Sermon for Lent 3: A heads-up from Jesus on the mystery of evil

It’s awesome, though it shouldn’t be surprising,
that God still speaks to the church through the scriptures;
that the Gospel stories, written so long ago,
address contemporary issues and troubling questions.

Take our reading from Luke (13:1-9).
A number of Galileans offering sacrifice at the Temple
had been murdered by the local Roman police.
(Pilate was a particularly petulant and pitiless prefect.)
In another, unrelated incident in south Jerusalem,
a building, the Tower of Siloam, had collapsed,
crushing to death 18 people.
Don’t events like these happen all the time?
Does a week go by when, somewhere, there hasn’t been a mass murder,
or a gas-explosion or a house-fire suddenly extinguishing human life?
People just going about their daily business when –
bam! – thunder from a clear blue sky.
Why do bad things happen to ordinary people?

Some folk claim to have an answer, an explanation,
just as those who spoke to Jesus had an explanation:
calamity is a punishment for sin, personal or collective.
Some religious people offer the same kind of explanation today.
When Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans in August 2005,
destroying roads and buildings, devastating the economy,
and killing nearly 1,500 people;
or when a magnitude 8 earthquake hit Haiti in January 2010,
destroying 250,000 residences and 30,000 commercial buildings,
and killing over 300,000 people –
some church leaders knew exactly why these disasters had happened:
they were God’s righteous judgement –
in New Orleans, on all the drinking, gambling, and prostitution,
in Haiti, on the island’s practitioners of voodoo and demon-worship.
(Never mind the rather careless divine targeting.)

And as for people killing people – 9/11, for instance –
well, some American church leaders at the time said
that God was using the terrorists as agents of his anger
against atheists, liberals, feminists, and gays.
(Never mind – what’s the euphemism? – the “collateral damage”.)
No doubt some pious pundits said the same thing
about the November terrorist attacks in Paris –
when they weren’t scapegoating asylum-seekers
or demonising the entire community of Islam.

But why stop there?
Ordinary adults are one thing –
but what about children,
what about the massacres of innocents?
The 16 shot dead at Dunblane Primary School in March 1996?
The 20 shot dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2014?
The 500 killed in Gaza, in their homes, in hospitals,
during the Israeli offensive in the summer of 2014?
The thousands killed in Syria since the start of the civil war in March 2011?
Pray tell, what is the explanation for their deaths?
Did they get what was coming to them?
Or perhaps it was the fallout from the sins of their parents?
I mean, God was surely gunning for somebody, right?

Wrong!
This whole idea of offering a theological explanation
for such terrible events –
is it not a callous and repugnant response to horrendous evils?
And the idea that to explain such evils is somehow reassuring –
how do you work that out?
If, for instance, my child dies of a malignant disease,
and I am told by someone that it is all part of a providential plan –
is that supposed to make the tragedy easier to bear?
Is it not rather just the opposite?
For am I not now confronted with an even more horrendous evil:
God could have and might have intervened to save my child –
but he didn’t –
does this not turn God into a monster?
And this sociopathic deity I am supposed to worship and adore?

These are the kinds of issues that Jesus confronts in our reading.
He tells the crowd very clearly that this kind thinking –
drawing conclusions about divine retribution on human sinfulness
from catastrophes and atrocities –
it is not only arrogant and ignorant, it is toxic.
Those people who were offering sacrifice,
those people who were at the tower –
they weren’t killed because of any wrong-doing,
they weren’t being punished for their wickedness,
they weren’t getting what they deserved.
As the Clint Eastwood character William Munny says in the film Unforgiven:
“Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
As Hamlet puts it to Polonius:
“Use every man after his dessert, and who should ’scape a whipping?”

Jesus impatiently dismisses this kind of populist theology.
And why?
Because it assumes that God is basically just like us
(only infinitely bigger and more powerful) –
an idol whose mind we can read and whose purposes we can plot.
Because it is inevitably and conveniently self-serving –
a deity who endorses our own personal and religious agenda.
But, above all, because it is morally unintelligible,
because it expresses a grotesque distortion of the character of God,
the God we know not in natural suffering or human evil,
but in Jesus –
the one who is never vindictive, vengeful, or violent,
the one who is always gracious, merciful, and peaceful,
the one who would rather absorb than inflict suffering,
the one who would rather die than kill.

