Evil

Back to sin and evil, the topic of my last post.

While according to Wilmer Cooper, Rufus Jones offered a viable new understanding of sin for liberal Friends, Cooper’s little article does not address Jones’s understanding of evil, and I don’t know Jones’s work well enough myself to fill in the gap. However, Jones’s “theology” of sin points in a direction that feels congruent with liberal Friends’ attitudes toward evil. Just as we are uncomfortable with the idea of sin, we are even more nervous about evil. Many of us just don’t want to think it really exists.

Here I suspect that Jones’s ground-breaking theological innovation of a divine-spark understanding of that of God in everyone is part of the reason. If there is something divine or at least quasi-divine about the human, then where does human evil fit in? How could the two coexist? I suspect that this cognitive dissonance explains part of our our unease with evil.

But there’s more to our unease with evil than believing that we all have a divine spark. I think we associate evil with theism and with the traditional Christian understanding of divine judgment and the war between good and evil that’s implicit in that worldview. And this links in with our cultural distaste for conflict in general.

Because “evil” calls for a much more radical response than mere human brokenness and mental disease, which are our usual alternatives. One feels called to a kind of spiritual warfare if you face a kind of spiritual darkness—a la the Lamb’s War. I suspect that modern liberal Quaker sensibilities and sensitivities are loathe to wade past the shallows of moderation into the deep waters of spiritual warfare. I myself can’t help but be repelled by the image of Bible-thumping evangelicals quoting Ephesians on the whole armor of God—while I am also weirdly attracted to it.

So taking evil seriously does cause problems. But so does denying its existence.

That’s why I’m headed out into those waters. Something important seems missing to me if you can’t recognize evil when you see it, some dangerous blindness. And that blindness inevitably leads to a dangerous moral reticence and confusion.

I “believe in” evil. I think it does exist. And I believe that people can be evil.

I think of the Third Reich as the  touchstone for virtually any modern discussion of evil. An entire nation swept up in a vision of hate, torture, death, and domination, with it’s individual disciples, its Himmlers and its Mengeles—these realities take me past the moderate shallows of human frailty into something much deeper and essentially spiritual in nature, something beyond the social, political, psychological, and/or medical in the human experience.

I am defining evil as something spiritual. What do I mean by this? This post would be very long if I continue, so I’m going to break here and resume in a subsequent post.