12:33 PM
in The Library, 24 hours ago, by Jack Douglas
@DanO'Day related to that answer (not the controversy, just the content), can I ask you a question about the Orthodox view of 'evil'? I thinking more and more that the physical concept of bringing 'harm' or 'disaster' to someone (or indeed God) is being artificially separated from a purely 'spiritual' concept of evil in my conservative evangelical circles—does this separation exist in the same way in Orthodox thought?
As I said this may be hard to communicate, so I'm going to try and illustrate from Les Miserables! (Don't worry, I haven't seen/read it either ;)
Here's the thing: I think in normal thought in my conservative evangelical circles, the idea of 'evil' is super-spiritualised, and the 'material' side is belittled, rather than allowing the two to entwine together
This is a trivial example, but I hope it illustrates the point: bloke in Les Mis steals a loaf ob bread because he is starving
was it an 'evil' act? if I ask a conservative evangelical they might agonise about the moral side of it or decide one way or the other, but they'll probably never consider the harm done to the owner of the bread
I think the bible, and especially the OT, uses the word 'evil' in a much more down to earth way than the normal way we use the word today, and we read the common, cultural meaning of the English word back into the text without thinking.
eg Romans 12:9. "Abhor what is evil". Paul seems is speaking both before and after about the specific ways we bring harm and blessing and harm to other human beings, so I regard his use of 'evil' in that verse to be limited in meaning to a summary of those harmful acts, not an isolated statement to be read alone and into which we are expected to read in all our modern baggage concerning what 'evil' is
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