The Problem of Evil's Source

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/020817.cfm
Genesis 2:4-9, 15-17
Mark 7:14-23

Philosophers, theologians, judges, and plumbers run into the same dilemma regarding good and evil. Did God set us up to do evil, or was it purposeful and egregious rebellion on the part of humanity? Was our “doom” the result of an inevitable accident built into God’s design, or a cosmic miscalculation of human power on our part?

All of us fit into a handful of these four categories of professionals. This is an analogy, of course, which will quickly morph into allegory, rife with a bunch of parabolic references.  

We waft between one or another of these categories, part contract laborer and another part dogmatic defender of spiritual truth. At times we emanate a mix of waxing ponderer on the meaning of truth while gaveling the world of family and friends around us into submission because we are ready to mete out who gets punished and who goes free.

Some maximum humans, radicalized and realized men and women, yo-yo between all four. Dear God help them, because they are the models of humanity. We’ll talk about them later.

The knowledge of good and evil, identified in some of the earliest verses of Genesis, point to a catastrophic failure by man and woman in the face of a loving God. A newly planted garden of trees sets the stage. In the center of the imagery, one forbidden tree’s fruit must be left alone. It’s sugary sap of evil beckons, though, offering a delight of the senses. In fact, the comely fruit isn’t the source of evil. A predatory snake with slithery words and venom lives in its branches. 

The serpent represents an eager protagonist, a hawker of harm, practiced in the dark arts and privy of the consequences of curiosity and taste-testing by sentient beings. Upon a bite, the fruit will become a spiked drink, a micky, a fatally addictive drug because of the dealer who claims the tree’s territory. He is a pimp who requires customers. The fruit is innocent, but poisoned, carriers of sin. 

God explains that users of the snake’s fruit can expect a lifetime of therapy, weekly buck-up meetings, and a nagging string of blunt sponsors who slap the addict back into consciousness, because the fruit is infested with unbridled satisfactions. Eventually, users will infect the entire garden with wanton desire. 

The humans become the snake’s customers, and scripture tells us a hero needs to save the day. And not a reluctant one. The fanged holes where venom flows have opened a portal into all human hearts, because the mother and father, partners of a creating God, are ruined. The tasty juices of the fruit will pass through our bodies, but the poison has infected the heart. We are drawn back to the serpent with a co-dependency similar to Dracula and his donor hosts. We forgo all good things at the most inopportune times for a fix. We cry out, though, for a savior who will conquer the evil with a kiss of vaccination, transfusion, and restoration.

This story of the fruit and the poison is true parable, analogy, and allegory, but we waffle between the two positions identified at the start of this reflection. First is evil’s presence and success as God’s fault due to an inevitability of sin. God knew creation would fail, so God’s plan, even with his incarnation, allows horrors and degeneration to run rampant. Second, evil is our fault, due to a lack of faith that God will transform creation simply by our willing submission and participation. This dilemma points out our infection. We know that evil prevails due to our wanton desires, but the allowance of evil confuses us about God’s mercy, twisting our logic to assume God’s abandonment. 

The scriptural call to pray and walk with the Spirit, the very experience of the Garden, will mute the consequence of evil. It sounds too simple. It is not.

A handful of reflection pages can’t adequately address this. Consequently, I have manufactured a four-pronged fabrication of human work, generic professions, to condense and oversimplify a massive scriptural and spiritual conflict. Writers do that. To extend a professional analogy to myself and my ilk, writers are theologically arrogant plumbers with judgmental tendencies and poor philosophical discipline. Let’s get to it.

Plumbers cannot be convinced that evil is an accidental mistake by God. Once a plumber has put in their first decade of repairs and construction they are convinced. They can provide damning evidence to every leak, plugged pipe, and faulty design. Polluted water, accumulated waste, rampant roots, wrong compounds, conflicting metals, and unchecked stupidity fill their diagnostic records. The evidence of fault points to human error every single time.

Judges lost their notion of unforced errors on the part of crime during their years as attorneys. Every rube and victim they represented and now rule over has ended up either as a defendant or a vengeful client of the prosecution due to unlimited combinations of careful conniving and explosive rage on the part of a criminal. To a judge, no one is innocent. A court case which determined some crime as an accident is simply a rounding error not worth the costly investigation and delivery. Perpetrators fill every seat of every chair in every house on the planet. The scum of the earth are those who don’t know how to clean up after themselves. The rest either repair the damage they have wrought or have been too clever to catch. Judges deal with scum and victims of scum.

Theologians and philosophers are the only professions which can attest to rank and file members who actually believe in accidents and innocence. While Judges/lawyers and plumbers/subcontractors regularly suffer ridicule as the most evil professions on earth, in fact they must face the evil reality of the sinful nature of human beings without the advantage of a false front. No wonder folks dislike them. They see through everyone’s mask, and underneath each plastered hole. They intrinsically know about sin and evil’s source.

