A New Christianity

Wayne's Notes

Jock's Notes

Larry's Reflection on Good and Evil

Dear Friends:
I have spent a number of hours reflecting on "good and evil" of all things. Thanks very much to David Swann and some food for thought which helped break my shyness; thanks particularly to Patricia Jean and Roger Thomas for their unfailing confidence. Thanks to Bernard Emond for his courage in dealing with good and evil in such creative ways in his writing and film-making. Thanks to long-standing and supportive friends like Alan Parry and Anne Goodman whose friendship and ideas are always worth incorporating.Thanks to fine people like Lorraine, Ginni, Emma, Gail, and others whose company is a pleasure and constantly reminds me of "the good" and beautiful in life. Thanks to all the bright fellow-students in the St. David's adult-study group dealing with Bishop Spong, particularly people like Wayne, Jock and Al who always prompt a revised version. It was all prompted as you will see, by the events of this past poppy-wearing week in Canada.
Larry J. Fisk

Jock's. Ch 9 - Original Sin Is Out; The Reality of Evil Is In

Good and Evil seem inextricable.

Tonight, I have few words because the words of Bishop Spong and the other voices in my head are so strong. So for this section I mostly will quote these other voices. First - Jesus. In "The Tares and the Wheat" he points us to the inextricable nature of the good and bad in our lives, and that only at the end can a measure be made.

"The kingdom may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the housefolder came and said to him, 'Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then has it weeds?' He said to them, 'An enemy has done this.' The servants said to him, 'Then do you want us to go and gather them?' But he said, 'No; lest in gathering the weeks you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, 'Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.'" ... Jesus

Spong feels the liberal theological perspective has minimized this issue of evil, but nevertheless there is a new understanding outside of the "rescue and guilt" formula the church has so long used. In this chapter he puts his theory forward.

"It is time, I am convinced, to move Christianity beyond that historically inaccurate and psychologically damaging definition of humanity that has resulted in a constant denigration of human life as helpless, depraved, sinful, and in need of divine rescue." (149)

"When I look at what human beings have achieved, from great works of art to magnificent symphonies, from architectural wonders to surgical and medical skills that are breathtaking, I stand in awe of human life. A religion that is based on denigrating humanity cannot make sense out of life to me." (150)

"It is true that evil is not hard to find in human life, but it cannot be the defining and ultimate characteristic of our humanity. ... evil is surely a part of our story. But so is human goodness. I suggest that they are intimately linked ..." (151/2)

M. Scott Peck agrees modern society misunderstand and underestimates evil. In his The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth. (Touchstone. 1978), he considers this very issue of the "Problem of Evil".

"The problem of evil is perhaps the greatest of all theological problems. ...

First, I have come to conclude that evil is real. It is not the figment of the imagination of a primitive religious mind feebly attempting to explain the unknown. There really are people, and institutions made up of people, who respond with hatred in the presence of goodness and would destroy the good insofar as it is in their power to do so. ...Evil people hate the light because it reveals themselves to themselves. They hate goodness because it reveals their badness; they hate love because it reveals their laziness. ...

My second conclusion, then, is that evil is laziness carried to its ultimate, extraordinary extreme. ... Ordinary laziness is a passive failure to love ... Ordinary laziness is nonlove; evil is antilove. ...

My third conclusion is that the existence of evil is inevitable, at least at this stage in human evolution. ...

Last, I have come to conclude that ... in its most extreme form of human evil it is strangely ineffective as a social force. ... Unwittingly, evil serves as a beacon to warn others away from its own shoals. Because most of us have been graced by an almost instinctive sense of horror at the outrageousness of evil, when we recongnize its presence, our own personalities are honed by the awareness of its existence. Our consciousness of it is a signal to purify ourselves. It was evil, for instance, that raised Christ to the cross, thereby enabling us to see him from afar. Our personal involvement in the fight against evil in the world is one of the ways we grow." (277)

Some years ago I noticed the word evil and the word live were mirrors and wrote this little poem.

ach thing carries hate.

ove is abundant.

ery much alone.

n everything we learn.

n everything we suffer.

ery much found.

ove is lost.

ach thing carries joy.

Evil as Incompleteness

In trying to answer this question of evil, Spong suggests it stems from a deep sense of incompleteness - a theme which pervades the myths of humanity. He notes it is in response to this sense of incompleteness that we are drawn into communities of worship. But this same drive to fulfillment often becomes obsessive. To win at all costs is the source of many cruelties we commit upon each other. And that competitive drive escalates to military competition - we are still tribe against tribe. This explains slavery and segregation for slavery has always been a prize of war.

To be different is dangerous. And so he explains our repression of homosexuality in much of the world. But occasionaly one encounters a minority tradition where such difference is honoured with the station of shaman and healer.

These evils are adequately explained as derriving from the sense of incompleteness, not a fall into sin. But more evil remains. "Mob spirit" is a frightening horror of violence and destruction. This he sees also adequately explained as stemming from our evolutionary inheritance for power and survival - just as having gone past a "psychotic edge". Next he considers various mental disorders: kleptomania, claustrophobia, acrophobia, sadism, and masochism. Such disorders of the individual he suggests are merely the same incompleteness made complex by neuroses and irrationality - as employing "a valid survival technique in an inappropriate context.". Even murder has explanation in hormone imbalance and childhood abuse.

Inexplicable Evil

Yet there seem classes of evil that does not fit this explanation of survival instincts. Addiction cannot be a survival strategy. These people were deeply disconnected from reality, even "imprisoned inside ... a destructive demonic spirit". People with mental illness seem to have "no power in themselves to help themselves." And there are those "distorted" persons that reach leadership and extend havoc: Nero, Ivan the Terrible, Stalin, Hitler, Idi Amin. Or events like the McCarthy inquisition and the Salem witchhunt. There is also the evil of disease like AIDs.

