The Reopened Court

Chapter 1: Agency Against the Dark

Why Evil Must Be Possible

The problem of evil remains the most durable and emotionally potent argument against the existence of a God who is both perfectly good and unlimited in power and knowledge. When a child dies of cancer, when a tyrant starves a people, when addiction hollows out a life that once held promise, the question rises with particular force: if God is both able and willing to prevent such things, why do they occur? The classical formulation is traced to the Greek philosopher Epicurus, three centuries before Christ, though it reaches us secondhand: no work of Epicurus stating it survives, and the trilemma is preserved by the Christian writer Lactantius, who quotes it in his treatise On the Anger of God (chapter 13, written about AD 313) in order to refute it. In the form Lactantius transmits, it runs as a trilemma. If God is willing to prevent evil but not able, He is not omnipotent. If He is able but not willing, He is not good. If He is both able and willing, why is there evil?

Most of historic Christianity has answered by affirming the absolute attributes and then attempting various theodicies: free-will defenses, soul-making arguments, greater-good explanations, appeals to mystery. These answers have often left the questioner unsatisfied, because the underlying metaphysics still places God as the sole ultimate source of everything that exists. If God created the universe ex nihilo, and if His knowledge and power are unlimited in the absolute sense, then every capacity for evil, every natural catastrophe, and every free decision that produces suffering ultimately traces back to a choice God made when nothing constrained Him. The result is a God who either wills evil or permits it when He could have ordered reality differently at no metaphysical cost. That picture is difficult to reconcile with perfect goodness.

There is another way. It is not the majority position of creedal Christianity, yet it is deeply consistent with the restored theology of the Latter-day Saints and with certain strands of the earliest biblical witness. It begins by refusing the premise of absolute creation from nothing and by treating free agency as an inviolable principle that even God will not, and in a coherent sense cannot, abrogate. On this view, intelligences are co-eternal with God. Matter is eternal. Eternal law and the capacity for self-directed action are not inventions God could have written otherwise. God is the most intelligent organizer and the supreme Father, the one who institutes laws and offers the path of progression so that other free beings may advance toward the glory He enjoys. He does not create the capacity for evil out of nothing and then look the other way. He works within a reality that already includes free agents who can choose for or against the good.

This chapter develops that theodicy. It argues that genuine opposition is a necessity if agency is to be real and if growth into godlike character is to be possible. It examines the early text of Deuteronomy 32, Psalm 82, and the narrative of Job. It contends that this world, with its actual mix of freedom, risk, natural order, and redemptive provision, is the best feasible arrangement available to God given the real constraints of co-eternal intelligences and inviolable agency. If a superior world consistent with those constraints existed, a good and maximally effective God would have ordered it. We inhabit this one; therefore no better feasible alternative was available.

Part I: The Doctrine and Its Support

The Classical Trap

Classical theism, as developed in the synthesis of biblical faith with Greek metaphysics, affirms that God alone is self-existent. Everything else depends upon His creative will: space, time, matter, minds. Creation is ex nihilo, from nothing. God's power is unlimited except by logical contradiction. His knowledge is exhaustive, including future free actions. His goodness is perfect. From these premises the problem of evil follows with nearly syllogistic force. If God created every capacity, including the capacity to choose evil, and if He knew in advance every actual choice that would be made, then the entire history of suffering is something He either intended or willingly accepted when He could have created a different order of things.

Defenses have been offered. The free-will defense, associated in modern form with the American philosopher Alvin Plantinga, argues that a world with free creatures is more valuable than a world of automata, and that free creatures cannot be guaranteed never to choose wrongly. Plantinga's own statement of the premise, in God, Freedom, and Evil (1974), deserves to be quoted, because this book will both borrow it and push past it: "A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all" (p. 30). God can create such creatures, Plantinga argues, but cannot also guarantee their choices, for a guaranteed choice is not a free one; the defense is widely credited, even by its opponents, with retiring the claim that God and evil are logically incompatible. Soul-making theodicies claim that character is formed through struggle and that a world without challenge would leave persons immature; the modern statement is John Hick's Evil and the God of Love (1966), which traces the idea to Irenaeus, the second-century bishop of Lyon, and takes its famous name from a letter the poet John Keats wrote to his brother and sister-in-law on 21 April 1819: "Call the world if you Please 'The vale of Soul-making.'" The reader of this book should see Keats's next sentence too, because he chose a word that will matter later: "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?" A Romantic poet, groping for a better theodicy than the vale of tears, reached for the exact frame a farmhand in New York would shortly publish as revelation: an intelligence, schooled by opposition, becoming a soul. Greater-good arguments suggest that certain evils are necessary conditions for higher goods: courage requires danger, compassion requires suffering to relieve, forgiveness requires offense. Appeals to mystery place the resolution beyond human comprehension.

