Living within tension is an urgent need today. While polarization bends us toward an either/or world—the black hats (villains) and white hats (heroes) easy to pick out as they ride toward us—real life often resides in both/and tensions. Such nuanced views find little support in a culture that dumbs down complex issues to twenty-second sound bites or 140 characters in a Twitter message.
During the height of the Cold War, Soviet human rights activist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
Yet our tendency to divide good and evil into mutually exclusive social or political polarities is particularly rampant today.
Dare we suggest that truth might sometimes reside within the tension created by opposing polarities? Dare we propose that the best policy choices may often reside somewhere between Democrats and Republicans, left and right, MSNBC and Fox News? Have we lost our ability to live within (or even recognize) such tensions because we spend most of our time in media echo chambers reverberating with the predispositions of people just like us?
Reflecting on the brutal Serbian fighters who murdered, raped, and pillaged paths of destruction through his native Croatia, theologian Miroslav Volf narrates how he lives in tension: “My thought was pulled in two different directions by the blood of the innocent crying out to God and by the blood of God’s Lamb offered for the guilty.”
Volf wonders how he can remain loyal to the demand of the oppressed for justice yet at the same time uphold the forgiveness that God freely offers to the perpetrators of these horrendous crimes. He concludes that he is “divided between the God who delivers the needy and the God who abandons the Crucified, between the demand to bring about justice for the victims and the call to embrace the perpetrator. I knew, of course, of easy ways to resolve this powerful tension. But I also knew that they were easy precisely because they were false.”
When we lose our honest ability to name both sides of such tensions, we also lose our ability to admit that the easy ways to resolve them are often false. Learning how to live within complexities, polarities, and ambiguities—while not allowing them to paralyze our thinking or acting—is urgently needed today.
So what can we do? Here are three practical suggestions in this tragically toxic political season:
- In emotionally charged political conversations, we can respectfully ask what actual evidence a person has that the other side is not only misguided or wrong, but also “evil?”
- We can inject into conversations Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s quote that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being” and ask if others agree.
- We can monitor our own thinking and emotions, especially on those topics about which we are most passionate. Can we be as honest as Miroslav Volf that there may be another side?
Question: Is learning to live within complexities and tensions as crucial as I have proposed? What dangers lurk if we cannot do so? Please share your thoughts in a comment.
Judges 21:25 – “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” After reading your post, Rich, this verse popped to mind! We have no righteous leader. Each one of us thinks our own ideas would save the day. When I look at the candidates across the board, I see “people”, and they are not “good” enough to make things right. Without God in the picture, we are looking to men (mankind) to give us answers to all our social and political ills.
It’s been a nice ride “here in America”, but I’m afraid we’ve gone past a time where civility and common sense can save the day. The evil residing in each of us is indeed the problem. Just as Isreal did, we have chosen to be led by men who naturally have “good and evil cutting through the heart”. We can only look forward to the theocracy when the New Heaven and New Earth are in place!
I will still vote for one of the “good-evils”! I know that God has set up all rulers and kingdoms for His purposes, and He’s put us here at this time to live out our calling. But, praise be to God, the rise and fall of nations is ultimately in His hands!
Hi Pam, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts!