RETRIEVING A BIBLICAL VIEW OF EVIL

We who grew Reformed pride ourselves in taking evil seriously. Total depravity, and all that. The doctrine of total depravity does make us wary of anyone who claims too much righteousness. We were taught that pious talk often serves as a cover for dishonorable motives. We expect people, religious or not (but especially religious people), to be as prone to sin as we are ourselves. Call it Calvinist cynicism. We pride ourselves in our realism, claiming everyone is a sinner. But this is not taking evil seriously; it’s making accommodation for it. 

Total depravity lets us off the hook. No one should expect too much of us; we’re depraved. Misquoting Isaiah (the Hebrew is much more graphic), we say with a bit of a smile on our faces, “All our works are as filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6 English; Hebrew 64:5), and with that we settle into comfortable acceptance of our sinfulness. We’re sinners, we allow, but sinners lite. Pretty good people, when you come down to it. Sinners, but not actually evil. If there is evil in the world, it’s not our evil. 

This way of thinking fails to take evil seriously. Part of the problem is that our theology has seized on the wrong biblical story to account for and understand evil. The story we usually tell about evil is a reading of Genesis 2-3. In this reading we follow partially an exegetical move by the Apostle Paul in Romans 5. He writes, “As sin entered the world through one man and death through sin. . .” (5:12). With this opening, he begins setting up a contrast between Adam and Christ. As through one man (Adam) sin and death entered the world, so through one man (Christ) grace and life enter the world, and so forth. I’ll not parse Paul’s argument further except to say in passing that despite the popularity of Romans 5 in conservative Reformed theology the passage raises considerable difficulties for that way of thinking.

Paul didn’t invent his account of how sin and death enter the world. His contribution was part of a lively discussion about Genesis reaching back at least to 1 Enoch in the 4^th century BCE. Or, if you include Ezekiel 28, reaching back even earlier. But the story in Genesis 2-3 is not a proper fall story. It’s not, as sometimes presented, that everything was perfect until Eve ate the fruit, and then the whole world, at least the human part of it, tumbled into evil. It’s a story, rather, about what constitutes humanity. We are—we, not just Eve and Adam, choose to be—the species of animal who are defined by our knowing good and evil, in all the senses of good and evil. And thus—this is the bargain we make—we are both mortal, fleshly, contingent, time-bound, and fully aware that we are such. We are poised between earth, from which we are taken, and heaven to which we aspire. Genesis 2-3 is a wonderfully told tale, wise and worth pondering again and again, but not by itself a sufficient account of evil. It does not mean to be.

 The Bible does not leave us with this single story. It contains other, older accounts of evil. In these, evil is not moral choice or some silly test by God but disorder, chaos, the falling apart of things. No, worse than that, evil wants disorder, wants to tear things down. In a recent novel, Ian McEwan speaks of “infinite malice.” Evil is primordial. Genesis 1 says as much, although it presents the original disorder in the tamest possible language: “When God began to create sky and earth, earth was chaos, the darkness hanging over the deep, a mighty gale stirring the waters” (Genesis 1:1-2). God speaks back the darkness, erects structures to confine the primordial waters to their place, and thus brings order in the midst of chaos. But the forces of disorder do not go away. They remain, lurking, waiting to well up once again, to destroy what God has created.

In a classic monograph, Jon Levenson calls this deeply biblical theme “the persistence of evil” (Creation and the Persistence of Evil (1987; new edition in 1994; electronic edition, 2013). Evil remains an ever-present threat. Creation should never be taken for granted. 

A place to begin telling this story is Psalm 74. The psalm is set in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem (587/6 BCE) and the desecration of the temple. Yhwh is addressed by the psalmist:

Your foes have roared within your holy place;

they set up their emblems there. (74:4)

They set your sanctuary on fire;

they desecrated the dwelling place of your name. (74:7)

Think the pictures you have seen of Gaza or any other war zone. The psalmist asks, where in these tragic events is Yhwh, the God of Israel? After all, once Yhwh powerfully wrested order out of chaos:

You divided Sea by your might;

you shattered the heads of the sea monsters upon the waters.

You rattled the heads of Leviathan;

you gave him as food for the people of the desert. (74:13-14)

The psalm goes on to describe creation as God dividing and damming up the destructive waters. The language is borrowed from ancient myth. It resonates with the Babylonian creation story, Enuma Elish, and the story of the combat between Ba’al and Sea (Yamm) from Bronze Age Canaan. Creation is presented as a fierce battle between the God who brings order and the forces that resist order.

These stories of creation by combat, wresting order out of chaos, were one way that those ancient cultures reflected on the nature of evil. They did not distinguish, as often we do in our theology, between creation and history, in theological terms, between creation and providence, between what God did back there and what God does now. Creation requires maintenance, if not by God, then by those God has put in charge. And always disorder, the disintegration, remains a possibility. The order of creation can be reversed.

In this contest between order and disorder what we humans do matters. Historical evil brings out, as we well know, consequences not only for humans but for all creatures—for the order itself. Consider this passage from the prophet Jeremiah:

I looked at the earth, and it was waste and void;

toward the sky, and there was no light.

I looked at the mountains, and they were shaking;

and all the hills were swaying side-to-side.

I looked, and the human race was gone;

and all the birds of the sky had flown away.

I looked, and Carmel had become a wilderness;

and all its villages had been destroyed. . .. (Jeremiah 4:23-26)

In this Genesis 1 is reversed. The earth once again is “waste and void,” tōhû wəbōhû, as it had been before God spoke the first words of creation. The lights have gone out in the sky. The mountains and the hills are about to collapse. Humans are no more. Even the birds have fled.

