The Return of Good and Evil

The puzzle is this. More than a week after he lit the inflammatory phrase "the axis of evil" and watched it soar into the sky, President Bush has been receiving remarkably little criticism for the "evil" bit, and barely more than that (from Madeleine Albright, after all) for the "axis" part.

How Clintonian of you. Your comment is equivalent to Clinton's, "The 9/11 victims deserved to die because America is so evil."

If people don't want our culture, they can ignore it. If people don't like our way of life, they can live their own.

Unlike many of the cultures of other countries, we don't impose ours. Others can take it or leave it.

It is the hatred and envy of the US by other cultures that is the problem.

"...if you ponder "How could people support such evil?", reflect that after 1,000 years of perfect government, there will be people who take the side of evil when they get the chance..."

I'm not accusing you of doing this deliberately, but it's quite misleading to the unchurched/uninformed to see people speaking/writing about a theory that's less than 200 years old (dispensationalism), as if it's "the gospel truth".

Not all Christians embrace that relatively new viewpoint of eschatology [last things] that Darby concocted and brought to the USA about 140 years ago. Just because dispensationalism is the most widely taught perspective in today's (Tim LaHay, et.al.) pop-culture churches, doesn't make it so.

Here is a much older view than that of dispensationalism:

For instance, the "Amillennialism" view of last things is that the Bible teaches "the end times" began when Christ was crucified, and the New Covenant was instituted, and that there will be a continuous parallel growth of good and evil in this world between the first coming of Christ and the second coming of Christ. The kingdom of God is now present in the world through his Word, his Spirit, and his Church. This is also known as "realized millennialism".

"But the word "evil," when used only of others, can intoxicate the user before he knows it. I commend to him, and all of us, Niebuhr's pregnant warning: "The final enigma of history is therefore not how the righteous will gain victory over the unrighteous, but how the evil in every good and the unrighteousness of the righteous is to be overcome."

No.... I don't think that is the enigma.

To my way of thinking, the enigma is why would the Almighty God NOT eliminate the evil in every good and NOT eliminate the unrighteousness of the righteous.

For "Christians", the Scriptures reveal a God who is omniscient and omnipotent. That means that he knows how to eliminate evil, and has the power to eliminate evil.

The Scriptures reveal an omnibenevolent God, also, so it would seem to follow that since God is good, he would want to eliminate evil. But evil exists in this world. In fact .. great amounts of evil exist.

To some, there is no enigma at all. They will just conclude that because of all the evil in the world, God must not exist, or if he does exist, he's not the One revealed in the Bible. He's impersonal and doesn't participate in any way with his creation other than to just observe it from a distance. These mentalities have their standards of goodness and this "personal God" that the Scriptures teach, who allows so much evil and suffering to exist, could never measure up to their standards. Therefore he either doesn't exist or he's impotent or disinterested.

To others, the personal, omniscient, omnipotent omnibenevolent God that the Scripture reveals, does exist, and because he hasn't eliminated moral, natural, a mixture of the two, or even [gasp] gratuitous evil ... we must take him at his word that his thoughts aren't our thoughts and his ways aren't our ways. He must have good reasons for not eliminating evil.

His reasons for NOT eliminating evil are an enigma.

"The presence of evil in God's creation is consistent with God's purposes for creation; moreover it is what we might expect to find in a natural order designed to serve as an arena in which human beings are given an opportunity to respond to real dangers and challenges in the process known as soul making." [Ronald H. Nash, (Ph.D. Syracuse University) - Faith & Reason - Searching for a Rational Faith. Pg. 221. Zondervan Publishing House - Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530 - Copyright 1988 - 2000].

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