Concept

Soul-Making Theodicy

Intro

Why would a loving God allow suffering? Soul-making theodicy gives one answer. It says God permits hardship because hardship is the only way to grow real virtue. A person who has never faced fear cannot be brave. A person who has never been wronged cannot truly forgive. A person who has never struggled cannot truly love. Hardship is the workshop where character is built.

The poet John Keats called the world a vale of soul-making. The philosopher John Hick borrowed the line in 1966 to defend Christianity against the problem of evil. Hick's deeper source was Irenaeus, a Christian bishop in southern France around 180 AD. Irenaeus said God made humans in two stages. First we are made in his image, which is the starting point, the moral infancy. Then we are meant to grow into his likeness, which is the developed, mature, Christlike character. That growth needs friction.

The view does not say suffering is good in itself. It says God uses suffering as the soil where genuine virtue can take root. A child raised in a padded room would not develop courage, patience, or wisdom. Reality has to push back.

This page lays out Irenaeus's original two-stage anthropology, Hick's modern philosophical version, the strengths of the position, the hardest objections (including the suffering of innocent children and animals), and how Christians have answered each one. It sits alongside the free will defense as one of the two main Christian responses to the problem of evil.

In full

A theodicy (justification of God in the face of evil) that holds God permits suffering because suffering is the necessary condition for the formation of mature moral and spiritual character, soul-making, that could not be produced in a frictionless world. Originating with the 2nd-century church father Irenaeus of Lyon (Against Heresies IV.37-39, c. AD 180) and developed in 20th-century philosophy by John Hick (Evil and the God of Love, Macmillan, 1966; rev. 1977), the soul-making theodicy is one of the two principal Christian responses to the Problem of Evil alongside the Free Will Defense.

The slogan, from Hick adapting John Keats: the world is a "vale of soul-making", not a hedonic paradise designed for maximum present pleasure, but a moral nursery designed for the formation of beings capable of mature love, courage, compassion, perseverance, and union with God. The presence of genuine suffering and genuine challenge is the condition, not a defect, of that formation.

This page presents Irenaeus's original frame, Hick's modern development, the strengths of the position, the principal objections and Christian responses, and the apologetic-deployment notes.

The two-stage anthropology (Irenaeus)

Irenaeus distinguished two stages of human formation in Against Heresies IV.37-39:

Stage 1, created in the image (εἰκών, eikōn) of God. Humans begin as morally innocent but immature, like infants, with the capacity for moral development but without yet possessing the developed virtues. Adam and Eve in Eden were good but childlike.
Stage 2, grown into the likeness (ὁμοίωσις, homoiōsis) of God. Humans achieve mature spiritual stature through a process of moral and spiritual development, requiring the exercise of free will under genuine conditions of challenge. This is the telos of human existence.

The Fall, on Irenaeus's reading, is not the catastrophic reversal it is in Augustinian theology, it is a necessary stage in the maturation process, the infant's stumble that begins the long walk toward maturity. The cross of Christ becomes the recapitulation of the entire human journey, completing what Adam failed to complete. (See Against Heresies III.18.7, the famous recapitulatio doctrine.)

The point for theodicy: God's purpose is not to produce a frictionless paradise; it is to produce mature theotic beings. Genuine maturity requires genuine challenge, including the kind of moral evil and suffering that calls forth genuine virtue.

Hick's modern development

John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (1966), reformulated and expanded Irenaeus's frame into the most influential 20th-century theodicy. The key moves:

1. The epistemic distance argument

For free moral development to be possible, humans must exist at a certain epistemic distance from God, that is, God's presence cannot be so manifest that belief and obedience become irresistible. If God's existence were unmistakable, the formation of free moral character would be aborted; the human would not be choosing virtue, only complying with overwhelming force. The hiddenness of God (see Divine Hiddenness) is therefore not a defect but a condition of soul-making.

This is also Hick's answer to Schellenberg's argument from divine hiddenness, though Schellenberg's argument came later and disputes whether the epistemic-distance frame succeeds.

