Tragedy, Trouble and the Christian Witness Against Evil

By Neil Earle

Volunteers unload relief supplies from an Indian Air Force helicopter in Nepal.

That was the week that was!

Even as rescue workers performed their usual feats of mercy and heroism in the rubble of Katmandu, Nepal, thousands violently protested violence in some of America’s major cities. And not to be outdone, James Holmes, the young man accused of shooting 12 and injuring 70 in Aurora, Colorado saw his trial come to head.

All in one week, which was also the 40th anniversary of the United States evacuation from South Vietnam.

James Holmes did his “alleged” multiple murder on July 2, 2012 during a midnight screening of the movie The Dark Knight Rises (DKR), a troubling film that perhaps shortened the life of Heath Ledger, the actor who played Batman’s nemesis The Joker. The persona of the Joker offers a convenient portal to tie these nefarious events into the question of evil – Why do bad things happen to us? Heath Ledger’s Joker was so convincing that, you may have heard, he made Batman seem like a passive spectator in his own movie.

“Pretentious” was the word used quite often to describe a movie the New York Times condemned as “as dark as night and almost as long.” How much hype can a mere comic book hero stand?

The Orlando Weekly tried to offer some political relevance to the Joker’s paranoid tendencies as a shrewd rebuke of the sometimes frothy “politics of hope” we hear about us. They described the movie as a “152 minute exercise in watching and waiting for hope to die.” Which it doesn’t, fortunately.

Defining Evil?

But popular culture sometimes stirs the depths. The movie and the shooter live on in my introspective pastoral imagination (my wife and I saw the movie) as examples of St. Augustine’s shrewd affirmation (borrowed from Plato) that evil is but the corruption of good. I wondered where DKR got its PG-13 rating though some of the most memorably cruel scenes are not shown, like Joker spearing a man with a nail. Ugh. Mind you, the Bible is no stranger to violence. Revelation 15:5-6 offers this: “they have shed the blood of your saints and prophets, and you have given them blood to drink as they deserve” (15:5-6). However, the Bible generally “knows what it is doing” in its more bloodcurdling sections, quite often doling out long overdue justice to some pretty nefarious types (Esther 7:10).

I digress. St. Augustine reminds us that evil is a knotty theological problem. The actor Michael Caine approaches the bleak core of “The Dark Knight” movie when he tells Bruce Wayne/Batman who is trying to figure out the Joker’s motives that “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Right. Evil’s origins are obscure even in Stephen King novels. Flagg in The Stand simply shows up. He is foiled but there are hints that given the right set of circumstances he’ll be back. And 2 Thessalonians 2, speaking of a very evil villain to appear at some unspecified time, speaks of “the mystery of iniquity.”

Horsehead nebula: a strange quantum universe that is predictable in some ways and yet teems with spontaneity and dynamism.

There certainly is a mystery about earthquakes such as struck Katmandu and snuffed out the precious lives of the victims in the Aurora movie house. Augustine’s definition of evil as a spore, a cancer, a mould preying on something healthy as its host element has rarely been surpassed. In the Bible evil is personalized in the Biblical form of the Devil who (some think) turned envious at God’s purposes for his good creation. “The only cause of evil,” wrote Augustine, “is the falling away from the unchangeable good…it is puffed up with a foolish joy” (Enchiridion, pages 3031).

Pride the Root

Satan is in fact scored for that very sin of pride in 1 Timothy 2:6.

Pride as “foolish joy.” Hmm. “For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good?” Augustine continued. His next point makes me think of another movie series – the Star Wars set featuring Anakim Skywalker a.k.a. Darth Vader in. Says Augustine, “and even one which was corruptible must be to some extent a good, for only by corrupting what was good in it could corruption do its harm.” He repeats, “the only cause of evil is the falling away from the unchangeable good of a being made good but changeable.”

For Augustine, God, being unchangeable, is the highest Good from which evil is a deflection, a defect. “Evil cannot exist without good,” he asserts, “but good can exist without evil.” Hmm, again.

