history of violence (part II) | the eighth month

What in me is dark

Illumine, what is low raise and support,

That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of G*d to men.

/John Milton                  

//

Tom White was 65 when he died. 

In May of 1979, White was captured and imprisoned in Cuba for his M work. Tom endured a year and a half of incarceration and torture before he was set free. After the successful reception of his book, G*d's Missiles Over Cuba,  White was launched into the Chr*stian public consciousness and became the executive director of Voice of the Martyrs--a well-known Chr*stian publication.  And under his leadership, the organization saw tremendous expansion.

But White's death wasn't from natural causes.  In the week prior to his death, an investigation had begun.  It seemed that Tom had molested a young girl.

She was 10.

She was 10, and Tom had committed suicide.

//

Logically, the problem of evil isn't terribly hard to overcome.  The thrust of the argument relies on the listener's inability to believe that actual evil and the Chr*stian G*d can coexist.  Like I outlined before, if evil exists, then an all-powerful/knowing/loving G*d could not. But why would that be the case? Because such a reality, one with evil, is obviously less ideal than the ultimately desirable reality that such a G*d, if He did exist, would desire to create.  This assertion pleads an obvious question: how is it possible to know that?  Plainly, it isn't.  But the tacit desire that lurks beneath the problem of evil's challenge is one worth questioning as well--that desire being to live in a world where evil is impossible.  While initially this notion could be considered a pleasant one, the principles that it would necessitate are far from pleasant.  In what world would evil not be possible? One without choice.  True...in a world without choice, men could never do evil.  Perhaps this could be considered more desirable.  But another basic question is potent here as well: but in what way is that more desirable?  I mean, what meaning would any action have, overall, if those actions were devoid of agency? 

Agency, a fancy word for choice, allows for what we understand to be an essential component of love--that being the choice not to love.  To me, compulsory love seems more akin to rape than romance.  Ergo (to use another fancy word), if you banish choice you banish evil--and consequently love; and how anyone can conclude with any kind of confidence that a world without love is superior to a world without evil is beyond me.

But perhaps all of this assumes that we've already agreed upon terms, and I don't think that assumption can be made.  I think a definition of good and evil would be pertinent at this point.  In a world where the Chr*stian G*d exists, good can be most aptly and succinctly defined as that which glorifies G*d.  Evil, then, would be those things that do not.  A notion that these would-be-evident definitions rely upon concerns the concept of relativity: G*d serves as point relative to which other points are deemed good or evil.   This is important to note for ohsomany reasons, but for our purposes one bears mention: it is impossible that G*d do/create evil, because He serves as the definer of good.  All definitions of good or evil that can used on G*d outside of direct comparison with Him are utterly useless, because they would be only effective in a postulated reality where there is a system of law and justice greater than not just us, but G*d himself.  And in such a reality, G*d ceases to be G*d actually, subservient to the rule of a greater Law.

But, at least according to our understanding, there is no such thing. 

It is precisely this fact of reality that Job, in squalor and misery, presents his friends with so that they might understand his very clear understanding of the Almighty.  He explains that G*d "is not a man, as I am, that I might answer him, that we should come to trial together.  There is no arbiter between us, who might lay his hand on us both."  If this is the case, then we must reconcile a reality in which a perfectly good maker began a series of events that led to evil manifested.  This reconciliation, daunting as it may be, fully relies on our understanding of how little we can understand.  It is fully possible that, since G*d being glorified is the greatest good, perhaps the choice of free beings to love (and not love) that G*d is the best possible means G*d can be glorified, and that instead of a reality with evil being somehow incongruous with a reality with good G*d, it is the expected consequence of a reality with a good G*d.  Perhaps, but we cannot know.  But ignorance is the expected plea from beings who are positioned as we are, given the limited intellect and knowledge we have.  Ignorance is the plea that must be made by thinking individuals, and, not only thinking individuals, but humble ones, too.

But of course, the efficacy of this rebuttal rests wholly on your ability to accept the existence of choice.  Now of course there are those, and those are legion, that to assert such a thing violates G*d's sovereignty.  I understand the contention, but I don't know if I agree.  I don't know that it's possible that liberated beings and a sovereign G*d could coexist in the same reality, but I don't know that's it's impossible either.  In fact, I have no idea how I could even make a determination.  That being the case, I feel relatively (fully, actually) at ease saying that I have as much reason to believe that it is the case as I have reason to believe anything else, and that based on my experience, I should side with the version of reality that best fits my data.

I think that reality implies a complex interplay of wills, divine and otherwise--that G*d works tirelessly to engineer righteous eventualities in opposition with unrighteous realities. 

