Events of Sept. 11 raise awareness, questions about evil
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___Jarred from an attitude of invincibility by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, many Americans today are struggling to redefine their understanding of evil in the world.
___Is Osama bin Laden the proverbial personification of evil?
___Are structures such as bin Laden's Al Qaeda network demonic?
___Do the former Taliban rulers of Afghanistan represent the power of Satan in human form?
___Questions such as these tap into so
me of the most difficult theological issues of the ages. How to understand the existence and nature of evil has puzzled theologians for centuries.
___Yet in some ways, the events of Sept. 11 have given Americans a much clearer view of the reality of evil, according to some theologians, philosophers and ethicists.
___"I see this in one tragic way as the vindication of the Christian position on the nature of human beings," said Steven Davis, professor of philosophy at Claremont-McKenna College in California and author of the book "Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy."
___"This is confirmation that the heart is desperately wicked and that our righteousness is like filthy rags," added Davis, who said he believes religions or philosophies that don't take into account the possibility of radical evil are unrealistic.
___At the same time, the events of Sept. 11 are "a real wakeup call for educated people around the world," added the Presbyterian professor. "A lot of educated and sophisticated people were very uncomfortable with accusing anybody of being evil or any act of being evil. They said others just had different sets of hopes and desires and that nothing really constitutes evil."
___After Sept. 11, that argument "no longer carries the same weight as before," Davis asserted. "It is very difficult to hold that position in light of 9/11.
___"The concept of something being evil in and of itself is something Americans are much more comfortable with than they were prior to 9/11."
What constitutes evil?
___Davis and other mainstream Protestant theologians said they have no difficulty acknowledging the existence of evil in the world.
___"I would define evil as anything contrary to the will of God, even the last sin I committed," Davis said. "Evil is an intrinsic part of our nature as human beings. We find all kinds of opportunities for temptation to do evil. There is a competition for scarce resources, and people do immoral things to gain some of those resources."
___Evil is "an intrinsic part of the world system and is impossible to avoid," he added. "Apart from the mercy of God, there's no solution to it."
___Although approaching evil from a slightly different perspective, Walter Wink agrees with Davis' declaration of the intrinsic nature of evil. Wink is professor of biblical interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City and author of a trilogy of books related to the problem of evil.
___He views evil as an institutional problem. _"Evil is a spiritual power, a reality," he said. "And it incarnates in institutions and systems and structures. They, too, are capable of redemption. My way of looking at it is the powers are good, the powers are fallen and the powers can be redeemed."
___In philosophical terms, evil exists in its own category of being, explained Jim Denison, pastor of Park Cities Baptist Church in Dallas and a former philosophy of religion professor.
___Evil is both an independent entity and a shadow entity of other realities, he said.
___And it's something even Jesus dealt with, he noted.
Types of evil
___Denison identified three categories of people who have been considered evil historically.
___First are the ideologues. "These are people the rest of the world considers to be purely evil but in their own minds are doing what their ideology prescribes," Denison said. "The rest of the world disagrees with their ideology and therefore sees what they're doing as evil."
___He placed bin Laden in this category.
___Second are the pathological. "These are people who are inherently damaged, who do things that are definitionally evil and an expression of their own personality dysfunction."
___As an example, he cited Adolf Hitler, whom he said was not driven so much by ideology as by an irrational need to create the myth of a super race.
___Third are those whose actions create a pattern the world perceives as evil even though the person's own character may not be evil. These are individuals for which there are opposing possibilities of interpreting the data.
___As examples, he cited Napoleon and Herod the Great.
___The results achieved by all three types of people may be similar, but the reasons they do what they do are different, he suggested.
___All could be classified as evil, though, because "any ideology that results in the deaths of innocent people is evil."
What is the source of evil?
___Any discussion of evil ultimately points a finger back to Satan and the demonic realm.
___"I take Satan more seriously than most anybody I know of," said Wink, who is a Methodist minister teaching in a Presbyterian seminary. "One of the ways I want to speak of Satan is the spirit of the domination system. I would take Satan as being the real spirit of domination."
___Wink said he dislikes it "when Satan and demons are treated as though they're somehow in the sky and come and jump down on people and possess them. I think they are incarnate in these institutions and systems and structures and people to varying degrees."
___Denison, too, acknowledged the reality of Satan. Citing John 8:44, he noted: "Jesus said Satan is a liar and a murderer. Satan is alive and well."
___Christians must acknowledge that "there are forces, personalities in this world that move against God," said Bill Tillman, professor of Christian ethics at Hardin-Simmons University's Logsdon School of Theology. "You may encounter these in people form."
___And Jesus taught that Christians will be challenged by these forces of evil, Tillman added.
___Conversations like these make many Baptists uneasy, however, because Baptists in America especially want to avoid talking about demonic powers, Tillman and others agreed.
___Such issues are better left to the charismatics and Pentecostals, many Baptists reason.
___"We Baptists respond to an extreme with an extreme," Denison suggested. "Everything is the fault of the devil, and nothing is the fault of the devil."