Evil Preying on Good

Christian thinkers have picked up on all this. The irrationality and dedication to chaos which the Joker exemplifies points to “one supreme degree of Reality beyond us.” This is a quote from C.F. D’Arcy in his essay “Atonement and the Problem of Evil” in The Atonement in History and in Life. A weighty tome indeed but one indicative of how Christians have wrestled with this problem of besetting evil.

In Dying, We Live Kenneth Grayston of the University of Bristol offers this rephrasing of Augustine: “Sin has no independent existence; apart from God’s holy law, Sin is lifeless. When, however, God utters a prohibition, Sin seizes upon it as a base of operations.” Grayston goes on to quote the Jewish writer Philo who summarized evil in terms eerily reminiscient of Michael Caine’s: “Like a flame in the forest, it spreads abroad and consumes and destroys everything.”

Grayston, D’Arcy, Augustine and Philo are all echoing St. Paul’s meditation on the strange, mordant effects of personal evil in Romans 7:7-8, “Indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the law…But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire.”

Thomas Torrance

“Contingent Evil”

Personal evil is one thing and these commentators have made some insightful attempts to set it down. But what about impersonal natural evil such as the earthquake in Nepal or the destructive tsunamis of the last decade?

Here we get help from the Scottish theologian Thomas Torrance (1913-2007) who wrote eloquently and passionately about evil, perhaps all the more after seeing soldiers die as a chaplain in World War Two.

“Mankind is engulfed in a vast evil quite beyond it…an abyss of fearful darkness too deep for men and women to understand and certainly too deep for them ever to get out of it.” Torrance is the apostle of Contingency, the theological claim that the universe, the world itself is subjected to vanity as Paul wrote (Romans 8:20, NAV). We see a good creation but it shows signs of either being unfinished or framed so dynamically as to allow for both progress or regression. Torrance noticed that Einstein and Bohr and others had discovered a strange quantum universe that was predictable in some ways (as Newton confirmed) but yet teemed with spontaneity and dynamism which defied complete mathematical confirmation.

Albert Einstein

In Divine and Contingent Order Torrance argued that the contingency of the universe (stars exploding and others being born, meteors streaking across the night sky) this points to the cosmos as ultimately mysterious and baffling. As he concludes, “this is not because it is deficient in rationality (we can still guide spacecraft to Mercury) but because the extent and nature of its rationality exceed our capacity to achieve complete mastery over it” (page 40).

The Cross, after all

These are powerful thoughts and are only now being taken up by many of today’s thinkers. Torrance the pastor of course sets forth the cardinal truth of the Christian message of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, coming to rescue us from the consequences of living in a contingent universe, a setting where good and evil coexist and where evil often has the upper hand. As he phrases it in a long sentence:

“This is what God does, he comes himself in order to deliver us from subjection to destruction and death. It is this that lies behind not only the cross and the descent of the savior into our bottomless pit of guilt and death, but behind every act of healing and mercy in which Jesus sought to release distressed humanity from its subjection to evil and vanity, to release it form being a prisoner of chaos and disorder and disintegration, and to restore it to the truth of God’s creation in which he affirms as good what he has made and assumes it into communion with himself to share in his own live and glory” (Incarnation, page 242).

This is hefty theologizing indeed but it speaks so well to our desperate need, our bewilderment and our suffering when evil strikes, either personally in the world of nature. “Do not lose your sense of the Future” counsels James Smith of Calvin College. All Christian hope and expectation looks to the future when the circles will be squared, when God himself comes down to explain to us what happened to us and why, when we shall know as we are known (1 Corinthians 13: 12).

Satan the Devil as the personalized Biblical archetype of evil seems to be many degrees of irrationality beyond us. His fictionalized spawn keeps showing up in popular culture which theologian Richard Mouw of Fuller Seminary salutes as “bravely keeping the idea of pure evil alive.”

Whether as Professor Moriarity in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or that agent of chaos, known as the Joker in The Dark Knight, evil often fascinates and beguiles and is too real to ignore as trivialized as we sometimes make it. Even Satan can only exist apart from God’s goodness, something perhaps hard to grasp when sitting at a scary movie. But, if evil exists, can Good be far behind?