Both Aspects of Good

One of the most pernicious aspects of our thought-lives is the idea of balance—the expectation that this or that element ought to have a corresponding opposing element.  Unsurprisingly, this leads to difficulties in the realm of religion, where mundane pairings like light and dark, past and future, alien and familiar, and the like, run up against much more troubling pairings—most famously, good and evil.

We see good as the counterpoint to evil, and yet the very idea of a latent “balance” is of course troubling to us.  Good must be greater than evil.  (And evil must be cast into an intellectual realm in which—contrary to our most “logical” tendencies—evil must be thought somehow separate from the creative will of God, and yet evil could not create itself, and so on.)  It must be asked first and foremost if the dualistic concept of counterbalancing opposites is not an imposition of us onto our conceptions of existence, rather than a necessary concept.

It might be asked, for example, how life can be the opposite of death.  Life experiences death, but death does not experience life.  Death does not come to life, yet life comes to death.  Inescapably, “death” as an object of consideration occurs only to that which is living, while yet it is only the living that also experiences “life” as an object of consideration.

Or to put it in a more general way (as I believe philosophers have done, more artfully than I), that which exists can both exist and be understood as no longer existing, but that which does not exist cannot in counterbalance be thought to intrude into the realm of existence.  Or something like that—I find it all rather confusing.

What ought not to be confusing is the way in which we must cede to God the ability to make things exist or not at will.  Genesis describes God as speaking Creation into existence and then calling Creation “good.”  Creation is less than God, and therefore by necessity uncategorizable as possessing the full range of divine perfections.  Creation is “good,” but it is not “perfect,” and therefore Creation could be called “not good” by God, if he so willed.

What might be stated just as bluntly, however, is that God could will out of existence any or all of the “not goodness” of Creation.  He is God, after all.  This is probably behind the great irony of the “Fall” episode.  Adam and Eve are raised above the animals in “knowing” good and evil—though the “above” part is ironic in itself, since arguably animals know good and evil in terms of what to approach and what to avoid—Adam and Eve simply acquired the chance to be philosophical, judgmental, unforgiving, and wrong in their notions of what to approach and what to avoid.

Moreover, it is only in a partial sense that humanity “knowing good and evil” makes humanity “like God,” in that humanity is in no way promised thereby God’s sovereign prerogative to will the good or evil of this or that out of existence.  To put it another way, the God that can “know” (as much as “will” or “speak” or any other presumptuous verb thrust by us onto him) anything into existence can also “know” that thing into a greater or lesser moral state.

The most intellectually volatile aspect of any concept of dualism must be the inherent tension between dualism and the sovereignty of the Creator God.  If God creates something, it is the prerogative of God to create a separate counterbalance to that something, or to create that something with an internalized dynamic of such dualism.

This concept runs strikingly through the introduction to John.  At first it begins with a primordial creation-story (which, like the primordial creation-story in Genesis, is not a story at all, but rather a narratively-framed presentation of a set of conditions):

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  The same was in the beginning with God.  All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.”

There is in the above passage no hint of how a course of events therein might be understood, nor any hint that such analysis would be of any profit.  The above passage leads to the next, pivotal statement:

“In him was life; and the life was the light of men.”

As I said, the primordial creation-story admits of no logical analysis, so there is no warrant to imagine that the “life” here described is “biological” in the strict sense, nor even restricted to a “life” in Jesus understood directly as a provision for humanity.  Jesus acts like fig-trees and mountains are alive—it would be an act of gross presumption to insist on overturning the insistent implication of a Creation made by and with the living Son of God—a Creation as an incomprehensible living totality.

The important point for the present analysis is to see the above passage as linked to the next, so:

“In him was life; and the life was the light of men.  And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended [that is, overpowered] it not.”

We must be reminded here of the analogous passage in Genesis:

“And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”

If the light was not divided from the darkness at first, then it permeated all.  To divide the light from the darkness was to draw out from it darkness—something that we cannot understand, yet the implication from what little we can understand is that “light” includes both light and dark, just as the “life” understood as pre-existing the light includes within itself both life and death.  The sovereign creative power of God that brings dualisms into existence simultaneously reins them in.

If this principle is understood and applied properly, then the rest of the introduction to John falls into place in our comprehension.

“There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.”  This, of course, is the John who said he was not Elijah, while Jesus said he was indeed Elijah.  There ought to be nothing really strange in this.  The “John Chapter One” life in Jesus is life, and it is also (in our ken) not-life.  The light is light, and it is also not-light.  John the Baptist is Elijah, and he is also not-Elijah.

After a brief description of the Baptist as a witness of the Light, we have:

“That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.  He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.”