"These are the issues that confront me as an observer of life and force me to seek a Christ-function that would not just empower and call to a new humanity, but would also rescue people from these kinds of brokenness." (164)

"I have no final answers. ... We do, however, have hints..." (165)

Our Shadow

Carl Jung proposed that our "shadow" or darkside is healed by the acceptance of our evil for it is a part of our being. Spong considers this "startling concept" one to include in the New Christianity.

"This community must be able to incorporate all of our human reality into itself. It must be able to allow God and Satan to come together in each of us. It must allow light and darkness to be united. It must bind good and evil into one. It must unite Christ with Anti-Christ, Jesus with Judas, male with female, heterosexual with homsexual. For the Christian story to be complete, the body of Christ - the community of believers - must play the redemptive role in transforming life inside human history." (167)

Mythical themes are found everywhere everytime says Spong. And we each carry our shadow with us. And so he augments his theory of evil as incompleteness. For those captured by their shadow, it is the role of the people of God to rescue them. The church is not to separate good from evil, but reach out to the ones possessed.

"The healing power is the the love that accepts us as we are, shadow included, and says that every part of who we are is made in the image of God."

"The primary task of a faith-community is to assist in the creation of wholeness - not goodness, but wholeness. That community's raison d'etre is to be the place where each person can be nurtured into being."

"That is why the church is called 'the body of Christ'"(169)

"For what we are is light and shadow."

"...selfless love represents, I believe, the next stage in evolutionary human development. The Christ figure to me is an image, a sign and indeed a promise of that birth of a new humanity."(170)

Satan and our Intimate Enemy

Not only must the god of theism die, but so also should satan die.

Elaine Pagels, the Gnostic Scholar, has written an illuminating book The Origin of Satan, Vintage, 1995. In this she uncovers how this idea came into and has evolved in our religious tradition. In the earliest traditions of the Hebrew Bible, and in Islam, a satan is simply an opposer, a tempter, a trivializer. Often a satan was an angel or heavenly messenger. Later the idea of satan became associated with apostasy - and the satan was associated with opponents within Jewish society. Later in Christian history, all heretics would be seen as in league with the devil. The Essenes felt so strongly against Jerusalem society that they retreated to the desert to live. Their escalated notion of satan was inherited by the early Christian church where the satan is associated with "intimate enemies" like priests and pharisees. From the apocalytic Jewish traditions came the idea of a cosmic battle to end all time - an idea that continues to capture the human imagination. Christians put Christ at the head of this battle against Satan.

The Lucifer Principle

A rock and roll empresario by the name of Howard Bloom wrote a most facinating book that speaks to this subject - The Lucifer Principle - a scientific expedition into the forces of history. The Atlantic Monthly Press. 1995. Bloom offers a lucid survey of evil in human history. What Spong calls simply evolution's instinct to survive, Bloom differentiates into a tapestry of genetics and sociology. Evil he says is what we as individuals experience, but evil is a most essential part of evolution. So we are each programmed with the aspects murder and mayhem.

"The creator of human savagery is Nature, who works her ways through brain segments bequeathd to both men and women by our animal ancestors." (44)

"Violence is the most appalling of human expressions. Yet we cannot wish our way to peace. ... like us our fellow humans are dangerous. There is one small consolation in this grim picture. Snapping and snarling at each other may be automatic, but holding, caring, and collaborating are built into us too. ... We desperately need each other, and that need is hope." (328)

The Demonic Male

The most horrendous description of human evil I have encountered is also the most extreme example of synchronicity I know. The notion of an innocent existence among primates was shattered when chimpanzee murder was witnessed in 1974. Slowly pieces of the puzzle came together, but no connections were yet clear to humankind. The anthropologists Wrangham and Peterson were eagre to extend this study of ape violence. Ironically, they had to pass through the horror of the Hutu-Tutsi war on their way to the mountain rainforests of central Africa in 1994. On this trek they encountered a Ugandan farmer Ngoga Murumba given the difficult and mind numbing task of burying the bodies that drifted ashore at Lake Victoria. "

"One time I found a woman. She had five children tied to her. One on each arm. One on each leg. One on her back. She had no wounds ..."

So it is with special attention we should hear the concluding words of their study on the roots of human violence.

"For us, the biggest danger is not that demonic males are the rule in our species. After all, other demonic male species are not endangered at their own hands. The real danger is that our species combines demonic males with a burning intelligence - and therefore a capacity for creation and destruction without precedent. That great human brain is nature's most frightening product.

But it is simultaneously nature's best, most hopeful gift. If we are cursed with a demonic male temperament and a Machiavellian capacity to express it, we are also blessed with an intelligence that can, through the acquisition of wisdom, draw us away from the 5 million year stain of our ape past. ... If intelligence is the ability to speak, wisdom is the capacity to listen. If intelligence is the ability to see, wisdom is the capacity to see far ... Wisdom, in other words, is perspective.

Temperament tells us what we care about. Intelligence helps generate options. And wisdom can bring us to consider outcomes distantly, for ourselves and our children and our children's children ... and perhaps even for the minds in the forest." Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Richard Wrangham & Dale Peterson. Mariner. 1996.

And if ever a man experienced and studied evil, it is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

Wayne. Ch 10 - Beyond Evangelism and World Mission to a Post-Theistic Universalism

A Definition of Myth and Metaphor:

Mythology - is an organization of symbolic images and narratives, metaphorical of the possibilities and fulfillment in a given culture in a given time. Mythology is a metaphor. God, angels, purgatory, these are metaphors. - Joseph Campbell (interviewed in the New York Times, Feb. 1985)

Metaphor - (meaning: 'is - like ') is a figure of speech in which a name or quality is attributed to something to which it is not literally applicable (for example - an icy glance, or nerves of steel). - Websters Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1988.

