Looking Evil in the Eye

Is the subject still a worthwhile one for theologians?

Modern liberal theologians have forgotten the problem of evil," says University of Chicago Philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Is that true, even in the aftermath of a horror like Jonestown? Remarks Yale Divinity School's Barbara Hargrove, "in other ages, what happened to Jim Jones would have been referred to very clearly as coming under the influence of evil forces--'the devil got in him.' But I haven't heard any people using that kind of language."

To be sure, traditionalist Catholics and Evangelical Protestants still talk of individual evil, original sin, even of the devil and demons--and did so in the wake of what happened in the jungles of Guyana. But these concepts have not exactly been popular among more liberal theologians. Brown University's John Giles Milhaven, for example, refuses to attach the label "evil" even to Jonestown. "I think what really happens with people like Hitler and Jones," says he, "is simple psychological sickness. The only response [to Guyana], it seems to me, is pity for everybody involved, not moral horror. Psychological illnesses that keep people from being good, sociological causes that compel people to turn to Jones or to Hitler--that's what one should be concerned with."

The University of Toronto's Gregory Baum, like Milhaven a former Catholic priest, agrees. The enormity of the Rev. Jim Jones' deed, he maintains, in no way discredits the liberal emphasis on social and institutional evil as opposed to individual sin. Yale's Margaret Farley also defends the modern de-emphasis on personal evil. "One of the advantages of looking to social evil is that you don't neutralize evil at all, but you don't become paranoid about it either."

While Jonestown may raise questions about upbeat liberal theologies, it also raises a classic problem for orthodox belief, one as old as the Book of Job or as current as next week's list of senseless murders: Why does evil exist at all? If God is benevolent, and if he is all powerful, why does he not prevent evil? If evil exists, so the argument runs, then either God's love or his power must be limited.

The classic Christian answer to this quandary is the free will theory formulated by St. Augustine. As the Rev. Stephen Duffy of New Orleans' Loyola University summarized it last week: "God freely decided to limit his own freedom and put no limit on ours. We certainly are capable of making a botch of it." If God had programmed all human beings to be good, he explains, there might be no evil, but there would be no virtue either. God chose to let man choose.

Philosopher Alvin C. Plantinga of Michigan's Calvin College offers an intricate, logical refinement of Augustine's theory in God, Freedom and Evil (1974, reissued in 1977 by Eerdmans). He contends that it is unreasonable to argue that an omnipotent God could have created a world in which moral evil is nonexistent and, at the same time, man's spirit is free. Plantinga concludes that the existence of evil does not render the existence of God improbable, much less preclude it. But he grants that this does not solve the problem of "theodicy," the effort, in John Milton's phrase, "to justify the ways of God to man."

The tendency in modern liberal Christianity has been to solve the problem of theodicy by trimming God's omnipotence. For instance, in God and Human Anguish (Abingdon, 1977), the Rev. S. Paul Schilling, former chairman of theological studies at Boston University, proposes that eternal limits may be built into God's power, even though his love is unlimited. "If so, his creative activity involves costly travail over long periods of time, and human beings are exposed to ills that he does not choose, but works ceaselessly to remove and prevent."

Over the centuries, speculation about evil focused mainly on the imponderables of nature, the so-called acts of God. But in the 20th century, the scale of man-made evil has become so vast that it too raises doubts about the very existence of God. Why did God not prevent mankind from carrying out the Holocaust? This is a continuing issue in Jewish theology, which has produced no more conclusive an answer than the vow of Canadian Philosopher Emil Fackenheim, who is Jewish, to maintain his faith in the face of everything. Otherwise, says Fackenheim, Judaism is in danger of withering away and Hitler will have won a "posthumous victory" after all.

Compared with the epochal events of a century that has produced both Hitler and Stalin, the Guyana tragedy raises no novel theological issues. To the Rev. J. Philip Wogaman of Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., Jonestown offered a wholesale example of a problem that humanity faces on a "retail basis" each day: a despair and lack of hope in God so deep as to lead to suicide.

Traditional theology ascribes human evil, as well as evil in nature, to the work of Satan and his legions or to the ravages of original sin--"the one Christian doctrine," quips Catholic Theologian David Tracy, "that is empirically verifiable."

The horror in Jonestown appears to undermine basic elements of modern popular religion: that social sin matters and not personal evil; that it does not matter what one believes so long as the belief is sincere; that such acts as suicide are not intrinsically wrong.

Yale's Hargrove agrees. "People are re-xamining some of the assumptions of both liberal religion and liberal education about the notion of the evil being in social institutions, the idea that if we just got rid of them, all the little flowers would be free to bloom. In Guyana, people who separated themselves from the evil institutions of our capitalist-industrial economy and went out to start Eden all over again ended up, not in the perfect life, but in death."

Since Jonestown occurred in a supposedly religious framework, it raises special questions. "Nothing is as bad as bad religion," remarks Canadian Protestant Theologian Alan Davies. Says Chicago's Ricoeur, author of The Symbolism of Evil (1967): "What I fear is that everyone will try to disconnect themselves from Jonestown. 'We are the good people. This cannot happen to us.' " It can happen to anyone, insists Ricoeur, the classic example being the "good Germans" of the Nazi era. Of course, it was those solid citizens who, in the late Hannah Arendt's famous phrase, exemplified the "banality of evil" --not its absence.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.