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This scapegoating mechanism is perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the evil personality. Children are most often its victims, because they are so vulnerable. Parents have an almost godlike power over their own children, and to the degree that they will not face up to their own evil, to that same degree they seem to project it onto their children. Peck observes that rarely will evil people turn up in psychotherapy. This is because psychotherapy is what he calls the "light-shedding process par excellence." Evil, by definition, avoids the light. So the persons who end up in the therapist's office are not usually the truly evil ones, but the victims of someone else's evil. Again, children figure hugely in this group of victims. .

Where and how does the Devil figure in all this? Peck is not sure. He writes, "Perhaps it will forever be impossible to totally discern exactly where the human Shadow leaves off and the Prince of Darkness begins." His tentative conclusion is that the Devil has very little to do with evil in everyday life. Most of us do not have to be recruited to do his work; we recruit ourselves. Of this much he is sure: the Devil does exist, and on rare occasions does take possession of people. But only on rare occasions. In preparation for his book he was able to participate in two exorcisms. It was his experience in these events that convinced him of the Devil's reality.

Peck the psychiatrist is bold, unconventional, and imaginative. In his field of endeavor it would take such a person to take a serious look at the possibility that the Devil might exist, and to risk the ridicule of the psychiatric dogmatists when he published his findings. Peck the theologian is also bold, unconventional, and imaginative. As he put it in a telephone interview, "When I talk theology I am utterly speculative." That he is, indeed.

For instance, take his view of man. Man is radically free to choose to do good and evil. Says Peck, "It is always within our power to change our nature." In view of this, I asked him what he meant when he called Christ "Savior." He suggested that there are three ways to understand what it means to call him Savior. One way is to think of him as Savior in the sense that he atones for our sins. Peck termed that "my least popular level." A second way is to see him as Savior in the sense that he is "a kind of fairy godmother who will rescue you when you get in trouble as long as you remember to call upon his name." Peck believes that Jesus does just that. A third way to see Jesus as Savior is to see him as the one who shows the way to salvation through his life and his death. So Peck likes Jesus the Savior as fairy godmother (a term I am sure he does not use flippantly) and as exemplar, or one who shows us how to live and die. But he does not like the idea of Jesus the atoner.

In all fairness, Peck does not reject the idea of Jesus as atoner, he just does not see that as very helpful in the healing of human evil. Why? Because, in his view, it compromises human responsibility. He thinks that as long as we think Jesus has done it all for us we will be encouraged to live passively in the face of our own sin and evil. Therein lies Peck's chief weakness as a Christian thinker. He lets what he deems to be psychological necessity dictate theological truth. With him it is like the old joke, "How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb really has to want to be changed." So it is with salvation from sin and evil. Peck insists that this is not Pelagian heresy, but I have difficulty in seeing how such a view of the Atonement is not.

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September (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49