//

Then the woman said, "Please let your servant speak a word to my lord the king." [David] said, "Speak."  And the woman said, "Why then have you planned such a thing against the people of God? For in giving this decision the king convicts himself, inasmuch as the king does not bring his banished one home again.  We must all die; we are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again. But God will not take away life, and he devises means so that the banished one will not remain an outcast."

//

The power of the problem of evil isn't necessarily embedded in logical impossibilities so much as it is emotionally distressing.  To try to understand the compatibility of ever-obvious present evil and an ever-present good G*d is a challenge and then some, but it really doesn't make a firm case for anything.  The problem is most provocative on an emotional level, not an intellectual one. But what is so ironic about that is how much more emotionally distressing the converse possibility is.  It is certainly hard to deal with an evil world and a good G*d, but it is even harder to deal with an evil world and nothing else. In fact, that depressing worldview becomes infinitely more so when the realization is made that it wouldn't actually be evil and no good G*d but that there would be no real reason to call anything evil or good.  The distinction would be purely arbitrary, and the moral difference between giving bread to a starving child and brutally killing the same kid would be nothing more than a product of your own meaningless mind, whose own significance is equally absurd to discuss because significance is, like good and evil, invented--not existent.  There will be no redemption, nor is it even possible, because there is nothing to be redeemed.  Evil, then, is just the word we use to describe the very natural, possibly infinite state of the universe.

For whom then, exactly, is the problem of evil a problem?

//

What seems to most challenging to believers, maybe more than anything else, is when supposed Chr*stians do confirmed evil.  But it's interesting that similar things didn't seem to bother J*sus: "'Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.  On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?'  And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.'"  It's an almost faith-annihilating thing when we mull over the evils done by those who claim to be followers, but I think it is our inherent idolatry of man that contributes the most to that power.

But to a certain extent, it may certainly feel justified.  After all, it is biblical to believe that believers stand for G*d, for it appear to Paul "as though God were making his appeal through us." But what must be looked out for is the subtle switch between advocate for G*d's case and substitute for G*d's person--something that I'll discuss another time.


What's most interesting about Chr*st's prophesy is how opposed it is to our own expectations.  I don't think surprise would have manifested on J*sus' face had the Tom White controversy exploded in C.E. 30 Palestine instead 2012 America.  Why would it?  The point of J*sus' point was to prevent any such bewilderment.  Instead of shock, the evil of "good" people is something to be expected.  In fact, according to His words, not only will evil be done by "good" people, but miracles as well.  The plain truth is that our confusion is a product of our own ignorance of the Word--not a contraction between reality and our knowledge of the W*rd.

//

In the winter of 1937 as the Japanese soldiers prepared to invade Nanking, Chinese nationals and westerners fled the city in droves.  Those that didn't, most of them, formed the "International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone," and most of the members of that committee were m's.  As atrocities heaped unimaginable, these men and women saved an estimated 250, 000 lives. 

G*d was there in Nanking, evil in that slaughter full sick of sin.  G*d was there saving lives from the horrid-black violence of wicked men.

And He made is appeal through men.

//

12 am and I needed to go to sleep something awful.  I was drowsily piling covers on, convincing myself this was the place to be. For the past couple weeks, some weird philosophical depression had leaked into my consciousness.  Doubts and hard thoughts and the like. Sometimes being in the extreme minority with your convictions on important things makes your convictions on important things seem south of plausible, and you begin to ask yourself, as Musgrove would say, "Am I the crazy one?" 

But in that ohsoperfect timing that is a complex product of my perception and divine intervention, my phone rings. 

"David. What?"

"You want to skype with Matt?"

"Uh.....sure"

As I walk into David's room, I hear David and Matt talking, and I know something is up.  I get square with the computer screen and see ruffled but glorious Matt Witty, and he's beaming.

"Matt. What's up man?"

"Alex. I got saved."

 //

I don't think I can rightly describe the moment. I had talked to Matt for months--crap, years--about everything and G*d and the whole deal.  The last time I really talked to Matt before leaving for China he was in tears.  In tears because he could not believe in G*d.  He could not believe in a G*d that he had never experienced or known. 

To listen to Matt describe how that G*d become known...I can't say really...but I can tell you something else:  It was an answer for me like non other.  In that space and time I understood the infinite value of a single human life.  It's something I just don't think is widely understood.  Because for me right there in front of him all I could think was that the entire compound length and weight of history was worth the single eternal relationship that now existed between G*d and my friend.  Because we ask, and often, why G*d tarries--why He allows this wretched world to continue.  But I think the answer is obvious.  He bides His time because He wills that non would perish, and that all who would love Him have every opportunity to do so.  He waits because He loves us infinitely, and since it's so hard to grasp that, the whole thing feels like some problem when actually it is His means to our s*lvation.

"But God will not take away life, and he devises means so that the banished one will not remain an outcast."

/(the wise woman that talks to David)