A Cautionary Note

This chapter is probably the one in which I differ most from Spong. When he disparages the mission of the church, he hits a sensitive spot with me. I am by training and several decades of experience, a missionary and a missiologist. I served in several practical roles as both a missioner and a church mission staff executive person. I served in these roles in Trinidad, the USA and Canada. I am also one who made a particular effort to reflect extensively on the contemporary importance of mission through the writing of a doctoral dissertation on the post-missionary (but not the post-missional) church in the Western Arctic. My attention there was focused on the question of what happens to a pre-evangelised body of people that moves through an era of missionary incursion and Christianization to a place where the people take responsibility for that mission themselves, and on their own terms.

So, in my comments on this chapter I would first like to convey what I understand Spong is trying to say and then attempt to respond to him from my own perspective. You, as always, will of course have to come to your own conclusions about these things.

Spong Comments

The exclusive claims of Christianity have most often been attrached to a text of the Fourth Gospel where Jesus is quoted as having said, "I am the way, and the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but by me " (John 14:6). The imperialism and the pain that has flowed from that single verse is so great it would be hard to measure... (It is a power claim) (172).

"There is no salvation outside the church" is yet another phrase heard in these same ecclesiastical circles. "Church" in this phrase clearly means the Roman Catholic Church, not the church catholic. It (too) is a power claim (173).

The unbaptized and those who do not know Jesus as their personal saviour face the ultimate penalty of spending eternity apart from God and inside the reality of hell... This is the mentality that has marked Christianity in previous centuries. It still marks the rhetoric of conservative churches, both Catholic and Protestant (173).

It was the solemn obligation to support foreign and domestic missionaries who, in the name of the church, carried the saving message of Christ to "the heathen" as most non-Christians of the world tended to be called... A closer and less romantic look at the missionary enterprize of the church reveals the darker side of these religious convictions, which has not even yet been faced fully by the Christian church. (We need to face that dark side) (174).

Much of the justification for these colonial acts of conquest was explained by the rhetoric of religion. The Western nations were not hostile conquerors, it was said. They were rather bringing "civilization and Christianity" to the uncivilized lost people in these unenlightened parts of the world... The fact remains that all of this missionary activity... was still relatively unsuccessful (175).

(There has been little missionary impact on Asia, where, in spite of massive efforts, the majority of people there remain Buddhist, Hindu, etc... Only in Africa has there been some major Christian success). The primary missionary voices in Africa were... english-speaking evangelicals... That evangelical religion, when filtered through the African ethos, tended to make their converts as moralistic, Victorian, and oblivious to developing biblical scholarship as their evangelical mentors had been (176).

Spong implies that, in a true sense, the real roots of black American religion are Islamic, not Christian... thus the emergence of Muhammed Ali from Cassius Clay and Kareem Abdul Jabbar from Lew Alcindor... I submit (he says) that these expansionist efforts were flawed from the beginning, because they were nothing more than an ill-disguised quest for power born out of the self-centredness that it our heritage from evolution (177).

Evangelistic efforts and missionary enterprises are thus compromized by a lack of integrity and filled... with manifestations of hostility. I think the Christian Church should abandon these tactics forthwith as unworthy of Christ... Surely the story of Jesus, as the love of God, cannot be told amid judgement and hostility. This remains true, I believe, despite the fact that some beautiful and sensitive people, with the best of intentions, have... given themselves to missionary enterprizes. We must now see these activities... as evil (178).

The theism that undergirded these conversion activities is dead. Christians today know that we possess neither certainty nor eternal truth. We know that we do not possess the sole pathway to God, for there is no sole pathway. God surely cannot be contained in any religious system... The ecclesiastical creeds can also never capture the truth about God. All they can do is point to it (179).

The new reformation will not require Christians to abandon the Bible, but it will require that we remove from the Bible the tribal claims and the literalness that have so often been attached to Scripture... (Christianity) as a religious system will remain my doorway to God... Christ remains my doorway into God. It is not, perhaps, the doorway that eveyone can use, and it is certainly not the only doorway, but it is my doorway (180).

My responsibility, as a Christian in this twenty-first century is to separate the wheat from the chaff of my tradition (whether it be Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, Presbyterian, etc.) in order to discover the essence and to grasp the treasure of its ultimate insight into the meaning of God (182).

The God presence assumes so many different forms in human history. (Spong gives examples of his experiences with a Jewish rabbi and Buddhist monks (182-3).

Wayne Comments

Spong is stuck in a time-warp regarding colonial expansionism and the Christian exclusivity linked to it. In essence, his argument died forty years ago with the reality of what we now call post-colonialism. What happened politically has also happened in terms of faith. A new global Christianity, very different from what we have known, is emerging on the world scene. It is significant, and largely a conservative movement.

Something ironic occurred as the colonial powers retreated, leaving in their wake a multitude of independent churches in numerous nations of the Two-Thirds world. Today, many Africans, Latin Americans and Asians themselves are redefining their received Christian faith. Indigenous Christians in many once colonized countries now embrace it with great fervour. Over the past century, the centre of Christain gravity and influence has been shifting dramatically southward. Large numbers of Christians in the South and East honour the early missionary commitment to evangelization. Explosive growth is taking place, not only in Africa, but in Latin America and parts of Asia.

(Comment on Nigeria. The 'protestantization' of Latin America. Significant growth in countries like South Korea and China).

Note my review of the book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, by Philip Jenkins:

http://www.wcr.ab.ca/columns/reviews/wayneholst/2002/wayneholst091602a.shtml
Spong has a truncated theology of Christian mission from which I see little hope of a new reformation developing. Every mature organism is capable of reproducing itself. A living organism, that is not in some way expanding, risks contraction, even death. We reproduce in kind. A faith tradition is like an organism. Christianity has always been, at its best, a missionary religion. Throughout its two thousand year history, for every period of strong growth there have always followed periods of fallowness. After a time of significant Christian expansion in the West there seems currently to be a plateauing, even decline. History tells us that times of expansion will return. What is so encouraging right now is that the churches spawned by our overseas missions in the past seem to have discovered something we have lost.

Spong, in his liberal fortress seems to have his blinders on. He appears, here, to be missing the point about mission. Mission is of the essence of being the church. Just because we may have done some things badly in the past and demonstrated in our mission efforts some things that should well be criticized, does not prelcude the importance of mission for the overall health and long-term vitality of Christianity.

