Was it wicked?

From D.A. Carson:

A couple of years ago I was speaking at a church in Washington, D.C. The senior pastor there is Mark Dever. Some of you - at least the graybeards - will know him. He was in this country [England] for quite a number of years, and has been over on occasion.

After the service, he said to me, "Don, I want to introduce you to someone." So he dragged me to the back of the church, and there was a woman. I don't think she'd mind if I told you her name. Her name was Claudia. Claudia was managing editor of probably Washington, D.C.'s most prestigious political weekly. And when he introduced me, he said to Claudia, "Claudia, tell Don how you got converted."

"Oh yeah," she said, "I got converted six months ago."

"How did that happen?"

"Well, I really was one of your quintessential postmoderns. I mean, I really did believe, that in our thinking, we are the product of our social environment. Good and evil depends on your point of view. And that depends, not only on your personal opinion, but also on the social construct, the individual interpretative community that you inhabit. Even something like the Holocaust, at the end of the day, well, obviously those being burned in the ovens, it was not a very good thing. But to the Aryan supremacists, it was a very good thing. The only difficulty was it didn't work. It didn't go far enough. It wasn't accomplished. It all depends on your point of view, you see. Who's to say who's right or wrong in any fundamental sense. But Mark and Connie [Dever's wife] invited me to this inductive Bible study on [the Gospel of] Mark. Because I liked texts, and I didn't know anything about the Bible, I thought I'd go along. I didn't believe any of it, but it was interesting."

And during the midst of this, she was posted for political reasons to Papua New Guinea, because of what was going on there. Toward the end of that stay, she discovered the story of a priest who had been arrested just about as he was to leave after 35 years of missionary service in PNG. Arrested for pedophilia. And it transpired, as she tracked the story, that he had sodomized something like 200 boys during the 35 years that he had been missionary in PNG.

And somehow this story got under her skin. It really troubled her whenever she started to think whether they'd ever have stable marriages, the fact that most abusers were themselves abused, what would they do, and when you think of the relationships, lack of trust, and what it might mean for Christian families down the road. It just got under her skin. And she came back, and told Mark about it.

Mark smiled and said, "Claudia, was it wicked?"

Claudia replied, "Mark, come on. We all know that in most cases where you have this sort of abuse, the abuser himself has been abused. Probably he himself is as much a victim as anything."

Mark replied, "Well, that's probably true. But the Bible says as much. 'The wrath of God is visited on the third and fourth generation of those who despise me.' The Bible insists that sin is social. There's very little sin that's purely private. The ramifications affect everybody. But that's not the question. The question is, 'Was it wicked?'"

And every time he saw her, he asked her the same question. "Hi, Claudia. Nice to see you. Was it wicked?" She'd come in the door for the Bible study in the evening. "Welcome, Claudia. Next chapter in Mark. Was it wicked?" Every time he saw her, "Was it wicked?".

It got under skin. She was losing sleep. She couldn't integrate this into her postmodern epistemology. She didn't know what to do with it. She woke up one night unable to sleep, getting angrier and angrier, and fussier and fussier, and finally she said, "This was wicked! This was wicked! This was evil!"

And then it dawned on her. If she had a category for wickedness, maybe she was wicked too.

And within weeks she had become a Christian.