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The Lord be with you. Let us pray. God of all seasons, in your pattern of things there is a time for keeping and a time for losing, a time for building up and a time for pulling down. As we journey with our Lord to the cross, help us to discern in our own lives

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what we must lay down and what we must take up, what we must end and what we must begin. Give us grace to lead a disciplined life in glad obedience and with the joy which comes from a closer walk with Christ. Amen. Welcome, good afternoon.

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Good to see all of you. Ready for a second of our Curry lectures with Dr. Carol Newsome. If you were here this morning, I think you heard a really stimulating reframing of a number of ideas.

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And I have to say, it's making me rethink some categories, because when you think about categories, it forces you to rethink where you come down in ethics and is very helpful. I know this afternoon will be informative and interesting and stimulating as well. After we finish in here with the lecture, we'll be going across to Stott Hall for conversation with all three of our lecturers, and I hope you'll be a part of that conversation, thinking up questions and ideas to pose, and I know that we'll have some really interesting answers as well. Dr.

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Newsom, it is a pleasure to welcome you again to this podium. Thank you for being with us. By this time in the afternoon, you may be thinking, where are the amphetamine pills? Well, I decided if I was going to have to talk to you after lunch, I might as well talk about evil, since that's one of the things that will usually keep people awake.

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So how do we imagine moral evil? That capacity of human beings that leads us to prey upon one another, to treat one another as things rather than as persons. What do we want to know about evil? Do we want to know why it exists?

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How it came to be? Whether it's part of God's creation? Or do we want to know how evil operates? How to cope with it?

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How to resist it? How do we think of good and evil in relationship to one another? What metaphors would we use to describe evil? What are the classic stories about moral evil, and how do they portray its presence in the world?

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Now, I suppose I shouldn't have been, but I was surprised when I realized that the Bible doesn't have just a single way of imagining moral evil. The more I poked around, the more ways of envisioning evil there seemed to be. Now, in contrast to the debate between Job and his friends, these different ways of imagining moral evil aren't set over against one another directly. They're scattered over the different books and types of literature in the Bible.

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But if you do put them together, you realize how different they are. And not just different, but in many ways, incompatible. Now, it may be that these different ways of imagining moral evil arose at different times or within different segments of Israelite and early Christian communities. But ultimately, they all ended up in the Bible that we consider scripture.

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So it's certainly an issue of biblical theology to reflect on them. And anyway, we ourselves tend to carry around with us a variety of different and even incompatible ways of thinking about things. Sometimes it may depend on what aspect of a complex phenomenon we're trying to grapple with. I always think of that story of the five blind Indian sages who are trying to describe the elephant.

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The one that has hold of the tail says, it's like a rope. The one that's over at the leg says, no, it's like the trunk of a tree or a wall. Well, partly it does have to do with where we're situated. but it may also have to do with what we're trying to do or to deal with.

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So the question that guides me is, in what ways or contexts might this or that way of envisioning evil be particularly powerful or particularly dangerous? How would it direct us to endure, resist, transform, or transcend evil? Now, there are three ways of imagining evil that I want to examine today. First, wisdom's way of conceptualizing evil, represented in some of the speeches of Job's friends, some of the Book of Proverbs, some of the Psalms.

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Second, the apocalyptic tradition's way of imagining evil. And finally, the way in which which moral evil is depicted in the creation story of Genesis 2-3. Let's start with a wisdom tradition.

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In the book of Job, in the middle part of the dialogue, the friends each devote one entire speech to describing the fate of the wicked, chapters 15, 18, and 20. Now, it's often been thought that they're simply trying to indict Job by talking about the fate of the wicked, and if the shoe fits, Job, But I don't think that's really what they're about. Job has shocked them by suggesting that the world has no moral order, but is run by an arguably deranged God.

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To the contrary, the Friends believe that there is a moral order that undergirds the world, and these poems about how the wicked come to a bad end are the primary way in which they try to affirm this moral order. Now, I always have a hard time teaching this material to my students. When I ask them, is what the friends say true, they just laugh. Of course not, they say, and they reel off the names of their favorite evildoers who are living quite well.

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And when I suggest that we might take what the friends say as a profound claim about the world, they look at me pityingly, sure that I am showing early signs of senility. But I don't give up. Because I do think that what the Friends are saying is a deeply profound claim about the world. I don't know if I agree with them, but I think it's something we have to take seriously.

