Acknowledging and identifying evil is easy enough. Oh, there are some evils that we label as such that are not clearly evil. We are from time to time prone to take what we don't like and call it evil. But most people, or rather anyone who has actually encountered it, can tell genuine evil when they see it. Evil comes to us as inherently condemnable. Peter Berger writes about this in A RUMOR OF ANGELS. There are some things that people simply cannot do, and yet they do them all the time. It is the experience of the impossibility of the act, like what is being done puts them outside the human condition itself. Some acts simply deserve hell. Any religion, and philosophy, which fails to do justice to this human experience, this 'demand' for hell leaves out something extraordinarily vital.
Yet what does one do if one has undertaken such acts? I heard once of an ex-nazi who took up the mantle of helping people to try to pay for his crimes. He changed, at least he changed what he did. And even if you do not take up such acts, most of us are capable of them. And really it is who you are that matters, on the scale of eternity. That is the point, I think, of Jesus raising up intention as more important than action. Your attitude tells you who you really are, it reveals your brokenness, your lostness, and your sinfulness. What happens when one experiences oneself as terribly wretched?
There is the hope, I suppose, of repentance. And one can feel the weight of one's sin so terribly. There is genuine penitence in the human heart, sometimes. But how often do we feel penitent about a sin one minute and commit anew the next. Is there no truth in the axiom: 'the only true repentance is ceasing the sin?' Oh, we all experience those acts, those moments, those tales that call out to us for hell. It is a transcendent experience as important to belief in God as hope, play, humor, or the importance of the moral, though I tend to talk about it less. Yet what we fail to do is turn that burning flame of judgment inward, or if we do, we don't do so consistently.
What I'm talking about is human depravity, of the evil and sinfulness that moved Calvin to believe in predestination. I can't escape it, it is all around me, and all within me. I must have hope for myself, yet I can have no hope for myself that doesn't then remove my sense that the act of the other is demanding of hell. Do I believe myself then condemned? I don't believe myself condemned. For the God who reaches out and puts justice and penitence in my heart also provides there the hope that comes from mercy. I experience God as all-embracing, all-consuming Love, as respecting me and empowering me and inspiring me, and moving me towards improvement, however small. And that gift I cannot reasonably believe goes to me alone.
And so God, to be both mercy and justice, must be something beyond both. But this 'beyond' cannot be annihilating of that which it transcends. It must fulfill the human experience and the divine experience of judgment, justice and mercy, while somehow reconciling and being more than them. Is there, then, any vision of God that is reasonable that does not conform to Christ Crucified. One can believe in God without Jesus, but the God one believes in must look remarkably like Jesus to really command ascent. Only the Pain of God, God as SUFFERING LOVE, can help us make sense of our experience of evil as separating sin and of mercy as overcoming that separation.
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