you have been in this place too: When your beautiful baby unexpectedly dies. When your wife declares that she does not love you anymore and leaves for good. When your business fails because your partner embezzled all its funds. When the fire from your faulty furnace lays waste to your uninsured home. When your church splits in two because your pastor has been exposed as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

How about when your grandchildren have to live with parents who exist in a perpetual delirium while being decimated by methamphetamines? When terminal cancer has canceled all your plans for the future? When your girl comes home from school and declares that she is a boy? When child protective services comes knocking because you disagreed with the school’s assessment of your girl’s transition?

We have our stories. We have our anger, our bitterness, our depression, our disillusionment. We have our ceaseless sorrow, our unfading wounds. We have our questions for God.

Will he answer us?

Searching for a Solution to the Problem of Evil

Believers have been responding to the problem of evil from the beginning of history. The technical term in theology used by believers to defend the Christian faith with respect to the problem of evil is theodicy, a word coined by the eighteenth-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. It combines the Greek words for “God” (theós) and “justice” (dikē). Consequently, a theodicy is an attempt to put forth a solution that “justifies God” in the face of evil, defending his divine integrity and exonerating him from the charge that he is morally culpable for the evil that permeates his creation. Ultimately, a theodicy tries to show why God has allowed evil to ruin his good creation. While Christians have put forward many different theodicies, they can be consolidated around two basic approaches.

The first and most common theodicy is often called the free-will defense. This solution says that evil unfortunately arises as a risk God takes when he grants free will to his moral creatures. There are serious problems with this solution, as we will see in chapter 2. The second basic approach to the problem of evil is often called the greater-good defense. This theodicy’s solution says that God allows evil only in cases in which that evil is necessary for the emergence of some greater good—a good that could not otherwise emerge unless the evil connected to that good existed.

The theodicy I present in this book is a species of the greater-good defense. It takes the ideas that are crucial to this solution and advances them in very specific and far-reaching ways. Most solutions to the problem of evil are content to provide the most succinct and sufficient way that the Christian faith can avoid the charge that God is culpable for evil. By contrast, a more robust theodicy gives reasons not merely why God is not culpable for evil, but in fact why he has a very clear and definite purpose for it.

In other words, most theodicies are strictly defensive positions, trying to defend God from the fiery darts of the skeptics and all those dismayed with a God who seems too inept to handle all this pain and suffering. This is unfortunate. The God of the Bible is never backed into a corner of the ring, trying to avoid all the punches thrown his way. The Bible is not afraid to expose the full gamut of evil right from its very first pages. Rather, evil, in all its manifestations, is a prominent part of the whole storyline of Scripture, and God is never tainted by his indispensable connection to it.

Evil was no accident.

Yet the Bible does not provide a direct answer to the questions: Why evil? Why the fall? Why all this corruption, pain, and suffering marring the cosmos? Nonetheless, it tells a remarkable story that narrates God’s plan for history in which it becomes clear why he not only permits evil, but dare we say, planned for it—all of it—to contribute to his glorious plan. The theodicy that the Bible implicitly unfolds is one in which the incomprehensible magnificence of our God is on full display.

Many Christians suppose that God’s purpose in creating human beings is to maximize their happiness. Evil disrupts these plans, and so the solution to the problem of evil is to figure out why God hasn’t restored human happiness. But if maximizing human happiness is God’s purpose, then let’s be honest: he has not done a very good job.

Furthermore, this solution is cringeworthy because it places humanity at the center of God’s purposes, as though human happiness were the supreme good of all reality. That is simply not true. God is at the center of all reality. God’s purpose in creating humans and the rest of the created order is to put his own glory on display, and to do so supremely. In fact, it could be no other way. If God is truly God, then he must of necessity be at the center. If reality were analogous to our solar system, then he must be the sun and we be the planets orbiting the sun. Only the sun has the mass and gravity to maintain the center and to keep the planets from flying to pieces. Nothing can displace the sun from its central place.

Likewise, we can never imagine a world where God does not occupy the place of singular majesty and glory. Everything that takes place, whether good or evil, must not detract from that glory. Rather, every last vestige of good and evil was purposely designed by God to magnify his glory and to do so supremely. And it is here that a legitimate pursuit of human happiness lies. The first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism captures this point well: “What is the chief end of man?” The answer: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” Our joy as human beings is found in one place—the glory of the incomprehensibly magnificent God (Ps. 16:11).

Thus, whatever theodicy the Bible supports must be one in which God is supremely glorified. For that reason, the theodicy I propose is called the greater-glory theodicy. The greater goods that God brings out of the darkness must shine a brilliant light on a greater glory resting in himself. Furthermore, he has designed his plan for history to magnify the well-being (happiness) of his adopted children, whom he has chosen to pull out of the darkness and to set before his glorious grace.

