I took another train tour of Switzerland - this time through an even more stunningly scenic part: Bern to Luzern via Interlaken. I've totally been to Interlaken before (6 years ago when I went to Grindelwald with my concert tour group) but I thought it was in Austria...
Anyway, the mountain air (you know what it smells like, right?) was so fresh it made me dizzy/high a little bit. I walked around Luzern for an hour and felt this deep "pull" from the city - like, I might really be able to live here (and that would be even more of a reason to learn German). It was this peaceful, very European town that felt very whooshy and quaint to walk though; I really did enjoy being there, seeing all the open air restaurants and mini
ice cream stands, the shops, the breezy-ness of it all.My favorite part of this day, though, was the three-hour boat ride my day-ticket allowed me to take from Luzern to Flüelen with a few intermediary stops at cute little lake towns. It was beautiful I could hardly stand it. The lakes ("see" in German), I were on - Vierwald-stätter (which means "four forest") which spilled into Urner See - were no ordinary mountain lakes. First of all, they were in the Swiss Alps (the most incredibly mountains ever), and second, they were HUGE. It took three hours to sail across them - so, I got a bit of a sunburn (too much sun = zu viel Sonne) - but I've never seen anything more beautiful than these large pools of water sighing their reflections of divinely crafted earth formations high enough to pierce the sky.
Speaking of water, I'm reading an article about it and its relation to evil. First of all, the Bible is not always literal (gasp!). Some of it is obviously poetry (the psalms), some of it dressed-up story-telling (we call these parables) and some of it is literal (like, the resurrection of Lord Jesus - otherwise, we are of all men to be most pitied). The Book of Revelation is apocalyptic - that is, it is highly symbolic language. For example, throughout the book, John refers to "Babylon", but it is not really Babylon to which he refers, it is probably Rome, so it may not be that when it says there will be no more sea (Rev. 21:1), it is speaking symbolically - what does the sea represent? Chaos? Power? But, even if it is literal, this does not mean that there will be no more water. In fact, in the very next chapter (Rev. 22), it talks about a RIVER of life, flowing from the tree of life. The "sea" may be gone, but water will not be - so it likely that the emphasis here is on the symbolic, or spiritual, meanings of the words "sea" and "river", not necessarily their literal representations. Maybe that's what it means for the "waters" to COVER the "sea." :-).
Just as a few questions for the author of this article: He calls the American and British response to 9-11 "knee-jerk" and "immature" but provides no suggestions for what my country SHOULD have done, other than to "not be surprised at evil when it hits us in the face."
He also makes this little point about death - "we are shocked again and again by the fact of death" - and how we're surprised by it/don't know how to deal with it. As if we're supposed to?! Well, YEAH we freak out about death. Death is the most horrifying thing on the planet, actually...I AM going to freak out when someone I've loved and cared about and has cared for me goes away and is no longer anywhere to be found. Whether or not you're Christian, it's bad to be alone (despite what this culture says about independence and "growing up"...and, if you pay attention to yourself long enough, you just might start to think that, too).
Oh, and he's also, in my opinion, wrong about what post-modernism actually IS. Postmodernism is what gave us moral relativity in the first place, so it doesn't actually say that there is any true "evil" at all. Not that I agree with post-modernism - I actually think the article would have been stronger (if I'm correct in assuming that the point of this article is to correctly identify evil and discuss what we DO about it) if he'd correctly defined postmodernism because moral relativity is actually more dangerous than admitting evil but not having a solution.
I do agree with the author's assessment that the Western world's view of evil is drastically inadequate (the world is not "alright" - the world, and everything in it is bondage to decay and is dying) and outdated but I don't agree with this huge leap he makes from saying that our worldview is inaccurate, unsatisfactory and, actually, wrong because, among other reasons, it doesn't give us anything to DO about evil to the Bible. Now, I'm Christian, so that works for me. But, for the not-yet believer, jumping straight to the Bible to explain evil won't work. It just doesn't take. If you don't already believe the Bible is an inspired book, you're going to be just as unsatisfied with what the Bible has to say about evil than you might be with what "the world" has to say about it. The author says, "It is therefore vital that we look elsewhere, and broaden the categories of the problem from the shallow modernist puzzles on the one hand and the nihilistic deconstructive analyses on the other. This sends us back to the Bible itself...?" Well, sure it does, for the believer. But what about for the determinist? The naturalist? These thinkers are no postmodern and they readily admit to evil in some cases. They will even be able to admit when something is definitely "wrong", but they may not believe that you have to deal with the Bible at all. Like that MK from South Africa I debated with Amsterdam, a lot of these people think that the Bible is a fairy tale, even a "stupid book" made up to control people. Now, of course, they've got the burden of answering the question of "who" in terms of control, but that's probably a much easier question to answer than the question of evil. There doesn't, it seems, to be a "logical" link between the Bible and evil for someone who is not already a believer because the Bible is a book for people already of the faith. The letters in the NT were written to churches and communities of believers - of people who already trusted this word of God. These atheists, modernists, humanists, and naturalists of the world today have some really good ammunition against this book, and our faith, so I would urge the author of this article to explain how one can jump from "inadequacy of worldview to explain evil" to "the Bible, obviously" - that is, if he wants to reach a broader audience (and it seems, especially in terms of evil, that "the world" is exactly the place we need to reach, eh?).
But, I do agree, as a Christian, that saying that "all evil is good" - even in an ultimate sense - is, basically, blasphemy. Not only does it do violence to Scripture to say that "God works all things together for the good of those who love him" = suffering and evil are good, but it says that God is, then, dependent on evil to bring about His purposes. While I agree with my friend who says that "God is so good at working good out of evil that it almost looks like He did it Himself," I have to say that I ALSO agree with Dallas Willard when he says that "Suffering is not the preferred method of God in dealing with His children." God clearly allows horrendous shit to happen on this planet. Every single day. He allows hatred, murder, "natural" disasters, and the death of each one of us. It's enough to make anyone lose his faith (or never find it). To say I know anymore than that would be disgusting pride. I used to think it was because of free will. But that is an offensively anemic answer to someone who has lost both parents to AIDS and has 6 younger siblings to care for in the poorest continent on the face of the earth. (And, the Bible even talks, at points, like there isn't really free will, at least not when it comes to faith: "those He predestined, He also called...").
The author goes on to say that in Jesus - that is, in one man's life who lied and died 2000 years ago - all of "this" (all of evil) was taken care of - in past tense. It seems to me though, that the world is getting worse and worse. The author actually criticizes the position of progress in his introduction anyway...and this is where a lot of people run into logical problems with Christianity. What of the efficacy of the cross if people still die, if the world is still dying and if it doesn't seem that even those who SEEK after God can find Him? The best we've got is "we live between the already and the not yet."
All in all, though, I think I like the author's "solution" - as in, what do we "DO about evil. We pull out bodies from under the piles of bricks as we remind ourselves that, in terms of sin, we too need help from under the rocks. We offer water to the thirsty while remembering that we, too, are parched and scorched under the sun. And, I think I've finally given up trying to understand. Faith is not simple, and I don't want a faith I've not thought about - but trying to explain evil to a human being is like attempting to explain quantum physics to a clam. Why is there evil in the world? We. Don't. Know. Anyone who thinks they do doesn't understand the problem. But God saves. Not from evil (for we've all had horrible things happen to us or to those we love). But IN evil. And sometimes, the very vehicle He uses is US.
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