The theology of that crowd in Jerusalem,
the theology of mouthy church leaders with a hotline to heaven –
we can respond to it only with contempt and derision,
and to them with exasperation and pity.
There is simply no way to get from the Gospels to their God,
who, in fact, is an image of the devil.
The God of whom Jesus is the image –
he is not a cosmic micro-manager of malice – zap! –
he is a God who loves creation into being,
lets creation be in freedom,
and acts in creation as – and only as –
a God who preserves and sustains.

And then the second half of our reading.
After his discussion with the crowd, Jesus tells a story:
the parable of the fig tree.
(Do you like figs?)
At harvest time, the owner of an orchard comes to collect the fruit.
(Date and fig bread, sticky cinnamon figs, fig and blue cheese tart – yummy!)
One year, two years, three years the orchard-owner comes …
But no figs!
“What’s going on here?” he says to his gardener.
“This tree is a waste of space. Chop it down!”
The gardener pleads, “Please, sir, let’s give it another year.
I’ll loosen the roots, throw on some compost, throw in some TLC.
Who knows? Maybe next year …”

Doesn’t this story speak to us?
Jesus looks at us, and what does he see?
He sees that often we are dry, barren, fruitless.
But chop us down? No! He gives us time.
He is patient with us, very, very patient with us –
though he does tell us that Harvest time is coming,
so we should “repent”. That is:
“Quit judging others; mind your own business!
Examine your hearts!
Redirect your lives!
Reimagine the world!”
Because the Lord can use all the hands he can get
to help gather the ginormous crop he’s growing,
to prepare a mega-feast to feed the world.

And as for those perennially vexatious questions –
Why do bad things happen to the ordinary and the innocent?
Where does evil come from? –
Jesus doesn’t answer them.
Which is rather a heads-up, isn’t it?
Because if Jesus doesn’t answer them,
why should we presume to answer them?
With Jesus, we should simply get on with our practices of TLC
wherever we find people hurting –
whether saint or sinner, whether Christian or Muslim –
because such distinctions mean nothing to God.

Not that we shouldn’t ponder the problem of suffering –
and even ask, desperately, “Why, O God?”
We most certainly should.
But not as a question expecting an answer,
rather, as a prayer, a prayer of lament
(check out the Psalms – they are our teacher here),
which though they look like demands for an explanation,
are actually, deep down,
articulations of pain and protest,
and appeals for comfort and strength.
Such prayers will keep us honest, humble, and compassionate –
honest about our bewilderment at the experience of suffering,
humble about our impotence to probe the origin of evil,
and compassionate towards others in their anguish and grief.

Finally, this.
While the teaching of Jesus provides no answer
to the problem of suffering,
it does answer another question:
Why is it that, along with all the ugliness –
why do we find so much beauty in the world?
We talk about the mystery of evil –
but what about the mystery of good?
Where could it possibly come from?
It comes from God, of course!
The Reformers called God the fons omnium bonorum,
“the fountain of all good”.
The gospel of God is the gospel of God’s prodigal goodness.
If people do bad, does God love them any less,
and smite them from a height?
No!
If people do good, does God love them any more,
and give them special privileges?
No!
God is love, from all the way up to all the way down:
a love as inexplicable and indiscriminate as suffering,
a love as immeasurable and inexhaustible as goodness,
and a love that, finally,
will clarify the obscure,
fix the broken,
and renew creation.

The spiritual vision of Macbeth

1. What if nightmares, and not the waking world, were real? What if the truth of human nature were seen not in love but in madness and murder? What if the love-instinct itself were only an instrument of a deeper, murderous instinct?

2. Harry Jaffa has called Macbeth “a moral play par excellence”. No. It is not a moral but a metaphysical play. In Macbeth, nightmare and murder are elevated to the level of transcendent realities. In an otherwise excellent review of the new film, Travis LaCouter wants to draw edifying conclusions from the play’s “strong moral warning.” But that is a mistake. The only way to respond morally to the nightmare world of Macbeth would be to despair and die.

3. Macbeth is not a Christian play. Christianity understands evil as a privation of the good. Macbeth is about positive evil. Its theme is murder as a manifestation of positive evil. In the play, evil exists. It extends itself. It grows. It devours the good. It has a horrible “generative” quality (as LaCouter nicely puts it in the same review). It is not like ordinary darkness – a privation of light – but like a vacuum that can suck the light out of a room, leaving the human heart blinded and confused.

