Friday in my class we got into a fantastic conversation regarding the problem of evil. The problem wasn't that we didn't have (what we considered to be) good responses to the problem of evil. The problem is, no one is willing to call anything evil any more.
One staff from Minnesota told this story: they set up booths for students on campus to interact with spiritual and personal issues. The first day's question: "how has evil invaded your space?" They thought there would be all kinds of responses: my parents screwed me up, abuse/neglect, concern about the environment, racism or other bad experiences. They got nothing. No one was willing to call anything evil.
The next day they asked a more personal question: "what would you change about your heart?" They expected people to be more hesitant to engage, but just the opposite was true. They couldn't keep up with the numbers of people coming to the table.
I think that there's several reasons why people are hesitant to engage with "evil:"
1. It's been used as a power-grab politically and sociologically/religiously, so people are distrustful that it has any appropriate use.
2. Pluralism convinces us that our perspective is entirely socially conditioned. What we might have historically called evil was just a matter of our viewpoint. If we were Nazi's in Germany, we wouldn't have thought of Nazi Germany as evil. Christopher Columbus was a hero in Western history but certainly "evil" for native peoples. So better not to "label" anything evil at all, because we might just be operating out of social conditioning/our limited historical-cultural context.
3. No one and no thing is ever considered to be entirely evil. All people have circumstances and issues and all situations have nuances that, when seen from a different point of view, might help us to have much more sympathy for the bad thing that has occurred that we might be tempted to call "evil." The Virginia Tech shootings this past spring are a great example of something that certainly wasn't "good" but was complicated by the fact that this kid certainly had psychological and other issues going on in his life. So he wasn't "evil" and neither was this shooting. They're all victims to varying degrees.
I think that this shift from the problem of evil as being the central issue in religious conversation to not being on the table at all is interesting. And certainly post-modern culture has other words that serve as replacements: injustice, oppression and brokenness--these words also function in place of the word "sin" in our culture.
I wonder if these more sociological/psychological approaches are valid in and of themselves or if they can only serve as a starting point for the conversation? In other words, is it necessary to convince someone of the necessity of the existence of evil (and sin instead of just brokenness, for that matter) before we can have a reasonable conversation about the Christian faith?
Oh, and by the way, this is post number 365. Happy Birthday, Piebald Life!
4 comments:
I think there are logical weaknesses in the supposed Christian explanation of evil, or at least what I've been told it is is (i.e., a devil and 2/3 of the spirit population going around causing amuck, all supposedly created by omnipowerful and omniscent God who hates the devil, demons, and evil)...but I think what you say raises the question of whether or evil actually exists or not.
If we cannot define evil, or if everything is a mixture of evil/good, or if evil things cause good, or if God uses evil for good, or if God created evil.....then can we really, really say evil actually exists?
Take the Holocaust. Bad, you say. A despicable evil.
But many people, including Christians, would say that the elements of the Holocaust are in fact good.
For instance, homosexuals and communists were thrown into the fires.
Ask the American pilot who dropped napalm on Vietnamese villages, he would probably say that burning communists is good.
And I'm sure numerous Christians would say the death of homosexuals is not only good, but is God's plan.
I prefer the thiodacy that if God created the world, the world must not be perfect, otherwise the world would be God. Therefore, the world cannot be perfect.
I think the explanation of the devil has some use, but it's best kept as a metaphor for the unknown.
Oh yeah, I think the devil of Job is a different devil from that of the Gospels.
Evil is never good. I surely don't think homosexuals or communists being murdered was a good thing and I seriously doubt that Jesus thought so either. The Holocaust and other such despicable events are a manifestation of evil.
I believe that God did create the world perfect. But I think there is a distinction to be made. Just because the world was orginially created perfect does not equal the world being God, but that the world was in a state of existence that was perfect according to God's will and purpose. It was perfect according to God's design - meaning that the world was still other than God, but perfect in the sense that it was as it was intended to be.
This is where the problem begins. The world was created perfect, but it is no longer. We don't know where evil comes from, but we know that it is a reality. Evil is not merely the sum total of all the bad things that people do, but a more pervasive power that has invaded the world (and I think people do have a sense of that because they recognize situations such as VT in which Cho was in some sense a victim of whatever psychological issues he had). But I think what doesn't happen, is that those psychological issues are not also recognized as a result of evil in the world.
I don't think you can really talk about Christianity without talking about evil. It's the reason Jesus became incarnate . . .
So much hinges on the fact that in Christ there is hope because evil is ultimately overthrown (and not only that, but we are given some power over evil in the present). When we talk about brokenness aren't we really just talking about the reality of evil in our own lives and the world?
"I surely don't think homosexuals or communists being murdered was a good thing and I seriously doubt that Jesus thought so either."
Ah...so Jesus wasn't the same God as Yahweh, if we believe that Yahweh wrote or inspired the Old Testament.
"The Holocaust and other such despicable events are a manifestation of evil."
When I read the Old Testament, the genocide, the murder of homosexuals, everything...surely, that can't be the God of "good." Unless of course, genocide, murder of homosexuals, are in fact, good.
"was perfect according to God's design"
Thus, the devil and demons were created perfectly, we should believe in them. Thus, their fall and all their actions are all part of God's plan. Hence, they must be acting out God's plan.
To a large degree, the world is perfect. But, many things attributed as "evil" have good elements - predation, homosexuality, our pain neurons, and in some ways, disease.
Perhaps "evil" was necessary, just to make things interesting.
I could go on and on. But this illustrates the confusion if we seriously look at the details through the lens of good v. evil.
All this might be interesting to ponder, but I don't think the answer is clear. Or at the very, very least, it doesn't make sense.
I probably talk about "brokenness" in the majority of my longer/slightly-more-serious day-to-day conversations. Like all words, it can mean something different to different people, but if used and understood well, I think it's seriously one of the most useful words introduced into evangelicalism!
I think to many sin feels like a finger pointing at us from the beginning and says very little beyond "you suck." Brokenness forces us to acknowledge the healing needed in the world and within ourselves before any fingers are pointed-- at which pt I think it's easier to see our need for a power beyond ourselves. I think it's similar the difference between Jesus only forgiving the paralyzed man and also healing his legs. People don't want a Jesus apathetic about their hurt, and Jesus doesn't want people to think he's apathetic about their hurt. I wish people didn't think talking about sin meant Jesus was apathetic about anything, but because of the ways it's been tossed around often without the radical love that puts it in context, people are a lot less stand-off-ish to the language of brokennness (even if their brokenness itself still scares them).
Eventually it's useful to be able to talk about evil and sin (since the Bible, other Christian writings, etc. are going to use those words) but if that's not the language that makes sense to people from the beginning, my idea is to start with brokenness and move toward establishing a definition of brokenness that truly encompasses other words like evil and sin or introducing more traditional words into the conversation, whichever seems it will be clear and beneficial to the conversation at that point. Their current definition of brokenness MAY just be a starting point, but that definition can sometimes be expanded, letting brokenness be useful for a good long while.
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