Grappling with Evil in a Redeemed World

Early Christians regarded Jonah’s emergence from the sea monster as a foreshadowing of Jesus’s suffering, death, and resurrection. During his ministry, Jesus compared his impending death to “the sign of the prophet Jonah”: as Jonah was swallowed by the sea monster “for three days and three nights,” so too “for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth” (Matt 12:39-40). Prizing this image, Christians depicted Jesus as the new Jonah being swallowed by the monster but emerging alive; in Jonah’s words, Christ could declare that God “brought up my life from the Pit” (Jonah 2:6). Christ, the new Jonah, adorns the walls of Rome’s catacomb of Peter and Marcellinus and the extensive mosaic floors in Aquileia’s Basilica, both of which date to around the fourth century. Significantly, Christian artists were depicting the new Jonah in the same years that Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine were advancing their soteriologies of Christ as the Victim-Victor.

Although Christ himself achieved victory over evil and death, they remain realities confronted by his human brothers and sisters, whether those burying loved ones in catacombs some 1700 years ago or today. We are painfully aware that Satan still moves among us. In particular, the suffering undergone by civil rights activists in the United States sixty years ago and the continuing struggle against racism today confirm the persistent presence of the demonic.

In light of these experiences, which so starkly contrast with the Christian proclamation of “victory,” the question arises: if Christ has redeemed humankind from the devil, why are we still afflicted by evil, sin, and death? While considering the atrocious history of lynching in the United States, James Cone asks pointedly, “If God loves black people, why then do we suffer so much?” Although he responds, “No one knows the answer to that question,” he insists that Christian faith provides resources for analyzing, resisting, and overcoming the evil that continues in our midst.[1] Let us take up this vexing query by considering again pertinent texts by Augustine, Aulén, and Schwager. As we read each theologian, we will place them in conversation with Cone's prophetic words to apply and synthesize their various themes, considering the evil that continues to afflict the world in light of God’s response to it in Christ.

Hope Beyond Death in This World

In The Trinity, Augustine holds that Jesus Christ was delivered into the devil’s hands in the death of his humanity, but that was not the end of the story. Inaugurating a new and glorified humanity, he rose from the dead, thereby releasing us for spiritual freedom in this life and for the resurrection of our bodies in the next.

In this redemptive act the blood of Christ was given for us as a kind of price, and when the devil took it he was not enriched by it but caught and bound by it, so that we might be disentangled from his toils. No longer would he drag down with him to the doom of the second and everlasting death, rolled up in the nets of their sins, any of those whom Christ, free of every debt, had redeemed by shedding the blood he did not owe. But those who belong to the grace of Christ . . . would simply die as Christ himself had died for them, that is to say, with the death of the flesh alone and not of the spirit.[2]

The promise that physical death does not have the last word can be critical for sustaining strength to continue on in the face of evil. In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Cone chronicles the gut-wrenching history of lynchings in the United States, among the most horrifying of which is the story of Mary Turner (1885 – May 19, 1918). Unsuccessful in their manhunt for a Black plantation worker suspected of killing his abusive boss, a white mob in Georgia began lynching Black men at random, including Turner’s husband, Hayes. Eight months pregnant and now widowed, Turner publicly vowed to seek justice under the law for his killers. And so, the murderous mob turned against her, hanging her upside down by her ankles, soaking her in gasoline, and burning her alive. As this atrocity occurred, one of the men split her swollen belly with a knife, causing her child to fall onto the ground, where the crowd quickly stomped the infant to death.[3]

As Cone explains, after emancipation, southern whites used lynching to remind Black Americans of their subordinate social status and powerlessness.[4] Indeed, lynching is a kind of terrorism, intended to dehumanize and crush the spirit.[5] Amid this terrorized world where “fragments of meaning were hard to find,”[6] Black Americans turned to the Gospel’s message of liberation in a particularly dialectical imaginative key: “it is a transcendent reality which lifts our spirits to a world far removed from the suffering of this one. It is an eschatological vision” by which Black leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., drawing on their faith, “faced their deaths, sustained by the conviction that this was not the end but the beginning of a new life of meaning.”[7]

But Cone continues with an analogical corrective, saying:

The Christian gospel is more than a transcendent reality, more than “going to heaven when I die, to shout salvation as I fly”: It is also an immanent reality—a powerful liberating presence among the poor right now in their midst. . . . Without concrete signs of divine presence in the lives of the poor, the gospel becomes simply an opiate; rather than liberating the powerless from humiliation and suffering, the gospel becomes a drug that helps them adjust to this world by looking for “pie in the sky.”[8]

