Giving The Devil His Due
If
you have read the most recent
newsletter, and if you have a good memory for trivia, perhaps you will recognize
that this is not the sermon I promised you for this week. I must say that I
really tried to stick with the topic I had announced. Someone had asked me to
discuss "Grace," and what that
theological term means in our daily lives. Sometime soon, I will return to that
topic and attempt to do justice by it, but this week I found myself unable to
drive from my mind an unexpected encounter, and since grace involves being able
to respond to the unexpected gifts which come our way, I have chosen to wrestle
with another topic for this morning.
A little over a week or so ago,
I found myself at an interfaith clergy luncheon. The usual pattern of such gatherings
involves a great deal
of talk about a great many subjects, always avoiding any discussion of religion.
In the midst of the meal, I was suddenly aware that at the table behind me
the rules were being broken. A rabbi and the minister of an African American congregation
were deeply involved in a discussion of whether the Devil existed.
The African American clergyman argued that the existence of the Devil
is attested to throughout the Old Testament. The Rabbi insisted that except for
the book of Job, which refers
to "the Satan," a functionary in the divine court, there is no reference to the
Devil in the Torah. Gradually other people at the table were drawn into the
discussion. A Methodist minister could not accept the idea of evil personified
in a supernatural being, but felt impelled to argue that evil is real, nonetheless.
An Episcopalian priest argued that evil is personified; he had encountered
in several individuals he knew. At that point, someone turned to me and asked,
"What about it? Do you believe
in the Devil?" And then someone said, "He doesn't believe in God! How could
he believe in the Devil?" At this point, the chair of the group interrupted
the discussion to introduce the program for the day, and we reverted to form,
by putting the religious discussion behind us.
I have found myself thinking
about this conversation in the days which have passed, wishing there had been
time and opportunity for a fuller discussion of the topic. The more I thought
about that luncheon conversation,
the more convinced I became that behind the light banter and the joking tone
was a legitimate concern deserving a more thoughtful response. I remember
thinking of Mark Twain's comment that poor Satan was the classic victim of a bad
press, that he was always being bad-mouthed, and that undoubtedly an impartial
inquiry into his history and character would reveal some endearing characteristics.
Given the fact that most of the pulpits in the land are aggressively pro-God,
maybe it is only fair that
we should devote some time to re-examining the Devil and attempting to rehabilitate
his character.
In all seriousness, there has seldom been a time
in human history when the problem of the nature and persistence of evil has been
more pressing and more relevant. We are the generation still struggling to comprehend
the scope and meaning of the great holocaust which consigned six million
Jews and God know how many other people to the gas chambers and cremation ovens
of Nazi death camps. (Despite
the occasional attempts by some to insist that the holocaust never happened,
we know that it presents us an unresolved moral challenge which we dare not
forget until we have understood what happened and why.)
We are the generation
still struggling to comprehend the incineration of entire cities, and the
nuclear bombing of civilian populations. We are the generation which watched
our own liberal democracy--with the best of intentions--slowly drawn into a vicious
war of attrition in Southeast
Asia; the generation which has lived most of our lives with an international
arrangement dependent for its stability upon a stockpile of weapons which, if
used, could destroy human civilization utterly and perhaps wipe out all life on
the planet. We are the generation which, having endured the cold war, now finds
ourselves in world in which ancient ethnic hatreds boil over into patterns
of ethnic cleansing, destroying young and old alike. We are the generation which
which has had to cope with
the rise of random, indiscriminate international terrorism as a tool of political
and ideological struggle. We are the generation which now lives in terror as
pointless violence ravages our great cities, as poverty in the midst of plenty
destroys human lives. We are the generation which which has grown cynical as
we have confronted the spector of corruption in business and government at all
levels. Maybe it is time that we paused for a moment to talk seriously about
the Devil.
Without a
doubt, our problem with the existence of evil is compounded by the fact that the
mind-set of the modern era served to relativize and, to some degree, trivialize
the nature and reality of evil. In terms of the modern world-view, the perspective
which dominated the western world from the enlightenment until recent times,
good and evil were categories which had no existence apart from human perspective.
The universe, the world of natural process, was essentially neural--neither
good nor evil. It was
the human animal who injected values into an essentially valueless context. Therefore,
good and evil were human creations and human problems, generated by human
thoughts and actions and human responses, with no external referent. It is
small wonder that God and the Devil alike were banished from the realm of serious
consideration, for both are symbols of the conviction that good and evil, right
and wrong are more than simple human conventions, but are rooted in the very
nature of the universe itself--that
the apparent struggle between good and evil is more than just an intra-mural
sport, that to some degree, all of existence is at risk in the outcome of
that struggle.
The modern world was not content to confine evil to the
human realm. In one of the most heroic poses in all human history, the modern
era saw evil as an accidental and transient quality of human experience. It had
its roots in ignorance and superstition and frustration. As human beings increased
their knowledge--both of
themselves and of the world in which they lived; as human beings mastered the
arts and sciences which could free them from crippling helplessness and frustration,
the sway of evil would be reduced steadily, and humanity's natural goodness
would rule human undertakings. There was no original sin; there was no fall
from grace; indeed, even the concept of sin was rejected as unhelpful. Evil was
simply the result of ignorance and salvation was by education and knowledge
alone. If we could learn to manipulate
the environment properly we could banish evil "forever" for, evil existed
only as a troublesome testimony to inadequate and insufficient social arrangements.
There is no need for a devil to explain the existence of phenomena which
could be accounted for on the basis of inadequate parenting, poor schooling,
lack of nutrition, and an inequitable distribution of wealth and power.
Through
this century, this modern vision of the nature and source of evil has
not fared well. One by one we
have watched the dogmas of the modern era fall before the onslaught of bitter,
painful human experience. I will not take the time to catalog those experiences
which have called into question the simplistic optimism of the modern age.
I would simply remind you that it was not some primitive, ignorant savage with
a bone in his nose who has brought human civilization to the brink of extinction.
It was not the superstitious ritual of some illiterate witch doctor which,
for decades, held the human community,
the planet around, hostage to the threat of nuclear annihilation. It was
not some tribe of uneducated primitives which encompassed the slaughter of millions
of innocent men and women and children in state-run murder machines. Quite
the contrary. The horrors we have witnessed and still witness in thus century
have been visited upon the human community precisely by those who have benefited
most fully from the modern confidence in the saving efficacy of knowledge,
power and education