The Person of Jesus - No. 38
Good and evil
Recently, I have been studying Bonhoeffer and reading more of his work. I have been struck by the way Bonhoeffer observed Jesus and His Gospel being removed from the Nazi German church. During this same time in America, the humanist movement did the same thing. Two very different situations in almost every way, but both are removing Jesus and the Gospel from Christianity. At first pass, it seems impossible, but upon deeper inspection, what we see is a pattern that repeats itself over and over throughout history.
In order for evil to flourish, the mass of men must stop believing in ultimate good. No leader has ever been able to convince their followers that evil is desirable, but many have managed to convince their followers that evil is good. In order for that to happen, though, you must hide from the people the ultimate picture of good so that they lose their reference point, and good becomes subjective. Humans seem to instinctively desire what is good but struggle to understand what it actually is or see when good has been perverted or manipulated into something else entirely.
Religion
When we look at the landscape of human history, we find that religion has been the primary vehicle for defining ultimate good for every people group, from ancestral tribes to 19th and 20th century empires. Religion has always been an attempt to show man how to live and guide him to God. The ultimate source and embodiment of goodness has always been God. The major religions of the world are very different in many ways, but all tend to agree on some foundational concepts. Ethical living, the golden rule, and a call to personal transformation are central to most enduring wisdom practices. Mercy and charity are almost universally recognized as good and necessary for individuals and societies as a whole. Most faith traditions recognize that ordinary human life tends to lead to selfishness, ignorance, and misguided desire, which end up producing chaos, suffering, and injustice. Much of religion is guiding people to be less harmful to themselves and others and more loving, just, and good.
It is understandable why religion in general has stood in the way of evil, corruption, and chaos in society. Yet we find that there are many times when religion has been perverted and used to support and justify horrible atrocities both in the world and in people's individual lives. It is clear that religion alone is not a safeguard at all against evil.
The worst things that have happened in modern history were only possible when religion was moved from the center of the culture to the periphery, and the core values of religion were hijacked to enable chaos, killing, and death on a massive scale. Let’s look at how this happened in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and America. The only common denominator that these nations shared was that they removed God and Jesus' teaching from government and culture before walking a road that led to killing on a massive scale.
Communism, Fascism, and Humanism.
Fascism: Nazi Germany took a very heavy handed all out control approach to the Christian church. They even went as far as to remove the cross and bible from churches and replace them with swastikas and Hitler's book Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”). He made Christianity in Germany about patriotism, duty, and being a “good and loyal" member of society. Hitler, in many ways, took the place of Jesus as the central figure of the German “Christian” church. In Nazi Germany, Hitler didn’t try to convince the German people that death camps were a good idea; he instead redefined good and celebrated an extreme, racially based patriotism. This paved the way for the systematic killing of 6 million Jews, and a world war that resulted in the death of 35–60 million people.
Communism: In the USSR, Stalin radically oppressed religion. He confiscated church property, promoted atheism in schools, and made religion as socially invisible as possible. Then deliberately used the Russian Orthodox Church as a tool for encouraging patriotism during WWII. In Soviet Russia, they redefined good as equality and a classless society through state socialism. Stalin didn’t try to convince the people that the gulags (forced‑labor camps) were good; he used a government that centralized power in the name of equality to attack any and all that stood in his way. The USSR, during Stalin's reign of terror, is responsible for an estimated 20 million deaths.
Humanism: On the western side of the world, formerly Christian nations began to embrace humanism around the middle of the 20th century. Humanism is a system of thought that centers around the belief that there is no God and puts prime importance on human rather than spiritual matters. Humanist beliefs focus on realizing human potential and finding solely rational solutions to humanity's problems. The growth of scientific thinking, industry, and technology was fueled by underlying humanist beliefs. Ayn Rand was the most notable voice calling attention and praise to the humanist values inherent in a capitalist society in her books and essays during this time. The Western governments officially began to separate themselves from religion and belief in God. Christian values were still celebrated, but God and Jesus were increasingly removed from the center of Western culture. Values like service, charity, and equality, which have their origin in religion, were secularized. This allowed good to be redefined in a way that focused on individual liberty over the value of every human life. Scientific thinking allowed the government to redefine human life in such a way that it excludes the unborn. Instead of viewing all humans as spirit and flesh, American culture increasingly viewed people through purely scientific terms. As a result, an estimated 63.5 million legal abortions have been performed in the U.S. since 1973.