The other two — theologians and philosophers — live above the fray of reality. While everyone around them delights and dances, or suffers and dies, these two transcend both joy and misery with conversation and calculation. Their investigations skip over the bloody evidence and the faulty construction. Documents, agreements, and manuals are not important to them. Motivations, intent, and historical context count for everything. Morality and policy are the details that matter. As John Sorensen suggested to me, professors of higher education largely live in one of these two professional states.

The theologian measures God’s activity within creation. The philosopher has no weights and measures. The philosopher searches the invisible domains of heaven and earth. The theologian studies the character of God and man. Evil is an activity to the theologian. It is a consequence to the philosopher. The theologian cannot fault God. The philosopher cannot fault man.

In essence, without the plumber and the judge nothing ever gets done. The theologian is never satisfied with the decisions of mercy and punishment by the judge, and seldom concerned with the difficulties left for the plumber to fix. The philosopher doubts mercy and punishment accomplish anything, and doesn’t bother to call a contractor when the roof leaks because water dripping into a pot evokes the tears of a decaying world.

And yet, the plumber will seek out a theologian to explain if God loves the working man now, or just in heaven; and, he’ll listen religiously all day to music provided by the worlds best philosophers, from Bach to Mannheim Steamroller. 

The judge interacts with theologians and philosophers only when he or she must remove them from a jury. Judges live a cruel life of evil on parade. Most missionaries and social workers are judges who purposely don’t judge. They live with evil and exercise mercy. Court judges who operate with mercy in full throttle usually get fired or quit, and then become missionaries.

Scientists are simply plumbers with primitive theological training. Politicians are claustrophobic when surrounded by philosophy, because they are driven to pass laws and eat in public. Philosophical plumbers are middle management. And, finally, theological judges are the business men and women who make the world work.

Theological judges operate in the world of commerce. Their theology is a fixed, nascent form of the living God. Inventors, salespeople and entrepreneurs are all formed from a set of basic theological stock — God inspires them, and they take a dream into reality, marching from idea into distribution and maintenance contracts. Their audience is the infected customer, who desires good over evil. They employ everyone who isn’t a theological judge, provide practical use for all inventions, and give sales people incentives. They love plumbers, who rush to their customer’s aid, and they fund the philosophers in order to advertise their largesse. They print the actual theologian’s books, and fit the true judges with robes.

The business people are the least of our sources for information regarding the dilemma of evil. They have no real idea where evil comes from, but they won’t put up with it. When people want to chat about God business folks provide the venue, the food, the handouts, light up the parking lots, get the drunks a cab, and provide the police with cool sunglasses. Their morphing of theology and judgement is entirely pragmatic. They know what works, and will merge planning and implementation into a singular act. They ignore everyone who is not on board with their plans.

Now, back to the Garden, and creation.

Moms and dads are the only authentic group of people worth listening to regarding evil. They know the truth. Children are angels and turn into devils when they discover sin. Parents begin as self-centered single folks and turn into the backbone of society through martyrdom. Parents have witnessed the infection of evil and its consequences, and they have seen God work miracles, and they have seen God allow tragedy. While they have trouble with this conflict, they eventually accept it with love. They love their children even when their children wish their parents would die and go away. They know what God is like.

Parents are the poor souls, the maximum humans, who we earlier described as theologians, philosophers, judges and plumbers all rolled into one. Men typically marry women who will let them escape from two or three of those roles, or they will become workaholics; or just get sick and spend their lives in the bathroom. Women typically are saints who need lots of love. When men love their wives evil runs for the hills unless it can set a family’s house on fire and send the inhabitants off to heaven and out of the way. Such a death is simply martyrdom that will inspire more loving parenting. This creates a conundrum for evil.

We are speaking here about parents where the wife is a saint and the husband loves her unconditionally. Such parents know that while God can be blamed for allowing creation the choice for evil, they know he did not create it. When we don’t have enough of these kinds of parents, confusion about where evil comes from takes over the psyche of children and adults, whole families, and ultimately the four professions of theologian, philosopher, judge, and plumber, and their subsequent combinations.

So, the bottom line is that the angst of evil’s source and purpose comes from a parentless, or parent deficient, world. Infected parents who have not succumbed to love become either single again, or inadequate. The attack of evil upon the wholesome and Godly husband and wife, the mothers and fathers of creation, lift up everyone to walk with God. Martyrdom is a beacon to folks who want to know how to walk with God, because most people retain the kernel of the knowledge of Good. They know that God will rescue them. 

Until the knowledge of Good and Evil are clarified, we will have the professional quadrant of working folks too often operating from a poorly formed upbringing where their mothers and fathers did not, do not, or will not reflect sainthood. 

Unfortunately, evil’s attraction can poison the holy children of holy parents when their subsequent adulthood convinces them that sainthood is undesirable.

To learn more about the savior, read the rest of the books after Genesis. Then, spend time with those who strive for sainthood. You will learn what will happen to the snake, and how the saints will prosper and get back to the Garden.