In the light of his wonderful countenance we find our greatest good and our greatest joy. Furthermore, what magnifies our own personal well-being is directly tied to the fact that we had to be dragged through all the filth and debris of a dirty, broken world, of our souls’ being corrupted by evil within as well as victimized by all manner of evil without. The grace of God that penetrates the darkness within and without is what in the end supremely magnifies God’s glory and works for our greatest well-being.

The Rest of Zamperini’s Story

This is exemplified in the rest of Louis Zamperini’s story. Louie’s wife filed for divorce after his abuse and violence reached a point of no return. But shortly afterward, she attended the well-known 1949 Los Angeles Crusade that jump-started the evangelistic career of the young firebrand Billy Graham. Cynthia was converted to Christ the first night she attended and told Louie that she was dropping the divorce.

After days of resisting, Louie finally consented to go with her one night to hear Graham preach. The evangelist was in dead earnest in his gospel appeals. Louie was uncomfortable. But when Graham spoke of divine judgment for those who think they are good, Louie was moved to anger. He thought of himself as a good man. Yet he knew that he was a liar. With every word Graham spoke, Louie’s thoughts grew more haunted. He huffed home that night and faced the maniacal Bird once again.

Louie was convinced to see Graham the following night. This time, Graham spoke directly to the problem of evil and why God allows such suffering, and then how he often penetrates the pain with a supernal peace. Louie was transported to a day in 1943 when he was adrift at sea after his B‑24 crashed. He entered that place along the equator called the doldrums where the sea mysteriously turns into a motionless sheet of glass. He knew without a doubt that the strange feeling of absolute serenity he felt that day could come only from the hands of an immensely powerful and benevolent God. Louie knew that he should have never survived his ordeal. God’s mercy had sustained him every moment.

Then Graham spoke of the saving grace that all must find in Christ. Still, Louie resisted, his head sweating now, throat constricting, the weight on his chest increasing. His rage returned, and he grabbed Cynthia and bolted from the service. But as he rushed outside the tent, it began to rain. He stopped and turned toward Graham. Then he had one final flashback. It was a moment on the life raft when he had made a promise to God: “Lord, bring me back safely from the war and I’ll seek you and serve you.”^[15]

This recollection was the turning point. He soon dropped to his knees and begged God for pardon and trusted Christ. Louie went home that night in a state of serenity that he had never experienced before. God had indeed saved his physical life; now he embraced Christ to save his spiritual life. He threw all his alcohol down the drain along with his anxiety, his anger, and his thoughts of revenge. The Bird came to him no more—neither that night nor any night since. Suddenly, Louie developed an insatiable appetite to know Christ and the Bible.

Louie Zamperini was a new man, and the gratitude he felt for his salvation was incomparable to the misery he had endured for the previous six years. In fact, the contrast between the depths of his misery and the heights of his peace made his experience of God’s grace and glory all the more remarkable.

Zamperini’s story is one of many that provide us with a glimpse into what God is doing in this broken world. “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). The one whose head is “like white wool, like snow,” whose eyes are “like a flame of fire, his feet . . . like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace,” and whose voice is “like the roar of many waters” (Rev. 1:14–15)—this One is magnifying his grace and his glory beyond all compare, and this is what is at the heart of the greater-glory theodicy that we will explore.

Study Questions

1.  Can you recall some “evil” event that affected your life? How did you respond to it?

2.  What is the difference between moral evil and natural evil?

3.  How did evil come about in the world?

4.  What do you believe is the greatest evil afflicting our culture today?

5.  What is the problem of evil? Why is this a unique problem for Christianity?

6.  Is the problem of evil more of a problem for God’s omnipotence (all-encompassing power) or his omnibenevolence (all-encompassing goodness)? Explain your answer.

7.  The author says that there is more than one problem of evil. Aside from the logical problem of evil as expressed by various philosophers challenging the existence of God, what other two problems does the author discuss?

8.  What is a theodicy?

9.  Explain the basic difference between the free-will defense and the greater-good defense.

10.  Why must a biblical theodicy be God-centered instead of man-centered?

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Scott Christensen is the author of What about Evil? A Defense of God’s Sovereign Glory and What about Free Will? Reconciling Our Choices with God’s Sovereignty.

Scott Christensen (MDiv, The Master’s Seminary) worked for nine years at the award-winning CCY Architects in Aspen, Colorado: several of his home designs were featured in Architectural Digest magazine. Called out of this work to the ministry, he graduated with honors from seminary and now serves as the associate pastor of Kerrville Bible Church in Kerrville, Texas.

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^[1] See Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (New York: Random House, 2010); Louis Zamperini with David Resin, Devil at My Heels (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

^[2] Hillenbrand, Unbroken, 232.

^[3] Hillenbrand, 237.

^[4] Hillenbrand, 296.

^[5] Hillenbrand, 315.

^[6] See Gen. 6:5; Matt. 5:21–30; 1 John 3:15.

^[7] See Rom. 1:18–32; 2:14–15; 3:9–20, 23.