To apply the straightforward analysis of which we imagine ourselves capable (and which we usually presume to be appropriate), we would have to conclude that the preceding passage is simply untrue.  The gospels are full of descriptions of “the world” in any number of terms (storms, plants, fish, children, crowds, prospective disciples, prophets, dead people, maladies, even—if you will—demons) in which Jesus is indeed recognized in such vein as is appropriate to the son and equal of the Creator God.  To use the analysis I have proposed above, there is no such difficulty, because Jesus possesses indeed both totalities of the dualism.  Jesus is the recognized and the not-recognized.

The Introduction continues:

“He came unto his own, and his own received him not.  But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”

The “unto his own” part seems curiously circumspect, if we are to take it simply as a reference to “the Jews” or to “Judaism.”  This is the same gospel that has “the chief priests of the Jews” say to Pilate, “Write not, The King of the Jews . . . ,” so we can probably surmise that the “unto his own” part is not meant out of delicacy.  We would do well to note that further on in the Introduction there is:

“For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.”

In the same framework of circumspection as the “unto his own” part, we can analyze the “law given by Moses” part as potentially more comprehensive than the idea of “the Jewish Law.”  The notion of the written law as in part a manifestation of a greater “law of the heart” or some such was not unknown in Jesus’ day (see Paul in Romans.)  Moreover, “unto his own” was potentially a malleable term, applicable in the most restrictive way to a “Judaism” that really did reflect the majority heritage of Judah as against the more diminished tribes, and the pivotal ancestor was now Jacob (Israel), and then again now Abraham.

So we have Jesus who was a Jew, and Jesus who was a not-Jew, much as we have (by his own puzzling query) Jesus who was Son of David and not-Son-of-David.  Much of this latter observation is of little consequence to an analysis of Jesus’ ministry, just as trying to figure out the primordial creation-stories might also be of little consequence (or little profit.)  There is, however, no warrant for perfunctorily turning over and casting aside persisting questions about dualism (which of course involve far more than the discussion here.)  Endless publications address the issue of “Why God Permits Evil.”

We might also, in a more comprehensive vein, draw up lists of questions about Why God Permits Unsolvable Questions to Exist.  We have gotten to the end of the Introduction to John, and just such a question arises (particularly since we are considering the Patriarchs):

“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.”

It is the “at any time” part that lingers—one of the chief commonalities of the patriarchs and notables of ancient Israel is the phenomenon of (admittedly fleeting or partial or “typological”) glimpses of God.  Here in John the gap and the distinction between God and his Creation are emphasized, and we would do well to maintain a respectful distance.  I contend, however, that considerations such as those about “dualisms” and “the sovereignty of God” in the midst of this discussion are of great importance.

We do not understand dualisms in Creation because we were not witnesses of Creation, nor is it really the case that Genesis or the other scriptures describe the act of creation.  What falls to us in description since the creation of Adam is what falls away from an original state (or divinely-intended original state) that we can barely begin to imagine.  The idea that the original and ongoing creative acts of God can be understood as dualisms translatable into our understandings of science or even of everyday experiences must always be suspect—not least because none of that helps The Problem of Evil.  It is probably no surprise that I will put forth the idea that good and evil are not a duality—that instead they are both aspects of good, much as life and death are both aspects of life.

What I consider most important, however, is that a lively approach to such questions can help us remember just how frustratingly primordial must be any of our attempts to understand our plight.  Our origins as a collective people cannot be understood as a God-designed plan for humanity and its institutions that was thrown off-course by the Fall.  God designed Creation for Adam (and potentially others) to thrive in unfettered communion with God.  The whole “society” thing is a reparative process, not a pristine plan.  That much is made plain in Genesis, if we are willing to read it without presuppositions.

With the Gospel of John and the “No man hath seen God at any time” passage in mind, we must do better than simply believe that no man hath seen God (while struggling with Scripture passages that seem to say the opposite.)  “No man hath seen God” is an attitude of reverence, and it is not well-served by contentions about the character of God that cannot stand unsparing analysis.  Neither have we any warrant to draw up pictures of God that consist of characterizations of him setting us this or that institution when we have good reason to suspect that they were not his “original plan.”

This reverential attitude can also have great practical applications.  A certain sophomoric type of American political analysis harps on the idea (of value in itself) that government is at best a “necessary evil,” and both a conservative Christian view of man as depraved and a good Fourth-of-July dose of Israel being chastised for wanting a king can be drawn up in support.  The problem with this analysis is that it is often yoked to the idea that “the family” was God’s original plan, and that government intrusion (or fancied government intrusion) upon the family (read: patriarchal family) is to be avoided at all costs.  Of course, the history of anti-governmental “family-based” communities provide the conscientious observer no lack of examples of why both family and government are necessary, and are both often evil.

I will not pretend to be unaware, however, how conventional—and scripturally comfortable—analyses of my views will hold me in suspicion.  It makes my head swim, indeed, to read what I just wrote: Good and evil are not a duality—instead they are both aspects of good, much as life and death are both aspects of life.