In his 1665 book of Maxims, the French writer and moralist Francois La Rochefoucauld noted, “Men’s nature are like most houses—many sided; some aspects are pleasant and some not.” So it is with human relations. No other species is capable of more brutal aggression against its own members, or of more compassionate giving of help. What other animals can feel such bitter prejudice toward another, or such profound love?... Laboratory experiments enable us to isolate some of the important features of social situations. By compressing social forces into a brief time period, we can see how these forces affect people. A number of such experiments have put well-intentioned people in an evil situation to see whether good or evil prevails. To a dismaying extent, evil pressures overwhelm good intentions, inducing people to conform to falsehoods or capitulate to cruelty. Nice guys often don’t finish nice… These social-psychological examples of collective evil parallel biblical teachings about evil. Evil’s external sources are represented in the story of the Fall as Eve is seduced by an external demonic force. The social character of sin is further evident in the corporate personality of Israel, in which whole families and whole cities are sometimes condemned for their wickedness…Precisely because sin has a collective aspect, we must also make a collective response to it…It is the whole believing people, not isolated believers, that is the body of Christ. To say that the church is Christ’s body reminds us that together we can admonish one another. Together we can enable each other to minister. And together we can contest evil in ways that we as individuals never could, by challenging and reforming not only the individual rotten apples, but also the social systems and situations that can make the barrel go bad. To repeat, evil is collective as well as personal and so requires a collective as well as a personal response. David Myers & Malcolm Jeeves in Psychology Through the Eyes of Faith, © 1987 by Christian College Coalition New York, HarperCollins
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 15:42:56 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015