^[8] See Voddie T. Baucham Jr., Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe (Washington, DC: Salem Books, 2021); Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel—and the Way to Stop It (Washington, DC: Salem Books, 2021); Erwin W. Lutzer, No Reason to Hide: Standing for Christ in a Collapsing Culture (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2022); John MacArthur and Nathan Busenitz, eds., Right Thinking for a Culture in Chaos: Responding Biblically to Today’s Most Urgent Needs (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2023); Carl R. Trueman, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022).

^[9] See D. A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God’s Story (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010), 33.

^[10] Trueman, Strange New World, 22–24.

^[11] Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

^[12] Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 134.

^[13] Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 34.

^[14] Wiesel, 64–65.

^[15] Zamperini and Resin, Devil at My Heels, 241.

Plato was the greatest student of Socrates and one of the greatest philosophers of all time. The greatest philosophers (among whom I include also Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel) tend to be those who bring together many ideas that at first seem disparate. As an example: Parmenides said that Being is fundamentally changeless, Heraclitus that the elements of reality are in constant change. Plato’s genius is to see truth in both of these accounts and to bring them together into a broader systematic understanding. Similarly, Plato provides distinct roles for reason and sense experience, soul and body, concepts and matter, objects and subjects, and, of course, rationalism and irrationalism.

Plato’s epistemology begins with the observation that we can learn very little from our sense organs. So far, he agrees with the Sophists. Our eyes and ears easily deceive us. But the remarkable thing is that we have the rational ability to correct these deceptions and thus to find truth. It is by our reason also that we form concepts of things. We have never, for example, seen a perfect square. But somehow we know what a perfect square would be like, for we know the mathematical formula that generates one. Since we don’t learn the concept of squareness by sense experience, we must learn it from reason. Similarly concepts of treeness, horseness, humanity, justice, virtue, goodness, and on and on. We don’t see these, but somehow we know them.

These concepts Plato calls Forms or Ideas. Since we cannot find these Forms on earth, he says, they must exist in another realm, a world of Forms, as opposed to the world of sense. But what are Forms, exactly? In reading Plato we sometimes find ourselves thinking of the Form of treeness as a perfect, gigantic tree somewhere, which serves as a model for all trees on earth. But that can’t be right. Given the many different kinds of trees, how could one tree serve as a perfect model for all of them? And even if there were a gigantic tree somewhere, how could there be a gigantic justice, or virtue, or goodness? Further, Plato says that the Forms are not objects of sensation (as a gigantic tree would be). Rather, they are known through intelligence alone, through reason. Perhaps Plato is following the Pythagoreans here, conceiving the Forms as quasi-mathematical formulae, recipes that can be used to construct trees, horses, virtue, and justice as the Pythagorean theorem can be used to construct a triangle. I say “quasi” because Plato in the Republicsaid that “mathematicals are a class of entities between the sensibles and the Forms.”^[1] Nevertheless, he does believe that Forms are real things and are the models of which things on earth are copies.

The Forms, then, are perfect, immaterial, changeless, invisible, intangible objects. Though abstract, they are more real than the objects of our sense experience, for only a perfect triangle, for example, is a real triangle. And the Forms are also more knowable than things on earth. We might be uncertain whether a particular judge is just, but we cannot be uncertain as to the justice of the Form Justice. Thus, the Forms serve as models, exemplars, indeed criteria for earthly things. It is the Forms that enable us to know the earthly things that imitate them. We can know that someone is virtuous only by comparing him with the norm of Ideal Virtue.

The Forms exist in a hierarchy, the highest being the Form of the Good. For we learn what triangles, trees, human beings, and justice are when we learn what each is “good for.” Everything is good for something, so everything that exists participates in the Form of the Good to some extent. The world of Forms, therefore, contains not only formulae for making objects, but also norms defining the purposes of objects.

In Euthyphro, Socrates argues that piety cannot be defined as “what the gods desire.” For why should they desire it? They must desire it because it is good. So piety is a form of goodness, and goodness must exist independently of what gods or men may think or say about it. So it must be a Form. We should note, however, that if courage, virtue, goodness, and so forth are abstract Forms, then they have no specific content. To know what is good, for Plato, is to know the Form of the Good. But Good is what all individual examples of goodness have in common. How, then, does it help us to know specifically what is good and what is bad?

Anytime we try to define goodness in terms of specific qualities (justice, prudence, temperance, etc.), we have descended to something less than the Form of the Good. The Form of the Good serves as a norm for human goodness, because it is utterly general and abstract. Any principle that is more specific is less normative, less authoritative. Such is the consequence of trying to understand goodness as an abstract Form rather than, as in biblical theism, the will of a personal absolute.^[2]

The world of sense experience is modeled on the world of Forms. Plato’s Timaeus is a sort of creation account in which the Demiurge, a godlike figure, forms matter into patterns reflecting the Forms, placing his sculpture into a receptacle (perhaps empty space, or an indeterminate “stuff” anticipating Aristotle’s matter). The Demiurge is very different from the God of the Bible, for he is subordinate to the Forms and limited by the nature of the matter. The matter resists formation, so the material objects cannot be perfect, as the Forms are. So the Demiurge must be satisfied with a defective product. It is not clear whether Plato intended this story to be taken literally. He sometimes resorted to myth when he could not come up with a properly philosophical account of something. But it is significant that he saw the need for some means to connect the Forms with the sensible world. And it is significant that he made that connection personal rather than impersonal.

