Epstein Files and the Christian response

As something of a freelance investigator of contemporary culture, I decided to do a minor dive into the Epstein files that finally got dumped. I have largely ignored this whole saga because Epstein is dead and pretty much anyone involved outside his inner circle of toadies is likely to never see any jail time.  I mean, let's be honest. Reality is our friend. 

The one thing that finally flagged my attention was the fact that this latest and presumably last dump of information from the US Department of Justice was literally documents in the millions. I was just assuming it was his personal redacted e-mails and whatever...but millions of documents? What was that about? So, I decided to take a look. 

What can I say, other than Kyrie Eleison? I knew Epstein was a sick man, but the level of depravity (and I don't use that term lightly) I saw in the documents that I examined online was shocking. I won't go into detail because I generally try to keep this blog 'G' rated. But, merciful heavens, some of these documents are truly twisted and not fit for innocent eyes. 

In fact, if you want my recommendation, unless you are a serious journalist or someone who can wade through filth and not be affected by it, don't even waste your time in that sewer unless you feel so called to examine it. Heed the words of the early Christian desert father who said in the 3rd century, "He who studies evil is studied by evil."  When one walks into a dark cave and lights a match, one should not be surprised if suddenly several eyes from the darkness look in your direction and become as curious about you as you are about them. 

To give but one of the hundreds of truly evil documents I read, take a look at this e-mail from Epstein himself. To give some context about it from other documents, apparently one of the trafficked girls that was trapped in his hell hole of an island was apparently a Christian girl who believed Jesus was watching over her and would ultimately save her. I was unable to discover the girl's name or what became of her in the files. Maybe it's there, but I really did not want to jump down that rabbit hole any further. Epstein had a series of e-mail exchanges with presumably people in the know where he's crowing about this and mocking this girl's faith, presumably as the sexual abuse continued. 

In reading some of the documents related to that chain, I really felt like I was reading e-mails from a demon itself. Truly shocking stuff. I literally have no words for the total depravity of this man's mind. The truly shocking part was there were people on the outside he was e-mailing who joined in with this utterly demonic e-mail train. I was utterly aghast. As not to belabor the point, I will move on.

So, my point here is to ask, "What are Christians to make of all this?" 

On one level, I think it is fairly plain to see an evil at work in all this that is extrinsic to humans. That's not to excuse the human collaboration with such extrinsic evil. I don't see how you can possibly explain the depths of this human filth without some evil influence from the outside. I take that to be demonic activity. I realize not everyone holds my beliefs on the power of the demonic. It's easy in sanitized Western culture to write off the idea of Satan or demonic influences as simply mental illness or whatever. I would certainly never say mental illness is not to be taken seriously; it most certainly is. But events like the whole Epstein thing stand as a testament to the fact, and it is a fact, that evil exists. Now, we can quibble as to what degree that extrinsic evil played a primary roll in all this tragedy, but no psychological or medical test is ever going to fully explain the depths of evil that Epstein and his hoards, who were all extremely well educated and had all the amenities of life, sunk to. 

On another level, there is the question of how to theology deal with and respond to this poor girl (and no doubt hundreds more like her) in this e-mail that Epstein mocks. It is not an unreasonable question to ask, "If this girl truly believed in Jesus, how did Jesus let this poor girl fall into this pit to begin with?" This is the basic question of theodicy. I'm painting in broad strokes here, but theodicy asks the question, 'If God is all powerful and all loving, how does a God like that allow bad things to happen to good people?'  
  
There are different ways of approaching this question. 

Of course, the Atheist response is to simply say, "This proves there is no god, because a loving god would never do such a thing." I always found that a rather simplistic answer because all that really proves, if anything, is that the atheist in that scenario would run the world differently if he were god. Whether God is just and loving is a wholly different discussion than whether or not God exists. Just because God does not run the universe the way you would does not have any bearing one way or the other on God's existence or lack thereof. At the end of the day, the best an atheist can say to truly evil situations is that we can't blame God because God doesn't exist. 

A Deist might reason that there is a God who created the world like a mechanical clock; he wound it up and left it to run on its own. So, truly evil events can be laid clearly at the feet of humans because such a deity has not had a hand in anything for eons. Ironically, Deists end up at the same logical place as Atheists because God either doesn't exist or does care, with the end results being the same. 