2. The necessary-friction argument

A world without suffering would be one in which:

Acts of courage are impossible (no danger to face)
Acts of compassion are impossible (no suffering to relieve)
Perseverance is impossible (no obstacles to overcome)
Genuine moral choice is impossible (no real consequences)
Mature love is impossible (love requires the possibility of loss)

In such a world, no mature virtues could be formed. The soul-making project itself is foreclosed. So God's permission of suffering is not contradictory to His goodness; it is constitutive of the kind of good world His purposes require.

3. The eschatological resolution

Hick's most controversial move: the soul-making process is not necessarily completed in this life. Hick himself held a form of universalism, that the post-mortem completion of soul-making is open to all souls eventually, since the purpose of the process is the eventual mature theosis of every human. This universalist tail is not required by the soul-making theodicy itself; the standard evangelical adoption keeps the soul-making mechanism for this life and rejects Hick's universalism. (See Hell and Eternal Punishment and Salvation of the Unevangelized for the orthodox alternatives.)

The key claim: whatever happens after death, the purpose-statement of suffering in this life is the formation of mature souls who could not be formed in any other way. The eschatological completion in glory (Romans 8:18, "the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us") vindicates the process retrospectively.

Strengths of the position

1. It answers the gratuitous-evil challenge directly

The atheist challenge (J. L. Mackie, William Rowe): if God exists, suffering of certain magnitudes and distributions is gratuitous, pointless, contributing nothing to any greater good. The fawn burning in a forest fire (Rowe's example) suffers without any morally-sufficient reason. The soul-making theodicy responds that even apparently gratuitous suffering may be morally-sufficient if it contributes to soul-making, either of the sufferer, of observers, or of the larger creaturely community across time. The atheist must show that the suffering is necessarily gratuitous, which is a much stronger claim than apparently gratuitous.

2. It accommodates "natural evil" as well as moral evil

The Free Will Defense handles moral evil (suffering caused by free human choice) but struggles with natural evil (earthquakes, disease, predation). The soul-making theodicy handles both: natural evil contributes to the formation of virtues (compassion in caregivers, courage in survivors, gratitude in the rescued, perseverance in the afflicted) that could not be formed without it.

3. It has biblical resonance

Romans 5:3-5, "we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope." James 1:2-4, "the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing." Hebrews 5:8, "Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered." The New Testament repeatedly frames suffering as the means of spiritual formation, not as a problem to be eliminated. The soul-making theodicy generalizes what the NT already teaches about the suffering Christian to the entire human condition.

4. It explains why God did not just create heaven directly

A standard atheist follow-up: "if God wanted mature loving beings, why not just create them mature?" The soul-making answer: because the maturity that is the product of free moral development is constitutively different from, and more valuable than, the maturity that is the product of fiat creation. The difference between someone who learns to love their enemy through long sanctification and someone who is created loving their enemy is the difference between a developed character and a programmed one. God's project is the former, and the former requires the conditions of this world.

Principal objections and responses

Objection 1, Animal suffering and pre-human evolutionary suffering

If suffering is justified by soul-making, what justifies the suffering of animals (with no rational souls to be made) and the millions of years of evolutionary suffering before any human existed? Hick himself struggled with this and offered partial answers (animal suffering is less acute than human; some animal suffering contributes to the broader ecological-developmental frame; eschatological renewal extends to creation per Romans 8:21).

Christian response. Augustinian theodicists handle this through the Fall extending to all creation (Genesis 3:17-19; Romans 8:20-22, "the creature was made subject to vanity"). Soul-making theodicists augment: animal suffering may have its own teleological role in a creation oriented toward the eschatological new heavens and new earth (Revelation 21) where "the wolf shall dwell with the lamb" (Isaiah 11:6). This is harder territory and the soul-making theodicy alone does not resolve it.

Objection 2, Horrendous evils (Marilyn McCord Adams)

Marilyn McCord Adams (Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, Cornell, 1999) argued that some evils, the Holocaust, child torture, certain individual catastrophes, are so severe that no this-worldly good could outweigh them. The soul-making framework appears to ennoble suffering in a way that becomes obscene at the limit cases.