But how do we know the Forms, located as we are in this defective, changing world? Here Plato reflects the subjectivism of the Sophists and Socrates: we look within. We find within ourselves recollections of the Forms. Recollections? Then at one time we must have had experience of the Forms. When? Not in this life, where our experiences are limited to imperfect and changing things, but in another life before this one. So Plato embraces the Pythagorean-Orphic doctrine of reincarnation. We lived once in a world in which the Forms were directly accessible to us. Then we “fell” from that existence into the sense-world, into bodies. Our knowledge of the Forms remains in memory, but sometimes it has to be coaxed out of us by Socratic questioning. One famous example is in Plato’s Meno, where Socrates asks questions of an uneducated slave boy, leading him to display a knowledge of geometry that nobody expected him to have.

The world of sense is not strictly knowable. Plato compares it to the shadows cast by a fire in a cave. Prisoners chained in the cave all their lives can see the shadows, but they mistake them for the truth, so in fact they know virtually nothing. Their notions are conjecture, not knowledge. We can move beyond conjecture to belief by distinguishing between images (such as shadows and pictures) and actual objects. Thus we come to know the visible world. But we do not “understand” the visible world until we see the things of the world as instances of general concepts. Thus we move from conjecture, to belief, to understanding. Pure knowledge is still a fourth stage: intuitive vision of the Forms. The first two stages Plato calls opinion, the last two knowledge. The first two come through sense experience, the last two through reason. Our sense experience is illumined by the sun; our knowledge of the intelligible world is illumined by the Form of the Good.

In Phaedrus, Plato considers knowledge from another perspective: knowledge is motivated by love. In beautiful objects,^[3] we see an echo of true beauty, and we are moved by passion to seek the Form of Beauty itself. Here is another example of the Greek focus on inwardness. People have sometimes said that the search for knowledge must be disinterested, without passion. Although Plato advocated the dominance of intellect over the appetites, he saw a positive use of the passions, even in philosophy.

Since we once lived apart from the body in the world of the Forms, it must be the case that the human soul can exist separately from the body. In Phaedo, as Socrates prepares for death, he bases his hope for immortality on this epistemological argument. Plato divides the soul into three parts. The lowest is the appetitive, which seeks physical necessities and pleasures. Next higher is the spirited, which includes anger, ambition, desire for social honor, and so on. The highest is the rational, which seeks knowledge for its own sake.^[4] We can see how, with a bit of emendation, these divisions correspond to the later common distinction between emotions, will, and intellect, respectively. They correspond even more closely to Freud’s distinction between id (appetitive), ego (spirited), and superego (rational). In Phaedrus, Plato sees the spirited part as a driver with two horses, white (the rational) and black (the appetitive). The spirited is swayed sometimes by the appetitive, sometimes by the rational. The more it subordinates its appetites to its intellect, the better off it will be; see fig. 2.1.

Fig. 2.1. Plato’s Analysis of the Individual Soul, with Comparisons

But Plato’s major interest, like that of Socrates, was to tell us how to live. His metaphysics and epistemology are all a prelude to his ethics and political theory. Yet it is in these areas that he is most disappointing. His Socrates discusses at length the nature of justice and courage, but comes to no firm conclusion. He does conclude that the definition of virtue is “knowledge.” One never does wrong except out of ignorance. If one knows what is right, he will necessarily do it. But most of Plato’s readers through the centuries (including his pupil Aristotle) have dismissed this statement as naive, and Christians have found it superficial in comparison with the Bible’s view of human depravity.

And if virtue is knowledge, knowledge of what? Knowledge of the Good? But good is more difficult to define than virtue is. Like all other Forms, it is abstract. So how can it settle concrete ethical disputes, such as whether abortion is right or wrong? For Plato, to live right is to know the Good. But to say that is to leave all specific ethical questions unanswered.

Plato did come to some specific recommendations in the area of politics. But these recommendations have been almost universally rejected. In the Republic, he divides the body politic into groups corresponding to the divisions of the soul. In his ideal state, the peasants are governed by the appetitive soul, the military by the spirited, and the rulers by the rational. So the rulers of the state must be philosophers, those who understand the Forms. Such a state will be totalitarian, claiming authority over all areas of life. The upper classes will share their women communally, and children will be raised by the rulers. Art will be severely restricted, because it is a kind of shadow of which one can have only conjecture, the lowest form of opinion. Images detract from knowledge of Beauty itself (the Form), and they can incite to anarchy. Donald Palmer says that Plato’s Republic “can be viewed as a plea that philosophy take over the role which art had hitherto played in Greek culture.”^[5]

Most modern readers look at these ideas with distaste. Where did Plato get them? It would not be credible for him to claim that he got them by contemplating the Good. Rather, the whole business sounds like special pleading. Plato the philosopher thinks that philosophers should rule. He is rather like a Sophist here, claiming to be the expert in the means of governance. But he certainly has not shown that philosophers in general have any of the special qualities needed to govern. And the Sophists denied what Plato claims: access to absolute truth. We may applaud Plato’s rejection of relativism. But his absolutism is what makes him a totalitarian. He thinks the philosophers have Knowledge, so they must rule everything.

