Chapter 3, Radical Evil In The Ruined Soul, sucks the wind out of me every time I read it and leaves me with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. Willard has done a thorough job of exploring the ruins of the soul apart from Christ. He highlights our societal efforts to remove “sin–an offense against God” as a category for understanding human choice. The main pursuit of the denial of sin is to maintain our self-deception of being god. Willard writes:
“In a world apart from God, the power of denial is absolutely essential if life is to proceed. The will or spirit cannot–psychologically cannot–sustain itself for any length of time in the face of what it clearly acknowledges to be the case. Therefore it must deny and evade and delude itself. Paul’s brilliant and inspired insight into the root of human evil–’There is no fear of God before their eyes’–must never be forgotten by those who would understand spiritual formation and would themselves be transformed into Christlikeness, or by those who simply want to be responsible leaders among humanity.” (52)
I find that an evolutionary or progressive view of the human soul comes creeping into my mind way too often. This perspective pervades our culture and has been adopted by many in the church. To address it makes me feel very confrontive–even combative. Our world wants to believe that lions will not make steak dinners out of other creatures: see the movie Madagascar for an entertaining exploration of the problem of good and evil. I am filled with many questions:
How to present the Gospel, how to preach the Scriptures, so that the truth of the ruined and deceitful heart is declared? Often we are preaching to the converted in our churches, but are they thoroughly converted to the great inescapable inability of humanity to save itself? They are not convinced. If they are not convinced of their position apart from Christ do they have any Holy-Spirit-unction for spiritual formation? How do we awaken souls in and outside our regular gatherings in a creative fashion to the true condition of a life without Christ? How do we confront the neo-pharisee–the person who has made being good their religion-without-religion and finds it incomprehensible that we would have a category for understanding life called sin? How do we revive sin as a way of talking about the human condition when the great majority of citizens seem to have rejected revealed truth as an accepted mode for reliable knowledge? Do we have the guts to revive sin?
Thoughts? Feel free to comment below.