4. I think it was Harold Goddard who observed that The Tempest shows human beings in heaven, while King Lear shows them in purgatory and Macbeth shows them in hell. That is true: but the hell of Macbeth is not a Christian hell.

5. Milton’s Satan is a notoriously lovable character because his vices are so recognisably human: pride, ingratitude, a “sense of injured merit,” an incorrigible independence of spirit. He is cast into darkness but he continues to glow with a residual spiritual light, a tragic but also fundamentally charming reminder of his created status as an angel of God. The weird sisters in Macbeth are not former angels. They are not creatures fallen from grace. They are agents of a positive evil. They shine, so to speak, with an uncreated spiritual darkness. Faced with them, one would turn and run for refuge into the arms of Milton’s Satan. At least the latter is part of creation. At least he stands in some relation to God. Not so the weird sisters.

6. Lady Macbeth is the most disturbing character in literature because in her the maternal instinct and the murder instinct are united. She would sooner dash the brains out of her suckling infant than to see her husband draw back from murder at the appointed hour: and she not only feels this, but confides it to her husband. In Lady Macbeth, the instinct to destroy life is stronger than the instinct to engender it. When the Greek heroine Medea is abandoned by her husband, she avenges herself by murdering her (i.e. his) own children: she does evil for the sake of love. But it is very different with Lady Macbeth, who seems to love for the sake of evil. Forced to choose between having Medea for a mother or Lady Macbeth, I would prefer to take my chances with Medea. She has human instincts at least. Better to be killed for love than to be loved for the sake of evil.

7. Does good triumph over evil in the end? In the last act, the castle is conquered and Macbeth is justly killed. But this limited theodicy has to be set within the wider metaphysical frame. The weird sisters have prophesied Macbeth’s rise to power and have riddled his downfall. Everything happens just as they have foretold. Everything goes exactly according to plan. For all we know, the triumph of Malcolm and Macduff might be the transition to even greater evils, the next necessary step in Evil’s ineluctable advance.

8. In Shakespeare’s history plays, the endless cycle of the rise and fall of kings is shown to be meaningless: power is meaningless. In Macbeth, one perceives with horror that the cycle of power is not meaningless after all but is evidence of a cruel and malignant design, a sort of inverted providence. In King Lear, the cycle of power is seen to be redeemable: the exquisite vision of Lear and Cordelia singing like two birds in a cage as they lovingly, lazily discuss the rise and fall of the mighty. At that fleeting moment, just before Cordelia is killed and Lear dies of grief, the cycle of power is glimpsed from a redeemed perspective. It has become an affectionate plaything, material for loving conversation between a father (once a king) and a daughter (once estranged). History, in itself, is still meaningless but it has been marked by love.

9. But the redemptive vision of Lear cannot be projected on to Macbeth. In Macbeth, the cycle of power is also seen from a transcendent point of view: from the perspective of the weird sisters. Here is the real thing to fear, not that history might turn out to be meaningless but that it might turn out to be designed.

10. The redemptive vision glimpsed in King Lear is set out fully in The Tempest. If the Christian message turns out to be true, then the final truth of things will be the marriage festivities of Ferdinand and Miranda, and the eternal joy of Ariel who sings forever within the tiny folds of a flower. If Christianity is mistaken, then the best thing that could happen would be to discover that Shakespeare’s history plays were true, and that history is merely meaningless. The worst that could happen would be if Macbeth were true, and what we had mistaken for meaninglessness were actually the cunning designs of murdering spirits who toy with human lives for reasons that we can never guess – if there can be reasons in a nightmare.

On café loyalty cards

There comes a time in a man’s life when he understands that he can never again use a café loyalty card. Nowadays every self-respecting coffee retailer in Australia has its own loyalty card. Buy ten coffees get the next one free. The economics of the thing is excellent. A saving of thirty-five cents on every cup. The sociology of it is excellent. Producing one’s well-stamped loyalty card at the counter, one is able to enjoy a certain sense of entitlement, of belonging. I have seen some gentlemen swagger impressively, hands on hips, while their cards are stamped. They survey their surroundings with satisfaction. “Good, very good indeed, everything here seems to be in order,” you can almost hear them say. The theology of it is excellent too. There is a certain irrational pleasure that comes from getting things for free. Even if you know that you have purchased that eleventh coffee, that its cost (plus the cost of producing your loyalty card) was distributed evenly across the previous ten cups of coffee, even then you cannot help smiling, cannot help feeling that small tingle of religious gratification when the fellow at the cash register announces with surprise, “Well now, would you look at that, your next one’s free!”