Plato engages in special pleading because he has no nonarbitrary way of determining what is right and wrong. But as we’ve seen, once one identifies Goodness as an abstract Form, one cannot derive from it any specific content. So Plato’s ideas about ethics and politics lack any firm basis or credibility.

The best thing that can be said of Plato is that he knew and considered seriously the criticisms that could be made against his system. He treats a number of these in the Parmenides, without actually answering them. In this dialogue, Parmenides asks the young Socrates whether there are Ideas (Forms) of such things as mud, hair, and filth. He might also have asked whether there are Ideas of evil, of imperfection, of negation. But how can there be a Form of imperfection, if the Forms by definition are of perfection? But if there is no Form of imperfection, then the Forms fail to account for all the qualities of the material world.

Another objection (called the third man): if the similarity between men requires us to invoke the Form Man to account for it, then what of the similarity between men and the Form Man? Does that require another Form (a Third Man)? And does the similarity between the second Form and the third Form require a fourth, ad infinitum?

The first objection shows that the Forms are inadequate to account for experience. The second objection shows that on Plato’s basis the Forms themselves require explanation, and that they are inadequate to provide that explanation themselves.

Plato also explores other objections to his theory that I can’t take the time to describe here. The main problem is that the Forms cannot do their job. The Forms are supposed to be models for everything in the sensible world. In fact they are not, for perfect Forms cannot model imperfection; changeless Forms cannot model change. So the imperfection and change of the experienced world have no rational explanation. Plato tries to explain them by the story of the Demiurge in Timaeus. But that, after all, is myth. Plato gives us no reason to believe in a Demiurge, and in any case the Demiurge does not account for the existence of matter or the receptacle. So the changing world of matter and space is for Plato, as for Parmenides, ultimately irrational. Parmenides had the courage to say that the changing world is therefore unreal. Plato does not go quite this far; rather, he ascribed a greater degree of reality to the Forms than to the sense-world. But we must question Plato’s assumption that there are degrees of reality. What does it mean to say that one thing is “more real” than another?

The picture should be clear by now. Though Plato is far more sophisticated than the pre-Socratics, his position, like theirs, incorporates rationalism and irrationalism. He is rationalistic about the Forms, irrationalistic about the sense-world. For him, reason is totally competent to understand the Forms, incompetent to make sense of the changing world of experience. Yet he tries to analyze the changing world by means of changeless Forms, an irrational world by a rationalistic principle. Eventually, in the Parmenides, he has the integrity to admit that his fundamental questions remain unanswered; see fig. 2.2.

Fig. 2.2. Plato’s Rationalism and Irrationalism

With Plato as with the pre-Socratics, the tension between rationalism and irrationalism has a religious root. If Plato had known the God of Scripture, he would have known in what fundamental ways our reason is competent, yet limited. And he would have understood that the world of change is knowable, but not exhaustively, because God made it that way. He would also have been able to consult God’s revelation for ethical guidance, rather than teaching his students to rely on the abstract Form of the Good, which has nothing specific to say to them.

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John Frame is the author of many books, including the four-volume Theology of Lordship series, and previously taught theology and apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia) and at Westminster Seminary California.

John M. Frame (BD, Westminster Theological Seminary; AM, MPhil, Yale University; DD, Belhaven College) is J. D. Trimble Professor of Systematic Theology and Philosophy, Emeritus, Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando.

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^[1] Diogenes Allen, Philosophy for Understanding Theology (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), 20. Allen’s further comments on this issue are helpful.

^[2] And if anyone asks the relation of goodness to the God of the Bible, the answer is as follows: (1) Goodness is not something above him, that he must submit to; (2) nor is it something below him, that he could alter at will, but (3) it is his own nature: his actions and attributes, given to human beings for imitation. “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48).

^[3] His example is the beauty of a boy, as a pederastic love interest. As did many other Greek thinkers, Plato favored homosexual relationships between men and boys, another indication of how far the Greeks were from the biblical revelation. Paul’s argument in Romans 1 presents homosexuality as a particularly vivid example of the depths to which people fall when they reject God’s revelation.

^[4] In Phaedo, the soul is only the higher part, but in Phaedrus, the soul includes all three parts, even prior to its bodily existence.

^[5] Donald Palmer, Looking at Philosophy: The Unbearable Heaviness of Philosophy Made Lighter (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing, 1994), 73.

