Evil

A common idea in Christianity is the philosophical notation that evil is an absence of goodness or a perversion of goodness.   I suppose this idea is fine and I cannot see that it leads to anything in and of itself, but I also cannot see that it is true.

I believe that it is the sort of the idea that if we dismiss the teaching of God on the devil and demonic realm we feel tempted to believe.

It also leads the other way our definition of evil can tempt us to dismiss the demonic world.

Evil at its worst seeks to destroy.   I cannot see how we can say the devil is in any sense lacking in goodness or perverted in goodness in his attempt to destroy Job.

None of this is very key, but I do think that by refusing to allow evil to have a seperate class or category than good we fail to grasp the seriousness of the problems of the world.  

There must be some good end or aim in an action or perversion of good if evil is an absence of good.   It seems of use to allow evil to be its own entity rather than to grasp it is some sort of perversion of good.

It seems that along with the categorization of evil as a subset of good often comes the denial or spiritualization of demonic forces.  Such slippage of knowledge opens the door to all sorts of problems.

I have only met truly penetrating evil and work of the devil in places where people see the demonic world as some sort of allegory of scripture.  And here is the problem with the definition we cannot carry its implications through scripture without risk. 

This would suggest the definition is in fact wrong.  If we hold to the definition anyhow we must be careful to not allow man made definition to override clear scriptural teaching as has at times been done.

Love is Not an Absence of Sin

It is very strange in the current day that some theologians have begun to define love as an absence. All discussion around love are what love is not.

It is difficult for these theologians to speak of what love positively is. They can talk for hours about what love is not. They tend to turn positive statements about love in the bible into the converse negatives of what love is not.

The bible gives negative and positive guidance about many things. It is important to keep the tense of the biblical teaching.

It is interesting that theologians who cannot speak positively of love also tend to turn all positive statements in the bible into negative statements which roughly correlate.

You see this is a great error. Christianity is an active religion, not a religion of absence. Love is a presence. It is positive power, not a lack of sin.

We can have a relaxing day at home alone avoiding sin, but we are not positively expressing love. There is nothing wrong with the relaxing day at home, but to be clear we have not expressed love if we sit at home alone for a day with no contact with the world.

Love is active. The bible uses many active statements about love because love is an action. The negative statements of what love is not in the bible clarify what love positively is.

Negative statements of what love is not are not a denial that love is an action. We must be very careful to read what the bible says. It is not scriptural to read what the bible says and then always modify it into a different form.

It is a form of redaction to turn the whole of scripture into a set of negative commandments. The bible is full of positive commands for living. To change the tense of the commands from positive to negative is to redact scripture.