I have used these cards, why should I deny it? I have crammed my wallet with documentary evidence of my loyalty to cafés around Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane, Byron Bay. I have collected stamps across four states. But there comes a day when you find you have grown weary of belonging to things. When your loyalty is spread too thin. When too many belongings seems the same as not belonging at all. When producing your loyalty card, watching them stamp it like a passport, sliding it back into the anonymous folds of your wallet – there comes a day when you cannot bear it anymore, when it is wrong and no amount of good economic sense can make it right.

In a moment of clarity – I nearly said a moment of righteousness – I unburdened my life of all these loyalties. I dumped them, all the cards and all their crooked little stamps, in the bottom drawer of my desk, down there with the bits of crumpled paper and broken pens and used envelopes and receipts from years ago that have faded back to their original virgin white. Down there I laid my loyalties to rest. It made me light and free, the way you feel sometimes after sex or church.

Tomorrow, I told myself, tomorrow I will empty the drawer into the rubbish bin, tomorrow I will throw it all away.

Today I lined up for coffee, I handed over the money, I took the change, I gave the card to the boy behind the counter. While I waited for him to stamp it I put my hands on my hips and swaggered rather impressively, surveying my surroundings with an air of satisfaction so that nobody would see how unhappy I was, how defeated, because of my loyalty. 

Radio programme: God, good, and evil

Radio National's Encounter has just released the first in a two-part series on God, good, and evil. It was produced by Scott Stephens, and features interviews with John Milbank, Stanley Hauerwas, Susan Neiman, Marilyn McCord Adams, Kevin Hart, Richard Kearney – and I'm in there too, talking about Augustine's solution to the problem of evil. I also argue for the continuing political importance of Augustine's understanding of evil.

I've been thinking a lot about this, since Augustine has been my main theological diet for the past year or two. Among other things, immersing myself in Augustine has led me to repudiate my decade-long fascination with Marxist political philosophy. I understand the appeal of Marxism, and of revolutionary rhetoric, but I think it's a mistake. And I think the roots of the mistake lie in a heterodox understanding of creation and fall. Anyway, I enjoyed having the chance to talk about some of this here.

You can hear the programme online – and stay tuned for the second instalment next week.

Audio talks on God and evil

I recently mentioned some talks I gave on God and evil. Although it looks like the quality is pretty poor, they've now uploaded the audio recordings.

And since I began the talks with Milton, I leave you with the timeless words of A. E. Housman:

And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.

Readings on God and evil

On Sunday I gave some talks entitled "God and evil: Christian witness in a damaged world", for a vibrant Sydney theological group, School of the Prophets. The three talks were:

1. The "problem" of evil
2. What is evil?
3. A tragic gospel
(If I had time, I would have included a fourth talk as well, on evil and eschatology.)

Here's an annotated list of the texts that I referred to:

• John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667) – The classic statement of the problem of evil and the need for a theodicy.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880) – A compelling dissolution of the project of theodicy. It's a betrayal of humanity to render evil meaningful within any larger harmonious system.
• Lars von Trier's film, Antichrist (2009) – An alarming portrayal of the self-predatory structure of nature; nature is like a fox lying in the grass, quietly disemboweling itself. Not only human agency, but even nature itself is tragically damaged.
• David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Eerdmans 2005) – A very poignant meditation on natural evil, and on the fact that atheist protests against theodicy retain an authentically Christian insight (often strangely absent from Christian attempts to "justify" evil).
• Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3, §50 (T&T Clark 2009) – Moving beyond the Augustinian idea of evil as privation, Barth sees evil as a kind of powerful negative gravity; it is poised in an undefinable zone between being and non-being, like a vortex that sucks created things down towards non-existence.
• Terry Eagleton, On Evil (Yale 2010) – I referred to Eagleton's Freudian analysis of evil and the death-drive. His example of the alcoholic is especially good, since it illustrates the way evil manifests itself in a surplus of will (the alcoholic doesn't have too little will-power, but too much) directed towards self-annihilation. I used this as a rough moral analogy to Barth's idea of evil: evil is not a "thing" in the world, but the ontological gravity that pulls each thing towards its own annihilation.
• Donald MacKinnon, "Order and Evil in the Gospel," in Borderlands of Theology: And Other Essays, (Lippincott Press 1968), 90-96 – A gripping and moving account of the gospel not simply as triumph, but as tragedy. Victory is the most tragic thing in the world, except for defeat. 
• I closed by riffing on Barth's statement, that "to clasp hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world." A Christian response to evil is not theodicy, but struggle – the struggle of taking God's side against the world's disorder, and of refusing to treat evil as an acceptable part of a larger harmonious vision.
• If I'd had time, I would also have talked (blending Barth and MacKinnon) about eschatological redemption: Christ's glorified body still retains the scars of crucifixion; the light of eternity does not erase history's tragic shadows. Even in eternity, "beauty is never free from melancholy" (Sarah Kofman).