Each of these has merit within its own frame, yet each remains vulnerable so long as the ex nihilo premise stands. If God is the sole ultimate source, then the free creatures themselves, their natures, and the conditions under which their freedom operates are all His design. He could have created beings whose natures inclined more reliably toward the good, or a world in which the consequences of wrong choice were less catastrophic. The fact that He did not means that the present arrangement, with all its horrors, is the one He preferred among options open to an unlimited power. The free-will defense still leaves God as the one who decided that this degree of freedom, with this degree of destructive capacity, was worth the cost. The soul-making defense still leaves God as the one who decided that this intensity of suffering was the necessary curriculum. The greater-good defense requires that every particular evil be instrumentally justified, a claim that strains credibility against the actual scale of historical atrocity.

Can God Force You? Three Questions for the Reader

Before the argument goes further, stop and answer three questions honestly.

First: can God force you to do something, specifically something you do not want to do? Not arrange your circumstances, not raise the cost of refusal, not attach consequences to your choice. Can He reach into your will and make you choose what you have not chosen, believe what you do not believe, love what you do not love? Most readers formed by classical theology will answer yes, of course; He is omnipotent; He merely refrains.

Second: where is the scriptural citation for that power? Where is the proof text, the passage in which God overrides a human will and produces an unwanted choice?

Third: if there is no scriptural support for it, why do you believe it?

The search comes up empty, and the emptiness is instructive. What the scriptures actually show, from Eden forward, is a God who commands and is refused. He pleads through prophets who are ignored, mocked, and killed. He sends an angel to Laman and Lemuel, who see it, hear it, and remain unchanged (1 Nephi 3:29-31), perhaps the purest demonstration in scripture that even overwhelming manifestation does not compel the will. He knocks Saul to the ground on the Damascus road and blinds him, yet the surrender that follows is Saul's own; "it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks" (Acts 9:5) is the language of a man who could have kept kicking. He commands Jonah, and Jonah sails the other way (Jonah 1:3). God then compels a storm, a fish, and a gourd, everything in the story except the prophet, whose sullen heart He addresses at the end not with force but with a question: "Doest thou well to be angry?" (Jonah 4:4). The pattern is total. Circumstances, yes. Bodies, yes. Consequences, always. The will itself, never. The risen Christ, holding "all power... in heaven and in earth" (Matthew 28:18), stands at the door and knocks (Revelation 3:20). Joshua's charge is "choose you this day" (Joshua 24:15). Lehi's is "free to choose" (2 Nephi 2:27). In Moses 4:3 the Father identifies the destruction of agency as Satan's program, the thing He cast him out for seeking. And Doctrine and Covenants 121 states the principle in its most radical form: "No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned" (D&C 121:41). That is not a concession to human weakness. It is a description of how divine power works, binding even the priesthood that acts in God's name because it binds God first.

The counter-texts deserve honest examination, because they exist and they sort into instructive categories. The hardening of Pharaoh's heart alternates in the Hebrew between Pharaoh hardening his own heart and the Lord hardening it, and the sequence begins with Pharaoh's self-hardening through the first five plagues; the divine hardening that follows reads most naturally as judicial confirmation, God giving a man the full strength of the course he has already chosen, and the Joseph Smith Translation renders every instance as Pharaoh hardening his own heart. The "strong delusion" of 2 Thessalonians 2 is sent to those "because they received not the love of the truth": again a judicial giving-over to a choice already made, the same movement as Romans 1, where three times "God gave them up" to what they had already preferred. Giving a person over to their choice is the precise opposite of overriding it.