Cone masterfully applies Jesus's teaching that God’s reign is “not yet” and also “already.” The “not yet,” as Cone notes, promises that there is reason to hope in the face of unthinkable present atrocities. The “already” assures us that God has not abandoned us in those present atrocities, but dwells in the midst of the oppressed, strengthening the downtrodden as they demand justice:

The transcendent and the immanent, heaven and earth, must be held together in critical, dialectical tension, each one correcting the limits of the other. The gospel is in the world, but it is not of the world; that is, it can be seen in the black freedom movement, but it is much more than what we see in our struggles for justice.[9]

A Dialectical Defeat of Evil

In Christus Victor, we see this same “already” but “not yet” theme for Gustaf Aulén, who presents a dialectical view of the human condition since Jesus’s suffering, death, and resurrection. On the one hand, Christ has overcome Satan once and for all, thereby saving us and justifying us in his blood (Rom 5:9). On the other hand, during our earthly lives, we continue to struggle with the devil even though we are already saved; as Luther taught, we are simultaneously sinful and justified in Christ. Having overcome the sea monster once and for all, the living Christ now seeks to make God’s grace available to us so that we too may overcome the monster—evil, sin, and death—by means of our faith, hope, and love. Aulén writes: “Thus the power of evil is broken; . . . [Christ’s] redemptive work can go forward everywhere, through the Spirit who unites men [sic] with God and deifies them; and, in regard to death, Athanasius can say that the disciples of Christ no longer fear death, since death has no more dominion over them.”[10]

As we have seen, Cone, an ordained AME minister, shares Aulén’s Protestant, dialectical imagination. In his prophetic denunciation of white supremacy, Cone found a useful tool in Karl Barth’s theology with its dialectical emphasis on the Word of God coming from “outside” as an earth-shaking correction to human sin. However, he noted that Barth’s approach could easily remain at the level of “abstraction . . . separated from real crosses in our midst.”[11] Accordingly, he simultaneously drew on the theology of another bright Protestant light, Reinhold Niebuhr (d. 1971), whose methodological realism appealed to him: “When one begins with the facts of experience and not, as in Karl Barth’s theology, with God’s revelation, the conversation must confront the brutal realities of racial injustice.”[12]

As he drew on both of these figures, together with his own experience, Cone adopted an idea from Niebuhr that helps to make sense of Aulén’s (and ultimately Luther's) emphasis on our status as simul justus et peccator, as redeemed but still struggling: the “transvaluation of values.”[13] By this term, Cone means that God’s revelation turns human values and expectations upside down. God’s Word, Jesus, was born into a world that relegated him at birth to a barnyard feed trough, and he was ultimately executed by an empire that ran over him roughshod. But this life is revelatory, both of God and humanity. Jesus’s death, especially, forces us to choose between two value systems: one of victory through violent oppression, and the second of service to others at great personal cost. And, the Bible makes clear which system is God’s: Israel’s prophets like Amos (to much protest) denounced the value systems of exploitation; Jesus insisted that the Son of Man must suffer and die, provoking a stunning rebuke from Peter (who stood in need of being “transvalued”); Cone also points to Mary’s “Magnificat” (Luke 1:46-55) as a hymn of transvaluation, one that proclaims that the “Mighty One . . . has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”[14]

Why does evil still appear in a world redeemed by God? Because, as these dialectical theologians testify together, God has revealed and established God’s reign in a world that stubbornly clings to its own competing set of values. “This reversal of expectation and conventional values is the unmistakable theme of the gospel,” writes Cone, the gospel which Christ lived out with the ugly consequence of the cross.[15] And, Cone remarks, quoting Niebuhr, we too “might end there if we really emulated it.”[16]

Undoing Evil from Within

In Must There Be Scapegoats? Raymund Schwager contends that the evil that God overcomes, the sea monster into which the Savior entered and remerged victorious, was the human psyche, exorcized in its darkest recesses of its tendency to “fix” problems by collectively blaming an individual or group, the scapegoat. By becoming the once-and-for-all scapegoat, Christ exposed this sham for what it is: a lie, a cheap distraction that provides a false sense of unity, fixes no problems, and feeds the idol of violence with the victimization of innocents. Hence, Schwager contends, Christ has redeemed us from ourselves, from our twisted impulse to project onto God our desire to feed innocents to the idol of false sacrifice. Unfortunately, often not grasping Christ’s saving act within the human psyche, Christians wrongly remain like deluded “peoples who experienced their projections as real and worshiped them as sacred powers and at the same time feared them.”[17]

