Evil in the world today

Press, 4 April 1987, Page 23

Evil in the world today

Encounter With Evil. By Lloyd Goering. St Andrew’s Trust for the Study of Religion end Society, 1988 31pp. $8.95.

The Double Cross. By Pau! Oestreicher. Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1986. 115 pp. $12.05.

(Reviewed by

Colin Brown)

There are some intriguing similarities between these two authors. Both grew up in and were educated in Dunedin, both are converts to Christianity, and both have achieved a degree of notoriety. Geering, while still principal of the Theological Hall, Knox College, was accused of heresy at the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1967. The nomination of Oestreicher as bishop by the synod of the Anglican diocese of Wellington was rejected by a majority of the other New Zealand dioceses. Despite these similarities their books are rather different. Geering is, as usual, clear, confident, and pungent, well in command of his subject. The four lectures printed here sketch a view of the problem of evil as seen from a perspective in which language about God, the resurrection of Jesus, and the Devil, is regarded as mythological, as arising out of and heightening awareness of certain aspects of the human condition, but not as corresponding to actual entities and events. With some assistance from Jung, Geering argues that evil originates largely within human beings and, hopefully, is resolvable by human resources. Indeed, for Geering’s type of religious humanism there are no other, supernatural, resources. Inevitably in so brief an account much

is left unsaid or unqualified. Brevity militates against subtlety at several points. Too little attention is given to the "corporate” or “structural” aspects of evil, to those situations in which human beings feel powerless. Oestreicher’s book, by virtue of the breadth of his experience, displays a vivid sense of the presence and power of evil in its individual and corporate aspects including its manifestation in the life of the churches. The book is not an autobiography, but Oestreicher draws interestingly on a wide range of experiences (life in New Zealand as an exile from Nazi Germany, parish ministry in urban London, work with Amnesty International, mediation involving terrorists, visits to East Germany, Soviet Russia, and Palestine), to introduce and illustrate issues concerning which he believes that change is long overdue. These include nuclear disarmament, resort to violence generally, the re-marriage of divorced persons, racism, and sexual issues. Little sustained argument is offered by Oestreicher to justify the positions which he advocates. The publisher’s claim that “this remarkable book ... argues powerfully for a Christianity which is both personal and which also recognises the continuing presence of the cross in the events of the world” seems excessive. The main interest of the book, locally, may well be to complement and correct the largely hearsay evidence on the basis of which the nomination of Oestreicher as Anglican bishop of Wellington was made and then, subsequently, overturned.