I do not see, in Spong's theology, a very well-developed missiology (theology of mission) or ecclesiology (theology of the church) for that matter.
"(Christianity) as a religious system will remain my doorway to God," says Spong. "Christ remains my doorway into God. It is not, perhaps, the doorway that eveyone can use, and it is certainly not the only doorway, but it is my doorway" (180).

Borg, in his new book The Heart of Christianity (2003) says much the same: "If I thought I have to believe that Christianity was the only way, I could not be a Christian" (221).

While I accept, in principle, what Spong and Borg have to say I ask myself: Is it wrong to be promotional about one's faith in a world of contending truth claims? In the free market of ideas and ideologies, does it not make sense to argue that one's truth is truth for all?

Reflections on Good and Evil: Remembrance 2003.

A SEASON FOR REMEMBERING

Dr. David Swann, the well-known Calgary physician and health director dismissed by the Klein government for his public support of the Kyoto Accord, ended an email to me this past week with the expression "blessings of the season". I interpreted David not to mean Christmas but this red poppy-wearing time, and November 11th in particular. This too is a "season", a season of remembering, and therefore a time for serious reflection on matters like the reality and depths of evil and the contrasting qualities of good. Also this past week, at St. David’s United Church in north-west Calgary, a number of us were engaged in a discussion of the nature and reality of evil in the context of studying Bishop John Shelby Spong’s latest book: A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith is Dying and How a New Faith is Being Born.

One of the weaknesses of Spong’s dynamic liberal position (the God beyond theism) is his acknowledged difficulty treating the existence and nature of evil. Any religious persuasion which attempts to live out its faith in the context of the 21st century can neither ignore the scientific/industrial/technological world which envelopes our thinking and activity, nor the calamities of nature and the demonic violations of humans by other human beings. Nor are the predicaments of contemporary circumstances, and their accompanying despair and panic, limited to war, rape, abuse, ignorance and callous indifference. There is as well within the human soul a depth of despair, anxiety, anger, shame and fear so deep as to allow mood disorders and mental illnesses to unfold like the possession of biblical demons.

John Spong is but one theologian, in this case a Christian American Episcopalian, determined to reclaim an understanding of good and evil based on sensitive and sensible mindfulness and a compassion for all, no matter what their spiritual or religious background. There are similar proponents in all the other Christian denominations and confessions, other world faiths and those of various secular or broadly spiritual persuasions. It may well be the case, for example, that each major religion has its own contemporary "demons" to exorcise. Christianity has its imperialistic past and fundamentalist emphasis on biblical inerrantcy with the resulting defenses of unjust practices–slavery, oppression of women, segregation, homophobia, strident anti-Communism, distrust of Islam and anti-Semitism. Such literalism considered at the personal level, fosters the pain of stringent or puritanical behavioural codes, an apologia for, and thus reinforcement of, guilt and shame; plus the narrow deification or personification of good (Jesus) and evil (Satan).

Today Judaism, in spite of its Martin Bubers, Abraham Heschels, and Harold Kushners, must live with somewhat similar problems, of strident ultra-orthodox streams, and a context of remembering the reprehensible of World War II and a long-standing post-war obsession with security in the Middle East. Islam faces the same disoriented fundamentalism as it attempts a defence of liberalism, justice, and democracy challenged by militant Muslims or terrorist acts conducted in the name of Allah and the Qu’ran. Similar turmoil exists in predominantly Buddhist, Sikh and Hindu cultures like Myanmar and India where warring factions in the name of the faith, or in defense of the faith are widespread.

For those who believe in a loving Creator whose nature is witnessed in a Christ-figure (Spong’s position) or a prophet (Islam’s Mohammed) or the stories of the great Rabbis, the problem of evil may be handled intellectually, but a confrontation with it is quite something else. Rabbi Harold S. Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People provides one of the finest treatments of the G-d who may bring comfort and strength, but whose creation of universal (scientific) laws does not lend itself to an "Omniscient and Omnipotent go-pher" jumping to the defence of the culturally-defined "upright citizen" or religiously-defined "most righteous and pious amongst us". Evil does descend both unexpectedly and seemingly unwarrantedly upon any or all of us. When it descends via "accidents", war, death, disease, divorce, torture, terrorism, abuse, pain and suffering, mere explanations seem at best incomplete. But at worst intellectual explanation may strike us as meaningless, callous and, perhaps in itself, a perpetuation of the evil.

To return to John Spong’s critique of one of the dominant religious positions of our culture: Christian fundamentalism or conservative evangelical biblical literalism; Spong would replace the belief in original sin with the notion of evolutionary incompleteness. The human predicament involves the struggle for survival and much of the so-called evil around us is related to this many-sided determination to survive and flourish, as individuals and as communities, tribes, or nations. At the very deepest levels we strive to live, but that survival "instinct" may result in "the miraculous cure from disease" or the brutal warring on others in order to secure one’s community in the face of perceived threat.

The critique of the Christian literalist position can be levelled at a number of key points. The first, as suggested above, is the literal interpretation of the Adam and Eve story and the concept of original sin. This is not just the story of the dawn of nakedness or defiance of the Creator. Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the 20th century’s finest political theologians explained original sin as a corruption not just of human sexuality or instincts but as well a distortion of human will and human reason. While in post-retirement Niebuhr regretted his previous emphasis on original sin, he nevertheless noted that Christian revelation offered the insight "that man [sic] can neither know the truth fully, nor avoid the error of thinking that he [sic] can".

I have long appreciated Niebuhr’s deeper and more well-rounded treatment of human incompleteness, if only because he places flesh on Spong’s skeletal contention that sin and evil are a result of what we are in our evolutionary development. Niebuhr’s neo-orthodox position enables a bridge, I think, between Spong and his more-literalist critics.