A final note: When I was preparing the talks, I also enjoyed reading the new Herbert McCabe volume, God and Evil in the Theology of St Thomas Aquinas (Continuum 2010). It's really a study of theological language: his main aim is to dissolve the problem of evil by showing that it rests on a confusion of language. It's not the kind of book that I'd really use in my own teaching. But I reckon reading a good work of Wittgensteinian Thomism is like taking a bath: you emerge clean, fresh and invigorated – even if it's hard to see exactly what you've taken away from the experience.

Lars von Trier's Antichrist

“For what flood of eloquence can suffice to detail the miseries of this life?” —Augustine, City of God, 19.4.

Anthony points to a gripping and eloquent reflection on Lars von Trier’s controversial new film, Antichrist. “Antichrist is very obviously the product of a serious and prolonged depression of frankly theological proportions…. Nature has revealed itself as the relentlessly cruel, profoundly disgusting indifferent monster it always was; human nature is even worse, and women are as disturbed and disturbing as anything a malevolent deity could create in its worst dreams.”

As one of the film’s characters says: “Nature is Satan's church.” I haven’t seen Antichrist yet, but a friend who saw it at Cannes gave it this glowing recommendation: “My God, it’s absolutely brilliant! Pure evil.” You can take that either as a recommendation or a warning...

And speaking of the ambiguities of nature, David Bentley Hart has a new post on the Gnostic turn: “In a sense, a certain ‘Gnostic turn’ is inevitable for us today when we attempt to find our way towards the transcendent, inasmuch as we begin all our spiritual journeys now in a world from which the transcendent has been forcibly expelled, and not as a result of mere cultural prejudice…. We simply cannot now (if we are paying attention) imagine a universe whose grandeurs and mysteries unambiguously lead the reflective mind beyond themselves towards a transcendent order both benign and provident.”

Marilyn McCord Adams and horrendous evils

by Kim Fabricius

Marilyn McCord Adams presented the most recent Theological Society Lecture in Swansea, on the theme “Horrendous Evils: A Theological Problem of Evil and Its Solution.” After the lecture, Kim gave the following vote of thanks.

When Nigel told me that Marilyn McCord Adams was coming to lecture I jumped for joy. Firstly, because we were going to get something we haven’t had here for a while – a proper English accent. And then I thought: what’s the topic? As a medievalist who knows that Occam’s razor is not a product from Gillette, perhaps she would do the sums on how many angels can fit on the head of a pin – or at least show us that this question is not the idiotic one it’s proverbially taken to be. Or as a member of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement and a critic of the Windsor Report, perhaps Professor Adams would lecture on human sexuality, or Anglican polity – with a title like, say, “A Dog Collar’s Breakfast”. But as one who devoured her books Horrendous Evils and Christ and Horrors, my money was on the theme of theodicy, and it turns out that I won that little bet with myself – and I dare say that none of us here tonight feels short-changed either!

Mind, I wondered if Professor Adams knew just how away she was playing, lecturing at the university where the inimitable D. Z. Phillips held a chair; knew that she would be speaking to some people who will remember Professor Phillips’ lecture on God and evil five-and-a-half years ago. Dewi had problems with what he called Professor Adams’ “theorising” about evil. So too does another Swansea boy named Rowan Williams. And, as an adopted Abertawean, I confess my own concern when the title of Professor Adams’ lecture was announced: talk of “a solution” to the problem of evil suggested that we might be in for an evening of theological hubris. I’m glad to say that’s not quite how it has turned out.

