I just read a speech delivered by Chuck Colson in 1993 to the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Colson was accepting the Templeton Prize, and this speech was the accceptance address. I was especially struck by his usage of the Four Horseman as a literary device, and thought I would share one a day. From “The Enduring Revolution”:
Four great myths define our times — the four horsemen of the present apocalypse.
The first myth is the goodness of man. The first horseman rails against heaven with the presumptuous question: why do bad things happen to good people? He multiplies evil by denying its existence.
This myth deludes people into thinking that they are always victims, never villains; always deprived, never depraved. It dismisses responsibility as the teaching of a darker age. It can excuse any crime, because it can always blame something else — a sickness of society or a sickness of the mind.
One writer has called the modern age “the golden age of exoneration.” When guilt is dismissed as the illusion of narrow minds, then no one is finally accountable, even to his conscience.
The irony is that this should come alive in this century, of all centuries, with its gulags and death camps and killing fields. As G. K. Chesterton once said, the doctrine of original sin is the only philosophy empirically validated by the centuries of recorded human history.
It was a holocaust survivor who exposed this myth most eloquently. Yehiel Dinur was a witness during the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Dinur entered the courtroom and stared at the man behind the bulletproof glass — the man who had presided over the slaughter of millions. The court was hushed as a victim confronted a butcher.
Then suddenly Dinur began to sob, and collapsed to the floor. Not out of anger or bitterness. As he explained later in an interview, what struck him at that instant was a terrifying realization. “I was afraid about myself,” Dinur said. “I saw that I am capable to do this … Exactly like he.”
The reporter interviewing Dinur understood precisely. “How was it possible for a man to act as Eichmann acted?” he asked. “Was he a monster? A madman? Or was he perhaps something even more terrifying … Was he normal?”
Yehiel Dinur, in a moment of chilling clarity, saw the skull beneath the skin. “Eichmann,” he concluded, “is in all of us.”
Jesus said it plainly: “That which proceeds out of the man, that is what defiles the man” (Mark 7:20).