Defining Evil

In the previous sermon, we defined God, as it were, as absolute goodness, in whom there is no darkness. Philosophers throughout history have come up with many different definitions of evil. Some have considered evil as an opposing or competing substance to the good. This is found in Plato and is recapitulated in the later Gnostics. This is a vision of evil which would understand God to be coexistent with evil for all eternity. God is the supreme good, and is in forever competition with evil. Some, like Plotinus, understood evil to be nothing more than a sub-par good, or a good that falls short of what it is supposed to be. Aristotle comes closest to formulating what Christian theology alone gives account for, but he did it somewhat haphazardly, almost unintentionally it seems. He understood evil to be a particular species of privation or deprivation. Orthodox Christianity, however, has understood evil to be an absence of a good that ought to be but is not. Evil describes a circumstance in which some good thing ought to be present but is not. So, evil is the privation of good.

This definition helps us to avoid three errors. The first would be the error we’ve already mentioned, where evil is a competing substance with good. This position is called substance dualism and is essential to Docetistic and Gnostic theology. The other error would be that which says evil is some substance other than goodness created by God. Remember the last sermon, we’ve already denied this as a possibility. God cannot create that which cannot be created. Something that is not a substance cannot properly be understood as that which has being. Rather, goodness is the substance and evil describes the privation or perversion of it. Or, all being is good, and evil simply describes the destruction of being. This is based on the Christian doctrine of creation which we will explore in a moment. There is a third error to be avoided by our definition which is more subtle. If evil is a mere absence of goodness, it would follow that if we do not have some good thing, like a pet lion or the power of flight, we must then be evil. But this is avoided by our definition of evil which states that evil is a privation of goodness which ought to be present but is not. God did not endow man with the power of flight, so to not have it is not evil because it isn’t something man ought to have—God did not constitute man a flying being, nor does He require it of him morally.

Again, our definition of evil is a privation of a good that ought to be present but is not. And this avoids three errors: (1) Gnostic dualism; (2) the allegation of evil in God; and (3) the reduction of every instance of absent goodness to evil. As far as I can tell, our definition avoids all three of these errors. The only question now is, Is it a correct definition? We’ve seen that it holds up against error, but is it what the Bible teaches? Perhaps what we are calling errors is that which the Bible actually endorses. So, we need to investigate the validity of our definition, and we will do this in virtue of revisiting creation.