Over at Progressive Revival, Diana Butler Bass has an excellent post about yesterday’s tragic murder at the Holocaust Museum. Using theologian Walter Wink’s notion of “the powers,” she makes a strong case that neither conservatism – which places all the agency for the killing with James von Brunn – or liberalism – which implicates the structural components of anti-semitism and hate speech – can alone serve as a proper response to an act like this. Rather, we need a holistic and integrated understanding of evil:

In other words, sin–the “powers” are both. They exist in the malformed soul and are intrinsically tied up in the ways in which the world and culture are structured. Everything–and everybody–has both good and evil within.

This integrated understanding of sin goes a long way to help understand Von Brunn, where inner and outer “powers” combined to push him toward a form of racial idolatry and personal wickedness that resulted in killing another person. But an integrated understanding of sin also begs the question: Where was I in this story? What do I do to resist these dehumanizing powers? What systems and structures that I am part of perpetuate the evil from which Von Brunn acted? (Talk radio hosts, take note….) . . .

Progressive Christianity is in no way a morally relativistic vision; instead, it is emerging as a morally integrated theology. We need to examine all the powers-at-play in Von Brunn’s reprehensive moral act–to name and resist the Powers is one way to transformation. It is wrong–in every case, everywhere, for everyone, and every institution–to target people and deny them basic human dignity because of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual identity. And equally wrong to let the “little” sins that contribute to the bigger evils to pass unchallenged.