Problem of Evil Part 3 of 4: Muddy Beaks

I have been working on this for a few days and know it is really long! This was my attempt to approach the evil inside us and continue on with that idea from Wright (and Solzhenitsyn) that the dividing line between good and evil runs through each of our hearts. Or the Arcade Fire song that says: "Now the preachers they talk, up on the satellite; If your looking for hell, just try looking inside." ​

1 - Two Understandings of the Cross

In a book of sermons by Reinhold Niebuhr I read the sermon The Son of Man Must Suffer. This is what I spoke on Monday in our discussion when I said that when we equate Christianity with certain knowledge we no longer need Jesus. He says there are two major ways Christians have looked to the cross for meaning:

On the one hand, the death on the cross means an heroic effort of self-regarding men, whose inveterate self-love is the root of all historical evil, to transmute self-regard into self-forgetfulness, into “sacrificial love” or love of the neighbor. This interpretation is rooted in Christ’s own words, “If anyone wishes to be a follower of mine, he must leave self behind, he must take up his cross and come with me”; or in the exhortation: “There must be no limit to your goodness, as your heavenly Father’s goodness knows no bounds.” ...

On the other hand, the cross is a symbol of a quite different meaning. It emphasizes that the life of good and evil men is inextricably involved in a mixture of noble and petty impulses, of concern for self and concern for the other, and that this mixture of good and evil cannot be overcome by taking thought, or by one more heroic effort to secure the triumph of good over evil; but that mankind must look at the cross of Christ, not as the triumph in defeat of a noble man, but as a symbol of the merciful action of a forgiving God … the Son of Man who “did not come to be served, but to give his life as a ransom for many.” Or Paul - “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.”

So, big picture, he preaches that we see in Christ, one to imitate and imitation of Christ as the way of salvation. Or we take the place of the Christ killer, shouting as one congregation (as litugical churches still enact): “Crucify Him!” and “May his death be upon us and upon our children.” And we accept that it was the mercy of God that saves us while we are enemies. And, of course, it is both and he quotes scripture for both.

2 - Deceitful Hearts

I will come back to this sermon, but the other essay I re-read was called The Confusion of Good and Evil by Abraham Heschel which interestingly, no curiously, enough was an essay on the meaning of Reinhold Niebuhr. BTW Heschel is a Jewish scholar/philosopher, Niebuhr a Christian scholar/philosopher and both taught together at Union Theological Seminary.

He writes:

“God asks for the heart.” Yet our greatest failure is in the heart. “The heart is deceitful above all things, it is exceedingly weak--who can know it?” (Jer 17:9) The regard for the ego permeates all our thinking. Is it ever possible to disentangle oneself from the intricate plexus of self-interests? Indeed, the demand to serve God in purity, selflessly, “for His sake,” on the one hand, and the realization of our inability to detach ourselves from vested interests, represent the tragic tension in the life of piety. In this sense, not only our evil deeds, but even our good deeds precipitate a problem.”

Further on he quotes Rabbi Isaac Meir:

We shall not know with what we are to worship the Lord until we arrive there (Exodus 10:26) All our service, all our good deeds we are doing in this world, we do not know whether they are of any value, whether they are really pure, honest or done for the sake of heaven--until we arrive there--in the world to come, only there shall we learn what service was here.”

Then he tells a parable from another Rabbi. A stork fell into the mud and was unable to pull out his legs until an idea occured to him. Does he not have a long beak? So he stuck his beak into the mud, leaned upon it, and pulled out his legs. But what was the use? His legs were out, but his beak was stuck. So another idea occurred to him. He stuck his legs into the mud and pulled out his beak. But what was the use? The legs were stuck in the mud …

“Such is exactly the condition of man. Succeeding in one way, he fails in another.” Heschel has more to say than this, but this is an important tension.

3​ - Self-Righteous or Moral Relativity

Niebuhr makes a profound point about the poles between the two ways of interpreting the cross (he characterizes them this time as “moral idealism” = imitation and “self-knowledge” = God’s mercy and forgiveness):

Thus the history of Protestantism shows that a rigorous form of moral idealism is more popular than a rigorous form of self-knowledge. For the one may enhance the prestige of the good man, while the other threatens the cherished distinction between the good and evil men, proving us all to be brothers under the skin.

This is a polarity that I find myself living on. When I was a pastor it felt natural to mostly think of myself as imitating Christ, doing his work and so I felt I was doing good and was a good person helping others who were trying to be good or, on occasion, fighting with evil-acting people and trying to put them in their place. I might even think to myself that I basically didn’t have any problems, it was other people who had problems and my problem was to help them with their problems. (Of course I realize this is not something to be said or even dwelled on, but I think if I was completely vulnerable this would be my conception of things). As I realized, awoke to, my own sin and my own problems, I was driven, to the second meaning of the cross. But a consequence seems to be that I do find it harder to draw hard lines as I see us all more and more as sinners in need of forgiveness.

