Moltmann, Jürgen. "'Deliver Us from Evil' or Doing Away with Humankind?" in World Without End: Christian Eschatology from a Process Perspective. ed. Joseph A. Bracken (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's Publishing Co., 2005), 12-27. ISBN: 0-8028-2811-6 Hbk.
There is a great difference between real and imagined Evil [Moltmann capitalizes "Evil" throughout]. We enjoy reading about Miss Marple or watching television shows which depict the machinations of the criminal mind because we always know that in the end all turns out well. Unfortunately, such denoument is not real. Real Evil hates, murders, lies, and lays waste to individuals and nations, cutting a bloody swathe through human history and the history of the planet. "World history," says Moltmann, "does not read like a detective story, either for us or even less so for God" (13).
Better an end
with violence than violence without end!
with violence than violence without end!
There are reasons why Evil is so attractive. Psychoanalysis has long described the psychic attractiveness of killing and cruelty. Clear and immediate experience is so closed off to postmodern human beings. Our virtul worlds do not provide the same feeling of newness and originality as can raw destructiveness and pornographic violence. There is a mental high, a trance, a feeling of god-likeness the comes over the killer, the torturer, the rapist. For many of the religious peoples of the world, Evil is attractive because it ushers in the apocalypse. Many look forward to such an ending, when the enemies of God will be finally put down and this history of suffering will come to a close. Better an end with violence than violence without end! (14)
more to come . . .
Jürgen Moltmann; Jurgen Moltmann; evil; apocalypse.
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