Professor Adams, firstly, fully acknowledges the irreducible horrendousness of horrendous evils, the meaninglessness as well as the pain. Second, she knows that a moral taxonomy is insufficient to account for the sheer intensity and scale of suffering, and she knows that the free-will defence fails because of its overblown account of human agency (not to mention its competitive account of divine and human freedom). Third, if Professor Adams speaks of the participatory suffering of God, it is, quite unlike the process theologians, only in connection with a robust two-natures Christology: it is the crucified and risen Jesus who is the horror-bearer and-defeater. Finally, Professor Adams consummates her theodicy with a robust faith in universal salvation, not because all must win prizes but because God is good and resourceful, the maker and re-maker of meaning, and because the penal options (as she puts it) of “liquidation or quarantine” are hardly a satisfactory quid pro quo for hell on earth. And all so tightly argued: Professor Adams is, after all, a philosopher in the analytical tradition.

Perhaps not all of us will now think, “Ah, QED!” But then Professor Adams would not want us to. On the contrary, as she says at the end of her book Horrendous Evils, she would fully expect to “have said something to offend almost everybody.” She has certainly said enough to disturb any pious complacency, and to rouse us to rethink our own intellectual, pastoral, and personal “solutions” to the problem of evil.

Finally this: I checked out the website of Professor Adams earlier today. It has a click-on for “Recipes”. It is empty at the moment, but she has certainly cooked us up a feast tonight. Thanks, Chef!

Evil overcome

“Nothingness had power over the creature…. But it was impotent against the God who humbled himself, and himself became a creature, and thus exposed himself to its power and resisted it. Nothingness could not master this victim. It could neither endure nor bear the presence of God in the flesh. It met with a prey which it could not match and by which it could only be destroyed as it tried to swallow it. The fullness of the grace which God showed to his creature by himself becoming a threatened, even ruined and lost creature, was its undoing.”

—Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3, 362.

Agamben on transcendence and evil

“The transcendent, therefore, is not a supreme entity above all things; rather, the pure transcendent is the taking-place of every thing. God or the good or the place does not take place, but is the taking-place of the entities, their innermost exteriority. The being-worm of the worm, the being-stone of the stone, is divine. That the world is, that something can appear and have a face, that there is exteriority and non-latency as the determination and the limit of every thing: this is the good. Thus, precisely its being irreparably in the world is what transcends and exposes every worldly entity. Evil, on the other hand, is the reduction of taking-place of things to a fact like others, the forgetting of the transcendence inherent in the very taking-place of things. With respect to the these things, however, the good is not somewhere else; it is simply the point at which they grasp the taking-place proper to them, at which they touch their own non-transcendent matter. In this sense – and only in this sense – the good must be defined as a self-grasping of evil, and salvation as the coming of the place to itself.”

—Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 15.

The mentally handicapped and the demonic

A guest-post by Scott Stephens

Anyone wanting to poke fun at the naïveté of the first-century worldview – and by implication the biblical texts shaped by it – will sooner or later bring up the “primitive” belief that those suffering from a mental affliction are actually beset by demons. As unremarkable as this jibe is, the comparisons that inevitably follow between their worldview and our own are even less interesting.

For instance: while the first-century world is full of magic, myths and demons, the modern world is determined by rationality, hard science and medicine. And so, whereas the ancients used exorcism to deal with mental illness, we use medication, precise treatment programs and various forms of supported accommodation. The implicit judgment that drives these comparisons is the superiority and benevolence of modern science and the health-care system, versus the cruel, more ancient practice of ostracising the sick from civic life.

But is the difference quite so clear-cut? As soon as it’s pressed, this double reduction (modern benevolence versus primitive cruelty) collapses.

To begin with, earliest Christianity – in which designation I include Jesus himself – did not simply accept the superstitions and religious palliatives supplied by its cultural surroundings. Instead, it consistently exhibited a remarkable capacity for theological imagination and an ethical intensity that released it from the clutches of nationalist idolatry and merciless ritual practices. The ethical freedom of early Christianity is nowhere better demonstrated than in the radical way that it presents and uses the notion of “the demonic”. Far from simply accepting the existence of malevolent, individuated personalities as an easy explanation for a variety of ailments, the Christian texts identify demonic influences as an effective mechanism of cultural and political critique.

