Matthew Henry John Bartlett

Aaron and I went to the From Plato to Nato seminar at Vic taken by Dr Peter Vardy discussing the Problem of Evil, with a particular focus on assisting RE teachers. It was rather worthwhile.

Dr Vardy is a brilliant and affecting orator. At one point he had us imagine standing above the lime pits looking down at the bodies of Jewish children and adults, at the point where philosophy, theory, rationality end, with Ivan Karamazov on our left, and Job on our right. With Ivan, we can choose to reject this God who allows tiny children to suffer miserably (what greater good could possibly justify that evil?), turn and do as we please, or we can with Job be silent, fearing, uncomprehending, take the step of faith and trust Him anyway.

Dr Vardy had us think quietly to ourselves for two minutes and ponder: “Imagine for the sake of argument there is an afterlife, and a judgment, and you are called to account for your life, and you fail the test (whatever the test is). What is it you have done or not done, do you think, that was the key failure?” He suggested we likely answered that question for ourselves with things like incidents of adultery, fornication, lust, theft, etc. He proposed that there was a larger category of evil we’d likely missed, but which is a key part of much of the misery of the world. This category he labeled institutional or structural evil. The kind of evil that let ordinary German citizens, churchgoers even, participate in a society which murdered as many people as it did. That kind of systemic evil, the evil of going along with the crowd is perhaps the hardest to fight.

I am excited by the idea of ordinary young people in New Zealand schools lifting their heads for a moment from the interminable soap opera of teenage life and facing some of the big questions of what it means to be human.