are actually a portion. Their results may feel evil to us, but themselves are natural.
And next I pare off the accidents, true accidents, randomly happening accidents, not of willful intent. Bad consequences, but again acts innocent in themselves. I cannot call these evil either. Newscasters agitatedly misname them tragedies, calamities, but they are not really evil; rather they are naturally occurring events, perhaps influenced by the randomness built into the universe.
Randomness
Several decades ago a friend handed me an issue of the magazine OMNI, and in it an article which continues to fascinate me entitled “Connoisseurs of Chaos.” It was about the discoveries of physicists who study chaos. They learn that chaos is not chaotic at all, but instead that all motion is organized around three forces: the fixed point attractor which defines homeostasis (a fixed or stable state), the limit cycle attractor which defines simple and complex harmonic motions (a rhythmic and recurring motion such as a swinging pendulum), and a random attractor which introduces an element of randomness into all things. I do not understand the complexities but this understanding suggests to me that randomness is built into the universe, into all things, and into all life. It is the driver of the genetic mutations fundamental to Darwin’s thesis of the natural selection of the species. And next, as a theological speculator, I interpolate that some of what we experience or call evil is simply randomness, an unpredictable, unforeseeable twist of events which usually has an undesirable result (when the result is favorable we call it good luck or God’s blessing, but I think it is still randomness). In his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold Kushner theorized similarly that many bad things are not God’s will, but merely randomness.
Now I am Left with Two Categories of Things I Feel Justified to Call Evil
Jeffrey Dahmer, carefully selecting his victims, killing them with such thoughtfulness and planning that the murder goes undetected, and then eating the body parts of his victims. This is evil, tinged perhaps with an unimaginable psychological aberration, but quite unadulteratedly evil. The willful drunken driver who, having been tagged five times goes out once more to drink and then drunkenly drive, killing a young girl walking along the street. There is willfulness here, an unreasonableness, and, if not a deliberateness, then at least a knowingness and willingness: not as simple as negligence, but maybe deliberate negligence. There is evil here too. It does not smell as pungent as Jeffrey Dahmer’s evil, but still is well within the category. But bounds of this category are mushy, it has an unclear, ill-defined edge. While the Dahmer event was purely individualistic, there is a societal complicity with our drunken driver. These exemplify one category of evil, but there is another. There is the Hitler syndrome.
This second category is much more problematic, more greatly impactful, and leads to the heart of my problem with sin. The evil that remains in the basket is communal and cultural: poverty, oppression, racism, violence. I have lived through the war with Nazi Germany, the S.S. Troops, and Hitler’s effort to exterminate all Jews from the face of the earth, the Holocaust. And I saw the latter years of Stalin’s U.S.S.R., of his and his government’s efforts to dominate and to eliminate persons and populations that were in the way, his cruel oppression and murder of his own people. And I am living in the aftermath of George W’s preemptive war against Iraq, his eradication of Saddam Hussein and his government, and the resultant unleashing of the conflictful, bloodthirsty clans and tribes and sects within the culture which Hussein had understood how to keep in check through the use of cruel oppression. And I am watching the deliberate enrichment of the wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle class in this country, and in the mid-East the oppression of dispossessed Palestinians by the same Jewish people who had been so cruelly oppressed by the Nazis and others. The litany can go on; I am well aware of this evil in this world. I am a systems person, I believe in and understand social systems. And this evil is systemic, not individual. It is deliberate, social, even though perhaps unconscious (or pre-conscious or subconscious); and it is deeply embedded in the social system. We build together and then live within a social system which rewards and punishes for no obvious or reasonable cause, or for deeply hidden causes. And we do nothing about it. We allow that evil. We may even quietly, silently, unwittingly enable it. We are complicit, sometimes ignorantly, but always voluntarily. We cooperate with that social system. In our prayers we pray abstractly about poverty, but we do not pray in ways that actually change or alleviate that poverty; we pray and then let it be. Therefore many go hungry, or homeless. And we allow it. And we do not consider that a sin for which we are individually culpable, in need of God’s forgiveness. And that is the heart of the problem. Hitler may be the embodiment of evil, but the reality is that we vote for him, and cheer for him at rallies, and readily or reluctantly and unresistingly, do his will. Again, the boundaries of both these categories are only vaguely visible, and fade into invisibility.
When I study these two categories of evil, one word resounds within me, malevolence. There is a will to do harm, injury, oppression, neglect, however conscious and deliberate, or unconscious and complicitous that will might be. Malice.
The Trivialization of Sin
Into the world I’ve just sketched I invite you to talk with me about sin. This is the framework within which I am questioning, “What is sin?” Mine is a world in which there truly is evil, but in degrees and gradations and maybe even in layers. And where often things that appear evil, may not be; but are just bad, or destructive. Or simply random. Unpredictable. Unforseen and unforeseeable. Even though damaging and hurtful.
In this world the notion of sin has been trivialized beyond significance. The sin we talk about these days in church is individualized, putting the locus entirely within the individual. Since earliest Christianity we have focused on versions such as the seven deadly sins: wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony. I note that these sins all require me to look within myself, at my interior life. But in reflection I note that Jack Bowers’s sins are puny and nearly insignificant when I confess them alongside a Hitler, a Stalin, an Idi Amin, a 2014 Tea-Party-driven U.S. Congress. The Hebrew Scriptures had it right when they placed the locus of sins mainly (though not exclusively) at the national level, when they sent the scapegoat off into the Wilderness of Zsin bearing on its head the collective sin of the nation. Yes, we may be complicit as individuals in the evils of the national sin, but Jack Bowers is not the paramount sinner. It is true that we can smell the evil of some individuals e.g., a cannibalistic serial murderer, and that we, the society, need to be protected from that evil. But mostly we need to be rescued from the evil of national sin, for we are both victims and complicit collaborators in that: hunger, poverty, inequity, oppression, abuse, functional slavery, destructive and self-serving governance, greed. To encourage myself to be focused interiorly on my own petty sins as an individual is to be seduced away from any awareness of the sinfulness of the nation or culture (which awareness might lead to reform and change, repentance and newness of living). Using Walter Breuggemann’s metaphor of the Empire, to focus on my sins serves to imply the sinlessness or incorrectability of the Empire, and thereby serves to isolate me, disempower me, to make me less important to the community and the Empire.
This individualized sin has become less than useless, and instead rather dysfunctional and misdirecting, even counter-productive, because it blinds me (makes me inattentive) to some larger realities of this world, our attention is diverted from the greater evils in our world. Thereby some far greater forces of evil are safely hidden from our scrutiny and we become unwitting collaborators in those greater evils, complicit, enabling them by allowing our eyes to be diverted into watching the puny evils on our own hands while ignoring the greater evil, or by thinking ourselves too small, too powerless, too stupid and inept to be able to do anything about them.
Evil Reprised
At the risk of being repetitive I need to back up and be clear what I am not talking about when I say “Forces of evil.” I am not talking about the natural forces of this physical world which cause events we thoughtlessly or hyperbolically call evil and tragic: Those events themselves I cannot really label evil. Let me lay those to the side as not part of this conversation.