Although Cone does not mention Girard and uses the term scapegoat only sparingly in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, he tells the heroic story of Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley, formerly Till-Bradley (November 23, 1921 – January 6, 2003), who likewise enters into the midst of tragedy to undo evil social structures from within. Her story puts a sharper point on the challenge issued by Girardian scholars like Schwager.[18]

In August of 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett “Bo” Till reportedly whistled at a white woman who took his payment at a Mississippi grocery store; a Chicagoan unfamiliar with Jim Crow etiquette, Till may have also “put his two cents directly into Mrs. Bryant’s hand” rather than on the counter, “in the process touching her pale white skin.”[19] Days later, the boy from Chicago was apprehended in the middle of the night, brutally tortured and beaten to an unrecognizable state, shot, and then thrown into the Tallahatchie River. The recurring terrorism of lynching had surfaced violently once again, aimed at putting Black Americans “in their place” and reminding them of white supremacist power.

The response of Emmett’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley (age 34), was transformative. Stricken by the worst grief a parent can imagine, she protested to God like Job, “Why are You so cruel that you would let this happen?” And, in a strange and revelatory experience, she received a response, a voice which she heard say, “You should be grateful to be the mother of a boy who died blameless like Christ. Bo Till will never be forgotten. There is a job for you to do now.”[20]

And so, upon receiving the battered, mangled body of her son back in Chicago, Mamie Till-Mobley took a remarkable action: she ordered the sealed casket to be opened for a three-day-long exposition so “everybody can see what they did to my boy.” In taking this painful step, she underlined the connection of her son to Christ: “Lord you gave your son to remedy a condition, but who knows, but what the death of my only son might bring an end to lynching.”[21] And her actions struck a deep nerve. Cone observes, “If lynching was intended to instill silence and passivity, this event had the opposite effect, inspiring blacks to rise in defiance, to cast off centuries of paralyzing fear.”[22] Till's mangled corpse, meant to intimidate Black Americans into submission, was instead exposed in photographs that were published around the world, viewed by millions.[23] Mamie Till-Mobley dragged the ugliness of lynching into the daylight, turning its destructive horror back onto itself and undermining its effectiveness by uncovering it. Three months after Till’s lynching, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

In sum, Augustine, Aulén, and Schwager offer three distinct strategies for grappling with the evil, sin, and death that continue to exist after Christ’s own suffering, death, and resurrection. According to Augustine, Christ has removed Satan’s worst power, the power to destroy our souls, our moral character, but has not yet removed Satan’s power over our physical death. According to Aulén, Christ has already defeated Satan and provided us with faith, hope, and love that will ultimately give us life in the battles with the world’s demons that we continue to face; suffering can result from living God’s reign in a world in need of transvaluation, a world which is simul justus et peccator. Finally, according to Schwager, Christ has exposed the monster within us and has commenced exorcizing the collective human psyche—a process that, it seems, has a ways to go. In particularly heroic cases, like that of Mamie Till-Mobley, that monster can be turned against itself. In the Spirit, the Savior calls us too as individuals and communities to assist in Christ’s work of “unmasking” and defusing the scapegoat mechanism in human affairs.

So why is evil still present today? On the one hand, as Cone says, no one can answer that question. On the other hand, even in the face of evil’s confounding meaninglessness, the model of Christ as the Victim-Victor provides us with resources for analyzing God’s response to evil in the person and work of Jesus, for resisting that evil now, and for maintaining hope and trust that God’s final overcoming of demonic forces is on the horizon. In the meantime, as Cone reminds us, we can find God among the oppressed and marginalized people of our day: there is “no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.”[24]

The cross is an unlikely victory, a provisional defeat in which evil—whether understood as the devil, as scapegoating, or the white supremacist terrorism of lynching—oversteps its bounds and collapses under its own weight. This general rationale, which incorporates both analogical and dialectical emphases and has act-centered and person-centered varieties, serves as just one model according to which Christians have sought to explain and live out the saving message of Jesus’s cross. Paul acknowledges that the Savior’s victory over evil, sin, and death has not yet borne full fruit in creation and history:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. . . . For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God . . . For in hope we were saved (Rom 8:18, 20, 24).