Theological Outlines • by • Francis J. Hall

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August 09, 2005

Ch. XII. Q. 77. Evil

EVIL is a quality or relation of things and actions which ought not to be. No thing or act is evil in itself.1

2. Substances, natural things and "natural operations cannot be evil in themselves, because they come from God, who cannot, properly speaking, be the author of what ought not to be.2 Things become evil by creaturely misuse, and actions by perversion from their proper ends. And even so, created natures and functions cannot be wholly nullified. God remains potentially present in any case, and absolute evil cannot be actualized.3 Thus a thing or act may at the same time be both good and evil, good for what it naturally is and evil for what it is unnaturally and perversely employed by creaturely wills.

3. Evils are commonly classified as metaphysical, physical and moral, either in themselves or in their causation. Metaphysical evils, or limitations which inhere in infinitude and in the laws of growth, are evil only in a metaphorical sense. Physical evils, or sufferings, so far as they do not belong to the metaphysical class, are either useful safeguards against injury, indispensable conditions of moral discipline and development, or proper consequences of moral evil. A world without pain would not afford a suitable sphere for human growth; and its unequal distribution appears to be unavoidable, an evil only in the metaphysical or metaphorical sense.4

4. That a thing or act ought not to be—the only proper sense in which it can be called evil is essentially a moral proposition. And the problem of evil is to explain the permission by a perfectly righteous God of what ought not to be, in a world of which He is the omnipotent Creator and Governor.

5. Considered intellucutally, or in the abstract, this problem cannot be adequately solved by us, but we are enabled to face the problem without loss of faith by several reasons: (a) The evidences in general of divine righteousness are sufficient to overcome the doubts which unsolved problems raise; (b) The divinely constituted possibility of human sin appears to be a necessary condition of human probation and development, and its actual commission is not due to God but to creaturely wills; (c) The attitude of God towards evil is shown by the death of His Son for our sins, and by His providential overruling of all events for the final triumph of righteousness; (d) This overruling providence, and our own experience of saving grace, alike assure us that an intellectual solution of the problem is unnecessary, because its practical solution is being perceptibly advanced in the Kingdom of God.5

Posted by AKMA at August 9, 2005 09:55 PM

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