Some years ago, I forget where, I read of a parish minister who wrote a Doctor of Ministry thesis on the problem of evil. He based it on conversations and interviews with exactly one hundred of his parishioners. Why one hundred? "I'm not a mathematician or a statistician, and I find it easier to work out percentages this way." The statistic that remains in my mind is this: 100% of the people, when serious, as they are in the face of illness, suffering, or the confrontation with death, own words to bring up the classic questions with which the various scriptures, philosophies, and theologies through the ages have been concerned. The question of evil evokes many modes of response.
The two lead essays in this issue appear to be-and perhaps are-far apart in theme, genre, approach, and intention. Both, however, deal with the problem of evil.
Their biggest difference is the presence of God in respect to evil in the presentation by Drs. Mohrmann, Healey, and Childress on one hand, and the presence of energy in respect to evil in the article of Dr. Albanese. Oh, if you look closely you can find her making a passing reference to "God or the Gods," and, near the end, a virtual equation of "the universal source of all energy" and God, since that source "corresponds to God in a traditional view." But God in any traditional view plays no direct part in her presentation. [Query: use "find and replace" button to be sure there are no other God references, and if there are, add mention thereof, please.]
Williams James famously divided spiritual concerns into "the religion of the sin-sick soul" and "the religion of healthy-mindedness." The three university professors deal mainly with the former and the Californian describes the latter. As the Mohrmann-Healey-Childress trio present case studies, one can hardly suppress rage over examples of "sin" in the form of rape and abuse of the most horrendous sorts. And those who make reference to God in respect to such evils tend to deal with people who look for ways out of evil, or ways for addressing evil, that have something to do with a God who creates, judges, and may forgive and heal. And, say these witnesses to gross evils, this also has to be a God who either creates evil, allows evil, is incapable of doing something about evil, or ignores the human plight.
For all the mysteries about the role of God in all this, the vast majority of the population-90% of the public and 60% of the physicians, we read, choose to deal with the connection of God and the problem of evil rather than abandon faith in God or ignore the evil.
The people in the movements that Catherine Albanese describes, on the other hand, while doing anything but ignore evil, seem relatively sunny, optimistic, unmoved by intractable problems or irresolvable paradoxes and mysteries. Native Americans, practitioners of neo-traditional religions of the East, New Agers, and other seekers of alternative medical ways talk quite consistently about "energy." If the statistics the other authors provide us are correct, the Energy-instead-of-God or Energy-as-God or God-as-Energy advocates are in a minority. Yet their influence grows.
By publishing the two essays together we hope to help our reading public make sense of a horizon where leaders and publics are both reaching into ancient wisdom and also into modern-pardon me, Professor Albanese-postmodern resources for dealing with evil. By the way, my thanks to Albanese for one of the more clear, less jargon-filled descriptions of what that "post" means in our culture.
The three shorter pieces also deal with evil in different ways. Tim Unsworth visits Bonaventure House, where victims of AIDS minister to each other, often to the point of death. He overhears them coming up with their own ways of coping with the evil of the disease, with an often uncaring citizenry, and with the problems of meaning that they face daily. Sometimes coping means raging or being frustrated, and at other times it means being ministerial or neighborly in times of personal crisis.
Robert Fowler finds in Kenneth Woodward's book on miracles an historical address to the issue of transcending evil in the form of what philosophers call "natural" (as imposed to inflicted) evil. In the past, in many faiths, we read of wonder-workers, healers, producers of signals and signs, who effected miraculous cures of diseases or address other kinds of evil. Interestingly, many of both the God-fearers and the Energy-connectors about whom the authors of the two longer essays are writing, live in range of miracle-talk. Polls tell us that the majority of Americans believe in miracles. Interestingly, a major New Age text that influences alternative medicine advocates is called A Course in Miracles.
In the New Testament there is a reference to "the last enemy, death." While there are some in our day who find ways to speak, in the end, of death as a friend, most rage against the dying of the light or acquiesce to the impending shadows, regarding death as an evil. Though most may believe that something, be it eternal life, immortality, resurrection, reincarnation, follows physical death, and though death therefore may be regarded as the passageway to something better, it still greets most mortals as evil.
With that in mind, Bill Moyers and his team have been listening to the dying. In a new television series they want to help the public learn to talk more readily about death. Faith McLellan's article, based on her interview, should inspire readers to pay special attention to the series. They will get new impetus for connecting death to the language about God or the alternative, Energy. And always in the background remains the question of evil, unexplained and still unsettled by this issue of Second Opinion, the scripture, and the philosophies. Whenever creative people address it, they do not seek to solve the basic questions but rather to advance creative pondering and conversation. I hope this issue will do some of such advancing.