Jeremiah has in mind events of his own day, the terrible destruction of the armies of Nebuchadnezzar as they marched through the land, destroying cities and villages, killing their inhabitants, damaging crops, and bringing an ecological disaster. This is no mere metaphor (not that metaphors are necessarily mere). In the Hebrew Bible, creation is not just the natural order, as we would have it in our science. It’s a comprehensive order that accommodates all God’s creatures, including us. Our modern distinction between the nature and social and cultural relationships makes no sense in biblical terms. Creation is all of those.

And because creation is all of those, the world is subject to being uncreated. Or, at least, to begin to be so. Our recent discovery that war destroys not only people but the fabric of the world would not be news to the writers of the Hebrew Bible. Hosea, perhaps the earliest of the writing prophets, says of his time (the 8^th century BCE):

There is no truth nor faithfulness, no knowledge of God in the land.

Curses and lies and murder and theft and adultery spread.

Blood runs into blood,

and therefore the land mourns,

the people of the land languish;

they perish along with the wild animals, the birds of the sky, and the fish of the sea. 

(Hosea 4:1c-3)

In both the creation of order and the disintegration of order, humans are complicit. Gregory Mobley (The Return of the Chaos Monsters and Other Backstories of the Bible, 2012), citing Levenson, says, 

Creation in Genesis 1 is not about making things out of nothing; it is about bringing definition and identity and differentiation to the amorphous chaos, the tohu wabohu, the “wild and waste.” But the cosmic waters are not obliterated. They are fenced in behind a retaining wall (Hebrew raqiʿa), a thin colander-like skydome that holds back the bulk of the water but allows for rain through its perforations. This firmament is our hedge against the chaos. (21)

Mobley adds:

. . . The chaos is ever ready to break free from its constraints, and human trespass erodes the stability of the dam behind which the waters mass. (22)

“Sin,” Mobley says, “awakens the chaos monsters” (22). It’s this interrelationship between evil and human trespass—not just in the distant past but in the present—that our theology loses. In the theology of the Hebrew Bible, the interaction goes in both directions: human trespass—our own little chaos—breaks the forces of chaos free of their constraints. I’ll come back to this. But it also goes in the other direction, as we well know: we can allow ourselves to become the instruments of the malevolent forces of the universe, what in a recent novel Ian McEwan calls “infinite malice.” Malice can take us over.

This is a much stronger view of evil than the matrix of original sin and total depravity allows. And it makes far more sense of the world in which we live. We live in a time in this country when disorderliness is celebrated by those in power. “Move fast and break things” has become the standard mode of operation not only for tech companies but for the current administration. Long-standing trade agreements made in good faith? Tear them up. Alliances built over decades? Ignore them. Laws passed by congress? Refuse to abide by them. Health care for millions? Oh, well. Sow chaos where you can. And on it goes; they are not done. The old order is fast disappearing. Not that the old order was in any way perfect. Far from it: order always risks institutionalizing oppression. But when you tear things down with no vision or provision for anything new, you wake up the chaos monsters. You end up not with something new but nothing at all. Or worse, with a malevolent disorder. With malice, infinite malice.

The McEwan novel I mentioned above, What We Can Know (2025), provides an imaginative case in point. The novel is set a century from now, in 2119. Between our time and that time the world we know has come apart. Partly the result of climate change and the failure of world leaders to do anything about it, partly the result of disastrous decisions leading to nuclear war, the seas have risen and inundated the land. What’s left of the UK is a set of smaller islands. The seas between the islands are frequented by pirates. It’s not safe, for example, to travel from England to Scotland. For those living in what’s left of the UK, the US is terra incognita. It’s entirely too dangerous to go there. The little news that does come through is of militias at war with each other. The time between our present and theirs has become known as the Derangement. The biblical writers would understand. They were the first to write not only of their own Time of Derangement but of the coming Derangement. All the coming Derangements, including our own.

They did so with great subtlety. In my description of the biblical view of evil—of the biblical fear of disorder becoming general, creation disintegrating into tōhû wəbōhû–I have scanted the complexity of the biblical discussion. The biblical writers are not all saying the same thing. There is a lively discussion among them. They disagree on the malevolence of the chaos monsters, for example. We have Job, with the chaos monsters appearing in chapter 3 in a graphic description of the reversal of creation, and then again in chapters 40-41 where Yhwh answers Job by asking whether he can tame Behemoth and Leviathan. We have Psalm 104, where Leviathan seems playful (although on this, see Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 56-64). We have Isaiah 24-27 with Yhwh promising finally to defeat Leviathan, “the dragon in the sea,” and, in contrast, Psalm 89 where the writer laments that though Yhwh once “crushed Rahab” [another name for the chaos monster], he seems no longer to want to do so. And, last, from the book of Revelation in the New Testament, you have the great dragon, summoning up Behemoth and Leviathan to do its bidding, waiting to kill the Christmas child.

Throughout the Bible challenges us to choose: serve the divine order as best we can or become hapless creatures of chaos, by our actions bringing into the world forces far greater than we can know. Keeping Torah in the Hebrew Bible and in the rabbinic movement that stems from it is one way of serving the divine order. It’s, in rabbinic terms, tikkun olam, “healing the world.” Living out the sacramental community of Christ is for us another way to discover and preserve the divine order, the “kingdom of God.” In biblical thinking, these are not small matters. They hold together the universe. The alternative is lawlessness, and lawlessness, the Bible teaches, feeds upon itself in a vicious circle until what has been created by God and by us comes finally apart.

As I said at the beginning, our theology does not take evil seriously enough. It seems written for another, less dangerous age. We can no longer afford to ignore what the Bible has to teach us about evil. Order is more fragile than we think.

Clay