Plato famously creates “two worlds”: the world perceived by the senses and the world perceived by the mind. The world of the senses is impermanent and shifting (more on that later), while the world of reason is eternal and unchanging. Individual things may become more or less beautiful, but beauty itself never changes. Individual dogs may come and go out of existence, but what it is to be a dog never changes. These two worlds are, of course, only two different aspects of the same world—there is only one world. But the spiritual realm is more fundamental and real than the physical. The one is eternal and unchanging, while the other is transitory and quickly shifts. The physical realm derives its being and reality from the spiritual. If beauty didn’t exist, nothing could be beautiful. If there were no such thing as what it is to be a human being, then no human beings would exist. Even the colors and shapes that are basic to physical objects have a nature or essence that makes them what they are. There are such things as redness and being square.

This view explains what is otherwise a very puzzling feature of our language. We have nouns that are names for individual things like “Bob Dylan” or “the Empire State Building,” but we also use nouns for things that are not individual, but are common to multiple individuals, such as “house,” “dog,” “red,” and “beauty.” The name “Bob Dylan” refer to only one object. But “house” is quite different. There are many houses, each of which is equally a house. There’s only one thing that is truly Bob Dylan. So why do we call multiple things by the same name? The most natural explanation is that there is something in common to all those things, by virtue of whose presence we apply the same name. There is something shared by all houses by virtue of which we call them a house. This shared thing, Plato says, is a “form” (eidosor idea, sometimes translated “Form” or “Idea”) or “essence” (ousia). The form or essence is what the thing really is.

We cannot explain the world around us without including these forms or essences. They make things what they are, even more than the material out of which they are composed. They tell us what kind of thing something is—where it fits into the overall scheme of the world. It’s not just “that thing”; it’s “a book.” Yes, it is a concrete, specific thing, but its essence tells us what kind of thing it is—where it fits in our taxonomy of being. Things would not be what they are without the presence of these essences. And individual things become what they are through participation in these nonphysical essences.

The relationship between these two worlds is one of dependence—the material depends on the spiritual—though Plato famously waffles on the precise language we should use to express this relationship. He generally calls it “participation”; the physical and temporal participates in the spiritual and eternal. The spiritual and eternal comes to bepresent in the physical as things change over time. So a pile of lumber, when acted upon by an agent with the knowledge to bring about the change, can be transformed into a house. “House” comes to be present in the wood through the activity of the homebuilder. What a house is imposes limits and constraints on how the builder can build it. A house can only come into being if it fits in with what it is to be a house, something that is eternal and unchanging. The spiritual structures the physical, and the physical is what it is only through its incomplete though genuine participation in the more than physical realm.

The spiritual world is the rational world. The nymphs and centaurs of Greek mythology were spiritual beings present in the Greek imagination. Plato, like philosophers before him, rejects these mythological entities in favor of rational, organizing structures. Without the spiritual and rational, the physical world would be disorganized chaos, with no structure whatsoever. In his dialogue Gorgias, he says it would be a “world-disorder,” rather than a “world-order.”^[1]

Christians can appreciate this insistence upon the spiritual, while still recognizing that Plato’s view is ultimately unsatisfying. That there is a pervasive spiritual aspect to creation, present everywhere, is certainly true, but because Plato does not have an adequate theology, the complete nature of the spiritual world is unknown to him.^[2] Compared with materialism, this view is attractive. But it is a long way from a recognition of the true Creator.

In Christianity, there is room for both angels and natural laws, but always derived from the sovereign hand of their Creator. At creation, God made everything out of nothing, by the word of his power. Creation is the manifestation of the glory of God’s eternal power, wisdom, and goodness. That it is structured rationally and orderly is implied by its being caused by wisdom. Platonism, in its insistence on the reality and fundamentality of the nonphysical, concurs with this part of Christian truth. There is an orderly, rational world, which consists of more than the material and which is ultimately comprehensible only when we see the eternal, yet imminent, source of that order.

Later philosophers will question whether Platonic forms are the only way to explain the rational structure of the universe. Aristotle, for example, agrees that there are forms, but he disagrees that they exist in a separate realm or world. For Aristotle, the forms are real and nonphysical, but are only immanent in physical things. There is an essence of beauty, but that essence only exists in beautiful things—it does not and cannot exist anywhere else.^[3]Aristotle also draws a distinction between essential forms, which tell us what kind of thing something is, and accidental forms, which tell us an attribute of a thing, but not what kind of thing it is.^[4] So “red” and “book” are both forms, but they are not quite the same kind of forms. If something is a book, we know what category of being it falls into, since being a book tells us about its essential nature. But if something is red, we don’t yet know its essence. There are red books, red cups, and red dresses. Each of those is a different kind of thing, though each is red. Furthermore, there are not only individual things and forms, but also different kinds of forms: essential ones (which are necessary to the object and are what the object is) and accidental forms (which are not part of the object’s nature but are still truly present in the object). Plato himself seems to be moving toward this distinction in his later dialogues.^[5]

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David Talcott’s publications have appeared in numerous outlets including Public Discourse, Eikon: A Journal of Biblical Anthropology, Human Life Review, and First Thingsonline.