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Now, to grasp what the Friends are saying, we need to recognize the genre they use. They are employing something like an anecdote, a story that doesn't claim to be what happens in every case, but a story that captures the essence of a situation. Now, many of you remember what a master of the anecdote President Ronald Reagan was. It didn't seem to matter if the anecdotes that he told turned out not to be factually accurate.

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For much of his audience, his anecdotes crystallized the underlying truth of a situation for them. So that, I think, is the sort of speech act that the Fate of the Wicked poem is. It encapsulates in a vivid account what the wisdom tradition sees as a fundamental truth about the nature of evil. But exactly how does it image moral evil?

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What claim does it make? Listen to a few lines from Bildad's description of the evil person. Indeed, the light of the wicked goes out, the flame of his fire does not shine.

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The light in his tent grows dark, and his lamp goes out over him. These are fascinating images. Light is clearly not used literally here. We aren't talking about the need to run to the hardware store for more light bulbs.

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Light is a metaphor, as it often is elsewhere in the Bible, for life and vitality. So when Bildad looks at the wicked, he sees an ever-diminishing vitality. But what is most striking are the verbs.

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No one is said to extinguish the light of the wicked. The light just goes out. The flame doesn't shine. The light grows dark.

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Now, if you play out the logic of the image, you know that fires only burn if they have fuel. Without it, they just go out by themselves. So what he is saying is, yes, the wicked exist, they are a presence, but the important truth about them is that they are a self-limiting presence. They can't sustain themselves.

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They self-destruct. The second cluster of images describes the movement of the wicked, or rather, the way their movement is rested. His strong steps are shortened. The wicked has trouble walking because the world is baited with traps and snares, which they can't see.

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He is led by his feet into a net. He walks into a pitfall. A trap seizes him by the heel. A snare lays hold of him, a rope, a trap.

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It's as though the environment itself turns hostile toward the wicked. And yet, those traps turn out to be his very own schemes. Evil, as the wisdom tradition imagines it, has an ironic structure. It sets out to harm others, but eventually what it destroys is itself.

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Bildad describes how the wicked, even in life, rots from within, as something consumes the tendons under his skin. And he uses the image of a plant withering. His roots below dry up, above his branches wither. Zophar adds some images of his own in chapter 20.

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He admits that evil can seem extremely powerful. Indeed, it can be very powerful, but it can't last because it can't sustain itself. Though the wicked grow as high as the sky, his head reaching the clouds, he perishes forever like his own dung. Those who saw him will say, 'Where is he?' He flies away like a dream and cannot be found.

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The most striking of so far's image. The riches, however, have to do with the wicked attempting to nourish themselves, to grow. He uses the metaphor of someone trying to eat, but the food either turns to poison or they vomit it out. Though evil is sweet to his taste and he conceals it under his tongue, though he savors it, does not let it go, holds it inside his mouth, his food in his vowels turns to snake venom within him.

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The riches he swallows, he vomits. God empties it out of his stomach. However much the wicked consume, and they do consume, they cannot nourish themselves. The wicked cannot live, but eventually dies.

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Now, that's a provocative way of looking at moral evil. It's there, it's cruel, it's destructive. Zophar describes the evil person as crushing and torturing the poor. Neither Bildad nor Zophar are denying that evil exists in the world.

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But what they perceive and try to make vivid in their metaphors is the secret truth they perceive about evil. It's an ironic truth. Evil cannot root itself in reality. It can't draw sustenance from the world.

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And so it finally uses itself up and self-destructs. Evil is the ultimate self-consuming artifact. Now, the wisdom tradition for which Bildan and Zophar are spokespersons perceives good and evil to have fundamentally different relations to reality. Goodness has a resilient, enduring quality because goodness participates in the structures of God's creation, a creation which is itself good and which supports the flourishing of God's creatures.

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But evil, no matter how powerful and vital it may appear, is actually fragile. and subject to sudden disintegration because it's not grounded and rooted in creation. That's what the psalmist says in Psalm 1, describing the righteous as like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. But the wicked are like the chaff which the wind drives away.

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Now, the theologians would put this in non-metaphorical language. Good and evil are ontologically different. Their very being is different. But the images of Bildad and Zophar add something that Psalm 1 doesn't address, the way reality itself seems to resist and refuse evil, how it turns evil back on itself.

