Just when Rick Warren was on the verge of convincing me he was a credible and moderate evangelical megachurch pastor, we get this:
There are a number of levels of wrong to this exchange. First, is Hannity's blithe assurance that he has the capacity to accurately detect "evil" and distinguish it from good. Second, is his belief that "taking out" Amadinijiahd is something either possible or desirable for the United States to do as a matter of national policy (it's not like it would cause any blowback in the Arab world or anything, right?). Third, however, is Warren's indulgence of Hannity's stupidity, first through his acceptance of Hannity's premises about the role of governments in fighting evil, but also in his own apparent belief that "the Bible says" that evil cannot be negotiated with, but only stopped.
The central theological problem here is that both Hannity and Warren accept the premise, stated by Hannity, that we are born and exist in a fallen state. If that's true, then it clearly can't be the case either that evil is something that exists apart from us, our own motivations, and our own objectives, nor that evil can and should simply be "stopped." Theologically understood, evil can't be "stopped," since it eixsts in some degree everywhere and in everyone.
Think about it this way, Jesus tells a parable about a farmer who plants some seeds. That night, his enemy comes along and plants some weeds along with the farmer's crops. Does the farmer send in his servants to seek to distinguish the wheat from the tears? No, because in doing so it may ruin the wheat as well. He tells them to wait for the Harvest, and then do the separating.
Taking Hannity and Warren at their word, they'd have the servants go and destroy the fields, root and twig, in order to root out those weeds.
There are many dimensions to morality. Discernment is an important element of it, but so is prudence. Even if we could accurately discern in all cases good from evil unambiguously, there is still the question of prudence: Should we fight this evil now? Should we fight it here? Should we fight it in this way? Those are questions that can't be answered easily even in the face of an obvious detections of evil. For Hannity, and now apparantly Warren, prudence has no role in moral discernment. I think it's time to write Rick off.
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