A second category is more interesting: texts where God seizes an instrument. The Lord "put a word in Balaam's mouth" (Numbers 23:5), and Balaam confesses he cannot curse whom God has not cursed (Numbers 23:8). That is a real override, of the mouth. Notice what it does not touch. Balaam still wants Balak's fee, still tries three times to earn it, and afterward still counsels Balak to seduce Israel into the sin he was prevented from pronouncing (Numbers 31:16). God commandeered his instrument for an afternoon and never got his heart. The same is true of Saul among the prophets, seized into involuntary ecstasy while his character and his subsequent disobedience remain entirely his own (1 Samuel 19:20-24), and of Nebuchadnezzar, whose faculties are degraded until the praise at the end comes from his restored reason rather than from compulsion (Daniel 4:31-37). Even the lying spirit of 1 Kings 22 works by manipulating information, not will, and God discloses the ruse through Micaiah, handing Ahab an exit he freely declines. The pattern across the whole category: God commandeers mouths, bodies, capacities, and circumstances. He does not manufacture volitions.

The texts most often cited for irresistible grace complete the survey. Ezekiel 36:26-27, "a new heart also will I give you... and cause you to walk in my statutes," and Philippians 2:13, "it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do," are promises of transformation addressed to covenant people already turned toward God; the working-in is the enablement of the willing, and Paul's own preceding breath is "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12). John 6:44's "no man can come to me, except the Father draw him" cannot mean irresistible dragging, because John 12:32 uses the same verb of all men, and the irresistible drawing of all men is universalism, which the proponents of the proof text reject.

Against this stands explicit counter-witness. Stephen tells the Sanhedrin, "ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye" (Acts 7:51), a flat scriptural statement that the Spirit of God is resisted, and successfully. And the incarnate Christ, holding all power, weeps over Jerusalem: "how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not" (Matthew 23:37). The divine will, stated in the first person, blocked by the human will, stated in the second. No text in the canon shows God creating an unwanted choice in a person; the nearest candidates show Him doing something else, and the Lord of the canon says plainly that He willed and they would not.

The spectrum has another end, and it completes the argument. Scripture is not silent about overridden persons; it is full of them. They are the demoniacs. The Gadarene driven among the tombs (Mark 5:1-5), the boy thrown into fire and water (Mark 9:17-22), the mute made to speak and the speaking made mute (Matthew 9:32-33; Luke 11:14): the canon shows plainly that seizure of a person is possible within the created order, and it shows with equal plainness who does it. Possession is never God's method. It is the adversary's signature, the mortal enactment of the program named in Moses 4:3, the destruction of the agency of man, for which he was cast out. So the abstention of God is not incapacity of the created order; the thing can be done, and one kingdom does it constantly. Heaven persuades. Hell possesses. The two kingdoms are distinguished, before any doctrine is stated, by their methods.

And even possession proves the deeper limit. What the demons occupy is the instrument. Legion can drive the Gadarene's body among the tombs and cut it with stones, yet Mark records that at the sight of Jesus the man ran and worshipped (Mark 5:6), the imprisoned self reaching past its occupation, and when the legion is expelled he is found "sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind" (Mark 5:15). The self was captive, not converted. A possessed person's acts are nobody's sins; the tradition has always known that compelled behavior carries no moral agency at all. Satan binds bodies because he cannot conscript souls, and Doctrine and Covenants 93:39 states his actual mechanism: the wicked one takes away light and truth "through disobedience," through the person's own choices, never past them. Which also answers the objection waiting at the end of this road: could God not then have seized the tyrant's body as He once seized Balaam's mouth, and spared the millions? A policy of routine seizure whenever freedom trends toward horror is precisely the plan that was proposed in the premortal council and refused, because a world policed by possession produces no beings capable of exaltation, only inmates. The occasional blocking of an instrument is compatible with a probationary world; government by override is the abolition of it.

There is a still sharper edge, and it is the point of the whole survey: when the evil is cast out, agency returns. Deliverance, in the canon's own dramaturgy, is definitionally the restoration of the captive will. Exorcism is the most frequent class of miracle in Mark's Gospel, and Jesus announces His mission at Nazareth in exactly these terms: "to preach deliverance to the captives... to set at liberty them that are bruised" (Luke 4:18). He describes His own work as the binding of the strong man in order to spoil his goods (Mark 3:27), and the goods are captive persons. Watch the asymmetry at the Gadarene's healing. Satan entered the man uninvited and had to be evicted by force. Christ, having done the evicting, does not move in. The healed man begs to go with Jesus, and Jesus refuses him: "Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee" (Mark 5:19). The first thing the restored man receives is a decision of his own. Even gratitude is not conscripted. And the parable of the swept and garnished house, to which the unclean spirit returns with seven worse (Matthew 12:43-45), completes the doctrine: deliverance restores the conditions of choice, never the choices themselves. The freed agent must fill the vacancy, because the one occupant who will not enter uninvited is the Spirit. The pattern extends across the entire miracle corpus. Sight, hearing, limbs, life itself: every healing repairs the equipment of agency, and one may search the Gospels without finding a single miracle that diminishes anyone's freedom. Hell's program is the contraction of agency. Heaven's program, demonstrated rather than merely asserted, is its restoration.

