A little of this, a little of that

There's a bit of Conventional Wisdom that goes something along the lines of: "To really understand X, you've got to understand the opposite of X." This is also sometimes clarified with: "To really understand X, you've got to participate in the opposite of X."

Whether we're talking about food, "I didn't know how great my Mom's cooking was until I got to the College Cafeteria!" or love, "I didn't know how horrible my previous boyfriend was until I started dating Macon," or automobiles, "Wait until you drive her Lexus, then you'll know how lowly is your Yugo," comparisons are often quite efficient and sufficient for clarifying information and knowledge.

But it's when we start drifting into a kind of Yin-Yang theory of opposites that we can find ourselves in theological trouble. That is, where we begin to think that we must know the False if we are to know the True, or even more sinister: that the True must have a little bit of the False in it.

This was the original temptation: Eve & Adam knew The Good, The True, The Real in the garden. Certainly they did not know the depths of these, but they knew the beginnings of them and God had prepared the Earth as a place where they and their descendants would grow up in their knowledge of them. One way to see the temptation by the evil one was one of comparison: knowing The Good is not enough, to really know something, you've got to know both The Good and The Evil. "Then you shall be as God."

But is this the case? Had God handicapped Adam & Eve in his creation of them when he forbade them to eat of the knowledge of Good & Evil? I think that the witness of Genesis is that God's creation was "very good," and that Adam & Eve had no need to know Evil in order to know the Good.

It's strange, then, to hear some Christians say of sins (either by them or against them), "Oh, that had to happen so that God could teach me how much he [loves me/is best for me/is in control of my life]." I scratch my head and wonder, "What kind of God is that who can't teach us Goodness, Truth & Life simply by using Goodness, Truth & Life?"

I think that two things are at play here. The first, and probably the lesser of the two, is that we use this approach to justify sins (either committed by us or against us). And by this I mean quite literally the justification of sin: the sin is now "good" because "good" came from it.

The other thing at play is that we confuse God's redemptive act of bringing good out of the jaws of evil (if you will) for God's needing the act of evil to teach us some important life lesson. For example, when my son is tall enough to reach the gas cooktop in our kitchen, I will need to teach him that he is not to touch the burners when they're lit. What I want is for him to learn from me simply by listening to & believing me. And this is entirely possible! Not only that, but I would add that should he go through his whole life without burning himself because he believed me, his knowledge of gas burners is every bit as robust as someone's knowledge of burners who, in fact, burned their hands.

At the same time, should Aidan disbelieve me and burn his hand, I will take that experience and use it as a "teachable moment" and redeem the pain & terror by bringing good from it: the good of learning about fire, heat, & the burners. But I do not think it correct to retrospectively decide, "It's good that he burned himself, because he learned something," or, "Well, he had to burn himself in order to know that he shouldn't touch the flame." (What kind of terrible father would I be, if I took that view of how Aidan must learn things?)

No, I think what we must say of the burned hand experience (and of all such experiences) is that, by God's grace, we can learn something from it, or put another way, that nothing, not even tears, are "wasted" in God's economy. But we need not, nor should not, go so far as to say, we had to know or experience evil to know the good. Thanks be to God that he is quite capable of teaching us the good without resorting to or being dependent upon evil.

[Editor's Note: The return of your usual Piebald Life poster, Alex, is nigh upon you. Keep your lamps full of oil, and you wicks trimmed as you await his return from the Land of Goshen. In the meantime, Macon is guest-blogging. Macon generally shines his 5 watt bulb along the Austin Greenbelt, in the shadow of his brother and sister, and at the Stokes Kith & Kin blog. ]