Getting Past the Language of Good and Evil

One of the greatest challenges faced by Christian ethicists during WWI was the debate on how to make ethical approaches relevant to the empirical reality of evil that seemed to grip the world in its clutches. The answer from those on the forefront of this question was that sturdy categories of good and evil that had carried us for ages were no longer sufficient. We had to revaluate an approach or find one that went beyond the ethical stalemate of good and evil in order to grant humanity the dignity necessary to embrace a responsibility it had lost hiding behind ethical language.

 



Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, H. P. Van Dusen

The new approach meant that despite what appeared as good or evil, one acted with the conviction of his conscience. Every appeal to love, kindness, or mercy had to be fortified with context if it was to mean anything at all. In that way, ethicists claimed that each one of us were responsible for his actions, both its representation and its misrepresentation. There was no easy appeal to moral truisms: "woe to them who called good evil and evil good" precisely because what we appeared to do under the conviction of our faith could in fact be perceived as evil, uninformed, or ill-advised. Christians were being called out for standing outside our actions in the safety of abstract language. We had to take ownership of our deeds. In doing so, Christians could reflect what it meant to be "Christlike" and to "carry his cross," because Jesus, like nobody else, was and still is misunderstood as a prophet whose actions of love were rejected and ended in his death. In taking personal responsibility, we allow ourselves to enter the challenge of good and evil.

Consider the moral clarity needed to defend oneself by killing your enemy, dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, or the taking of a life in war by people who were drafted into service and uncomfortable with the thought, and you have many episodes that have to be confronted and explained with a black-and-white biblical Christian language that has historically failed to be at harmony with itself.