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And again, the best way to describe that is by a metaphor, but one that wasn't available to ancient Israel. Evil is like germs that infect the world. It's dangerous. It causes illness.

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But goodness is the world's immune system. It allows the body to resist and repel the illness until the germs are gone. And that is a provocative way of thinking about evil. I also want you to notice Wisdom's way of framing evil.

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Remember, framing not only directs our focus, but excludes other things from view. Wisdom's moral imagination seems completely uninterested in why there is evil at all. There's no story about the origin of evil. And although individual wicked people may perish, there's no imagining of an eschatological future in which evil will be no more.

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Yet, as we'll see, those concerns about the origins and end of evil are issues that are at the very heart of other ways of envisioning evil. For the wisdom tradition, evil is just a fact of life. The wicked you will have with you always. The concern that seems to drive the wisdom tradition's reflections seems to be more about how to live confidently and resiliently despite the presence of evil in the world.

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Now, if I buttonholes an Israelite sage and said, but I really want to know what makes some people good and other people evil, That sage could probably give me an answer, although at first it might seem a perplexing one. The sage might turn to Proverbs 29:7, The righteous understands the rights of the poor. The wicked can't perceive it.

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Gee, thanks. But I think he would be pointing me to is the conviction that those who truly see the structures of God's creation understand right and wrong. understand the difference between nurturing life and acting in destructive and self-destructive ways. What makes the wicked not only wicked, but dangerous, is that they just don't get it.

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They live in a world of illusion, and so, failing to see the connectedness of things, they act in ways that are not only damaging to others, but ultimately to themselves. Now, how might we evaluate this way of imagining, envisioning evil. When I teach this material, my students are usually still skeptical at this point.

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But then I pull out that ace in the hole, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. When asked how he found the strength to oppose what look like such a strong system of evil in South Africa. He said, Well, I had to believe that the universe is finally a moral universe, that no evil can last, and that good will prevail.

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That, I think, is one version of this perspective of the wisdom tradition, that good and evil are ontologically different, that even powerful-looking evil can suddenly collapse because it's not grounded in the goodness of God's creation. And that perspective can sustain people who struggle against what look like overwhelming odds. It's a faith for those who have to resist evil in the long run. Dean Gillespie's sermon the other night talked about the fragility of Ceausescu's regime, and I think that's another example of what the wisdom tradition sees.

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But where I do think that the wisdom tradition falls short is in facing up to the terrible damage that evil does before it burns itself out. And I think it fails to deal with evil's own resiliency. Why does it take so long for it to crumble?

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And why does it seem to come back like crabgrass? And often it doesn't notice that frequently crime does pay, a point that Job is happy to point out when he responds to Zophar. So I think that the wisdom tradition's perspective is powerful, but it's flawed by its framing, by what it chooses not to see, and by a certain oversimplification of reality. Moreover, although I recognize that it can provide the strength for persons to resist evil, it could also be used as a justification for passivity in the face of evil.

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Well, it's going to self-destruct anyway, so we can just wait for it to happen. It could be used as a justification for remaining a Jehovah's bystander instead of a resistor, by my borrowing Gillespie's phrase. Now, these are my questions as I try to draw the wisdom perspective into dialogue. But in the Bible, the wisdom tradition doesn't spend much of its time talking about evil.

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Despite the vivid poems by Bildad and Sophar, the wisdom tradition in general is more fascinated by good than by evil. If I pressed that Israelite sage, it's likely he would say, well, if you want less evil in the world, what's important is building up goodness. And one does that by educating young people so that they really understand that doing good builds up the community and doing evil tears it down. so that they see beneath the attractive illusions of evil and root themselves in what sustains life.

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After all, that's what the book of Proverbs devotes itself to. It's a book of moral formation based on the conviction that to know the good, truly to perceive the good, is to do the good. Well, the wisdom tradition, very appealing in many respects, but also with some limitations. Now, a strikingly different way of imagining evil occurs in the apocalyptic traditions that became so influential in Judaism from about the 3rd century BC, and which had a profound impact on the development of early Christian theology.

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One of the most striking differences is in the framing of the issue. Whereas the wisdom tradition seemed quite uninterested in questions about the origin and end of evil, these are precisely the questions that stimulate the imagination of the apocalyptic writers. Why is there evil in the world? How did it get here?