In James 1:27, it says, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” In Matthew 22:39, Jesus says the second greatest commandment is to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” A culture that is built around teaching like this will not allow the senseless death of millions of people. That is why the golden rule has always been the enemy of those who embody evil and wish to perpetrate it.
The person of Jesus
It is hard to argue that Jesus is not the single most influential man in human history. He holds a place of paramount importance in reference to all the major world religions for one primary reason. Instead of being a wisdom teacher or a prophet, he was God as a man. This is of profound importance because instead of just telling us how we should live, he became a man and showed us how to live. Instead of teaching about God, he modeled God for us. Instead of dying a martyr's death, he died a sacrificial death. And unlike all the other central teachers of the world's major religions, Jesus rose again from the dead. Then He took it a monumental leap further and gave us the gift of the spirit of God to live in man.
Every religion teaches a form of the golden rule and seeks to define good. Only Jesus modeled it in an individual person’s life. The battle against evil is not a governmental one or a societal one; it is always an individual one for each person. This makes Jesus the ultimate embodiment of good. What Jesus did was invite us to move from religion (practices and ideas about God) to relationship with God through the Holy Spirit. Instead of practicing the golden rule, he showed us how to become transformed into people who naturally live it out. Jesus is the path to personal transformation; the world will not change unless individual people are transformed.
For these reasons and more, the person of Jesus is the ultimate antidote to evil and chaos in the world. That is why wherever evil flourishes, whether in a society or a person’s life, Jesus has been moved from the central figure to a peripheral one. Instead of being the way, he becomes a way or worse, an idea. Personally and culturally, we cannot afford to conflate the religion of Christianity with the person of Jesus. It is his life and teaching that led to Christianity, but ultimately, he was not creating a religion; he was showing the way and giving us a relationship with God through the Holy Spirit. Christian cultures often treat Jesus as an idea, a prophet, a historical figure, a great teacher, a healer, and the Son of God, but fail to truly understand Him as The Way.
On one end of the spectrum of Good vs. Evil, we have Hitler's death camps, and on the other, we have Jesus Christ. The farther Jesus gets from being the central figure in people's lives, the more we drift towards that other end of the spectrum where human life becomes a commodity, and destruction a way of life. Ultimate chaos is where Jesus is forgotten, and evil is called good.
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. - Isaiah 5:20
There is no other enduring way to value human life than to see man as created in God’s image. Humanism values man’s ability and ends up killing some men for the sake of other men. Marxism values human life equally, but ends up killing many men for the sake of the collective. Fascism obviously doesn’t value men, only the state, so it kills those who stand in its way. There are many other ideologies that have been tried throughout history, but they always end up committing evil in the name of Good. The most shocking modern example comes from science and data-driven thinking. The belief that many should die now for the sake of the future human race. It doesn’t matter how smart we are and how much history we get to observe; without Jesus showing us the way, we seem to be deceived into thinking evil is good. Our only hope is to keep always before our eyes the person of Jesus Christ and His way.
Jesus stepped into a world filled with every manner of evil and injustice, carrying the power to accomplish anything He wished. He could’ve overthrown the Roman empire and raised up or called upon armies to fight injustice. Instead, he lived as a man who owned nothing, walked from town to town discipling ordinary men, speaking in parables, and showing us how to live. God’s response to the overwhelming injustice of the world is a sacrificial death and the gift of His Spirit so that any man who chooses Him can be transformed. The solution to evil is always the transformation of individual people into the likeness of the person of Jesus.
Discipleship is the process of becoming who Jesus would be if he were you. - Dallas Willard
- John Walt.
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