The Devil Made Me Do It! Yeah, Right.
Well, its Sunday morning, coffee pot is brewing, and I’m getting ready for church. What better time to talk about “evil”. Evil has always been a sticky question for people of faith. From where does evil come and, if God is good, why does evil exist? There’s much to be said about happenings that we deem to be destructive evil but for this cup of coffee let me stick with some of our more antiquated ideas.
Ancient thinkers have pictured God as having an adversary, a competing power, often called Satan or The Devil. I like the insightful Star Wars designation as “The Dark Side”. The anthropomorphic (human-like) attributes we apply to evil are quiet natural in the history of religious development.
We project human qualities onto God even though we know that God is not limited or bound by such features. Communication about God in metaphoric terms that parallel our human experience helps us connect with God. The same need for metaphoric images is at work when envisioning evil. We give evil anthropomorphic (human-like) qualities that tend to make evil real, fearsome, and an adversary with greater than human powers. A theological problem develops when we imagine the powers of this adversary as equaling the power of God.
Primitive gods were as likely to be bad as good, ill tempered, unpredictable, and just down right adversarial to humans. In the earliest of religious thinking even creation was not considered “good”. These ancient ideas were in the cultures surrounding biblical people and posed significant obstacles to monotheism. There is good reason to believe that even though Judaism championed monotheism, up until the time of King Josiah other gods were not only prevalent among those who lived in the land, the worship of other gods was tolerated. Monotheism became the Law of the land in Judaism after Israel’s return from exile in Babylon.
Though the idea of a competing evil power is part of Biblical thought it is not compatible with the premises of monotheism. It is also not compatible with modern thinking any more than the Biblical affirmation that the world is flat, the sun revolves around the earth, or that the planet has four corners. Evil is what we create individually or collectively by our counter productive choices based on greed, fear, hate, envy, deceit, and the dire need to control our destiny. Evil is real and it is powerful and when it is allowed to permeate a community it can seemingly develop a life of its own.
Somewhere deep in our DNA there is the need to blame evil onto someone or something else. The Genesis story tellers capture that in the character of Adam after he eats the forbidden fruit. When God questions Adam about the evil he has set loose on creation he answers, “The woman, whom you gave me, made me do it.” We not only blame others for our evil we make our enemies the epitome of evil or whatever necessary to see them as less than human. By seeing them as evil and making them less than human it is then easier to hate them, treat them with disdain, heap all manner of evil upon them, even to the point of killing. We fight evil with evil and the result is escalating evil.
When viewing how it is that we are restored to that relationship intended at creation I do not see God as being held hostage to any power or justice other than God’s own. There is no force greater or equal that could make demands of God. Forgiveness that restores our relationship comes solely from God’s capacity to love and willingness to forgive.
Oops, getting late. I’m going to take this cup with me while you let that sink in.
Ancient thinkers have pictured God as having an adversary, a competing power, often called Satan or The Devil. I like the insightful Star Wars designation as “The Dark Side”. The anthropomorphic (human-like) attributes we apply to evil are quiet natural in the history of religious development.
We project human qualities onto God even though we know that God is not limited or bound by such features. Communication about God in metaphoric terms that parallel our human experience helps us connect with God. The same need for metaphoric images is at work when envisioning evil. We give evil anthropomorphic (human-like) qualities that tend to make evil real, fearsome, and an adversary with greater than human powers. A theological problem develops when we imagine the powers of this adversary as equaling the power of God.
Primitive gods were as likely to be bad as good, ill tempered, unpredictable, and just down right adversarial to humans. In the earliest of religious thinking even creation was not considered “good”. These ancient ideas were in the cultures surrounding biblical people and posed significant obstacles to monotheism. There is good reason to believe that even though Judaism championed monotheism, up until the time of King Josiah other gods were not only prevalent among those who lived in the land, the worship of other gods was tolerated. Monotheism became the Law of the land in Judaism after Israel’s return from exile in Babylon.
Though the idea of a competing evil power is part of Biblical thought it is not compatible with the premises of monotheism. It is also not compatible with modern thinking any more than the Biblical affirmation that the world is flat, the sun revolves around the earth, or that the planet has four corners. Evil is what we create individually or collectively by our counter productive choices based on greed, fear, hate, envy, deceit, and the dire need to control our destiny. Evil is real and it is powerful and when it is allowed to permeate a community it can seemingly develop a life of its own.
Somewhere deep in our DNA there is the need to blame evil onto someone or something else. The Genesis story tellers capture that in the character of Adam after he eats the forbidden fruit. When God questions Adam about the evil he has set loose on creation he answers, “The woman, whom you gave me, made me do it.” We not only blame others for our evil we make our enemies the epitome of evil or whatever necessary to see them as less than human. By seeing them as evil and making them less than human it is then easier to hate them, treat them with disdain, heap all manner of evil upon them, even to the point of killing. We fight evil with evil and the result is escalating evil.
When viewing how it is that we are restored to that relationship intended at creation I do not see God as being held hostage to any power or justice other than God’s own. There is no force greater or equal that could make demands of God. Forgiveness that restores our relationship comes solely from God’s capacity to love and willingness to forgive.
Oops, getting late. I’m going to take this cup with me while you let that sink in.
Love it. More later if this goes through
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