However, for those who cannot accept an interpretation of the notion of original sin (even when it is a very sagacious enlargement of our understanding of human nature, will and thought included) there remains anyway the problems of an atonement thesis to account for our way through the predicament. The need to be "saved" from our inevitable and prior sinful status or nature must be the action of a forgiving Creator. There is no action possible to change the Creator’s "mind". "We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God". That there should be the need for some appeasement to the Creator of the Universe (sacrificial blood— in this case not of animals but of "His Son") seems to theologians like Spong both primitive and ludicrous.

The Divine activity of reconciliation or at-one-ment is understood by many Christian theologians as but one of several biblical themes. Marcus Borg, for example, notes the reconciling or redemptive action of a Caring Being in the Biblical Exodus, the exile of the faithful remnant and their return to the "promised land", and the "priestly tradition" which speaks of sacrifice and atonement. One might well imagine a much larger set of themes which help explain the Ground of All Being and the action of salvation (wholeness). The Hebrew Scriptures are full of examples of G-d’s action within the lives of the lowliest or most reluctant, for example–whether Joseph, Moses, Samson or David.

Evil may result because of our failure to appreciate Niebuhr’s truism about our nature, but it may also result from the more narrowly presented formulae which are put forward as the (only) means of achieving wholeness. The predominant status of the priestly (sacrificial) view of salvation obscures almost all other sensible, meaningful and deeply satisfying and healing portrayals. The Ground of all Being, the Universe in some Buddhist persuasions, is not a personified entity—an angry patriarch who requires constant appeasement from his disloyal and punishable subjects. Furthermore, the pre-eminence of the "saved by the blood of the lamb" and "only he [sic] who believes in Me shall be saved" over-simplifies any Divine/Human relationship, reducing it to a narrow creed or set of beliefs which if not assented to will result in further estrangement and wrath from the Almighty. Consider the unloving and inconsiderate pain and suffering inflicted on family members who must house the most narrow of these position-holders. Or consider the hell of the many suffering from forms of abuse, mood disorders, mental illness or unconventional sexual orientations and relationships for whom this religious myopia exaggerates guilt, fear of punishment and unfathomable shame.

INTERIOR OR PERSONAL EVIL

Permit me to stay with these "demons" of an internal nature for a time. Many of us, perhaps all of us, can recall times when emphasis on our failings, shortcomings, anger, only served to intensify that weakness. "Stop smoking!", "Quit drinking so much!", "Stop your worrying!", " Be nice", "Get off your ass—you’re so damn lazy!", "Get some insight will you!" "Stop pursuing same sex relationships!" "Accept the Lord as your personnel saviour, confess your evil ways (sinful nature) and be saved!" One could write an extensive treatise on each one of these admonitions. What is implied throughout these remarks is (1) that the individual has complete freedom (choice) to reset her or his direction—its just a matter of will; and (2) that accepting something about yourself while it has psychological salience, in the context of religious belief, is buying into a very particular world-view which may, or may not have substance and may not bring wholeness.

Those who have worked with the smokers, alcoholics, and those suffering from mood disorders, mental illness, obesity, and discrimination because of an unconventional sexual orientation or relationship, know the hell of being harangued to change what is either yours by genetics, biochemical changes or traumatic events. We know from "Alcoholics Anonymous" and "Emotions Anonymous" that much can be changed by the willingness to change and a confidence in some Being or cause larger than one’s self. But we also know that in the context of intensive counselling, cognitive behavioural therapy, and the need for medicinal support, many people cannot "make it" in the AA way. They would like to but the hurt is too deep, the evil too profound, convoluted and pervasive. There just are anxieties so frightening, failings so well-entrenched, depressions so severe, that for a time there is little if any choice left. If Niebuhr is correct, our thinking and will is suspect anyway. And just to illustrate the complexity, what difference does it make to the person under consideration if s/he does or does not accept Niebuhr’s view of human nature?

What matters at this deep level is that it not be reinforced by further negativity. To avoid such a confrontation is not a feeble liberal jog to "all must be soft, easy and self-enhancing" because in such desperate situations individuals instinctively know the difference between soft, white-chocolate covered half-truths and, tough-minded, hard-hitting and potentially healing, verities.

In Spong’s work on evil he credits the work of Carl Jung and the necessity of working with, (acknowledging) the shadow side of all human life. Perhaps this is the difference between the more popular notions of a comfortable–"I deserve the best" life and the bitter reality that we are capable of much more daring loves, but much more brutal hatreds, as well. This is not a mental acknowledgment as much as it is an inner awareness or appreciation of the culturally ill-defined or unacceptable in all its complexities which lies within our contemplation. How often have we felt when encouraged by others that we wanted to protest: "but you don’t quite understand, its more complicated than that" or "I honestly don’t think I should get off the hook that easy because there is more to it than the common attribution of fault–no-fault." What goes on at this deeper level of a consideration of good and evil, of innocence and accountability are the undergirding, seldom heeded layers of well-being, the internalised conscience of a life-time of pieces, and those fragile encasements of long-standing guilt, regret, shame, and anger.

My life-long friend Alan Parry has written sensitively and intelligently about the way our current view of conscience, in reaction to the influence of the Freudian understanding as oppressive superego of internalised external authority, has been confined to the dunce’s corner of irrelevancy. Conscience, and therefore guilt and shame, are Victorian hold-overs preventing moderns from getting it on with the busy scene of self-development, self-esteem, and easy sociability. The conscience writ large in ages past, which served to help us consider our better selves and those around us, seems currently to be known at best as a behind-the-times pest.

