Sárospataki Füzetek 16. (2012)
2012 / 3-4. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Eberhard Busch: Az egyház értelmezése a Heidelbergi Káté tanítása szerint
M iRTien E, Brin God’s will. The stories of the fall (Gen. 3:1-24), the flood (Gen. 6:5-9; 7) and the tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1-9) are striking examples. There is repeated evidence of the awareness of the small space that humankind has actually been given. However, the Bible’s undisguised realism never leads to pessimism. It does never lead to the acceptance of human evil as an inevitable fate. Nor is evil attributed to an existing power competing with the God of creation, like in Manichaeism or Gnosticism. In church history that idea has undeniably time and again had a certain appeal, for instance when Marcion speaks of an evil creator-demiurge.12 Marcion confronts us with the question of the integration of the dark sides of created reality into the Christian concept of salvation. Marcion teaches us never to underestimate the bitter mystery of the capricious creation.13 Unlike him we shall, however, have to maintain that God never abandons His creation. That is the kernel of the doctrine of predestination, the covenant and the image of God, as we saw. God is not only the one who creates difference between righteousness and evil, between ‘life and death’ as Deuteronomy 30:15 and 19 calls it, but also the one who encompasses that often inextricable complex of good and evil. The biblical authors knew about forces of nature which at times assumed a demonic shape and they were also aware of their own inner malevolence like Paul in the letter to the Romans expresses. This awareness, however, came never to the detriment of their responsibility, their calling as image of God, although any simple, unproblematic reference to human responsibility is foreign to the Bible. The experience of God constantly appears to break through our concepts of righteousness and evil. Sometimes God may even be depicted as the one who is surrounded by spirits and angels and among them is sometimes even a spirit of evil, Satan, who incites human beings to evil. In those cases the authors do their utmost not to identify that evil with God in order to keep up even then our responsibility, our calling. Epilogue We can conclude that it is impossible for us humans to come to a clear distinction between righteousness and evil. Preferably we would be inclined to put God purely at the side of our ideas of righteousness. Often, however, we fail to manage that because - so is often our experience — His thoughts are not ours and our ways not His. Against the backdrop of the broad range of biblical experiences of God’s revelation an exclusive identification of God with what we experience as righteousness, seems to be too rigorous a reduction. Before we know it, the argument may be turned around: something can only be called God if we experience it as righteousness. The ridding of the concept of God of all kinds of evil confronts us with the question that it places too heavy a burden on humans. Then a strong anthropologization of evil occurs, whereby all the suffering in the world is connected with human acts. That not only frequently proves to be psychologically unhealthy, but also to be contrary to the, in our experience often mysterious, origin of a lot of suffering. However, it is also clear that the only alternative, the inclusion of our ideas of evil into our concept of God, certainly does not leave us with fewer problems. Then 12 Blackman, E.C.: Marcion and His Influence. London: SPCK, 1948. 13 Brinkman, M.E.: Sacraments of Freedom: Ecumenical Essays on Creation and Sacrament - Justification and Freedom. Zoetermeer: Meinema, 1999. 11-18. 90S F
