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This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Ingrid Faro
Hello. I’m Ingrid Farrow, Professor of Old Testament at Northern Seminary in the Chicagoland area.
David Capes
Dr. Ingrid Farrow, good to see you. Welcome back to The Stone Chapel podcast.
Ingrid Faro
It’s great to be here. Thank you, David.
David Capes
We’re going to be talking about your book in our time today, Demystifying Evil. The subtitle is A Biblical and Personal Exploration. You begin the book with a warning. I’ve not seen many books in theology that start with a warning.
Ingrid Faro
Yes, I do have a trigger warning. And I’ve actually had people tell me, even after the book is out, that they’re afraid to read it because of the word “evil”. And since it also is a book that does include personal stories of trauma and abuse, because we’re talking about evil, I felt it was important. And my publisher also felt it was important for me to let people be aware. Also, if they start to feel themselves responding to certain stories or things that they read, to take a break, to think about it. We have certain suggestions on what to do, because evil is the toughest topic for most people, the toughest topic both theologically
and personally.
David Capes
And at some point in most of our lives, we end up close and personal with evil, absolutely. It comes at us. It comes to us one way or another. What would you say is the big idea of your book? You’re talking about evil. I know to some even they’re superstitious of the word. What would be the big thing you’re trying to accomplish in this book?
Ingrid Faro
To have a dialog about it, because people tend to be afraid. I think often of N.T. Wright in his book Evil and the Justice of God, and he states that most people face evil in three ways. First, they don’t expect it to happen. Second, when evil happens, it slaps them in their face. Third, therefore they tend to respond in immature and dangerous ways. And looking at my own life, that was pretty much the story of my life. I was kind of like a pinball machine. I just bounced around it and hit the gutter, way too often. The important thing is for people to be willing to face it. And it takes courage to face the evil, the hardships,
both that have happened to them and sometimes that they have done as well.
David Capes
So, we have evil, not only that comes at you, but the evil that you’ve sometimes perpetrated.
Ingrid Faro
Sometimes without planning on it, knowing it, but being able to take a look at the evil outside as well as the evil inside.
David Capes
If the evil that comes at us slaps us in the face, to use Wright’s image, what about the evil that we do? Does it also at some point slap us in the face?
Ingrid Faro
We can be surprised at the things that we’ve done over the years. It’s the problem of evil that led me to start seminary in the first place because of the abuses and traumas that I had personally experienced, which is why that’s half of the subtitle. But also in that process, I had to reflect on ways that I had either participated or allowed, for all kinds of reasons. That some of the evils happened that maybe didn’t have to happen if I had just taken time to learn, to grow, to heal, to process, to pray.
David Capes
You talk about evil in a lot of different ways here in this book, let’s begin with a definition of evil. The Hebrew Bible has a number of words that are translated wickedness and iniquity and evil. How do you define that?
Ingrid Faro
In the book and in my studies, looking at how people define evil inside and outside of Scripture. Most anthropologists and philosophers say there’s no agreed upon definition of evil, and that is true because it’s culturally determined. It changes with the culture and that we can see happening around us all the time. I’ve studied scripture over 15 years now, just digging into the Hebrew and Greek text. But there’s a simple definition that I’ve come up with though evil is far from simple. But the simplest definition is a corruption of creational and relational goodness. I see evil as taking what was made good, what was intended good from God, and twisting it, polluting it, defiling it, corrupting it. I don’t see evil as the absence of good, but rather taking what is good and violating it.
David Capes
And that’s not just something that human beings do. You have a chapter dedicated to natural causes, but there’s also a little bit of a surprise there. And how natural is this? I don’t remember your exact wording, but, is it really natural.
Ingrid Faro
And of course, natural evil is a complex topic, and I had a whole other chapter on it. It can be a whole other book. Others have written on it as well but recognizing everything from tornadoes and hurricanes to illness and pollution and so forth. We can recognize our role in pollution, and we can recognize to some degree with weather and so forth. Some of the writings going back to well over 6000 years. They can demonstrate that people have been destroying our environment ever since we started messing with it. So, we do have some complicity in our actions. There are also greater ways in which we are complicit with natural evils. And even Dan Block writes about that. The earth that opened its mouth to
receive the blood of Abel and so forth. The earth itself cries out. We are one with nature, you know. And that’s not “new age-y”. That’s biblical.
David Capes
Our bodies are made of the food that comes from the earth. We are, what we eat. Isn’t that the saying? The hair that we have, the skin that we have, the bones and such, all of that really starts in and with the earth and the energy that comes from the sun. It’s all connected. Do you see God connected in the same way with creation?
Ingrid Faro
Certainly! God being the creator and God being the force. And even just thinking of the passage in Colossians “in Jesus, all things hold together”. I love that visual. And recognizing that God takes personally how we treat one another, as well as his creation. We are responsible before God for all that we do. Everything that we do is interconnected in some way. God has made us that way. We came from the earth, just like the plants and the animals. We all came from the earth. There is that interconnectedness.
David Capes
And we’re going back to the earth. Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes.
Ingrid Faro
Yes. And I think of Carmen Imes and Richard Middleton’s books on creation care and Sandy Richter’s Stewards of Eden. There’s that biblical mandate that we are responsible for how things go here. And there are some important practical things that we can do, things that we can do to be responsible. Certainly, when things go wrong, our responsibility to step in and help those who have experienced loss and pain.
David Capes
Yes, helping them is a part of our role as well. Much of the evil that is around us has, however, a human cause, right? Human beings are responsible for the murders, for the rapes, for the pillaging, for the wars. That’s a deep-seated problem where people often blame God at that. We blame God for natural evil as well, I should say. But do we say, God, if you had not given us this free will, if you had not given us this planet to steward, we wouldn’t be having these problems.
Ingrid Faro
Yes, and I ground my conversation of evil first in Genesis 1 and 2, because that’s where scripture starts the conversation. We have to start with goodness. In conversations about evil, first we have to look at what is good. Who is good. What is God’s intention. Who is God. What’s God’s character. Like the book and the saying, “we become what we worship”. And that is so true. Our view of who God is, and our view of who God made us to be is going to impact the decisions that we make and the kind of people we become. When we look at God making us in His image, we understand more. There are so many great books about that now. More and more is coming out all the time.
David Capes
It’s one of the most fundamental things. If we don’t get that right, it’s hard to get the next step right.