David Talcott (PhD, Indiana University) is fellow of philosophy and the graduate dean at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. He is a program manager for truthXchange and a ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church of America.

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^[1] Gorgias 508a. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of Plato in this book are taken from The Complete Works of Plato, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1997).

^[2] See chapter 8 for additional discussion of Plato’s theology.

^[3] See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I.6, for one example of this argument, which is present in a number of places in Aristotle.

^[4] See Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book VII, for one place where he discusses this distinction. Aristotle’s discussions of these issues are notoriously dense and difficult.

^[5] See, for example, Sophist226b–231d.

Central to the whole of the gospel, the “good news” of Christianity, is the person of Jesus. Apart from Jesus, there would be no Christian religion. At the same time, a person’s view of Jesus will inevitably define the character of the “Christianity” that he propounds.

Essentially two basic views of Jesus may be proposed, although these two opposing views will come to expression in multiple ways. Jesus in his person and work may be viewed either from a naturalistic or from a supernaturalistic perspective. Either (1) God the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of this cosmos has intervened in a miraculous manner through the person of Jesus or (2) Jesus, his teachings, and his actions are analyzed from the perspective of the boundaries imposed by the naturalistic realities commonly used to distinguish the “credible” (the believable) from the “incredible” (the unbelievable). Unless, of course, a person is quite happy to base his religious faith on mythology.

Without question the four Gospels—the Synoptics and particularly John—represent Jesus as a supernatural person manifesting supernatural powers. This man walks on water, stills the storm with a word, multiplies five loaves and two fishes to feed five thousand. He even raises the dead. He regularly functions well beyond the limitations of normal, natural reality.

Even beyond these testimonies of the miraculous works of Jesus, the most thoroughly supernaturalistic affirmations regarding the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, are the statements that attest his preincarnate state. Jesus Christ had an existence as God himself in all divine glory before he took on the nature of humanity. But how could this affirmation be regarded as reality in a naturalistic worldview? From a naturalistic perspective, only as myth and no more could the man Jesus have existed before the world in which we live from day to day.

Yet the united testimony of Scripture repeatedly affirms his eternal preexistence before his appearance in mortal flesh and blood. Reading no further than the opening verses of John’s Gospel makes that fact apparent:

In the beginning [!] was the logos, and the logos was face to face with God, and the logos was God. . . . And the logos became flesh. (John 1:1, 14)

What is this logos? The logos is the divine personhood that gives purpose to and makes sense out of the whole of reality in this world. Jesus is this same eternal logos embodied in human flesh and spirit, situated in time and space. He resides eternally in inseparable unity with the essence of God the Father, he came from the Father, and he returned to the Father. This concept of the eternal logos who is the Son of God testifies to the true nature of Jesus and the Christian gospel as supernatural to the ultimate.

But how did Jesus view himself? What may be discerned in the Gospel records that define the self-consciousness of Jesus? The progress of revelation from the earliest stages of new covenant realization to the promise of the consummation encourages an exploration of Jesus’ testimony concerning himself. Before considering the distinctive witness of the writers of the four Gospels, it is necessary to explore Jesus’ self-testimony to his own personhood. Indeed, except for the witness of the Old Testament Scriptures (a witness that must be given its full weight), the testimony provided by the four Gospels is the only “Jesus” that can be known. Yet a careful analysis of the Gospels may enable us to uncover Jesus’ self-testimony concerning himself. His person, his teaching, his miracles, his death, resurrection, and ascension as perceived by himself must be explored if Jesus is to be rightly understood for who he actually is. Later the effort will be made to examine the distinctive witness of the various Gospel writers. But first, the self-testimony of Jesus concerning his person and work must be examined.

Jesus’ Self-Testimony regarding the Witness of the Old Covenant Scriptures concerning Himself

One aspect of the self-testimony of Jesus should not be overlooked. It is Jesus’ own assertions regarding the witness of the old covenant Scriptures concerning himself. This witness concerning his person as found in the old covenant Scriptures would have preceded his own appearance among humanity. He confronts his adversaries by saying:

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life. Yet these same Scriptures are the very ones that testify about me. (John 5:39–40)

In this same discourse Jesus declares, “If you were believing Moses, you would be believing me [ἐμοί], for it was concerning me [ἐμοῦ] that [Moses] wrote” (John 5:46). By these words Jesus claims a unique role in relation to the Scriptures of the old covenant. What other person could so boldly and convincingly claim that these old covenant writings speak so specifically and holistically about himself? Indeed, in generalities a claim may be made. Occasional prophecies about John the Baptist and Judas become evident. But in terms of prophetic words in the old covenant Scriptures that anticipate all the major elements of a person’s life and work, only Jesus can make this claim with any degree of credibility.

