There is a duality in human beings, they are created for good, but they do evil. How does one set them free from evil, from the evil within themselves! Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (which I read in high school) depicts this struggle to conquer the evil of the human state as the challenge of science. Science, so it goes, might one day find the answer to the cause of evil and find a way to control it and eliminate it. The result in Stevenson's narrative, however, is not freedom from evil but its intensification when humans try to play God. In a tragic irony, Jekyll becomes the very thing that he tries to destroy.
Well, Jekyll and Hyde has been made a into musical (with none other than David Hasselhoff playing the lead role). Watch the opening two scenes and note the biblical echoes (e.g. "in the twinkling of an eye") about what it says about human evil and how one might go away in liberating humanity from its clutches.
So we learn that science can have a go, but in the end it does not have all the answers. How then do we defeat evil, not the evil of others, but the evil of ourselves? I'm reminded of what Paul says at the end of Romans 7.24-25: "What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!"
Well, Jekyll and Hyde has been made a into musical (with none other than David Hasselhoff playing the lead role). Watch the opening two scenes and note the biblical echoes (e.g. "in the twinkling of an eye") about what it says about human evil and how one might go away in liberating humanity from its clutches.
So we learn that science can have a go, but in the end it does not have all the answers. How then do we defeat evil, not the evil of others, but the evil of ourselves? I'm reminded of what Paul says at the end of Romans 7.24-25: "What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!"
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