Questions and Objections

The objection is serious and no answer should be given quickly. The argument of the book does not claim that each instance of suffering is individually required, but that a world in which freedom is real cannot be a world in which its misuse is contained to a safe, symbolic dose. What can be said is that the cross places God inside the suffering rather than above it, which is not an explanation of every wound but is a refusal to be exempt from them.

Because the resolution is definitive without being instantaneous in its application. The verdict has been reached; what remains is the working out of it in creatures who were not compelled at the start and are not compelled now. A conclusion imposed before it can be freely received would repeat the error the whole argument avoids.

This is the objection the author considers hardest, and the book declines to soften it. Two things are affirmed: that innocence suffering is never described in Scripture as deserved, and that the argument of the book makes such suffering an indictment of the rebellion rather than of the Creator. Nothing here is offered as consolation to a grieving reader; consolation is a different task from argument.

No. The outcome of the trial was certain because truth was certain, not because the choices were pre-assigned. Foreknowledge describes what will be seen, not what is forced; the distinction is developed in Chapter 4.

The argument is explicitly Christian in its conclusion, since it identifies the cross as the resolution. Its earlier steps — divine sufficiency, freedom, evil as privation — can be examined by any reader, and the book invites that examination rather than assuming agreement.

It depends on there having been a first free refusal by a created will in full knowledge. The book reads the relevant passages as describing such an event; a reader who takes them more symbolically can still follow the structure, provided the refusal itself is real.