The Unique Christ

It's hard to deny that there is evil in the world. Any student of history, no matter how new to the discipline, cannot help but notice that humanity is capable of evil things. Humanity has done with clear conscienced creativity, things that later generations observe with horror. There are things done in the name of science, or productivity, or imperial ambition, or even individual recreation, that can only be described as evil.

The question we all face in light of this reality is: what do we do with the evil and brokenness in the world, and more pointedly, what do we do with the evil and brokenness in ourselves as individuals?

There have been two traditional ways of psychologically coping with the reality of evil. They are to either: 1. define away evil, characterise it as an illusion, or a lack of enlightenment, or a simple evolutionary process, and continue to live with it; or 2. to struggle with all your might to fix the evil, to heal it in your own heart and in the world around you.

These two approaches to evil have themselves two sad but inevitable consequences. The consequence of ignoring evil is that it remains and the world continues to groan under it, even if intellectually it can be rationalised as survival of the fittest, or ignored as an illusion. The consequence of working to fix evil, to conquer it, to so live that it is not present in our own lives, is unfortunately despair. The general problem of human evil is always too big for us to fix, and the specific problem of evil in our own hearts is too pernicious to be cured by our own labours, such that eventually honesty will lead the labourer to the realisation that they are helpless in the face of this problem, and thence to despair.

The unique thing about Christianity is that it chooses neither path in dealing with evil, and thus, alone among faith systems and philosophies, finds a way to live with evil that is at the same time both intellectually credible and existentially satisfying.

Christianity is intellectually credible because it recognises that evil is a problem. A holocaust, genocide in Rwanda, or Bosnia, or Cambodia, these things are evil, and to simply rationalise them as evolution, or ignore them as illusion is to do a profound disservice to those who suffered and to be, in my humble opinion, intellectually irresponsible with the fact of these atrocities.

But rather than then labour to the point of despair, Christianity avoids the opposing pole by finding in God both a love that grips us despite our own personal evil, and a power that took evil into itself on the cross and will return to cleanse the creation of the evil which presently plagues it.

Christianity finds in the love and sacrifice of God in Jesus, an approach to evil that can hold both the reality of evil and our helplessness in the face of evil, with honesty and without despair. Christianity allows us to live in the world without either despising it or accommodating it. Christ alone among the gods loves us in such a way that we are able to live... as ourselves... here.