Some Christians think that Satan and God
are in some kind of an eternal arm wrestling match—matched opponents struggling
for souls—and that by what we see around us—God is losing. But the Bible says that Satan is just one of
many countless angels that God created, and thusly cannot be equal to God in
His powers, as whatever powers Satan has must have come from God. I also deny that the world is getting
progressively worse morally while also denying that it is getting progressively
better morally. There are any number of
periods in world history that that appear far worse by any measure than our
times, such as the Viking invasions, the Black Plague, and World War II. I think that evil is real, but I locate the seeds of evil
neither in society nor in Satan. To say,
for example, that the Cambodian genocide of the mid 1970s occurred because of a
societal break down doesn’t make sense to me.
If everyone is guilty, then no one is guilty. If the devil made me do it, then I cannot be
responsible for my evil. Evil comes from
us-- our ability to choose freely between right and wrong.
Adam’s fall “perverted the whole order
of nature in heaven and on earth.” To
Martin Luther a man was a sinner saved by God’s grace received through faith
alone. The 16th century
Council of Trent re-endorsed Augustine’s attack on Pelagianism
for the counter-reformation Catholic church. John
Calvin relied on Augustine’s attack on the British monk Pelagius, who preached
that man could save himself by good works. Augustine based his interpretation on the
Latin Vulgate from Roman’s 5, that implied the
biological transmission of sin from Adam on.
However, theologians since believe the phrase “in whom all have sinned”
should read “because all have sinned.”
The term “original sin” means that man is originally and personally
sinful. American has always presumed
itself that it was God’s chosen remnant awaiting to fulfill its manifest
destiny, to the point where it very nearly subscribes to the heresy of
Pelagius, the fifth century Christian ascetic who argued that man could gain
salvation by his efforts alone. Pelagius was a childless theologian, and parents know that
children must be taught to do right.
Delightful as they are, they are also little lumps of original sin that
need loving guidance.
The Puritan ethos was striving and hard
work. No wonder that it gave way to its
secular descendent pragmatism, that uniquely American philosophy articulated by
C.S. Pierce, Dewey, and James. Americans
are the exemplars of pragmatism, of rational humanism. The pragmatist does not deny the existence
of evil—although he likes to call it something else. But he optimistically assumes that it exists
in institutions rather than men and can therefore be legislated or educated
away. Thus, the American ethos was part
pragmatic, part Puritan and part Pelagian, and had
the synergistic effect of masking the popular consciousness of evil.
Organizations both dilute personal
responsibility while amplifying evil.
Bureaucracies segment each act so that a person distances himself from
the ultimate horror and convinces himself that he is merely performing his
duty. It sometimes takes rare moral
courage to perceive that I am a participant in evil although I don’t perform an
act of evil. If I pay taxes for a bomb
or construct a bomb or load a bomb into airplane, am I any less guilty that the
man who pushed the button to drop that bomb?
Hannah Arendt
spoke of Adolph Eichmann’s “banality of evil” and we
also see this in the kind of people who joined the Nazi death squads to kill
their friends or neighbors. These were
the people who pushed children and their parents into charnel pits and then
later sang “Stille Nacht, Heilge Nacht” to the German
Christ child with the shining hair.
These people were not monsters in the way that we think of
monsters. They were policemen and
teachers and postmen. The Final Solution
was decided at the Wannsee Conference in 1942, and
most of the people who attended had doctorate degrees and were loving and gentle
husbands-- the
very flower of Christian Europe.
Somehow, a confluence of factors converged to turn them and indeed
people at all stations in life into beasts who marshaled law, medicine,
technology, and science to achieve their greatest evil of the 20th
century. The holocaust was the second
fall of man. I think this was far more
than an institutional or a political break down, and it is overly simple to
blame the holocaust on Martin Luther or Adolph Hitler or the crash of ’29. It was viral evil, evil spreading from person
to person, group to group, that finally infected national policy. There were a few brave Christians who stood
up to the Nazis, and some who died for their faith in doing so. But the vast majority did not. In the movie Sound of Music, after the
wedding of the Trapps, the movie shows Nazis marching
into