MARCH 22 2015
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
Why do I tackle the problem of evil? My youngest brother – living in the Netherlands – sent me an article by a Jewish writer dealing with evil. He also sent it to my only other brother, a retired minister of the gospel with a doctorate in theology, living in Canada: we emigrated together in 1951. That youngest brother, an engineer by profession and a philosopher by inclination, keeps me on my toes by challenging me to take a stand, this time on “The Problem of Evil”.
The article he sent me was written by a Jewish philosopher, originally written in Hebrew I believe, (written while the author was in Jerusalem) and translated into Dutch. The man connects the problem of evil to Job, a person, almost as well-known as Jesus, and also often misunderstood, mainly because both Job and Jesus deal with the Problem of Evil. The author, being Jewish, only deals with Job, but I will also deal with Jesus, of course.
First Job
We all know something about Job. We know that he was famous for his afflictions and his supposed patience, a man fabulously rich who suddenly lost all his wealth, his children and in a violent argument with his wife was told to curse God and die.
We also may vaguely remember how three men, come from afar, visited him in his misery, joined later by a younger visitor and how these fellows made long speeches, to which Job replied. How finally God spoke up, vindicated Job, rebuked the four friends, after which Job received twice as much wealth back as well as his family.
The book is famous for that strange encounter with a mysterious figure called the Satan. Imagine: God and Satan, the two sworn enemies, make a bet, and here is where the Problem of Evil enters. God allows the Satan to introduce evil into the idyllic situation where Job and his family live.
Here’s how I see it. It seems to me that Job then represented the human world in ‘the beginning’, living a ‘paradise-like’ life, where everything was just perfect. The Satan is used by God to teach us all a lesson, because life is nothing else than one endless learning process: we never arrive, never quit learning, not even in eternity. Part of our ‘lesson’ is that Job was abandoned by God and left to the wiles of Satan. Actually the same happens to us. Yes, I mean that God has left us to cope for ourselves. In these last days God has declared us mature, old enough to live without his guidance. Deuteronomy 32: 20 says it all: “I will hide my face from them. I will see what their end will be.” That is the situation we face today: life without God and God testing us how we will manage without him.
The Jesus angle
So “How are we making out without God?” Oh, you don’t believe that we are on our own? Let me refer you to a noted theologian.
J. H. Bavinck, in his Between the Beginning and End: a Radical Vision of the Kingdom makes this quite clear. Here is a quote:
We are now faced with a development in creation that we cannot understand and control, but of which we daily experience the terrifying consequences. We now see God’s work of art embroiled in the power of demons. Satanic forces have thrown themselves onto nature, onto us humans, onto the entire radiant creation. Nowhere does the Bible elaborate on these matters, but once in a while it allows us a peek into the abyss of sorrow and hardship now evident everywhere. This is especially evident in the Gospels. When Peter’s mother-in-law suffers from a fever, Jesus “rebuked” the illness and “it left her” (Luke 4:39). When Jesus and his disciples were at sea and a severe storm endangered the ship, Jesus “rebuked” the wind and said to the sea: “Be still!” (Mark 4:39). The forces behind that storm and behind that fever are satanic; the world of hideous demons plays a blasphemous role in these phenomena. Jesus shows us here a scenario regarding life in general—awesome storms—and what will affect us in particular—mysterious diseases—both with ominous consequences. No longer is our universe one of only beauty and harmony, but, especially in our days, one of unpredictable powers which threaten us with annihilation from all directions. The world in which we live is dominated by demons. Every hour we experience the terrible influence of this satanic situation.
It is impossible to visualize the immense difference between the majestic, harmonious unity of creation as it emerged from God’s hand, and the frantic, demon?dominated planet in which we, the cursed humanity, dwell after the fall into sin. The Kingdom is in shatters. That is the profound tragedy confronting the life of the world. This goes far beyond the fact that we have torn up its cohesion: it actually means that God has surrendered his own creation to Satan and his followers, whose only purpose is to abuse it and destroy it. The Kingdom, after all, comprises all things, all plants, all animals, all people, all angels. The Kingdom includes the sea and the land, the mountains and the valleys, all that was and is and is to come; and all of it is incorporated in a great and mighty whole. The Kingdom is the place where all things are in their rightful place and where everything can fulfill its function and deploy its potential in complete harmony with all that surrounds it. The Kingdom is synonymous with light, peace, joy, service to God, in harmonious veneration. Where the Kingdom is being destroyed, where this structure comes apart at the seams, there is decomposition, brokenness, fragmentation, enmity, contradiction, meaninglessness, darkness, death.
Jesus is the fighter against evil and has won the battle. Still today not God but Satan is in charge, just like he was allowed to intervene in Job’s life. There you have it: The Problem of Evil still with us. God allows this to see how we’d fare without him. The Satan now ruling the world accounts for the wars, the cancer pandemics, the Holocaust, Capitalism, Global Warming, and the total world-wide destruction we are busy completing. Remember: today not God but Satan still calls the tune.
In the article my Dutch brother sent me the author Moshe Halbertal writes about the Problem of Evil, quoting Hannah Arendt who attended the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann was the German official in charge of killing 6 million Jews in Europe. Ms. Arendt, being Jewish was forced to flee Germany in 1933, moving first to Paris then to the USA. Here’s part of the article, which I translate.
