Our previous conference had been held in Leeds on 9-12 September 2001 and during the course of the last morning but one, word came through of the spectacular assault on tens of thousands of civilians in New York. Some had watched it live on television after breakfast. By midday we had learnt that the twin towers of the World Trade Centre had collapsed with many people inside. Outrageous and brilliantly executed as it was, we quickly realised that it was one more example of an assault on innocents in a political cause to add to Srebrenica, Tel Aviv, Jenin, now Bali and so many others. Whatever the political injustices, real or perceived, they could not justify such an assault on ordinary people. Here evil was at work.

Suggestions for the next conference inevitably included: forgiveness, reconciliation, Christian-Muslim relations, but in the end the committee decided to pull several themes together under the topic Dealing with Evil. The purpose was to have a moment of theological reflection on an ever-present theme without getting caught up excessively in the crises of the moment.

The conference opened with the paper by John Hemer on how God dealt with evil through Jesus on the cross. Here, we were told, is God’s rejection of an apocalyptic overcoming of evil in some dramatic resolution. The God incarnate in Jesus Christ is no deus ex machina who stops the forces of destruction in their tracks. Jesus confronts evil by suffering it and refusing to perpetuate it. Karen Kilby examines the tradition of ‘theodicy’ where philosophers of religion try to answer the question of why an omnipotent and loving God allows evil to flourish in our world.

One oppressively hot night in 1985 in the south of Pakistan I lay on my bed punching the wall. I was very angry. A local landlord was mistreating some of our Christians in a dreadful way. I had been several times to speak to him and at first thought I was doing some good, but now realised that my intervention would change very little. The landlord was a particularly violent man, but the system itself was brutal and too old and too ingrained to give way just because one Western missionary thought it should. The people I was trying to help were powerless and so was I and that made me furious. The landlord had lots of enemies. If only one of those enemies would take a revolver to him, put out a contract on him - it happened all the time in this violent society - then our problems would be solved

How ought evil to be dealt with in Christian theology? In what follows I will approach this question by reflecting on what is arguably a different intellectual tradition—the production of theodicies—and on the relationship between theology and this other tradition. What I shall try to show is that Christian theology ought neither to construct theodicies, nor ignore the kinds of problem theodicies try to address. It ought instead to acknowledge itself to be faced with questions it cannot answer, and to be committed to affirming things it cannot make sense of.

In a society such as our own (I am thinking particularly of Western European society) that sees little need for postulating the existence of God and no longer lives by specifically religious rules and rituals, it would seem that human intention and action could be quite adequately explicated in the language of ethics rather than theology : the opposite of good, consequently, is not evil, it is bad, that is to say, bad in the sense of being wrong morally, of willing and acting in ways that are in opposition to an accepted moral standard. The fact that it may be difficult to establish widely accepted moral standards does not invalidate the principle. When the word evil is used—and, of course, it is used—its semantic content is vague, or, if clear, then reductive, by which I mean that, more often than not, it acts merely as a kind of intensifier—so that, when one wants to express extreme outrage at an action of gross immorality, the word one reaches for is the word evil; but there would be no qualitative difference between a wrong action or intention and an evil action or intention. Given the nature of the relationship between art and its cultural context it would not be unreasonable to expect the literature of our own era to reflect this situation and, indeed, it would be surprising if it did not. We should expect the representation of evil in modem literature to take on an extremely etiolated and reductive form. But does it?

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Herbert McCabe OP, the best theologian / have ever met, whose work will remain exemplary for all who aspire to think theologically in the twenty-first century.

George Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ is presumably part of what this conference is about. Certainly, the intentional killing of the innocent, that is people who have done us no harm, must be one of the most blatant examples of evil anybody can think of. Dealing with this evil has, alas, become one of the pre-occupations of the present age. The last century saw enough of it, from Auschwitz and Hiroshima to Srebrenica and Omagh. But today we are confronted by what many see as a new form of this evil: namely suicidal terrorism. Yet even this is not so unambiguously evil that people cannot find religious justifications of it. Indeed the existence of a religious industry for justifying killing the innocent is, I take it, part of the evil that we are dealing with at this conference.

Many Muslims, and perhaps some Christians too, think of those who perpetrate suicidal murders as martyrs for the faith, specially blessed by the Almighty with a vocation to kill. Some even find arguments for it in the Qu’ran or in Islamic law, or in the Old Testament. But before we rush in to condemn their arguments, we must remember some precedents. The most obvious is that of Samson.