But there is a flip-side to the Freudian super-ego, especially if it is understood not just to be enforced by parents, but reinforced by friends, cultural habits and religious tenets. Have you listened to how deep your own negativity can go when you are down on yourself? If you have wronged another or disappointed yourself by your behaviour it is possible for you to enter a downward spiral. The spiral might begin appropriately enough with the acknowledgment of the deed as dastardly, but self-criticism, generalization to other matters, reduction of your nature to something unworthy, may all be part of the increased velocity of the negative fall. If sermonizing friends (Job’s comforters who do not know the complexities of the situation) confront you, and more to the point if they carry the "inerrant condemnations of scripture", you are also carried to the lowest levels of hell and its consequent damnation. Friends, social surroundings and religious personages may not now speak anything. There are still so many citizens of contemporary societies who have internalized these self-destructive, undigested, and ill-considered religious tenets that we carry out the self-destruction ourselves.

I am more and more convinced this is the continually foggy, grey or pitch-black cavern in which so many have chosen to end their lives. It is at this level that narrow, non-reflective, thoughts eat as a cancer into our confidence, our hopes, our potential for joy and compassion by reducing us to the damned. One cannot say that literalist fundamentalism is the cause of such profound negativity. But one can, and ought to say, that biblical literalism cast in the conservative evangelical tradition may perpetrate and seriously exacerbate these profoundly painful situations in many lives. When employed in this insensitive and mindless manner such religious practice is a manifestation of evil. Those of other faiths may have to engage in similar soul-searching to determine the depths and styles of their own religious evils. I speak at this point only for those of us who have experienced something of the different Christian traditions and what I continue to slowly and painfully come to appreciate as practices that risk becoming "hand-maidens of hell", "mid-wives of personal terror".

Before we leave this discussion of the internal or psycho-spiritual dimensions of evil it is important to treat two areas in which conservative religion has a mixed effect on their manifestation. Perhaps every internal process, every line of thought however unsettling, has the capacity to feed rejuvenation and well-being, along with fuelling discouragement, dis-ease or demoralization. The first of these domains is that of anger, guilt and shame. The second is the predominance of laziness and narcissism.

For many anger is an ill-considered emotion. When attached to unjust treatment, whether of one’s self or one’s neighbour (social injustice) it is an appropriate vehicle or catalyst of political change. In the context of personal suffering, deprivation and/or pain, the imprint of perceived unfairness: "Why me?" "Why do I suffer so?" "How come they have so much and I so little?", situates anger where it may again serve as an impetus for right-wising situations but where it may be blocked by cultural or internalised restrictions. The religious person may find it difficult to express her anger towards others: "love your enemies, do good to those who spitefully use you". She will also find it out of keeping with her religious beliefs and principles to "blame God". This may leave only one’s self "to take the whole rap" for everything that goes wrong. One of the dynamics of anxiety, depression and chronic pain is this self-same blaming of one’s self for one’s condition. "I must have done something terribly wrong to deserve this deplorable state."

The spiritually-minded secularist finds her or himself cursing fate, a kind of flowing anger with no place to settle. Modern psycho-spiritual practices often deal with this anger by attempting to provide distinct outlets: screaming, pounding pillows, an ersatz spouse, and anger management workshops. It may well be the case that "getting it off your chest" is at best a mixed blessing, since there would seem to be no reason why any expression of anger, however frivolous in style, would not reinforce the need or wish to "let off steam" again, and yet again. One wonders if the thoughtful consideration of constructive avenues for venting anger: acting, writing, satirical expression, political action, and critical study (to name just a few) would not constitute a more enlightening, all be they more refined, and therefore demanding, outlets of anger and indignation.

Anger, at this personal level, therefore, is all too often an unconsciously repressed, or consciously suppressed emotion–"the forgotten emotion" which is all too often made trivial in modern western cultures. What could be a powerful force for aggressiveness against injustice may be played out in hockey games, bar-room brouhahas, and mindless partisan bellyaching. As Carol Travis has concluded in her fine book Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion:

The moral use of anger, I believe, requires an awareness of choice and an embrace of reason. It is knowing when to become angry–"this is wrong, this I will protest"–and when to make peace; when to take action, and when to keep silent; knowing the likely cause of one’s anger and not berating the blameless. For most of the small indignities of life, the best remedy is a Charlie Chaplin movie. For the large indignities, fight back. And learn the difference.

Are we not too slow to recognize that underutilized human emotions and energies like indignation (which may be avoided because we fear they represent our "dark or shadow" side), may be a common cause in the origination of evil?

Guilt and shame arise by our reaction to our own behaviours which in retrospect we judge as missing the mark, undesirable, reprehensible, or evil. The feeling we get when we judge ourselves is one of guilt. Through longstanding internalization the feeling of guilt may have few audible recriminations associated with it. But it has been well fed in the past by phrases like "I shouldn’t have done that" "I ought to have treated her better". Shame is the deeper dimension of unspoken, perhaps unrepentant or unacknowledged, guilt. For purposes of psychological or spiritual health both cases require acknowledgment of transgressions committed and clear-headed assessment of responsibility. In the deeper realm of shame the cognitive behavioural therapist constructively augments traditional spiritual insights: the need for acknowledgment; the honest assessment of the extent of my responsibility (my share of the pie of unfair or reprehensible causation); breaking the silence (confession to priest or friend); seeking forgiveness and preparation to offer reparation to the transgressed other; and self-forgiveness.

Those of religious backgrounds may readily see the parallels between sound cognitive behavioural therapy or "secular-humanist appropriate actions" and traditional confession, repentance and forgiveness. I would simply add that

religious practices here as elsewhere may, on the one hand, strengthen the healthy conscience and constructive thinking which engenders reconciliation and social justice, or on the other hand, they may end at magnifying guilt and shame, blocking the realistic process of assigning and sharing blame, expressing appropriate anger, and reconciling with one’s neighbour. There are, in short, situations where we are in the wrong and our religious, spiritual or moral sensitivities are rightly called into play. But, equally, there are other situations and circumstance where we are unable to acknowledge, or incapable of assessing, our own shortcomings fairly and realistically. Once again in the latter context religious dogmas may serve to tear down rather than build up; to de-energize the already weak, to blame the already victimized.

