"O God, the nations are come into thy inheritance. They have defiled thy holy temple. They have laid Jerusalem in heaps. They have given the dead bodies of thy servants as meat to the fowls of heaven, the flesh of thy saints to the beasts of the earth. They have shed their blood like water round about Jerusalem, and there was none to bury them." Ps. 79:1-3
There is something strong and solid about the Christian Faith. It looks boldly into every fact and facet of reality, including the presence and power of evil. To put it perhaps controversially, there is something manly about the Christian take on evil, something more manly than all the other philosophies and religions of the world, manly in this way: it acknowledges the fact of evil as well as the fact of its defeat. Starting from such grounds, evil is a matter of neither surprise nor despair. The Christian can face any evil with equal parts gravity and levity, furiously engaging evil as a thing to be fought and yet joyously acknowledging that ultimate victory is in the hands of another who has already triumphed (Col. 2:13-15). In that sense, Christianity is not like the childish optimism of some that either spiritualizes evil away as a mere product of the mind or marginalizes it away as a mere bad habit to be kicked rather than an active principle that must be fought. The philosophy of "We are the world" and the religion of "The world is I" are both soft faiths; they regularly shatter against the ragged rocks of our broken world.
Neither is Christianity like the cowardly pessimism of others. We do not blow the trumpet for the triumph of evil, nor do we believe in the ultimacy of impersonal brutality that we are helpless before. We are incredulous towards nihilism. We do not believe that all is lost or meaningless, nor that it is better to be at the right hand of the Devil than in his path. It is exactly in his path that Christianity stands like a rock undaunted. Surrender is not an option; that point must be stressed. Christianity's acknowledgment of evil's reality can make us seem like just another pessimism, which is near the truth (e.g., Original Sin is highly pessimistic) but not quite. There is a difference that needs to be noted. Christianity is similar to nihilism/pessimism on this point: they both stared open-faced into the dark abyss. The difference is, when the abyss stared back, Christianity didn't blink.
-Jon Vowell (c) 2010
"Christianity is similar to nihilism/pessimism on this point: they both stared open-faced into the dark abyss. The difference is, when the abyss stared back, Christianity didn't blink."
ReplyDeleteAmazing.