On Good & Evil, #1: Been Hurt

After this last series on Jesus and the atonement, I want to demonstrate how this early church atonement model (medical substitution, or ontological substitution) leads to better conversations with non-Christians.  So this new blog series is called Adventures in Conversation.  My most thoughtful and effective conversations about Jesus have been about (1) human nature; (2) good and evil; and (3) the character of God.  They’re interrelated topics, and I think you’ll see why.

Here are abbreviated examples of real conversations I’ve had.   Be mindful that I’m really just giving a bare bones outline here.  If you find this helpful, be more personal in actual conversation.  But watch for how I keep pressing other people to have a coherent story of good and evil, a clear location for the evil, and whether they can really live in the story they’re telling me.

Been Hurt:  What kind of God would allow all the evil in the world?  What’s your explanation for that?

Me:  You mean you think that evil in the world is an argument against the existence of God, right?

Been Hurt:  Yeah.

Me:  Has someone done something to you that you think was evil?

Been Hurt:  Well, yes.  It’s a personal thing, but yes.

Me:  Well, if there was no God at all, then we’d just be chemicals wrapped in skin, competing for survival with other chemicals wrapped in skin.  There wouldn’t be any such thing as good or evil.

Been Hurt:  Well, isn’t that easier to believe?

Me:  Except that you believe someone did evil to you.  Something in you tells you that there is evil, which means there is good.  And if there is good, there is Someone higher than us who defines it as good.  So your belief in evil is an argument that God exists.

Been Hurt:  That’s ridiculous.  You’re just playing games.

Me:  No, I’m not.  Have you read the first Harry Potter book?  Where Professor Quirrell, speaking about what Lord Voldemort taught him, says, ‘There is no good and evil, only power, and those too weak to seek it.’[1]

Been Hurt:  Sure.

Me:  Well, do you agree with that, or not?  ‘There is no good and evil, only power, and those too weak to seek it’?  That would mean:  ‘Whatever was done to you wasn’t really evil.  It was just someone using power.  And you were too weak to resist it.’  Do you think that’s reality?

Been Hurt:  Well…

Me:  Look, I can tell that something in you doesn’t believe that.  I don’t believe it either.  I believe there is good and evil.  I believe Jesus is offering to heal our human nature, which is still good, even though evil has come to infect it in each one of us.  Whatever was done to you, he wants to heal that but also destroy whatever it was in the other person which influenced that person to do that.  Because he destroyed something in himself, like Harry Potter did to Voldemort’s soul, so he can share his new humanity with each of us.  That’s the only way evil can really be tackled.  It can’t just be tolerated or made normative.  It has to be destroyed, and people need to be healed.  Have you ever heard of that explanation of Jesus before?

[1] J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (New York, NY: Scholastic, 1999), p.291