So the answer to the third question must be given honestly: the belief that God could compel you but declines to is not a scriptural doctrine. It is a philosophical inheritance, absolute omnipotence as the Greeks conceived it, read back into texts that portray something else entirely: a God of command, invitation, consequence, persuasion, and refusal endured. The doctrine sits so deep in the creedal bloodstream that it is mistaken for revelation. Once it is seen for what it is, the problem of evil is transformed, because the accusation "He could have stopped it and did not" quietly assumed the very power the scriptures never grant. How that unscriptured assumption came to govern Christian theology, and what a sound method for weighing such claims looks like, is the subject of a later chapter on how we know. Here it is enough to notice that the whole argument of this book begins not by asking the reader to accept a new doctrine but by asking where the old one came from.

The Restoration Premise

The restored gospel removes the premise. Doctrine and Covenants 93 declares that "intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be" (D&C 93:29). Man was also in the beginning with God. The elements are eternal (D&C 93:33). In the King Follett discourse, the funeral sermon Joseph Smith preached in Nauvoo in April 1844 for a member of that name, his last great doctrinal address and delivered ten weeks before his own death, he taught that God found Himself in the midst of spirits and glory and, because He was more intelligent, instituted laws whereby the rest could have the privilege of advancing like Himself. Creation is organization, not absolute origination. The core of each person, the intelligence, is co-eternal. Agency is therefore not a gift God could have withheld without remainder; it is a fundamental feature of the beings who already exist. God does not invent the capacity for self-direction and then wonder why it is sometimes used poorly. He confronts a pluriverse of uncreated selves and offers them a path.

Under this metaphysics the problem of evil changes shape. God is not the author of the capacity for rebellion. He is the one who offers a path of progression to beings who already possess the power to choose. The plan of salvation is not Plan B after evil appeared; it is the only coherent way to bring about the kind of beings who can enter into the relationship of freely given love and glory that God Himself enjoys. To force the outcome, to abrogate agency even for the sake of eliminating suffering, would destroy the very possibility of exaltation. The limitation is not an arbitrary self-restriction. It is the recognition that certain goods are possible only on the far side of real freedom, and that real freedom includes the real possibility of its misuse.

Opposition in All Things

Lehi's teaching to his son Jacob in 2 Nephi 2 supplies the metaphysical key. "It must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my first-born in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad" (2 Nephi 2:11). Without opposition there is no law, no sin, no happiness, no misery. If these things were not, there would be no God, and we would not exist; all things would vanish away (2 Nephi 2:13).

The point is not that God injects evil into a previously innocent cosmos so that people can suffer and thereby grow. It is that the structure of reality, if it is to contain free agents capable of meaningful choice and progressive development, must include live alternatives. A will that can only move in one direction is not a will. Virtue that cannot be refused is not virtue. Opposition is the condition of agency; agency is the condition of growth into "the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ" (Ephesians 4:13).

This necessity is not limited to human mortality. The premortal council already contained the possibility of rebellion. Lucifer proposed a plan that would have destroyed agency in order to guarantee that not one soul would be lost (Moses 4:1-3). The Father rejected that plan. The war in heaven (Revelation 12:7-9) was fought over the question of whether free beings would be allowed to choose, with all the attendant risk, or whether they would be compelled. The same principle continues to operate in mortality. God will not abrogate the agency even of those who use it to wound. Doctrine and Covenants 93 underscores the point: "All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence" (D&C 93:30).

The necessity of opposition does not romanticize suffering. It does not claim that every instance of pain is finely calibrated for the maximal growth of the one who endures it. It claims only that a reality containing free agents who can become like God must contain the possibility of choosing against the good, and therefore the possibility of the consequences that follow. The actualization of those possibilities is the result of agency exercised, not of a divine decision to inflict harm for its own sake.

