I conclude with one last pastoral reflection. The fourth paragraph up, I argued that God
had to have believed that evil was worth it in order to qualify as
perfect. That argument was made on the
assumption that it is, in fact, metaphysically possible for evil to outdo good
in terms of worth. I’m not so certain
that this is even a metaphysical possibility.
A single shred – the tiniest grain of true joy – is worth even an
infinity of evil and transgression. If
there is no good, then there can be no evil, and if there is even a shred of
true good, then no amount of evil that results can overturn it. The Psalmist seemed to express similar
sentiments, “Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere” (Ps.
84:10 NIV). C. S. Lewis, through the
characters in his narrative The Great
Divorce, communicates insights that are well in agreement:
And yet all
loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that [Hell] contains, if
rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least
moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight
that could be registered at all. Bad
cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell’s miseries together entered the
consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be
swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that
Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific itself is only a molecule.[1]
There is, therefore,
reason for optimism. For we are in the
hands of some kind of Something which we have an idea in our minds about;
something which, through our knowledge of it, allows us to discern that our
world is truly fallen. And if it is
fallen, then there is a Height from which it fell. And if there is a Height from which it fell,
then we must entertain the hope of returning to that Height, or else perish in
absolute despair. Christianity presents
to us a chilling story of this fall, a maddening picture of the Height from
which we fell (maddening because it is so surpassingly beautiful), and a
glorious hope in the Resurrection, through which we might rise up from the
depths into which we have fallen through the divine enigma that is Christ.
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