The second realm in which religion and spirituality may have a significant role in overcoming and/or contributing to evil is that of laziness and narcissism. M. Scott Peck in his book People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil describes the processes whereby we take the easy way out, follow others instead of setting our own directions and values. Every Remembrance Day we recall how fortunate we are, that others: the Boys of War, have sacrificed their lives for us. We go on to condemn the evils of war, but seldom do we examine or reflect on the evils of comfort, ease, and self-indulgence which configure our contemporary lives.

If a long-standing period of comfortable living is suddenly uprooted, by death, disease, and divorce, the reaction of some is one of disbelief and recrimination towards others, towards God, towards ourselves. There are of course many others for whom comfort is a distant utopia and so more disruption in life quite simply supports their fatalism and hatred of life and those who are understood to be the causal agents of grief: doctors, lawyers, former friends, and preachers. Similarly, and in the larger realm, "the rich", "the government", "the military", the flaky peace-lovers" can be targeted as the causal factors of gross injustice.

The advantage of religious, spiritual or moral accounting is that it may call our attention to the easy-going evil which defines our lives. The disadvantage is that the self-deprecation which can be associated with the radical critique of our way of life may leave us with no leg to stand on, no foundation on which to build or rebuild a better life. We may still argue that the priestly (sacrificial-radical) view of a Capricious Divinity requiring sacrifice is necessary to challenge those who lie in comfortable beds and sit in equally comfortable pews. The views of the Divine Entity engaged in deliverance (Exodus) and reconciliation (return from the Exile) may apply more to peoples who are not denoted by their indolence and self-preoccupation but by their long-suffering and patience as they wait for peace with justice and an end to economic exploitation, misery, and political oppression. But if the nature of the Universe is a Love-Force then we may assume that no one theme or understanding will hold in one place, but that the Spirit of Justice and Compassion may arise at any location, and for any people at any time.

The constructive process which counters this internal, psycho-spiritual or experiential fall (as distinct from a literalist one) may be summed up, for many Christians at least, as "resist not evil, but overcome evil with good". My Jewish and Muslim friends have their own scriptural counterparts but we may well share injunctions about a loving creator and "though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be made as white as snow". There is in all of us a response-centre which magnet-like clings to the just, the true, the compassionate. The resistance of evil at these lower levels of personal hell are, as my good friend Anne Goodman once described "baby steps, taken one at a time". The payoff of coming through abuse, torture, divorce, chronic anxiety, severe depression, racial and class discrimination, may well be the gut-level knowledge that things can be changed, but we won’t be surprised and disappointed if they change from bad to good as tiny baby steps towards what is positive, decent, truthful and loving.

All of these actions at the personal level represent tiny victories of the better over the not as good and every one of them takes personal courage. This is the courage which is all too often difficult to recognize in our fellows. If M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth , is correct, the effort and courage to overcome one’s own lethargy bit by bit is also a portrait of overcoming evil with good.

My 95-year old mother openly illustrates this reality of quiet courage and sticktoitiveness. I suppose because those around her know of her age and how spirited she is for that age, her witness is rather obvious. But even here they do not know that each day (and night for that matter) is one of living with and around constant pain. Our contemporary world is brim full of such courageous souls and this is yet another reason why it strikes me as loathsome that religious messages would confront people at the level of their carefully-crafted aides-to-courage, as if to kick away the elderly woman’s cane, so that she could see (again) that she cannot walk long without it. Remind her, if you will, of her sinful nature!

So I and others whom I know (but also millions in the USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand to be sure) celebrate the frank way in which John Shelby Spong defends honesty and just-dealing while attacking the dishonesty and narrowness of his conservative religious opponents—the unthinking cane-kickers. And it is at this level that we must turn back to social, societal and institutional matters of good and evil.

EXTERIOR OR COLLECTIVE EVIL

Many of us grew up digesting the notion "In a world of organized evil, it is essential that there be organized good to confront it". Others of us read with care Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society in which, and in spite of his views of original sin, he recognised that good individuals may be corrupted in groups. Political scientists studying the American Presidency for example have witnessed the deplorable "group think" in which advisers shrink from differing from "the Chief" or from the majority opinion. How could such a collection of astute individuals possibly be wrong?, the secret dissenter asks herself, or himself.

Canadian Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire has experienced the truth of this declaration of the need for forthright and well-organized good in his duties as the military officer in charge of the U.N. operations in Rwanda. The evil epitomized in the murder of 800,000 persons in 100 days is beyond comprehension. Yet it not only happened but it happened through the viciousness of a relatively small band of killers, known to be preparing for such horror. It also happened at the same time that a relatively humane and liberal U.S. President (Bill Clinton) and other political leaders were speaking at the United Nations General Assembly about peaceful relations, but also about their caution in risking their military personnel in African civil war.

I raise the horrors of Rwanda, not because I am overly knowledgeable about the situation but because I am convinced that it is like facing death, it represents the reality of evil in a manner that cannot be denied or avoided. It represents, or more precisely constitutes, evil at all levels since it forces us to see its organizational and partisan nature, our unwillingness or feeble attempts to confront it, and its lasting effects. The evil of Rwanda still casts its ugly web with continuing hatreds, suicides and attempted suicides and the hell of what we today call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

I also raise Rwanda because I have had the honour of meeting the longest serving Canadian Peace-keeper in that country. I have seen the effects of the horrors of Rwanda on this gentle and compassionate soldier, in his own struggle with PTSD and yet, his unswerving courage as he finds his meaning and health in talking to others like my former students about his experiences, and raises a bit of money to bring at least one Rwandan (his former aide) to study in Canada. The students in this class exchanged email messages with this generous-spirited man and announced to all with tears in their eyes that it had been the most moving and significant university class in their careers.

Romeo Dallaire’s long struggle back to some semblance of health, similarly demands his telling of this story as forthrightly as he is able. In Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda Dallaire has described his meeting face to face with Evil. At times his descriptions are of personified evil (the murdering leader himself) and at other times Evil has become an impersonal force. Permit me to use his own words from a recent CBC interview with Brian Stewart:

STEWART: How can you have any optimism about human nature when you've seen really the "heart of darkness" itself -- the worst genocide of our recent decades?