Christian response. Adams's own answer (which the soul-making theodicy can incorporate): the resolution to horrendous evils is not this-worldly soul-making alone but the vision of God (the beatific vision) which is so good that it retroactively redeems and out-weighs even the most catastrophic this-worldly suffering. Paul: "the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us" (Romans 8:18). The soul-making framework needs an eschatological completion clause to handle horrendous evils, but it is compatible with one.

Objection 3, The "useless" sufferer

Some suffering produces no visible soul-making, the person dies in the suffering, learns nothing, becomes worse. Where is the soul-making justification?

Christian response. (a) The soul-making may be in the observer, the caregiver, the community, not just the sufferer. (b) The completion of soul-making may be eschatological, not temporal, the person broken by suffering in this life may be restored and matured in the resurrection. (c) The framework does not need to identify the soul-making product in every case; it needs to defeat the claim that the suffering is necessarily gratuitous, which is a much weaker burden.

Objection 4, It's still cruel

A purely philosophical response that the suffering serves a purpose may not satisfy the pastoral need of the person suffering. The mother of the dead child does not need a theodicy; she needs presence, lament, and the assurance that God Himself suffers with His creatures (the passibilist tradition; see Classical Theism vs Theistic Personalism).

Christian response. The soul-making theodicy is philosophical, not pastoral. Its job is to refute the atheist claim that the existence of suffering disproves God. The pastoral response to actual suffering, the cross of Christ, the lament Psalms, the presence of the church, the promise of resurrection, is a different work, done in a different mode. Both are needed; neither substitutes for the other.

Soul-Making vs Free Will Defense, complementary, not competing

These two are often presented as alternatives but actually function together:

Defense	What it handles	What it does not handle
Free Will Defense	Moral evil (suffering from free choices)	Natural evil; the question why God permits free will at all
Soul-Making Theodicy	Both moral and natural evil; why God permits the world to be the way it is	The fact that the formation requires risk of damnation

The classical Christian theodicy combines them: God permits free will (Free Will Defense) because the world He is making requires free moral agents (Soul-Making Theodicy purpose), and the suffering attendant on that permission contributes to the soul-making purpose. The two are facets of one larger account, not rivals.

Apologetic deployment

30-second response to the Problem of Evil:

"The Christian framework doesn't claim suffering is meaningless, it claims suffering is the condition under which mature moral character is formed. C. S. Lewis: 'pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.' A frictionless world would produce no virtue, no courage without danger, no compassion without suffering, no perseverance without obstacles, no mature love without the risk of loss. The presence of suffering is part of what makes the formation of real persons possible. That doesn't make any specific suffering not-real; it means the meta-question 'why suffering at all' has a coherent Christian answer."

Live-cite kit:

Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.37-39, recapitulatio doctrine III.18.7 (c. AD 180)
John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (Macmillan, 1966; rev. 1977), modern locus classicus
C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (Macmillan, 1940), popular treatment; the "God shouts in our pain" line (ch. 6)
Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Cornell, 1999), the horrendous-evil refinement
Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford, 2010), Thomistic-narrative theodicy that incorporates soul-making

Pair with: Free Will Defense (for moral evil), Listening Tools #5 (Honoring the Objection, the Problem of Evil is almost never a pure philosophical question, it is almost always a wound; deploy the theodicy after the wound is heard).

Tensions and honest caveats

Hick's universalism is not load-bearing. The soul-making mechanism is compatible with orthodox eschatology; you can adopt the theodicy without adopting universalism. The codex's posture on universalism is preserved in Salvation of the Unevangelized, orthodox Christianity holds a range of positions but generally rejects automatic universal salvation.
The theodicy is philosophical, not pastoral. Deploying it to a grieving person at the moment of grief is malpractice. The pastoral resources are the cross, the lament Psalms, the church's presence, the promise of resurrection.
The Augustinian tradition is suspicious of soul-making theodicy. Augustinians prefer a Fall-based account in which the suffering of the world is the consequence of moral evil entering creation, not the condition for moral development. The two accounts differ in emphasis and can be partially reconciled, but the Augustinian critique (Henri Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 1990) is worth knowing.