Then you have people who have some sort of faith in a deity/deities that are at work in some way with humanity's plight. The ancient polytheists in some ways had it theologically the easiest. Having a pantheon of gods that basically act like self-absorbed teenagers with omnipotent powers makes it pretty easy to deal with theodicy. The gods are arbitrary and toy with humans as it suits there whims. So, if someone like an Epstein does despicable things, either the gods don't care or delight in watching one human torment another for their amusement. Maybe one god might take pity and help when another god is egging on the perpetrator. Maybe there ends up being some divine war like the Battle of Troy where gods take sides against each other, and it Troy gets sacked and pillaged, so be it. Humans all end up over the river Styx in the dark underworld regardless of whether they be valiant or evil. 

Then we come to the Christian understanding. Christians as a whole are all over the board in terms of how to deal with theodicy. Theodicy comes from the Greek words for God (theós) and justice (díkē). To be a bit more technical, theodicy is an attempt to “justify the ways of God” in the face of His seeming indifference toward suffering, like this poor girl mocked by Epstein in his e-mails. Theodicy has to balance three realities: God’s omnipotence, God’s justice, and the fact that people still suffer and die.

Even the Bible writers themselves seem to postulate different theorems, if you like, of how to balance these three realities. Some passages seem to rely heavily on Divine retributive justice. You see this particularly in a book like Exodus that refers to “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” This may sound like ghastly tribal revenge to the modern mind that has visions of a blindfolded Lady Justice and ideas like the rule of law from Western jurisprudence. 

And on one level, the early books in the Bible were told to very tribal people living hand to mouth existences. They were surrounded by cultures with many gods, no one god of which had all the divine attributes. There might be a god of war and a goddess of fertility. Depending on what your tribe needed, you might offer sacrifice one god for that one purpose and offer another sacrifice to another god for another purpose. The Divine inspiration in the early books of the Bible were trying to teach the early Israelite tribe that the one God had all the attributes at once. Thus, the one true God was directly responsible for everything that befell the tribe, good or bad. This also includes the aspect of vengeance-which belongs to the LORD-not the tribe or the tribal chief. That is a hard lesson to learn to a tribal bronze age people. (It also is a hard lesson to learn for modern tribes of all kinds, political and otherwise.)

Once the ancient Israelites had gotten their heads around the idea that "Vengeance is mine, saith the LORD," the realities and nuances of theodicy expand as the timeline of the Bible continued. By the time of the Prophet Isaiah during the period of Babylonian exile, the Bible begins teaching theodicy in this way:

"I form light and create darkness,
I make weal and create woe,
I am the LORD, who do all these things. (Is 45:7)"

In other words, God can call into existence external evils for the sake of purifying and training. St. John Chrysostom suggested that such Biblical passages an analogy where God to a medical physician who heals a patient with medicine but also can perform tasks that involve pain: “When he cuts, and when he cauterizes and when he brings his bitter medicines, he is equally a physician.” Sometimes a surgeon has to amputate an arm to prevent infection and gangrene which, if left untreated, will always kill a patient. 

For Christians, this sickness stems from the Fall of Adam in the Creation story. Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because they want to be like God and know what God knows. They rebel and are ultimately cast from the Garden of Eden. As part of that judgment but in respect to free will, God allows the separation and sin to enter the world. That is not what He willed, but He allowed it, and the wages for this sin is death, both spiritual and physical death. 

This is why the Christian response to Jeffrey Epstein is one of theodicy. Christ is the Great Physician that wishes to heal the sickness of sin and ultimately bring justice to the earth at the end of time when He comes again in power and great glory. God is weaving together a great tapestry of salvation so that He may bring all things back unto Himself in the ages of ages. We only ever see a few strands of this tapestry he is weaving to undo the great damage of sin and Satan. 

In the end of time, when God has created the New Heaven and the New Earth, we will see the whole tapestry that God has been, is and will continue to work on in the salvation of the world. We will see how He weaves in justice through his omnipotence as the Great Physician to cure the evils of sin and death. There is no easy answer to theodicy in the here and now because we only see a few of the threads that God is weaving, but one day we will. 

In terms of Jeffrey Epstein, we can already see how God was at work in that evil to end it. Epstein is dead, his island closed, and worldwide awareness of this tragedy has spread in a matter of only a few years. In the grand scheme of geological time that encompasses billions of years, the time of Epstein's depravity is not even a fraction of a second in the eons the Earth has existed. One must have faith than when God unveils His finished tapestry, we will see, like in the great Bayeau Tapestry, in some small corner the image of Epstein and justice. 

For that poor girl, we can pray that she lived and God can use the evil she had to experience to bring about Divine Justice, and that right soon. 

To quote the biblical summary by the fictional Sherlock Holmes:

"Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another."