Still trying to finish up the research paper. Since I'm too lazy to type up an original post, here's an excerpt from my paper "Evil, Suffering & the Human Experience."
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"The salvation of a man is through love and in love‒" these words belong to Frankl, but this truth can be gleamed from [the other writers]. In love, a Jewish doctor persevered through the Holocaust by clinging to memories of his beloved; in love, a German theologian joined the resistance to defend his nation from tyranny; and in love, a Jesuit priest did evil to stop a greater evil, the persecution of his apostate brothers.
This one may learn from Frankl, Bonhoeffer and Endo: that a worthy man, depending on his circumstances, may actively fight or passively endure evil, but when confronted with the realities of human suffering, he cannot ignore it. He cannot be lethargic. He cannot harbor indifference when evil threatens the poor, the downtrodden and the outcast. If he does, self-absorption and apathy will be his death. It will sear his conscience, and he will not dare look into the face of whatever God he serves.
"Love [is] man's last hope for salvation‒ not deliverance from a literal hell, but freedom from the things that most kill a man..."
ReplyDeleteClarification: in my paper, I speak from a general humanitarian standpoint rather than an explicitly Christian standpoint. Being a die-hard, Bible-totin' Christian, I do believe in a literal hell, since that's what God's Word teaches (and Rob Bell can't convince me otherwise).