Is this witness of Scripture about Jesus, given five hundred, seven hundred, a thousand, fifteen hundred years before his appearance in history, to be regarded as a naturalistic phenomenon? Or is not this written testimony, by its very nature of anticipating persons and events centuries before their occurrence, to be viewed as supernaturalistic in its essence? Does not this phenomenon provide clear testimony to its divine origin by unfolding the eternal plan of God for the redemption of fallen humanity hundreds of years before the actual occurrence of these events?

Jesus goes one step further in defining his relationship to the old covenant Scriptures. People who do not genuinely believe the writings of Moses will not be able to believe Jesus’ words. As he says, “If you are not believing in the writings [of Moses], how will you be able to believe in my words [τοῖς ἐμοῖς ῥήμασιν]?” (John 5:47). In other words, anyone not truly believing in the old covenant Scriptures will not be able to believe in Jesus. Contrariwise, anyone truly believing in the old covenant Scriptures will inevitably believe in Jesus once the person hears of him.

These claims of Jesus regarding his relation to the old covenant Scriptures are indeed noteworthy. No other person could make these comprehensive claims with any semblance of authenticity. As this current study of progression within the New Testament proceeds, numerous particulars of the direct relation of Jesus to the Scriptures of the old covenant will be explored. But these generalized testimonies about Jesus’ own self-consciousness regarding his relation to the old covenant Scriptures may serve as an appropriate introduction to the subject. By this testimony, Jesus may clearly be regarded as unique.

If you have not done so in the past, do so now. Search the Scriptures of the Old Testament. If you truly desire to know God and understand his plan for delivering this world from its self-destructive inclinations, see for yourself what these writings say about Jesus. In them you may find fullness of life in relation to God the Creator and Redeemer.

Jesus’ Self-Testimony by His Earliest Recorded Words

Jesus spoke his first words about himself when he was twelve years of age, according to the Gospel records. Although normally treated as a sweet story for children, this incident provides clear insight into Jesus’ self-consciousness. Even with this early utterance, Jesus’ consciousness of himself as unique becomes apparent.

After anxiously searching for Jesus across three days, his distraught mother gives vent to her frustration:

Young child, why have you done this? Ahh! Your father and I have been searching for you in a state of deep distress. (Luke 2:48)

Though only a boy, Jesus replies in a way that provides profound insight into his self-consciousness. He responds to his mother’s frustrations:

Why were you searching for me? Did you not know it was necessary for me to be in the house of my Father? (Luke 2:49)

The contrast between Mary’s reference to herself and Joseph as Jesus’ earthly parents (“your father and I”) and Jesus’ response by identifying his intimate relationship to his heavenly Father (“the house of my Father”) dramatizes his first self-revelation. Completely ignoring his mother’s appeal to his earthly father, Jesus identifies himself with reference to his true and ultimate Father. In addition, he specifies that the temple where he has felt himself to be completely at home is the house of his Father rather than our Father. Jesus’ statement has the effect of excluding his parents from this same intimacy of relationship with the Father. Though only a boy, Jesus affirms his unique relationship as Son in his Father’s house. In New Testament times, people simply did not normally speak about God in such familiar fashion. To personally claim God to be “my Father” went well beyond the accepted mode of expression.

In this context, quite amazing is Jesus’ ongoing relationship to his earthly parents. He returns to Nazareth and lives in submission to them. It may be assumed that this situation prevailed until the beginning of his public ministry when he reached the age of about thirty (Luke 3:23). So even after a clear indicator of his unique personhood as Son to God his Father, Jesus submitted to earthly parents from age twelve to age thirty (2:51).

A later incident clearly displays before a larger audience Jesus’ inherent inclination toward recognizing a more central relationship to God the Father than to his earthly relatives. As Jesus teaches with a large crowd pressing against him, his mother and brothers seek to approach him. Culturally, it would have been expected that special audience would be granted to his immediate relatives whenever they requested it. But Jesus responds by indicating that his disciples—those who do the will of “my Father in heaven”—are his brother, sister, and mother (Matt. 12:46–50; cf. Mark 3:31–35; Luke 8:19–21). Once again, Jesus reveals his distinctive role in relation to the Father in heaven. The self-awareness of sonship to God as manifested at twelve years of age remains with him, even though he practices appropriate respect toward his earthly parents. This unique consciousness of sonship to the heavenly Father provides a foundation for understanding his self-consciousness as Son to the Father as it unfolds throughout the remainder of his life. Consider with all seriousness this affirmation of Jesus while still a young boy. The naturalness with which he speaks of God as “my Father” provides a pure attestation of an innocent but naturally mature young person.

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O. Palmer Robertson is the author of Christ of the Consummation: A New Testament Biblical Theology. Volume 1: The Testimony of the Four Gospels.

O. Palmer Robertson (ThM, ThD, Union Theological Seminary, Virginia) is the founder of Consummation Ministries. Previously, he was director and principal of African Bible University in Uganda and taught at Reformed Theological Seminary, Westminster Theological Seminary, Covenant Theological Seminary, and Knox Theological Seminary. He has also served for many years as a teaching elder in various pastoral roles.