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Evil is good at making us more conscious. Meditate on evil and you
delve into the limitations of being human. Explore evil and you wonder if there can be a
force opposed to Creation or perhaps whether the origin of evil exist within the Creator
itself. The story of Job certainly suggests that God can be in cahoots with evil. Then
again, maybe evil is an illusion, a result of a limited way of looking at life.
I have learned from my students, however, that
people easily become uncomfortable talking about evil, almost as if they sense the
presence of some alien awareness eavesdropping on their conversation. "Shouldn't we
surround ourselves with light before we talk about evil?" someone asks. So we say a
prayer and surround ourselves with light to protect us from the evil one. Afterwards, I
point to my own heart and ask, "could there be any evil in here? Does surrounding
ourselves with light protect us from what's inside?" My question raises perceptibly
the level of discomfort in the classroom. Now we are under the spell of evil.
Evil is good at creating a sense of magic. From
the beginning, the ambiguity about whether evil originates outside ourselves or from
within us has been part of its mystique. In these latter days, when the world's future
seems to wait upon the revealing of the script secretly written by divine destiny (or
perhaps our own choices), evil becomes a hot topic. According to Bernard McGinn, author of
Anti-Christ: Two thousand years of the human fascination with evil (Harper Collins), the
ultimate reason for the existence of evil is to remind us of the importance of our
choices. It is a supreme paradox that even within a history that may be divinely governed,
our own choices matter.
The author is immanently qualified to pass
judgment upon the role of the embodiment of evil within the history of our spiritual
imagination. He is the Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor of Historical Theology and the
History of Christianity at the University of Chicago and editor of the 80-volume series,
Classics of Western Spirituality. In this current work, he takes us on the journey of evil
from Day One to the Last Day. It is a history of theological debate within the
Judaeo-Christian tradition.
I was fascinated to learn of the origins of the
Anti-Christ legend within Jewish history and of the important role the Essenes played by
their portrayal, within the Qumran scrolls, of the followers of Belial. I learned the
meaning of more technical terms (millenarianism, premillenarianism, apocalyptic
eschatology, fundamentalist apocalypticism, post-tribulationist) than I ever imagined
existed surrounding the role of evil in the destiny of history.
This history revolves around two important issues
surrounding the Anti-Christ, about which McGinn attempts to set the record straight.
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