WE ALL LIVE UNDER A TOTALITARIAN REGIME

'Reading Luke's Gospel I see why Steiner is so terribly wrong when he says that only people living under totalitarian regimes can produce art worthy of the name. We all live under the totalitarian regime of the world's evil. And it's in the terms in which our own culture manifests it that we have to expresss our struggle against it, our longings for glimpses of good.'

Helen Garner, How to End a Story:Collected Diaries, p.419.

PERSPECTIVE

'One afternoon [in 1939] I was planting in the orchard under an apple tree iris reticulata...Suddenly I heard Virginia's voice calling to me from the sitting-room window: "Hitler is making a speech." I shouted back: "I shan't come. I'm planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead." Last March, 21 years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowers flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.'

Leonard Woolf in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, p.727.

EVIL DESTROYS ITSELF

'...evil carries the seed of its own destruction. In the long run right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.'

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Death of Evil upon the Seashore' in The Gift of Love, p.86.

SHADES OF GREY

'..if no one is thoroughly unredeemable but the devil alone, and if the two cities are intermingled until the final judgement, then the Christian will be predisposed to expect any and every aspect of human culture to contain some mixture of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood, and will refuse to give absolute allegiance to any human ideology, value, or institution. That refusal and the affirmation of God on which it rests give the Christian a wonderfully open but critical mind to engage with culture in all its diversity. In other words, if we begin and end with a black and white antithesis (God and creation, city of God and earthly city) we find many fine shades of grey in between.'

Christopher Watkin, Critical Thinking: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, p.20.

EVIL IS A PARASITE

'...badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled. We call sadism a sexual perversion; but you must have first had the idea of a normal sexuality before you talk of its being perverted...'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.44.

GOD'S JUSTICE

'When God punishes sinners, He does not inflict His evil on them, but leaves them to their own evil. 'Behold', saith the Psalmist, 'he hath been in labour with injustice, he hath conceived toil; brought forth iniquity. He hath opened a pit and dug it; and he is fallen into the hole he made. His sorrow shall come down upon his crown.' [Psalm 7:154-16] When therefore God punishes, He punishes as a judge those that transgress the law, not by bringing evil upon them from Himself, but driving them on to that which they have chosen, to fill up the sum of their misery.'

Augustine of Hippo in Andrew Davison, Blessing, p.61.

THE EVIL OF NOT FORGIVING

'It may be infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be a moment of passion: the latter is the heart's choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the idea of hatred.'

George Macdonald in Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet, p.158.

THE PROBLEMS OF BEAUTY & EVIL

'I have to admit that sometimes nature seems more beautiful than is strictly necessary. Outside the window of my home office there is a hackberry tree, visited frequently by a convocation of politic birds: blue jays, yellow-throated vireos, and, loveliest of all, on occasional red cardinal. Although I understand pretty well how bright coloured feathers evolved out of competition for mates, it is almost irresistible to imagine that all this beauty was somehow laid on for our benefit. But the God of birds and trees would have to be also the God of birth-defects and cancer.'

Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature, p.200.

OUR MUDDLED HEARTS

'...people do a lot of evil that is both unconscious and intentional.'

Martin Boyd, The Cardboard Crown, p.186.

HOW HUMANKIND DOESN'T CHANGE

'Three things were immortal: good and evil and the hope in men's hearts that evil would be overcome by good.' 

Howard Spring, Fame is the Spur, p.646. 

MEETING THE DEVIL

'After one of my many presentations following my return from Rwanda, a Canadian Forces padre asked me how, after all I had seen and experienced, I could still believe in God. I answered that I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him. I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists, and therefore I know there is a God.' 

Roméo Dallaire in Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.439. 

THE EXPERIENCE OF EVIL

'Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.' 

Simone Weil in Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.425.

ADMITTING DEFEAT

'If you do not believe in Satan, how can you fight him?'

Michael Green, I Believe in Satan's Downfall, p.248. 

CHRISTIAN COMPLACENCY ABOUT THE DEVIL

'Doubt about the existence of a malign focus of evil is to be found, by and large, only in Christian lands. It is only where the victory of Christ is so well known, only where the defeat of the devil is so celebrated, that doubts are expressed. If he exists, it must please him mightily to have his existence denied by the only people who know his inherent weakness, and are aware of the act of Christ on Calvary that spelt his doom. Were he better known he would be more hated, more resisted, more defeated in the lives of Christians. So it suits him admirably for them to slumber in the bland assurance that he does not exist.' 

Michael Green, I Believe in Satan's Downfall, p.17. 

IMPRECATORY PSALMS

'These cries for help are not about minor conflicts that could be resolved by greater generosity on the part of the one praying or by the exercise of love of neighbor. Rather those who pray these psalms are crying out about the injustice they suffer and are protesting about the arrogance of the violent. They are impelled by the contradiction posed by the mystery of evil and the presence of evil people in a world supposedly in God's care. This is no a trivial or selfish complaint: they are protesting not just because they are being hurt, but because God's justice, goodness, and power are at stake. These are not mere grievances about their own suffering, rather they are protests about the challenge that real wickedness poses for believers in an omnipotent God of love. The passion that drives these laments arises from a belief in God's justice that is called in question by unrestrained evil.' 

Gordon Wenham, The Psalter Reclaimed, p.139. 

GOOD & EVIL

'The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.'

Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.85.

EVIL

'...the evil is not in the system, but in the man.'

John le Carre, The Secret Pilgrim, p.374.

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

'Consider...what the Bible does teach us about the problem of evil. It gives us slivers of a pie chart. One tiny sliver (and I'm convinced that it's no more than that) would be labeled, "We live in a fallen world." Another sliver would say, "There is a devil." Other tiny slivers would be labeled, "People have free will," "Sin has consequences," "Sometimes God disciplines his people," or "Good can come out of suffering."

Perhaps there are more slivers. I tire of even writing them because they offer so little consolation. The vast majority of the pie chart (a good 75 per cent if you could quantify such things) would be labeled in bold, bright letters, "WE DON'T KNOW."

However we choose to word our answer, we must not imply that one of the slivers in the whole pie. Our "answer" must sound and feel like it's 25 per cent sliver, 75 per cent "I don't know." If our words have no Job-like angst, we'll sound more like Job's friends and receive a similar response.'

Randy Newman, Questioning Evangelism: Engaging People's Hearts the Way Jesus Did, p.110.

EVIL

'There are many arguments that promise to be logically satisfying but which in the end miniaturize both God's transcendence and the seriousness of human agonies in the interests of somebody's idea [of] philosophical neatness. It is intriguing that the Bible itself never leads us down this road. It pictures the mystery of evil in the world not as an intellectual riddle to be solved but as a reality of inexhaustible depth that deepens even as we reflect on it.'

Dick Keyes, Seeing through Cynicism: A Reconsideration of the Power of Suspicion, p.111.

EVIL

'The repetoire of evil has never been richer. Yet never have our responses been so weak. We have no language for connecting our inner lives with the horrors that pass before our eyes in the outer world. Philanthropy and protest seem empty gestures, arbitary in their choice of beneficiary or occasion. It is now commonly remarked (especially since the Cruise missile excitements of the Gulf War) that technology has carried us to the point where death by fire is indistinguisable from the puffs and crackle of a video game; and when some shocking new cruelty does sieze our attention, it is likely to be met with some consternation or annoyance. We shudder or wince; then we switch the channel.'

Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans have lost the sense of evil, p.3.