A particularly thorny dilemma for Christian apologists over the centuries has been the challenge of “theodicy” — or providing a justification for how an all-powerful, all-loving God can co-exist with the very real and palpable evil we see in the world.

If anything, 2020, and at least the first few weeks of 2021, hasn’t made “the problem of evil” any less daunting. From widespread political violence to a global pandemic, racial strife to heightened levels of depression and addiction, the evidence for evil in our world certainly seems to be mounting.

And it’d be utterly foolish, as someone trying to help point another toward belief in God, to suggest otherwise. The evil that we see and personally experience ourselves is a serious problem, a grave injustice, a scandal demanding an answer. Despite the proliferation of moral relativism in our society, the reality of evil — its ugliness, its deviation from what is good for us and what we desire — seems to be something that we can’t escape, and even agree upon, at least in certain cases.

But this raises a question, a dilemma, even more fundamental than the problem of evil. I call it “the problem of good.”

Because to acknowledge the existence of evil, to acknowledge that something has “gone wrong,” as so many people have when it comes to contemporary America, we must first acknowledge that there is something good that can go wrong. And it’s this goodness that is more foundational, even more mysterious and harder to account for, than evil, which St. Augustine described as only ever a “privation” — or lack — of the good.

Canary on a skull

A beautiful encapsulation of the problem of good is found in Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” The author’s reflection upon the seemingly senseless cruelty of the natural world — prompted by observing a frog eaten inside-out by a giant water bug — leads her to “bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull.” Evil, Dillard suggests, cannot be understood except against the wider backdrop of beauty, “a grace wholly gratuitous.”

Evil is real, seems more forceful in our day and demands a response. But when we try to account for it without first acknowledging the primacy of goodness and its transcendent source, we risk errant responses, such as nihilism — which accounts for evil by denying any meaning — or totalitarianism — which provides political solutions to what is ultimately a spiritual challenge.

Instead, when we encounter evil in our lives, we can practice a kind of “spiritual jujutsu,” using its own forcefulness against it. Since evil is the lack of something good, each experience of hurt, loss and injustice includes within it the opportunity to acknowledge the good; to remember and express gratitude for the “wholly gratuitous” graces of our lives that we so often take for granted — family, health, pleasure, joy, life itself — and the God who so freely gives them. This doesn’t undo the pain and wrongness of evil, but it can help us enter the only posture that makes sense in the face of it: childlike trust in the Lord.

Liedl lives and writes in the Twin Cities.