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How and when will God put an end to it? Wisdom would be puzzled. A beginning to evil? How odd.

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Evil happens whenever people do not perceive the structures of creation properly. An end? Well, it'd happen only if everyone became wise, and that's not likely. But it's not just the framing that's different.

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The modes of imagination are different, too. In the wisdom tradition, the favorite modes are the image and the metaphor. But as you might expect, with apocalyptic's interest in beginnings and endings, its favorite mode of imagination will be narrative. It wants to tell the story of evil.

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But it also has a central figure or poetic trope that guides the plot of apocalyptic narrative. In contrast to the wisdom perspective, in which good and evil are ontologically different, in apocalyptic, good and evil are more or less mirror images of one another. They're opposites set over against one another. And so you get the figure of dualism.

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Now, in contrast to the wisdom tradition that tends to depersonalize evil, Even the wicked person of the poems is a kind of generic figure, and the evil is described in non-personal metaphors of plants, lamps, and so forth. Apocalyptic personalizes evil. Maybe it's because apocalyptic likes to think in narrative, and you need characters for that.

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But evil tends to get embodied in a concrete figure, a fallen angel, Satan, the devil, an evil spirit. And good may be similarly embodied. God, the angels of God, a righteous hero, a messiah. And once you've got these kinds of characters, then the way of imagining the relationship of good and evil is that of struggle, a battle, the war of the children of light versus the children of darkness.

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That's all very cosmic if we're talking about the battle of Satan and the angels. What about people? How do we get caught up in this story? Well, there's several possible roles for people.

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We may be victims of evil, we may be complicit with evil, we may be saved by the good, we may fight on the side of good. But somehow we're always invited to see ourselves as caught up in a cosmic story in which the main protagonists are considerably larger than ourselves. And that's a very different way of thinking than what you see in the wisdom tradition. Now, I've given you this very generic vision of the moral imagination of apocalyptic.

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Each of the apocalyptic books tends to flesh out the story somewhat differently. In Daniel, in the Old Testament, in the background of the Gospels in Paul, and most vividly in the Book of Revelation. But none of these writings focus much on the story of the origin of evil. For that story, we have to look at some of the books that didn't become canonical, but that were very influential among Jews and Christians in antiquity.

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When the apocalyptic writers began to speculate on the origins of evil, naturally they turned to the stories about the beginning of the world to be found in Genesis. But it wasn't, at least not initially, the story of Adam and Eve that fascinated them. Rather, it was that strange story told in Genesis 6 just before the flood narrative. The story about the sons of God and human women.

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If you don't remember it, here's how it goes. When people began to multiply on the face of the ground and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were very fair. They took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh.

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Their days shall be 120 years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterwards, when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown. Now in Genesis, nothing connects this story of divine human intermarriage with the emergence of evil.

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You could just as easily read it as a story of nostalgia. They don't make them like they used to. Nothing connects this story with the origin of evil except the fact that it's the last thing that's said before the story of the flood. But that was enough for the author of the book we know as First Enoch.

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Now, if we're talking about central and peripheral things, I would still like to make a case for the canonical importance of 1 Enoch, but I think that battle has been lost long ago. But Enoch elaborates this account to give a fully imagined story of the origin of evil, how it leads to the brokenness of the world, and how God will finally heal the world and expel evil. As in Genesis 6, the account in 1 Enoch opens with the angels, the sons of God, seeing and desiring human wives.

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And as in Genesis, the offspring of the angels and the human women were giants. Only in this account, the giants have enormous appetites, and so not only eat up the people's food, but also the people themselves, and birds, and animals, and reptiles, and fish. In other words, everything God creates in Genesis 1. And the earth itself cries out to heaven against this evil.

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Now at this point, humans appear to be only victims. Moral evil is something external. But that's not the whole story. In addition to having sex with the women, the angels also taught human beings.

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They taught women how to do magic spells and incantations and how to use cosmetics. And they taught men how to do metalwork and to make weapons along with astrology and the arts of deception. Now I think that the author of Enoch sees the destructiveness of evil in its power to undermine human social structures. Cosmetics seems to point to the misuse of sexuality in ways that undermine family structures.

