/ evil
Fred Winters and I were classmates in graduate school at Wheaton College. The pastor of First Baptist Church, Maryville, Illinois, on March 8 Fred was doing what he loved to do, preaching, when an interloper shot and killed him. The man you see in this video is the Fred I remember. Pray for him, for his wife Cindy and their daughters and pray, as she does, for the man who killed him.
. . . and still obeys
Screwtape, a highly placed assistant to “Our Father Below”, writing to his understudy Wormwood, elaborates on the Enemy’s intentions:
Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs — to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best …
He cannot ‘tempt’ to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
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from C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters
Social Constructionism: The Self As So Much Sausage
Isaac Babel’s fate illustrates a key tenet of Soviet ideology, perhaps the single most important one. I have in mind the doctrine that there is no such thing as human nature or individual selfhood. As thinkers from John Locke to Margaret Mead and today’s many “social constructionists” like to say, people are simply whatever they are conditioned to be. In his 1921 treatise, Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology, Bukharin claimed that
if we examine each individual … we shall find that at bottom he is filled with the influences of his environment, as the skin of a sausage is filled with sausage meat… . The individual himself is a collection of concentrated social influences, united in a small unit.
And that is all he is.
It follows that selfhood cannot be violated. Individual rights do not exist because individuals do not exist. Human nature places no limit on social engineering because human nature does not exist in the first place. Brent concludes:
The endpoint of Bukharin’s logic is that everyone is a nonperson… . Inwardness and all that comes with it, selfhood, consciousness and conscience were nothing but the illusions of a long history of Western metaphysics. What remains after the illusions of the bourgeois sausage, such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” universal justice, or truth are scraped away? Power alone and its terror, a fury that in Lenin’s words can express itself and “therefore must.” … The physical destruction of individuals had long been preceded by their philosophical negation.
Marxism-Leninism claims to be materialist, but, in fact, it is governed by ideas. It is the idea of social constructionism — certainly not empirical reality — that led Stalin and so many since to treat people as the wholly redesignable products of their environment, as so much sausage.
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Gary Saul Morson in The New Criterion, reviewing Inside the Stalin Archives by Jonathan Brent.
Cormac McCarthy's Satan-figure judge
In all this time the judge had spoke hardly a word. So at dawn we were on the edge of a vast malpais and his honor takes up a position on some lava rocks there and he commences to give us a address. It was like a sermon but it was no such sermon as any man of us had ever heard before. Beyond the malpais was a volcanic peak and in the sunrise it was many colors and there was dark little birds crossin down the wind and the wind was flappin the judge’s old benjamin about him and he pointed to that stark and solitary mountain and delivered himself of an oration to what end I know not, then or now, and he concluded with the tellin us that our mother the earth as he said was round like an egg and contained all good things within her. Then he turned and led the horse he had been ridin across that terrain of black and glassy slag, treacherous to man and beast alike, and us behind him like the disciples of a new faith.
Amy Hungerford, Professor of English, teaches Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in the first of two lectures (I’ll post the second later in Lent). If you strictly go in for page turners, romance and that sort of thing—if Melville and Faulkner and The Iliad are not among your favorites—then you may not have the eye for McCarthy’s vision. But if you are a member of the Church—that support group for adult children of Adam and Eve—and remember that the first fratricide was Cain; if you hear the slogan “Yes, we can!” and are skeptical of hubris wherever it may be found—then Blood Meridian can take you to the north plains of the human soul. In such parts, the hunger is as dangerous as anything on the Texas frontier.
John Polkinghorne on the problem of evil
