Good and Evil

Christianity Today has been pretty good the past few issues. Honestly, some of them time it focuses too much on controversies, debates, and splits; it’s kind of depressing. But the China issue a few months back was really really encouraging the whole issue. Both the state-run church and unofficial churches in China are fully legitimate and growing a lot. It’s just amazing.

Anyway, each issue has a bunch of quotations on a random topic, and this month’s topic (“The Human Condition”) had some profound ones. Two of them stuck out:

The power of temptation is not in its appeal to our baser instincts; if that were the case, it would be natural to be repulsed by it. The power of temptation is in its appeal to our idealism.” – Helmut Thielicke

The evil wrought by those who intend evil is negligible. The greater evil is wrought by those who intend good, and are convinced they know how to bring it about; and the greater their power to bring it about, the greater the evil they achieve while trying to do it. – Allen Wheelis

Man, that’s really thought provoking. Keller says some similar stuff The Reason For God when he talks at length about the original Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story. He quotes a passage where Jekyll is trying to control his bad nature, and vows to do only good deeds, in part to make up for the bad things Hyde has done. At one point, he’s sitting on a bench, and comes to be satisfied in the good things that he’s done. And then, spontaneously, he becomes Hyde. Philosophically and psychologically, it’s a really interesting passage.

I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and the CT quotations brought it back to mind. And I think I agree. There’s obviously no danger in doing good. The danger is when we think that we alone know what is good. When we start thinking we ourselves can do good things, there’s a danger there; it’s the road to self-righteousness.

Will Smith got slammed a while back when he was misquoted as saying Hitler was good. What he really said was:

Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, “Let me do the most evil thing I can do today”. I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was “good”. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming.

Call me crazy, but I agree with him.