"The World"

 

I'm reading Franciscan Richard Rohr's short book about evil, The World, The Flesh, and The Devil (2021), and benefitting from many of its insights.

(Starting this blog, I wanted to cite the verse where those "enemies of our souls" are enumerated...and was quite surprised to find there is none.  That specific formulation seems to have originated with the writings of Peter Abelard (d. 1142) and Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), and was established in English-language usage by its appearance in in the first Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1549).

    Some point to Jesus' temptations in Matthew 4 and Luke 4 as the basis of our familiar formulation, though the order of temptations in those passages differ from it.).

I'm less conversant than Rohr with much current theology, and recent psychological and social research, and sometimes can't follow his meditations on evil's manifestations.  But many of his comments, regards our life-experience in Christ, seem spot-on.

    Rohr emphasizes the role "the world" plays as a vector of sin in our lives (after carefully disclaiming any attempt to de-emphasize the role of our human failings, "the flesh").  Coming from a tradition that treated sin almost-exclusively in terms of personal wrong-doing (and primarily as literal "fleshly" sins: our drunkenness, sexual immorality, and the like), I was struck by his comment that

"...this much deeper meaning of sin is found in the largely social judgements of YHWH against the whole society, in the oracles of the prophets that were almost always aimed at Israel's corporate evil.  How did we not see this ?"  (p.14)

Of this "social matrix" which encourages and enables sin, he also reflects that

"Conformity with the loudest group's mood is--for many people, maybe even most people--equated with being moral...the public mood is another way to describe 'the world,' evil's first hiding place..."  (p. 23)

It occurs that "the loudest group" closely equates to "majority rule:" society's largest group will always be the loudest.  Similarly, Rohr's "the public mood" is probably very much what we mean when we invoke "public opinion," or "the will of the people."

God asserts that He, ALONE, sovereignly rules all things...the "Kingdom of God," which Jesus says is first priority.  So it's hard not to view our much-vaunted belief in "democracy" (demos +kratia, "the people rule") as directly contradicting...and affronting...God.

And per Rohr's insights, the operative mechanisms of democracy seem to be those which most encourage and enable societal sin, "the world"...and which we thoughtlessly "equate with being moral."

It goes a long way toward explaining why human beings believe passionate absurdities ("the war to end all wars," for example), that we think problems can be solved by means which are the problem.