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Being Real about evil
Holy realism … [also] witnesses to [the existence of] evil. And … it can witness convincingly to evil precisely because it understands that enemies are real. That’s anathema in America these days because we all want to be friends. At the extreme, this attitude can be summed up in a sign that I saw at a recent peace rally: “Saddam Loves You.” Well, the evidence is that Saddam loves no one but himself, and even that is a dysfunctional relationship. Contrast that silly thing, “Saddam Loves You,” with a passage from Life Together, which is a little book that Dietrich Bonhoffer wrote about the Christian community in an underground seminary in Nazi Germany. He writes, “Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. And at the end, all his disciples deserted him. On the cross, he was utterly alone surrounded by mockers. So the Christian too belongs within the thick of foes.” He [also] quotes some Luther: “The kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies, and who will not suffer this does not want to be of the kingdom of Christ. He wants to be among friends.” Well, it’s tricky, isn’t it, to think of enemies. And of course, we all have to begin by saying the worst enemy is within. But I think we do also have important witness, both in the Scriptures and in poetry, to evil, to what enemies do. ...

What is a Christian to do when we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves, commanded to love our enemies? There are situations in which making nice does no good and begins to do harm. As Garrett Keiser insists, anger, righteous anger in the Biblical sense, not selfish, self-aggrandizing anger, can break through denial and lead to the prayer of forgiveness that makes anger no longer necessary, [even] perhaps the concept of an enemy. But the question nags, how can I pray for my enemy? We need to be, first of all, suspicious of our own motives and keep a close watch on ourselves. “But if I truly love my neighbor as myself,” Keiser insists, “I am not looking for victory but a radical change of heart. It is love that impels me to pray for my enemy while fully intending to do everything in my power to oppose him. I intend to prevent his abuse,” he writes, “from destroying us both.”
--Kathleen Norris

Surely evil cannot be any more vile than the face it showed during the holocaust. Auschwitz, Dachau, and Treblinka stand as searing reminders of the depth of human corruption. As Elie Wiesel, another survivor of the holocaust, continually reminds us, such horror should never be forgotten. Any religion that cannot acknowledge such bitter fruits of human sin is not worth believing. For only if we admit the rank horror of evil can we hope for a God and a faith strong enough to redeem it.
-- Lee Ramsey, Focus on Film, "The Pianist"