Bold Love and Evil

"If Christ, for one had practiced the love we advocate these days, he would have lived to a ripe old age."

In his classic book, Bold Love, psychologist and minister, Dan Allender writes compellingly of the face of evil in a world that is all things, not all love. He says, "We've come to view love as being nice. Forgiving and forgetting. Yielding to the desires of others. Yet the kind of love modeled by Jesus Christ, Ghandi, Martin Luther King and others has nothing to do with manners or unconditional acceptance. Rather, it is shrewd. Disruptive. Courageous. And as a result, often socially unacceptable."
Bold love is a harsh mistress, because there's nothing redeeming about a love that just blindly accepts.

What does it mean to love those who harm me? What does it mean, to love my enemy? The love of my friend is not so difficult. This story ultimately is about a forgiving love in a world side by side with the evil of the devil. Allender says that forgiveness surely does not mean forgetting the past, and ignoring the damage of harms past and present. Doing this would be erasure of one's personal history in the midst of a life. Human beings have been created lives worthy of love and forgiveness. We must first learn to forgive ourselves of the fault and failings that we have perpetrated. We must accept our humanness, our sometimes incomprehensible oddities and weaknesses.

"Bold love is a powerful agent of change that can transform both the lover and the beloved." The passion of bold love is a gift that brings a hardened heart face to face with a redemptive tenderness, and love of a Creator for his creation. We have all heard so much about God's love that his wrath and fury at our hardness and iniquity have been plowed under. There is no understanding of the Gospel message nor the centrality of the cross. Without recognition of the cross, its meaning and intersection of both, wrath and mercy are lost. It is a cross.

Mercy and its mysteries are great. Is it possible that we may be both passionately furious, and disposed to the doing of good?
Like the biblical figures Job and Jacob, we have the privilege to struggle with our failings, with God, and know that we will not be destroyed. Someone has been to the cross and shown us that. We are not to be in exile, nor a stranger to the promises of God. Not to be stripped naked and shamed, even in our darkest rage and most insolent self-justification, the face of God is there for the viewing. We may see his face and live.

The apostle Paul writes,  'For if we were God's enemies, we were reconciled with him through the death of his son.' Romans 5:8-10
"In his book, The Crucified God, Jurgen Moltmann expressed the loss for the Father and for the Son in this way: 'The Son suffers the dying; the Father suffers the death of the Son.
 The grief of the Father here is just as important as the death of the Son. The Fatherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlessness of the Father."

Allender writes, "Love is [now] before me, like a wall, like a deep cut on my hand. It is unforgettable; it is inflamed within me; it is a shrill, silent, noisy, still voice that captures my deepest and my most superficial thoughts." I am saved because he is mine and I am his. I am the deepest secret of God's heart.

A Theology of Evil

"The Devil has a whole system of theology and philosophy...which explains that created things are evil...in fact the whole universe is full of misery..." Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

According to the Evil One, the creator rejoices in the sufferings of men; the universe is filled with misery because the creator himself plans it and wills it. In myriad ways, the implication of a move toward what is good within a spiritual tradition, by definition, acknowledges its opposite, what is evil. This is an idea which has not been directly explored here before.

Evil is indeed the counterpoint to many if not most spiritual systems and modes of practice. Yet in a modern, pluralistic society such as the United States, its presence may be easily obscured by many factors, and it may be enveloped and packaged into a number of other ideas. Without clear, careful awareness of the implications of a thought or action, an individual or a mass movement, evil easily arises into our midst.

Thomas Merton writes-- indeed, says within this system, the Creator took real pleasure in the crucifixion of souls; the Christ came to earth so as to be punished. Punishment is in fact his chief goal for himself and for all others. The pair, the Christ and his creator, want nothing more than to punish and persecute; that mankind inevitably is in error, he is wrong, so much so that there is great opportunity to manifest the justice of the wicked.

In the cosmos of the Evil One, the first order of creation is Hell; it comes first, before all else. The proper devotions of the faithful are about evil so as to be cloaked with evil. It is so that man cannot escape his punishments, the justice that this One metes out.There is no escape for individuals, nor for society in this way; there is no mercy, for it has no place in these systems of justice by punishments. The suffering, the Christ and his cross have now been transformed into a new symbol, a symbol for the victory of Justice and Law.

The Evil One declares that it is Law and Justice, not Love that fulfills the teaching. "Law must devour everything,' writes Merton, 'such is this theology of punishment, hatred and revenge."
Those who live by this dogma, live for just punishments, and yet desire to successfully evade the very same for themselves. He or she will take care to see to it that others do not avoid suffering. This concern powers the believer. The chief mark of hell is that there is everything but mercy. God absents himself from hell.

His mercy is elsewhere. Those in agreement with the Evil One are perfect; they no longer have need of any mercy. It is perhaps because "they derive a deep, subconscious comfort from the thought that many other people will fall into hell which they themselves are going to escape."

By this feeling, this conviction they are saved. The Evil One makes many disciples; he furthers his conquest through announcements against sin, the evil of sin which is guilt. So don't feel guilty, lest you fall into sin! In syllogistic logic, the principle of pleasure is explored:
 pleasure is sin; all sin is pleasure.
Next comes the notion that since pleasure is practically unavoidable, indeed planted here by the creator, we have a natural tendency towards evil, our nature is evil; therefore practically no one can escape sins because pleasure is inescapable. And so in the philosophy of the Evil One, what is left except to live for pleasure, to live in the now--with no thought of anyone or anything else beyond the self?

Ironic how those lives are often miserably unhappy ones, isn't it? Yet it's all in the plan of Justice and Punishments devised by this creator who works without mercy or grace, explains Thomas Merton in his essay, "The Moral Theology of the Devil."