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On September 11, 2001 an old word re-entered our vocabulary, the word “evil”. On that day, we witnessed a deep suicidal hatred that reduced two of the world’s great towers to smouldering rubble and brutally snuffed out over 3000 lives. It was evil. There is no other word for it. Some things are just wrong, and killing 3000 unsuspecting people is one of them.
And yet what was so clear in New York on Sept. 11 had not been all that clear to us in the days leading up to that day. We have become unaccustomed to speaking of evil, of right and wrong. We speak of social causes and psychological disturbances and unhealthy choices. We say that morality is an outmoded concept or at best a matter of preference in which everyone should choose for themselves – After all, you can’t legislate morality and what’s wrong for you is okay for me. Yet those vague sentiments are revealed as folly when we are confronted with something clearly as evil as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
And yet the death of 3000 people is not large by historical standards. The aftermath may result in many more equally “innocent” bystanders dead. Moreover, 3000 is far fewer than the number of North Americans killed each year by other North Americans. Worldwide, it will not even register on the statistical charts of the number of people killed by other people in 2001. Looking at the issue another way, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 35,615 children starved to death on Sept. 11, 2001. Another 35,615 starved to death on Sept. 12, another 35,615 on September 13 and 35,615 on every day after that. These children are not primarily starving to death because there is a shortage of food but primarily because of war, economic dislocation, political instability and corruption, in short, because of the actions of other people.
The statistics are mind-numbing, but the individual cases are undeniably real. One such story happened in Rwanda. There, a United Nations team approached a smouldering hut with horror, knowing what they would find since this was not the first village they had visited that day. The stink of death was already beginning to overwhelm them. But it was not death that stopped them – it was a faint cry from the bushes beside the path. Gingerly a soldier stepped off the trail and made his way towards the sound. There was a child, barely a year old, hidden under a dirty pile of rags. It had been hidden there in an act of frantic desperation and had survived the scavengers of the jungle only because the smouldering villages provided such overwhelming feasts of other carrion. The soldier picked the child up, cradled it in his arms and saw the eyes of his own children in Canada. The child was given several hours of safety in a UN truck, then taken to a nearby camp and dropped into the hands of people themselves reaching out for protection. It would be some months later, when he was back with his own family, having come upon many more burned villages and heaps of bodies that the horror of seeing such evil began to ooze from the soldier’s being. He did not let himself weep because he suspected that once the dam broke, there would be no end to the flood of tears.
It has become fashionable, since the advent of Darwinism to see the world as an amazing, intricate array of life struggling to reproduce and flourish. Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” means that baby seals die alone on beaches, that this is to be accepted as a natural part of being a species in the great chain of life and that humans can ask for nothing more than any other animal.
But where does such a view leave those who cannot look away from the death of children? The answer is simple – it leaves them with a horror too deep to handle. Inside the core of our beings, we know that death and suffering signal that something is terribly wrong. Not every death comes from human cruelty, but every time a loved one dies, our hearts remind us that this is not how it should be. Even Jesus Christ, who understood all there was to know about life, wept at the death of His friend Lazarus.
We need a better answer when we are faced with the reality of death and when faced with the brutal and endless cruelty that humans inflict on each other.
Is there a better answer? Indeed there is – the Christian Bible’s answer that the death and suffering of children and indeed all people have their source in the reality of evil.
At first, that might seem like a grim comfort. How can belief in the existence of evil comfort those who see suffering? Does not admitting the existence of evil deepen the terror, turning the world into a nightmare?
The presence of evil in the world, however, is not the end but rather the beginning of the Bible’s answer to the suffering and pain we see around us. In the following series of articles, we will explore the Bible’s answer more deeply.
The main articles in this issue of Encounter were written by Jim Coggins, editor of Encounter, and James Toews, senior pastor of Neighbourhood Church in Nanaimo, B.C.
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