The Divine Council: Delegated Stewardship and Its Risks

The oldest recoverable text of Deuteronomy 32:8-9 deepens the picture. A word of background, developed fully in a later chapter: the Hebrew text behind most English Old Testaments is the Masoretic text, fixed by medieval Jewish scribes centuries after Christ, while two far older witnesses exist, the Septuagint, the Greek translation made by Jewish scholars in the third and second centuries before Christ, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, actual Hebrew manuscripts from around the time of Christ, discovered in caves near Qumran beginning in 1947. Where the Masoretic tradition reads that the Most High fixed the boundaries of the nations "according to the number of the children of Israel," two of the Qumran Deuteronomy manuscripts (designated 4QDeutj and 4QDeutq) and the Hebrew underlying the Septuagint preserve an earlier reading: according to the number of the sons of God. When Elyon gave the nations their inheritance, He set the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the divine sons. Yahweh's portion is His people; Jacob is His allotted inheritance.

This is the language of the divine council. The Most High assigns jurisdictions to other divine beings. Real authority is delegated. The nations are not kept under the direct and exclusive micromanagement of the high God; they are placed under intermediate agents who possess genuine stewardship, and those agents can govern justly or unjustly. Psalm 82 stages the courtroom in which they are judged: "How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute" (Psalm 82:2-3). The verdict follows: "You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince" (Psalm 82:6-7). Real status, real stewardship, real accountability. Their sin is the misuse of delegated power to contract the agency of those under their care.

The implications for the theodicy are direct. Intermediate agents possess real agency, and God does not continuously override their choices to prevent every injustice. He assigns authority, allows its exercise, and then judges its results. The same refusal to abrogate agency that preserves human freedom also preserves the freedom of higher stewards, with all the attendant risk. And the standard by which stewards are judged, in heaven as on earth, is precisely the enlargement or contraction of the agency of the weak. The full textual and historical case for the council, including the Ugaritic background and the New Testament's continuation of the pattern, is developed in a later chapter; what matters here is the structural point. Evil and misrule among the peoples can arise from the free exercise of delegated power at every level of reality. God works, judges, and redeems inside an order where free agents, including heavenly ones, can choose for or against the good.

Job: The Refusal to Relinquish Agency

The book of Job supplies one of the most powerful narrative illustrations of the agency theodicy. Job's suffering is extreme and, by the terms of the prologue, not the result of his own moral failure. What matters for our purposes is not only the origin of the suffering but the responses it elicits, and Job's steadfast refusal to surrender his agency under that pressure.

Job's wife speaks first after the second wave of calamity: "Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die" (Job 2:9). Her counsel is an invitation to relinquish agency in its most radical form: stop choosing, stop holding, stop wrestling. Job refuses. "Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?" (Job 2:10). He will not trade his integrity for the relief of surrender.

The friends offer a more sophisticated pressure. Their speeches urge Job to confess sin he has not committed, to accept a tidy retributive theology in which suffering is always the direct consequence of personal wrongdoing, and thereby to resolve the tension by falsifying his own experience. In effect they demand that Job relinquish the agency of honest perception and honest speech: surrender your integrity, accept the false explanation, and the dissonance will cease. Job refuses this too. He maintains that he is not guilty of the crimes they invent. He insists on speaking what he sees. His declaration, "Though he slay me, I will hope in him; yet I will argue my ways to his face" (Job 13:15), is the opposite of relinquishment. It is the determination to keep choosing, keep trusting, and keep speaking truthfully even when the cost is maximal.

The divine speeches from the whirlwind do not give Job a detailed theodicy. They relocate the question, confronting Job with the scale and wildness of a creation that is not centered on human comfort, while refusing to condemn Job's honesty. Job's final response is humility, not the abandonment of agency. The book never requires him to confess sins he did not commit. The integrity he refused to surrender is vindicated; the friends are the ones who must repent. In the framework of this chapter, Job models the proper response to the pressure that suffering and bad counsel exert toward the surrender of agency. Despair says: stop choosing. False theology says: choose the comfortable lie. Job does neither. His refusal is the preservation of the self that can still stand before God and speak, and that preservation is itself a participation in the divine insistence that agency not be abrogated.