​4 - Vested Interests in Ministry

I know this one is long, but in an effort to give personal example what Heschel describes as the “inability to detach ourselves from vested interests”, of seeing my good deeds as containing impurities, this is a portion from a writing I did a couple of years ago. It is dramatic because it is from a story, but it is also personally true.

God, this busted heart of mine hurts, but damn-it if doing ministry donʼt at least make something of it. And Iʼve spent my life feeling like a big nothing, like a meaningless waste of skin and now people look to me, trust me, seem to think I offer them something.

But what do I offer them? My gifts are like marbles running around a plastic puzzle. Sometimes they land and sink into place, but there is always a few still running and by the time I figure how to wrangle them, the others loosen and slide away.

Some people face such pain and sadness. Some are in such messy worlds and come from the same. What am I saying, everyone is like that, nearly everyone. And my lot is to be a kind face, willing to pray, willing to venture a thought or comment or idea. Sometimes it is helpful and sometimes my vast unknowing shows threadbare and the poor beggar goes away hungry.

And all the while my own soul sinks, my own belly swells with hunger and confusion. Or there are times when I must do more than comfort. When I must confront in the name of my title and the thin wall between love and control punctures, the sickness and anger and sadness felt toward my own inner chaos or the chaos that always seems to loom just behind the framed picture of four godly men, joined in the spirit ... it spews out upon the person whom Iʼm to confront.

My God, I am a danger, Lord save your sheep from me.

But of course these thoughts only crystalize four years later sitting in my kitchen in the suburbs.

5 - But We are Not Hopeless​

But what to do if we are forever stuck in the mud with our muddy beaks? Does this imply that we give up since we are so hopeless? And what about the scriptures that with God’s Advocate, God’s Holy Spirit, we will do greater things than Jesus, what about our being the household of God, what about Jesus telling Peter it is only his feet that must be washed (not his whole body, beak included)?

Heschel doesn’t believe its hopeless, and in fact, he even states that “we believe that there are corners full of light in a vastness that is dark, that unalloyed good moments are possible.” But it is interesting, since we are Christians, how he believes that.

If the nature of man were all we had, then surely there would be no hope for us left. But we also have the word of God, the commandment, the mitzvah...

To the Jew, Sinai is at stake in every act of man, and the supreme problem is not good and evil but God, and His commandments to love good and to hate evil. The central issue is not the sinfulness but the obligations of man.

While insisting upon the contrast between God’s power and man’s power, God’s grace and human failure, Judaism stresses a third aspect, the mitzvah. It is a mitzvah that gives meaning to our existence. The mitzvah, the carrying out of a sacred deed, is given to us as a constant opportunity. Thus there are two poles of piety: the right and the wrong deed; mitzvah and sin. The overemphasis upon sin may lead to a deprecation of “works”; the overemphasis upon mitzvah may lead to self-righteousness.

Here we have another polarity: mitzvah (commandment, sacred deed) and sin which connect to Neibuhr’s concept of the moral idealism and self-knowledge. I am already really long, but just know that Heschel has an entire page or two that spell out that Jewish faith is not confused as to whether “good deeds alone” will redeem history. They know the world needs the Messiah for its redemption. He does have wise thoughts on why these deeds help us in our struggle against the evil inside of us.

Should we, then, despair because of our being unable to attain perfect purity? We should if perfection were our goal. Yet we are not obliged to be perfect once for all, but only to rise again and again … To be contrite at our failures is holier than to be complacent in perfection.

Judaism insists upon the deed and hopes for the intention … purity of motivation is the goal; constancy of action is the way.

It is the act, life itself, that educates the will. The good motive comes into being while doing the good.

6 - The Secret of Saints​

I like this idea of rising again and again, continuing to try to obey God and participate in his near kingdom. AND remaining aware of the danger of complacency. Here is my last quote, this time from Neibuhr’s sermon.

One of the most significant reinterpretations by Jesus of all the traditional eschatological symbols of the sharp distinction between justice and injustice, virtue and vice, was his reinterpretation of the apocalyptic story of the “last judgement,” with the seperation of the “sheep and the goats.” According to Jesus, the righteous, who stood “on the right hand” of the Messianic judge, protested that they were not really virtuous---”Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and fed you?”---while the unrighteous were equally uncounsious of their deeds of omission and commission. This version of the last judgement prompted Pascal to the observation, “The world is divided between saints who know themselves to be sinners, and sinners who imagine themselves to be saints.”