___Davis suggested that "even Baptists read the Bible and find the devil and demons talked about there. I look back on the 20th century, and the fact that there is a category called the demonic is almost undeniable.
___"To say there's a demonic force out there but not a devil is like saying there's gravitational force but no gravity."
___The fact that the source of evil in the world may appear as invisible as the gravitational force compounds the problem of understanding it, Tillman said. "With evil, with Satan, we're dealing with a personality that is supernatural and beyond our usual ways of thinking."
Where is God?
___The presence of evil in the world does not mean God has gone missing, added Wink. Because of his writings on the problem of evil, he frequently was questioned after Sept. 11 about where God was in the midst of the terrorist attacks.
___"My reaction was to say that just as the clouds of smoke caused by the falling debris of the towers eclipsed the sun, so God appears to be eclipsed by an action of such horrendous proportions. But just as the clouds of smoke cleared, God is in fact still there."
___Tillman said his students have gained a better understanding of God's response to evil this fall by reading "The Screwtape Letters" by C.S. Lewis. In this classic book, Lewis speaks through the voice of one of Satan's minions.
___"Students have said, 'I understand God better by having looked through the lens of how one of Satan's helpers sees God.'"
___The drive toward evil "in a perverted kind of way may be looking for God," Tillman added. "But it makes the self god. It makes a self-centered individual."
___Yet many wonder why God doesn't simply stop evil in its tracks.
___Christians find different ways of answering this question. Davis, who comes from the Reformed tradition, believes everything that occurs happens with God's permission.
___"God created a system where human beings would have free choice that could go tragically wrong," he said. "So in a sense, God is responsible.
___"The sense in which God is not involved in it, however, is that any item of unjustified suffering is contrary to the will of God and precisely what God does not want."
___A danger in looking for easy answers to this problem is to fall into the theology of hyper-Calvinism, Denison warned. Such a view would reason that God created some people outside the possibility of salvation and therefore uses them as bait for evil in the world.
But what about us?
___Tempting as it may be to label others as inherently evil, there is much danger in such a step, several theologians warned.
___While Americans are justifiably outraged by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, they must not ignore their nation's own actions that at least in part provoked such an attack, Wink suggested.
___He cited ongoing United States intervention in Iraq as an example, claiming 500,000 Iraqi children have died as a result of U.S. policy.
___"Who has the boasting rights for having suffered the worst?" he asked. "We cannot demonize these people. From the point of view they take, the actions they have taken are liberation."
___The terrorist attacks on the city where he lives may indeed be more heinous because of the way civilians were deliberately targeted, but that does not negate the fact that others have done wrong as well, Wink said.
___To say any individual is inherently evil is to say there is no possibility of redemption for that person, he explained. "I don't think we can make that judgment. God will decide whether that's the case or not.
___"The game is up if we do that. We have to say everyone is a sinner and everyone can be redeemed. If we write anyone off, we've written everyone off."
___Tillman quoted longtime Baptist ethicist Henlee Barnette as teaching him: "We always need to be sure we understand who we are and those things of which we are capable. The one who stands before you, in him beats the heart of a barbarian."
___There is a personality of evil lurking in the world, "and each of us has the potential to side in with that," Tillman warned.
___Moving too quickly to label another person as "evil" is one way American society uses to find a scapegoat and avoid dealing with redemptive processes, he added.
___Further, the desire to label others as evil sometimes makes one guilty of an inverse transfer--"the things I hate about me I impose upon you," he said.
___Nevertheless, Tillman also joins the category of those who assert some people can indeed become the personification of evil.
___"At some point, we probably have to say: 'I can't do anything else with this individual. They are so overcome with anti-good that nothing I do gets through.'
___"There are individuals so violent, so overcome with doing evil that they've gone completely over to the other side."
___Denison agreed.
___"If a person is going to adopt a theology and ideology that are evil, that makes the person evil," he said.
___There is a distinction, though, Denison suggested. "Most of us do evil things, but that doesn't mean we are evil people, because not everything we do is evil.
___"We are sinners. It's not just that we commit sin. We are by nature sinners. But then there's a second step to take from being a person who is by nature a sinner to being a person who is by nature evil."
___The line between the two is extremely difficult to determine, he admitted, pointing out that even the Bible is vague in explaining Satan's fall.
___And the belief that a person can become irretrievably evil does not mean any human has the capacity to assign such a label, Denison said.
___"There may well be a point beyond which a person is not retrievable, but we don't know what that is. So we must operate on the assumption that there is not a line."
The Baptist Standard
News of religion, faith, missions, Bible study and Christian ministry among Texas Baptist churches, in the BGCT, the Southern Baptist Convention ( SBC ) and around the world.
Contents/ Masthead / Why We're Here / Links / Archive / E-mail us/ SUBSCRIBE!/ Signup for FirstLook
|