For instance, in Mark’s Gospel, the commencement of Jesus’ public activity – in the form of the announcement of the redefined kingdom of God – is punctuated by the presence of “a man with an unclean spirit” in the synagogue. It is as if the Jewish religious system itself, governed by the demands of holiness and ritual exclusions, is possessed by something antagonistic to the presence of the kingdom of God. Similarly, it is hard not to pick up the political overtones in Mark’s episode concerning the Gerasene demoniac. As Dominic Crossan observes: “The demon is both one and many; is named Legion, that fact and sign of Roman power.” Toward the end of Luke’s Gospel, the nocturnal arrest of Jesus is depicted as the proper activity of “the power of darkness.”

And in Paul’s writings, not only are the Roman rulers reduced to impotent “powers” that cravenly plotted to execute Jesus, but the Jewish Torah itself is described as belonging to the stoicheia, the dark, elemental forces that exert their chaotic influence on this world.

What is crucial to notice here is the way that the demonic influence is mediated through political and religious structures as the means by which individuals are subjugated, humiliated, excluded, dehumanised. The message of the gospel is that these powers have been emasculated (as Karl Barth put it, demons “are null and void, but they are not nothing”), and that their effects must be opposed in the same manner by which they were defeated: in faith and by love. The powers are thus to be taken seriously, but disregarded as an act of faith. Here again, Barth captures the spirit of the Christian critique perfectly:

“Demons are only the more magnified if they are placed in a framework of the conflict between a modern and an ancient system.… The demythologisation which will really hurt them as required cannot consist in questioning their existence. Theological exorcism must be an act of the unbelief which is grounded in faith.”

The Christian attitude toward demonic powers, then, was not simple acceptance of their existence and influence on the world, much less a kind of primitive heuristic device for explaining what now is the domain of medicine. Instead, it represented a vital critique of those political, religious and even bureaucratic systems that subjugate the masses, and thus manifest a terrifying yet anonymous form of Evil.

But this sword cuts both ways. Just as the New Testament texts are neither naïve nor homogeneous in the way they speak of demons, our own world is hardly free from “demonic” influences.

What is needed is the theological clarity and moral courage to be able to identify these influences as such. And one need look no further than the diabolical effects that political neglect and bureaucratic indifference continue to have on the quality of mental health care. The dehumanising forces endemic within the mental health care system stretch from the woeful levels of funding – designed to maintain an already exceedingly tenuous status quo – to the high rate of staff turnover due to burnout and work-related stress. But Stanley Hauerwas has gone further, suggesting that the care of the mentally handicapped exposes the deep contradiction at the heart of liberal humanism:

“No group exposes the pretensions of the humanism that shapes the practices of modernity more thoroughly than the mentally handicapped. Our humanism entails we care for them once they are among us, once we are stuck with them; but the same humanism cannot help but think that, all things considered, it would be better if they did not exist.”

In his terrifying masterpiece of theological journalism, Hostage to the Devil, Malachi Martin insisted that it is the exorcist himself that must play the role of “the devil’s hostage”, by placing himself between the victim and the demon, by being an advocate for the one who has no capacity to resist. This is precisely the kind of faithful advocacy demanded from Christians today: to oppose Evil even in its most innocuous, anonymous and bureaucratic forms, and thus to enact the prayer, “Deliver us from the Evil One!”

20 great Satanic characters in novels

Following our list of literary Christ-figures, Kim and I decided to put together a list of great Satanic characters as well. Here are our top 20, listed in chronological order:

1. Daniel Quilp: Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)
2. Roger Chillingworth: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)
3. Ahab: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
4. Simon Legree: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)
5. Count Fosco: Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859)
6. Ivan Karamazov: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
7. Mr. Hyde: Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
8. Dracula: Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
9. Kurtz: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)
10. Naphta: Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924)
11. The bureaucrats: Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)
12. Pinkie Brown: Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (1938)
13. O’Brien: George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
14. Johann Ulrich Voss: Patrick White, Voss (1957)
15. George Rayber: Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away (1960)
16. Nurse Ratched: Ken Kesey, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
17. Alex: Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)
18. Jorge: Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (1980)
19. Daryl van Horne: John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick (1984)
20. Kevin: Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin (2003)