DALLAIRE: Padre once asked me a similar question, and I said you know padre, now I know there's a God, because I actually shook hands and negotiated with the devil. And I know what he looks like; I know what it does; I know its character and I know the horror that can come from paradise turned into hell.

"They were devils. And I couldn't see them as human," he says. "Just as I know there was a presence of a superior being on a couple of occasions, present as a physical vibrating sense to help me through very, very difficult moments. That same reality came through with those people. I was not discussing with humans. They had erased themselves."

"Which created in itself an ethical dilemma, do you negotiate with the devil? Or do you just take out your pistol and shoot him between the eyes."

"I describe at one point in the book where I walked in and for a second or whatever, long enough to be conscious of it, I wasn't sure if my hand would go take my pistol out or would move to shake their hand. It was that strong,"

The evil which Dallaire confronts goes unanalysed in nature, although its possible prevention by international attention and organization is posited by the Lt-General in his new book. However, M. Scott Peck, in his study of Mylai, Vietnam, and the wholesale murders of villagers including women and children by U.S. Marines, does hearken back to laziness and narcissism as root causes. Peck describes "group evil" in Mylai, a group dynamics of dependency and narcissism where individuals routinely regress since: "More than anything else, it is probably a matter of laziness. It is simply easy to follow, and much easier to be a follower than a leader." (p. 233, People of the Lie). This may be particularly so when procrastination and sloth replaces diligence in part because of the authoritative, in many instances authoritarian, nature of much military discipline. The same might be said of churches, mosques and synagogues where authoritative, or traditional tenets shape their adherents’ beliefs and thinking and thus their disposition whether or not to confront tenaciously the presence of evil or evil-doing.

This discussion is reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil where the great American Jewish political philosopher described this German bureaucrat Otto Adolf Eichmann) during his trial for holocaust murders. Once again, the "banality", the "just every day carrying on of administrative duties," resulted in the imprisonment and gassing of millions of human beings.

Closer to home, John Spong’s biography (Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love & Equality describes scores of situations where evil in the form of gross dishonesty, self-serving, and gutless reaction is taken up by the leaders of the American Episcopalian Church. Spong is repeatedly lied to and betrayed by fellow-bishops who are afraid of public opinion and will not freely open their minds to reconsidering issues like same-sex marriages or the rights of blacks or divorcees. If segregation and the oppression of gays and lesbians is evil then conservative Christians have much for which to answer.

But evil is only rarely performed politically in the name of evil, it is generally conducted in the name (and therefore unconscious disguise) of good. "The Unity of the Church" is one such justification for refusal of change and failure to develop structural and cultural justice. It has haunted John Spong throughout his life as the conservative justification for wrong-doing or uncharitable actions. Those of us active in synagogues, mosques, temples and churches will have to re-examine our need to be called pious and good. We may have to be continually vigilant for fairness, intellectual honesty, and empathic activity, knowing as we do so, that ours is a particularly vulnerable position of wanting to be seen as good, and afraid to wander too far from some scriptural or institutional directives.

I began this rather lengthy essay by mentioning Dr. David Swann. Allow me to conclude this admittedly terse first glance on my part on the problems of good and evil by returning to his thinking. David Swann describes health as the issue of the millennium. By this he means that human physical, mental and spiritual health are under attack not just by SARS, AIDS, cancers and West Nile Virus, but by wars, street violence, terrorism, famine and environmental degradation. The concomitant physical and traumatic stresses of mind and soul are everywhere present in the 21st century. The good doctor prescribes dosages of TLC applied generously to the ills of our time. There is no substitute for the diligent application of Truth, Love and Courage. Personally I was moved by David Swann’s confession that being a "nice guy" fails in comparison to being "an honest man".

The manner in which we must confront evil therefore is by honesty, love, compassion, kindness, the Hebrew "hav a" or love as the action of giving...and the courage I attempted to describe earlier. For what, after all is said and done, is evil but the absence of these attributes of the Divine. It matters not to me, you, or God, G-d, Allah, whether you believe in Him, Her, It. What does matter is our proximity to the capital U Universe, or capacity to share in Truth, Love and Courage. Evil is that eternally dark and hellishly frightening realm which can only be described by what is absent, and what is absent is God, or the attributes of the foundation of this miraculous Universe. It is not surprising that a Hitler can initiate the Evil of the Holocaust. He was one of the empty people, whose only sense of the TLC was mere words to be used to propagandize his existential emptiness and insecurity.

Hell is the place where evil abounds. It may rest inside the despairing, the PTSD victims of horrendous events and circumstances. It resides, hopefully for shorter rather than longer periods, in those grieving losses, those facing death without comfort, the mentally troubled, the severely depressed, those in chronic pain and chronic anxiety. It rests heavily on those who have lost their identity, their homes, workplaces and schools. It rests even more heavily on those who have not known the comforts of family and friends, but rather have experienced abuse, whether physical or mental.

So it is that whether we speak of the interior or exterior, the personal or the political, we are faced with unfathomable evil, which can destroy us, every one of us individually, or all of us together. But we are also enveloped in uncharted seas of compassion and social justice if we exercise the patience which exceeds "political terms of office", compassion which gives in spite of cost rather than "Hollywood romances" which are celluloid thin and sentimentally shallow. We address evil with respect, coming to know and acknowledge its power in all human-made institutions and roles (including the hallowed halls of organized religion) and its ever-present residence within us (our dark or shadow side). And finally, we "resist evil, and overcome it with good by moving one foot ahead of the other, one baby-step at a time, moving away or resisting little by little the laziness and self-adornment or the fear of our own isolation and absence. Together with quickened minds, encouraged energy, emboldened spirits and the comfort of true friends of like mind and spirit we are able to constantly regenerate patches of the organized good, which salves the psycho-spiritual within and makes politically constructive the world without.

Larry J. Fisk
November, 2003

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