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Magic and astrology and the arts of deception undermine the basic trust and consensual structures that bind persons and communities together in mutuality. And weapons, of course, represent the destructiveness of force and violence. At any rate, now humans themselves become culpable and use this knowledge to do evil. This is a fascinating and ambivalent portrait of human moral evil.

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Evil doesn't spring from our original or true selves, but instead it's part of a great seduction, both sexual and cultural. Talk about guilty knowledge. Humans do use what they learn and so plunge into corruption and violence and deception. They devastate the earth even as they are being

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victimized by their own children, the giants. There is something poignant about this view of how evil emerges and what its consequences are. The sinned against become the sinners. I can't help but think of the cycle of violence in which the abused becomes the abuser.

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The author of First Enoch knew something about the pathos of evil. as well as the devastating consequences that expand from it. Now the story about evil that Enoch tells continues with the flood. The world is so corrupted that the only way to cleanse it of evil is to uncreate it and begin again.

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And as in the Bible, Noah and his family become the seed of a new creation. But why and how, after the world has been cleansed, would evil emerge again? Here, the apocalyptic tradition is drawn to answer the question the wisdom tradition did not. Why does evil persist?

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What makes it so hard to eliminate? Well, the author of First Enoch described it this way in mythic terms. The flood was able to kill the destructive giants, but only their bodies. Because they were the offspring of angels, the flood couldn't destroy their spirits, and so they remain at large, causing mischief.

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Not only do they continue to attack people, but they will also start the cycle of moral corruption all over again. Though God assures Enoch that a remnant, the plant of righteousness, will always remain. It's as though apocalyptic tries to tell a story of the emergence of defeat of evil, and yet can't find closure. Somehow, evil slips out and gets on the loose again.

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In fact, when apocalypses tell the history of the world, which they're quite fond of doing, history has this same repetitious structure. Evil becomes great, and is defeated, and good flourishes. But evil rises again, and so forth. Yes, it is rather like The Lord of the Rings, because much of our popular imagination about good and evil still takes its cues from the apocalyptic imagination.

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But as in The Lord of the Rings, For apocalyptic, there has to be an ultimate defeat of evil, after which it cannot ever rise again. I think that apocalyptic captures, in a way that the wisdom tradition does not, our sense of weariness with evil, the sense of being ground down by it, and our desire for a decisive defeat of all that is destructive in the world. And as you know from reading the Book of Revelation,

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The way the apocalyptic imagination envisages the end of evil is rather terrifying in itself. Apocalyptic not only has a narrative imagination, it has the imagination of a thriller, which is one of the few things that Left Behind gets right. Evil, which keeps coming back, begins to grow unimaginably strong. It threatens the very structures of the cosmos.

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It does tremendous damage to the earth, but at just that moment, the forces of good are unleashed, and the drama of good and evil comes to a violent and bloody conclusion. And the world is either restored to the way it was before the eruption of evil, or there is a merging of heaven and earth in a new creation, the new Jerusalem, the heavenly Jerusalem descending from heaven. Once that has happened, the story's at an end. In fact, you could not imagine a sequel because everything that gives rise to conflict has been done away with.

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The end. Now, I don't know about you. I find myself ambivalent about this way of imagining good and evil. Several things really appeal to me.

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For one thing, it grapples with the ambivalence of the relation of humans to evil. It affirms our original goodness and innocence, but also our willing complicity with evil. Evil is simultaneously outside of us and inside of us.

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It sees the consequences of evil not so much in terms of the individual self, but in the way individual actions serve to destroy the social fabric of community. And some of the most vivid images of the destructiveness of evil are ecological destruction. This is a strong view of evil. that addresses some of what the wisdom tradition does not.

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Indeed, it doesn't limit the reality of evil to the actions of human beings. Evil remains a force in the cosmos that transcends humans. Now, that may sound just too weird, too mythological for your theological tastes. And I myself can't appropriate the apocalyptic imagination in a literal fashion.

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but I think in its concrete narrative terms leads apocalyptic to something important. Now, I found it most convincingly analyzed in the writings of theologian Walter Wink. What apocalyptic directs us to is the systemic nature of evil that goes beyond individual human choices. We know the ways in which an

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institution, for instance a corporation, has a reality that is more than the sum of the people who work in it. The corporate culture that grows up within it has a reality and a power that is undeniable, and it may be either a force for good or a corrupting force. The evil in Enron was not just the bad deeds of a few bad people. It was more the way the ethos of that corpus culture lost track of right and wrong and seduced otherwise good people who became complicit in its evil.

