Episode 1728: SRA HUMANS AFFLICTING OTHER HUMANS PART42 RADICAL EVIL

https://us15.campaign-archive.com/?u=012a44d6e7986cf7f82de120f&id=8cdb3f2029 The Concrete Problem of Evil Historian Philip Friedman provides the following eyewitness account of what happened to a young Jewish girl living in the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation. Zosia was a little girl . . . the daughter of a physician. During an “action” one of the Germans became aware of her beautiful diamond- like dark eyes. “I could make two rings out of them,” he said, “one for myself and one for my wife.” His colleague is holding the girl. “Let’s see whether they are really so beautiful. And better yet, let’s examine them in our hands.” Among the buddies exuberant gaiety breaks out. One of the wittiest proposes to take the eyes out. A shrill screaming and the noisy laughter of the soldier-pack. The screaming penetrates our brains, pierces our heart, the laughter hurts like the edge of a knife plunged into our body. The screaming and the laughter are growing, mingling and soaring to heaven. O God, whom will You hear first? What happens next is that the fainting child is lying on the floor. Instead of eyes two bloody wounds are staring. The mother, driven mad, is held by the women. This time they left Zosia to her mother. . . . At one of the next “actions,” little Zosia was taken away. It was, of course, necessary to annihilate the blind child.2 While philosophers argue endlessly about how precisely to define “evil” in abstract terms, none of us has difficulty recognizing this concrete nightmare as an example of it. At the very least, evil consists of the fact that for far too many people—as for Zosia and her mother, along with six million other Jews during the Holocaust—life becomes a horrifying nightmare from which they cannot awake, a nightmare as full of pain as it is devoid of meaning. Radical evil of this sort cannot be captured in abstract definitions. Indeed, “abstractions . . . distract us from that immediate reality [of evil] and reduce evil to a statistic,” as Jeffery Burton Russell suggests. In this worldview, the only “reason” why Zosia is tortured is because free beings, human and angelic, can will such atrocities. While the sovereign God can and will strive to bring some good out of the horrifying demonic event (Rom 8:28), the evil event itself exists only because free beings who are against God have willed it. The “ultimate reason” for this ghoulish torment lies there. If the words “good” and “loving” mean anything as applied to God, if Scripture’s testimony regarding the perfect character of God and the antidemonic ministry of Jesus mean anything, and if God’s power is to be construed as supremely admirable, as truly transcendent, not simply as coercive after the impoverished image of fallen human 108 From THE LIVE RAGGED EDGE RADIO BROADCAST/SHATTER LIVE TV WEBINAR RUSS DIZDAR © ideals of power, then we simply cannot suppose that it is ultimately God himself who is secretly willing Zosia’s nightmare for some supposed “higher” reason. Coping with evil. Where does all this leave us in terms of our coping with the atrocities of our world? Whatever else may be said about the classicalphilosophical blueprint model of God’s providence, it does provide the believer with a certain kind of security that the warfare worldview seems to lack—so long as one steers clear of concrete atrocities. A certain peace comes, for many at least, in resigning oneself to whatever (one believes) the hand of God might bring to one. Herein lies the appeal of the sort of traditional hymns spoken of in chapter one. If, however, we can no longer find solace in the conviction that a mysterious providential plan governs every event in world history, in what can our hearts find hope? If Zosia’s torment is truly as gratuitous and barbaric as it appears, must we not despair? It is, I think, undeniable that the warfare worldview on one level depicts a scarier world than the providential blueprint worldview, for the simple reason that ope(continued)