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THE QUESTION OF EVIL

It has been a terrible year in America. We have endured a torrent of horrific violence that has shaken Americans to their core, namely, the shocking Aurora, CO shooting last July, then the senseless Sandy Hook massacre in December, after that the Boston Marathon bombing, and now the unimaginable decade-long abduction of three women in Cleveland. Through it all I have heard no one discussing the nature of evil.

Where have the questions been: What is evil? Where does it come from? What do we do about it?

We certainly want to be careful when talking about evil. There has long been an unfortunate entanglement between a diagnosis of mental illness and a judgment of evil. Long before modern medicine understood that a disease of the brain may cause irrational, even violent behavior, people explained such behavior as evil. The label ‘possessed by a demon’ was pinned on people whose behavior was inexplicable by any framework available to pre-modern people. We now know better.

In the Aurora shooting, the perpetrator was definitively clinically mentally ill. We will never know the mental health of Adam Lanza when he set out that day to his old elementary school. However, neither the Tsarnaev brothers nor Ariel Castro will be deemed mentally ill when they committed their monstrous crimes. Left with the horrors of these men’s actions, we try to wrap our minds around the question: how did this happen? Holmes was nowhere close to being in his right mind. Lanza may or may not have been rational during his rampage. The Tsarnaev brothers and Castro present a wholly different problem. There is no other way to explain their actions: what they did was evil, pure unadulterated evil.

Surely we never want to return to the misdiagnosis of suffers of mental illness as possessed by evil forces. Even though we now have powerful new insights into the nature of diseases of the brain, we still have not extinguished the questions surrounding the nature of evil. Our modern knowledge of mental illness does not mean that there is no such thing as evil. Complicating matters further, even in those who are undeniably mentally ill, what James Holmes and Adam Lanza did must also be judged as evil.

So, my question is just this: Why has no one been talking about evil? Why no national or even water-cooler discussions about the nature of evil? Why no queries about what evil is, or where evil comes from? Why has no one even breathed the word ‘evil?’

My definition of evil is straightforward: evil is a lie. At the very core of every single incident that you would label as evil, you will inevitably find a lie. This is why lies, of all sizes and shapes, are so troublesome. Lies always breed evil and evil always contains a lie.

Christianity proclaims that evil is in every single one of us. Every human being is capable of good and evil. It is the enduring human condition from which we are powerless to save ourselves. No self-help book, no therapy, no chanting, or trying, or willpower, or soul-searching pilgrimage can transform this fundamental reality. Evil resides in every heart, mine included, and we are powerless in and of ourselves to defeat it.

So, let me come full circle and try to answer my own question as to why there is no pervasive discussion about evil in this country in light of these otherwise inexplicable events. The discussion of evil would lead to a theological conversation. Talking about evil would invariably open up the philosophical debate about the nature of good versus evil, which leads directly to the whole question of God. In our thoroughly secular society no one seems to want to go there so the entire conversation about evil is shunned.

This should not be true of Christians. Christianity is the only religion or worldview that confronts the question of the nature of evil head on. Other religions and worldviews either sidestep the question or pretend there is no such thing as evil. Aurora, Sandy Hook, Boston, and Cleveland tell another story. There is indeed such a reality as evil.

Only in Christianity, has evil met its match. Only in the God who gave His only Son is there a cure to the problem of evil. Let us bear bold witness to Christ who has put evil under his feet while at the same time rolling up our sleeves to comfort the victims of evil doers.