In Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God , Marilyn McCord Adams uses another kind of defense for theism. In this reading Adams argues that the problem of evil has been directed at theism in general, which in this case has caused readers on either side of the debate to miss how important and how unique Christianity is to the problem of horrendous evils on this view. She argues that Christianity has a variety of unique tools that can meet the problem of evil more effectively when not abstracted into simply classical theism.
Adams’ account has the kind of honest, penetrating discussion of real evil in our world about which philosophy would do well to take notice. The little child kidnapped and murdered; the innocent family killed by the drunk driver; the millions murdered by Hitler; these examples all demand answers for the individual occurrences of evil, according to Adams Specifically, she writes that At a minimum, God’s goodness to human individuals would require that God guarantee each a life that was a great good to him/her on the whole… God would have to… [give each person's life value]… by giving it positive meaning through… great enough good within the context of his/her life” (31, emphasis hers). This stunning claim will likely make the theistic philosopher rock back on his/her heels for a moment. Surely, we cannot be called to account for every individual evil!
Adams believes that the Christian theist can indeed do so, not by taking the unconvincing route of arguing that such persons are having their character built by suffering, but by appealing to God’s goodness to each individual person. Specifically, Jesus Christ demonstrates this goodness of God within Christianity. After a penetrating discussion of purity and defilement on Christianity and Judaism, Adams argues that in Christ, God takes the approach of joining us in our defilement that is, our suffering of horrendous, individual evils. This act of Christ means that our defilement from sin, evils, and even horrendous evils has the possibility of becoming holiness. Thus, through Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit’s redefining rebirth of baptism, God offers the greatest good to every individual
Through this self-defilement which leads to holiness, God invests meaning by “…being good to all created persons–that is, in seeing to it that each gets a life that is a great good to him/her on the whole, one in which any participation in horrors is not merely balanced off but defeated Adams’ thesis, then, is that in Christ, God provides the defeater for horrendous evils by ensuring that each person’s life is a great good. Here Adams rides a fine line of universalism it seems as though she may be saying every person is indeed saved through Christ, eventually, but her account can be easily modified by those who reject universalism–for one can argue that God provides the defeater simply by offering the possibility of such goods to each person. And God is good to each person by providing such an opportunity.
Adams uses the rest of her work to argue further how God’s participation in suffering demonstrates that God has been immeasurably good to each individual. I find Adams’ argument particularly enlightening. Her emphasis on the individual evils of the world is a breath of fresh air as well as a new challenge to Christian philosophers. We do need to address individual atrocities. This doesn’t mean we need to go through, case-by-case, and provide theodicies for each event. Rather, as Adams urges, we can address this by arguing that God is good to every individual through his redemptive act by Jesus Christ.
My main critique of Adams in this work is that while I find her issues with abstracting the problem of evil to hit the mark some of the time, I think she underestimates the value of some of the analytic responses to the problem of evil. Certainly, taking evil as a sum total and arguing that God could have some reason for permitting this much evil to occur downplays the importance of the evil actions towards individuals, but there is a place for such defenses within philosophy. Rather than jettisoning these types of answers, then, I think we would be best suited adding Adams’ defense to the many-faceted response to the problem of evil from Christian philosophers of religion.
My first objection is that she looks at the problem of evil as residing fundamentally in the finitude of creatures. She says that the main hurdle to atonement lies not in what we as people do but what and who we are. In the face of the holy, to use Otto's key term, `we have no more rightful place in God's household than worms and maggots do in ours nothing we could naturally be or do would make us suitable for divine company. There's just a `size gap' between us and God We are also `metaphysical stragglers', who in various ways break down normal categories, and therefore in Douglas's terms are prime candidates to be unclean. Like fish without scales or anteaters that climb trees, we by our very natures challenge the orderliness of the cosmos, and are thus metaphysically unclean. It is thus our nature as the kind of creatures we are that leads Isaiah to declare paradigmatically in the face of God's holiness that he is a man of unclean lips who dwells among a people of unclean lips. Certainly some strands of Christian theology, particularly in the East, have taken this view, but I think they represent a minority. The majority opinion has been that human nature (finite and however odd though it may be) is one thing, and sin is quite another. Like the rest of creation, after all, we are part of what God made and pronounced to be good. As Reinhold Niebuhr put it, `The fragmentary character of human life is not regarded as evil in Biblical faith because it is seen from the perspective of a center of life and meaning in which each fragment is related to the plan of the whole, to the will of God' (Nature and Destiny of Man, 1.168). It is not a bad thing to be finite, if you are made by a good God and can accept your finitude.
To me, Adams's near collapse of the categories of finitude and sin seems a dramatic move. Making it would require a good many changes at other points in standard Christian theology, and at minimum Adams needs to say a good bit more, I think, to make that all seem like a good idea. On the face of it, I would say that our inability to face God's holiness derives more from how we have misused what we were given than from how we were made, and Adams did not persuade me of her contrary view. Second worry: Adams puts little emphasis on the distinctions between the victims and the perpetrators of horrendous evils. Both suffer affliction, and sin is, for Adams as for Julian of Norwich, a form of suffering (163). One of Adams's criticisms of liberation theology is that it too sharply divides people into victims to be comforted and oppressors to be punished. She sees everyone trapped together in horrendous evil and in need of God's mercy. In this I think she captures something Christians need to say. When we see the relatives of the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing, and then see young Timothy McVeigh, who did this horrible thing out of motives and a life experience we cannot understand and now may never know, our prayer must surely be, `God have mercy on them all'. Adams and I both, I gather, at least hope for universal salvation, so I do not mean to insist that perpetrators have to get eternal punishment. But does not God's mercy on victims and perpetrators take different forms? Don't we need to attend to those differences?