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And nations, too, may be held in the grip of ideologies that take on a life of their own and lead people to do what otherwise they would not have done. Wink rightly says that in these transpersonal realities, we do recognize something very similar to what the apocalyptic imagination calls powers and principalities. And it's this life of its own quality of transpersonal evil and its ability to recruit persons into its life that I think the apocalyptic imagination captures well. As powerful

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as the apocalyptic imagination of good and evil may be, there are some things that trouble me. Its strongly narrative imagination and its plot of good versus evil can lead to a radical oversimplification of reality. Its sense of the pathos of evil can get lost in a rigid dualism in which the world can be divided up into good people and evil people. What are in fact complex political, social, cultural conflicts can be unhelpfully recast in terms of a schematic apocalyptic plot.

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Apocalyptic is sometimes described as crisis theology, not because it emerges out of a crisis, but because it tends to cast everything in terms of a crisis. Apocalyptic is strong on moral clarity. but it's weak on moral complexity. Thus, I think many of us were ambivalent about the invocation of categories from the apocalyptic imagination to shape perceptions about the United States and how it should respond to the threat of terrorism and the regime of Saddam Hussein, as Don Richter pointed out this morning.

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The imagery of apocalyptic answers well to the sense of outrage at horrible acts of violence and cruelty. But every particular moral imagination, as it focuses on one thing, excludes something else from view. Every particular way of telling the story excludes another way of understanding what's relevant and what's significant. And in telling the story of terrorism simply as the struggle of evil versus good, tends to render irrelevant the more complex stories of economic underdevelopment, political backwardness,

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and in general, the difficulty of traditionalist societies in coming to grips with modernity without losing their sense of identity. We pay a price for seeing only in apocalyptic terms. My final reservation about apocalyptic moral imagination is similar. Because it sees good and evil as mirror images, opposites engaged in a struggle,

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there can sometimes be a rather unconscious slippage that takes place. Oddly, while violence is one of the first manifestations of evil, the struggle against evil, in the struggle against evil, good becomes similarly violent and destructive. Now, one might portray this tragically, that good unwillingly has to engage in violence to resist evil. But in the actual apocalypses,

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There's none of that subtle shading. There is instead a pure delight in paying back the wicked in their own Cohen. And while I can understand that reaction on the emotional level, I'm morally afraid of it. Is it, in an ironic sense, the final triumph of evil over good?

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Here I think the wisdom tradition would shake its head in disapproval. It would see the apocalyptic way of thinking to be the result of misunderstanding the nature of good and evil. They're not mirror opposites, they're qualitatively different. How does one effectively resist evil?

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Not by becoming like it. Instead, take away its fuel, contain it, isolate it, and at the same time build up the good where you are able. Evil will diminish, good will grow, not through violence, but through containment and the patient pressure of good.

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Now, I don't know about you, but I'm not sure I could completely sign on to one or another of these perspectives. They've both got strengths and weaknesses. As different as they are, however, they have one thing in common. They're both attempts at total explanation, and that may be part of what I resist.

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They may attempt to explain too much with a single perspective. So I want to add one last way of imagining good and evil that I think complements these. It begins with the story of Eve and Adam in Genesis 2-3, and it shapes much of the rest of the Hebrew Bible.

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Now, the early Christian thinkers, beginning with Paul, were so much indebted to the apocalyptic worldview that they tended to read Genesis 2-3 as though it, too, were an apocalyptic story. In their reading, the talking snake, who is actually something of a trickster figure like Coyote, the talking snake is Satan, and the story is again about the seduction of humans by evil and its cosmic consequences. That's an important reading, and one that remains a significant part of Christian tradition, but it's not the story as it was originally written, and I don't want to lose the wisdom of the original. We're accustomed to thinking of this as the story of the fall, which it is, but various scholars have argued that it might just as well be called the story of the birth.

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Genesis 2 to 3 is a creation story, a mythic account that attempts to explain how the world came to be the way it is. In particular, it's concerned with how human beings came to be the way we are and the consequences of that. And we're going to talk about Genesis 2 to 3 more in the third lecture, so I won't dwell on the details here. But the crucial event is the woman's and the man's eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

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When they do, they become in some sense like God or like the gods. What does it signify? Well, the ability to know what is good and what is bad or evil is the essence of what it means to be a moral being. Animals aren't moral beings.

