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.
Comments (6)
Scott - Sunday, Jun 29 2008 - 6:51 PM PDTit's an interesting premise; i always enjoy counterintuitive truths.
the trouble with this idea for me is that the Bible seems to consistently describe evil as the product of intentional misdoing. for example, the most devastating act of wickedness described in the Bible was original sin, committed by Adam and Eve in the Garden. one might argue that Adam and Eve could have rationalized some moral argument for their actions, but the Biblical description casts the two as eager for selfish gain. i can't think of a situation in the Biblical narrative in which an evil outcome arose from an initiative that was truly good.
the idea is also difficult to defend because one must define what "good" is relative to intention. there are plenty of people in the world that define morality according to what is conducive to self-interest, but this would hardly qualify as a universal definition. to argue that evil can result from good intention, one must believe that there is absolute morality and that a human intention--apart from God's providence--could ever be "good."
in my personal life, i have been tempted to link evil outcomes to good intentions for my own self-justification, but in every case i found that in fact my intentions in those situations were misguided and wicked at their root. total depravity for me really means that men in themselves are incapable of good intentions, because the ultimate goal of their intentions is the glorification of an idol.
DC - Sunday, Jun 29 2008 - 9:52 PM PDT
I think you're missing the point, Scott, and we're actually in agreement. It's not that evil stems from actual good, but that evil masquerades itself as good. Satan is called Lucifer ("Light-Bringer") for a reason. And the Eden story is, to me, the perfect example of that. His temptation takes the form of making that which was forbidden seem good to them. At heart, their motivation was bad. But the temptation was in making that which was bad seem good. That's in fact what makes it temptation.
The lesson for me is that we can never fully trust our instincts for doing good. The answer is trite but true: we need Jesus.
ditty - Sunday, Jun 29 2008 - 10:39 PM PDT
This ultimately comes back to what is "good" and what isn't. The common definition of "sin" and "evil" of doing wrong things, can easily go awry. What's right? God's ways, rather than "sin" (missing the mark)! It is so easy to say that I'm not "sinning" (ie, not doing something specifically labelled as wrong), but whether that automatically means obedience to God's ways remains to be judged. Intention or effect may be aspects of that judgment, but the baseline is in walking in God's ways, according to his assessment, not ours.
Scott - Monday, Jun 30 2008 - 7:19 AM PDT
well, sounds to me then that every conceivable action can be interpreted as the result of a good intention.
DC - Monday, Jun 30 2008 - 11:47 AM PDT
Yes, and there's something deep about that, don't you think? I do. Some of the ancient Greeks claimed that we always seek our own good; when we do bad, it's because our thoughts aren't fully correct. We use drugs not because we think they're bad, but because we think the value of the pleasure outweighs the possible consequences.
More relevantly, I think most people think they'll be OK as long as they just try to do what's good. Or that they're better than other people because they don't actively try to do evil. That misses the point, because what matters is not whether we intend good or not (which we probably almost always think we do on some level), but whether we actually do good. And assessing that requires going beyond our intentions. Indeed, Satan uses "good intentions" to do evil.
The conclusion for me is to be extremely wary of my own good intentions, and only trust that which I know to be absolutely good, that is God.
JR - Sunday, Jul 6 2008 - 9:05 AM PDT
"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."
--Usual Suspects
All this discussion reminds me of this quotation from the Usual Suspects. The fact is our own will confuses pleasure and doing good. I mean we live in America, it is the "if it feels good, do it" mentality. Feeling good is not equal to doing good. Too much of our world relies on feelings rather than obedience. When we are disobedient and we choose our pleasure seeking selves rather than God. This is when the Devil gets us. We need to obey God's way, instead of feeling our way to goodness. Feeling our way to goodness just doesn't seem right. Acting our way towards God's way is the only absolute good. I am not saying we do it perfectly, but I think this is what we have to think about when we do fail and fall. Repent and allow God's way to infinitely flow into our life, not the pleasures of our finite world.
(I'm afraid my site doesn't have 'eProps'. Sucks for you.)