Dr. Mohler and the Devil

When I heard Dr. Mohler’s response in his 4/11/17 Briefing to Scott Simon’s NPR piece “A Meditation on ‘Evil’”, it was clear to me that he had missed Simon’s point. Simon’s daughter asked of the Syrian gas attack, “Why would anyone do that?” Her question was about cause. Simon added,

“I was of a generation educated to believe that “evil” was a cartoonish moral concept, a word we used only when we didn’t know what madness or imagined infraction might drive human beings to commit murder, even on a mass scale.”

Notice once again Simon is talking about causation, what might “drive” people to do such things. Possible natural causes he lists are insanity and “imagined infraction” (that is, false attributions of wrong-doing which can foment terrible acts of revenge or retribution.) The “cartoonish moral concept” of evil his generation had rejected was the concept of evil as a cause in human affairs, a hidden but active force – or even a Being. That concept was the ‘evil’ Simon was meditating on.

But Dr. Mohler never once speaks of evil in this sense. Instead he takes up the subject of “the distinction between right and wrong, between good and evil.” But ‘evil’ in the sense of ‘wrong’ is not a cause; it is an attribute. Mohler says,

“The modern age did not begin by denying the distinction between good and evil. To the contrary, modernity was born in an Enlightenment confidence that human beings could, on the basis of reason alone, come to distinguish what was true and what was false, what is good from what is bad, what is righteous from what is evil. As it turned out that was an implausible proposition from the very beginning. It turns out that human rationality is not enough to anchor the distinction between good and evil.”

But Simon was NOT saying that his generation had any trouble telling right from wrong, or recognizing great crimes as evil, much less that it denied moral distinctions, as Dr. Mohler implies. It was not the concept of evil as “wrong” that Simon’s generation found “cartoonish”, and his point had nothing to do with post-modernism or moral relativism. It was the concept of evil as cause – as active force or agent – that was no longer taken seriously. Dr. Mohler’s historical account of the Enlightenment and modernity ignores the fate of that other concept. An important step toward modernity was the rejection of witch trials – those disastrous searchings out of devil worshippers. Courts ceased recognizing supernatural evil as a cause of wrong-doing, and the Devil disappeared from public discourse. Evil became natural, and, as Simon said, only when natural explanations seemed to fail in the face of some enormity did the old spectre threaten to raise its fabled head.

After listening to the Briefing I followed Mohler's link to Simon’s NPR piece and was shocked to find something the Briefing had not prepared me for: Simon himself, in his meditation, had brought up the devil, the personification of evil, recounting the impressions of a general who said he had “shaken his hand.” So this was not just a misunderstanding on Dr. Mohler’s part. He could not have missed Simon’s point, yet he ignored it, and changed the subject. Why?

I am not a Christian, nor was I raised as one, so there is a lot I don’t understand about Christians, their sects, schools and denominations. Can anybody tell me why Dr. Mohler seldom if ever mentions the devil, although his followers (on Facebook) often do? And why would he choose for a topic a meditation on evil as a cause – a force or a person – but fail to confront or even acknowledge the question of whether events like the Syrian gas attack are the work of the devil? He says evil is “a theological term”, but evidently this does not mean for him that it is supernatural.

I’m certainly not advocating talk of the devil. I don’t believe in evil as an active force, let alone a person. It is natural for humans to personify what they don’t understand. It may sometimes be useful, but it is definitely dangerous. Once our adversaries become (in our minds) devils or the devil's servants, we can do anything to them. That’s why I despise the cheap violence of Lord of the Rings movies. Because the Orcs are personifications of evil and serve evil, they are ugly, and their deaths count for nothing, and can be rejoiced in. Perhaps we have this image of “the evil other” in our minds from prehistory when we evolved in tribes at war with other tribes. It might serve survival to see outsider enemies as inhuman monsters in need of killing, as opposed to members of our own tribe, whom we must not kill. But such perceptions perpetuate horrors.