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They don't choose good or choose evil. They just act as their instincts guide them. They're neither moral nor immoral. That's what Clifford Geertz meant when he called them complete.

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And on the other end of the spectrum, God, having God-like understanding, is the ultimate moral being who will choose rightly. But what about human beings, who now have a kind of nature that is somewhat between the animals and that of God, in having acquired the God-like capacity to choose between good and evil, but that we were not originally created to possess. Now, the problem is, as we might put it today using a computer analogy, we are running divine software with an animal operating system.

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Given that, problems are bound to occur. Some of our choices will be good ones and build up the world. Some of them will be bad ones and have disastrous consequences. But there you have it, the origin of good and evil in the world.

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Now, compared with the wisdom tradition's reflections and those of the apocalyptic writers, this seems like an awfully mundane explanation. We're human beings with limited capacities who have the power to make our own decisions. But I think that explains A lot. On the one hand, it's the premise of a lot of comedies.

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Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it's also the precondition for disaster. DDT seemed like a good idea at the time. But perhaps the most profound insight into the relation between our human condition and evil in the world is what is not specified in the phrase, knowing good and evil. Good for whom?

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Evil for whom? What's the point of reference? Good for me alone, good for my family, good for my nation, good for the world. As limited human beings, we often can see only so far in our calculus of good and bad.

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And so we choose narrowly, setting up a fearful competition with others who also choose in their own self-interest. Much evil in the world comes from this narrow calculus of good. Are lower prices good? Yes.

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But what of the misery of the sweatshops in which those cheap goods are produced? Are higher crop yields good? Yes. But what of the destruction of the topsoil and the degradation of the watershed?

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Now, this story may not be a grand cosmic explanation, but I think it may be the most insightful of all three in the attempts to imagine good and evil. For one thing, it's a very nuanced view, and it can deal with complexity. In fact, the story itself presents a very complex view as to the consequences of our becoming moral beings. It does disrupt the world as God had initially envisioned it.

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It gets us thrown out of the garden. But the garden, though lovely, was essentially a womb. We were not fully human there, only infants. Only outside the garden can we become moral beings, not just choosing good and evil.

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but taking responsibility for those choices. And we become beings capable of entering into a much more complex and richer relationship with God. Now, at first, to be sure, the story goes only from bad to worse, until by Genesis 6, the earth is corrupted by human violence and the flood comes. But in the new beginning

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after the flood, God does one thing differently. God gives laws to human beings. The insight of the writers of Genesis was to recognize that we can't choose wisely and well without guidance. We need the law to guide us.

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And so I would see the culmination of Genesis 2 to 3, the story of the birth of humans as moral beings, as actually coming at Sinai, with the entry into the covenant and the giving of the law. The covenant and its law pay homage to the dignity and responsibility of being moral beings. It provides a framework within which we school our choices so that we build up rather than tear down. And it makes us covenant partners with God.

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But still, we must choose over and over. In Deuteronomy, Moses exhorts the people with these words. I call heaven and earth to witness against you to this day that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.

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The story to which this moral imagination gives rise is not the thriller one finds in the apocalyptic imagination. Rather, the story funded by the moral imagination of Genesis is more like the character-based novel in which characters live out the consequences of their choices. And so in Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, the biblical author tells the story of the people's attempt to live in fidelity to the covenant and its laws.

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It has its ups and its downs, though it seems to end rather badly, the people having been unable to sustain their moral responsibility. But when the two prophets of the exile, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, attempt to understand the failure and envisioned a future, their moral imaginations both light on similar images. The image they use is the heart of the people. Jeremiah and Ezekiel see the failure of the people as located in a defect of the heart, a defect of the mind.

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Even with the gift of the law, they were unable to choose rightly, were too flawed, our understanding too inadequate without further divine assistance. But Ezekiel describes God as promising a new gift, a new heart I will give you, a new spirit I'll put within you. I'll remove from your body the heart of stone and give you the heart of flesh.

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I'll put my spirit within you and cause you to follow my statutes. The moral imagination embodied in Genesis 2 to 3 that sees our humanity fundamentally in the difficult process of seeing and choosing between good and evil.