Hannah Arendt in her book “The origin of Totalitarianism” has elaborated the concept of ‘radical evil.’ She wrote that radical evil is not a crime against humanity but a crime against being human. Radical evil tries to do away with the characteristics of the essential components of the human existence: spontaneity, openness and pluralism. Radical evil is accomplished in the totalitarian fantasy by changing humanity, not affecting their physical state but by instilling in them completely predictable reactions, such as never doing anything unusual, always a total sameness, never altering their behavior. The Nazi concentration camps, being a monstrous experiment in absolute domination, turned out to be nothing else but death factories by turning human beings into living dead, people not even sufficiently alive to wish to be dead: they even lost the will to die, a symptom Arendt typifies as “the banality of evil”.
The perpetrators of these evils – the ordinary German people – were without remorse and didn’t see their actions as evil. This sort of evil – the banality of evil – has a deadening effect because what is lost is the ability to be ‘outraged’, the will to fight. These people simply give up. They are survivors interested only in self- protection. They have lost the capacity and desire to fight against evil.
Arendt at the time – after the Eichmann trial – talked about the German people who ignored what happened to Jews among them, favoring Hitler who provided them with jobs. They later backed him ‘for the greater glory of Germany’. Then their national anthem started with the words: Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles, which means Germany, Germany above everything else. Their desire for jobs and glory overshadowed their feelings for justice and human dignity.
Moshe Halbertal is referring to us today, the Century 21 people. We too have lost the ability and the desire to fight against evil. We are like the Israel people wandering in the desert, rather being slaves in Egypt and having meat than being guided by God. They then had Moses to plead for them. We, almost all others, have no Moses: we are on our own!
We have lost the will to fight to preserve creation. The powers of advertising, the ease of daily living, the modern conveniences we, you and I, experience every minute of our lives, have killed us, have sapped us from the will to fight Climate Change and global injustice. The very church people who rule the USA and Canada – the Republicans in the States and Stephen Harper in Canada – are the leaders promoting death to us all. And we too are the willing victims, victims of evil.
We do have warnings, even though we ignore them. All crucial measures of the health of the ecosphere in which we live—groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity—suggest that our high-energy/high-technology society is unsustainable. Because we live in an oil-based society and are rapidly depleting the cheapest and most easily accessible oil reserves, we face a huge adjustment in the way of life on which our existence is based. We now have entered an era of “extreme energy” evident in such dangerous and destructive technologies as hydro-fracturing, deep-water drilling, mountaintop removal, tar sands extraction, all of which will hasten the coming calamities of climate change. Welcome to our affluent captivity where we ignore ‘the problem of evil’.
Back to Job. He is a fighter. Back to Jesus. His fight cost him his life. Job fights against his three so-called friends who accuse him of hiding his sin. His friends see wealth as the reward for living a good life. Job knows better, that’s why he fights back, even against God. He screams at God: “Why have you made me your target? How come that I am in this miserable condition?”
Scientists these days are talking about tipping points and planetary boundaries, about human activity pushing the planet beyond its limits. In a recent study, 22 leading scientists warned that “humans likely are forcing a planetary-scale transition with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience.”
In plain language it says that our biological resources – water, trees, soil, air – which we now take for granted, will be subject to sudden and unpredictable transformations probably sooner than later.
That means we are in deep trouble, something the church can no longer ignore, because that trouble plays out in a world chockfull with the inequalities that flow from deeply entrenched power structures, both within individual countries and between the so-called developed and developing worlds. Stir in the ecological crises which will greatly exacerbate existing problems rooted in the unjust distribution of wealth and power, and our troubles are likely to magnify exponentially. I see it as the role of preachers and self-appointed bloggers like me to warn our society that we are in deep denial, denial that is especially anchored in the relatively privileged sectors, such as organized religion where our affluence insulates us from the immediate consequences. Bonhoeffer’s advice to the Church of Christ, in his introduction to Creation and Fall, is: “To witness to the end of all things, to live from the end, to think from the end, to act from the end, to proclaim its message for the end.” In this the church fails miserably.
Therefore I see it as my duty to sound the unpleasantly loud alarm that we must drastically change the way we think, move, worship, especially the latter, because only as a community can we prepare ourselves for the future. In other words: like Job and Jesus we must fight insidious evil.
Fact is that we need a radical conversion. Many of us are shuttled by way of cheap gasoline from climate-controlled house, to an artificially lighted work-place, to a prepackaged supermarket, to a night in front of electronic amusement, and there is little, in all this, to shock one’s level of energy and material use out of the unconscious realm. Just as Job ‘in paradise’, we need a totally new way of life, not just ‘brother are you born again?’ but consciously trying to live a God- that means Cosmos- pleasing existence.
The sin of Job before his affliction, our sin today, is Anthropocentrism, the arrogant and deluded belief that the earth and the universe were designed for human (Anthropos) benefit and control, something the entire World, including all religions, believes with a passion. John 3: 16 is almost always wrongly interpreted as if it reads: “God so loved the human race….”
The Problem of Evil is now all-pervasive. In 1933-45 Hitler and his willing countrymen ignored what happened to the Jewish people. They paid a steep price. Today the entire world is complicit in perpetrating the evil of Climate Change. We will pay an even steeper price.
The Bible is quite clear on one cardinal point: We can’t love Jesus if we don’t love creation, the topic of the next article. This makes me wonder whether a deliberate Sin against Creation is equivalent to the Sin against the Holy Spirit. Look up Matthew 12: 31.
Next week: We can only love Jesus when we first love creation