Soulwork: The Lucifer Effect

This Sunday, November 30, at 9-10 am and the following Wednesday evening, December 3, 6:30-7:30 pm, we conclude our four-week Soulwork series entitled, “Be Not Conformed.” For the first three weeks, we discussed Walter Wink’s “Powers” trilogy of Biblical scholarship investigating questions around the reality and morality of power–earthly and divine–as illuminated by the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.

For our final discussion, we will look at the recent book, The Lucifer Effect, by Stanford psychologist, Phillip Zimbardo–the man behind the famous “Stanford Prison Experiment.” For info about Zimbardo, the Stanford Prison Experiment and The Lucifer Effect, click here. And here’s a quote from Zimbardo’s book, subtitled, “Understanding How Good People Turn Evil”:

The “Lucifer Effect” describes the point in time when an ordinary, normal person first crosses the boundary between good and evil to engage in an evil action. It represents a transformation of human character that is significant in its consequences. Such transformations are more likely to occur in novel settings, in “total situations,” where social situational forces are sufficiently powerful to overwhelm, or set aside temporally, personal attributes of morality, compassion, or sense of justice and fair play.

Evil is the exercise of power to intentionally harm (psychologically), hurt (physically), or destroy (mortally or spiritually) others.

According to various scenarios of early Christian Church Fathers (from Cyprus, Armenia, Greece, and France), Lucifer was god’s favorite angel, referred to as the “Morning Star,” as “Light,” as the “Prince of the Power of Air.”. His sin, and the origin of his transformation into the Devil, stems from his envy of man and disobedience to God…

Thus, “The Lucifer Effect” represents this most extreme transformation imaginable from God’s favorite Angel into the Devil. My work has focused on lesser transformations of human character not as dramatic as this one, in which ordinary, even good people begin to engage in bad deeds, for a short time or longer, that qualify as evil.

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