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Can Theodicy be Avoided? The Claim of Unredeemed Evil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

James Wetzel
James Wetzel
Affiliation:
Colgate University Hamilton, New York
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Extract

Theodicy begins with the recognition that the world is not obviously under the care of a loving God with limitless power and wisdom. If it were, why would the world be burdened with its considerable amount and variety of evil? Theodicists are those who attempt to answer this question by suggesting a possible rationale for the appearance of evil in a theocentric universe. In the past theodicists have taken up the cause of theodicy in the service of piety, so that God might be defended against libel from humans, particularly the accusation that God's reign lacks justice. Contemporary practitioners, who live in a world where the existence of God can no longer be presumed, tend to favour theodicy as an exercise in securing the rationality of religious belief. Their hope is that one crucial theoretical obstacle to responsible belief in God will have been eliminated, once the idea of God has been reconciled with the reality of evil. What has commonly united theodicists, at least since the Enlightenment, is that they must answer to a non–believing antagonist. Until relatively recently, theodicy has been a debate between apologists for theistic faith and their cultured detractors.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , March 1989 , pp. 1 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

page 1 note 1 Surin, Kenneth, Theology and the Problem of Evil, Signposts in Theology (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).Google Scholar See especially chapters 1–3, where he advances a very powerful critique of contemporary theodicy in light of its Enlightenment heritage.

page 1 note 2 Surin, (1986: 52).Google Scholar

page 1 note 3 Surin identifies Dorothee Soelle, Jürgen Moltmann, and P. T. Forsyth as guides for this sort of theodicy.

page 2 note 1 Hick, , Evil and the God of Love, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), pp. 8–9.Google Scholar

page 2 note 2 Plantinga, Alvin, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1974), pp. 28–9.Google Scholar

page 3 note 1 For this kind of argumentative ploy, see the response of D. Z. Phillips to Richard Swinburne's theodicy in the context of a Royal Institute of Philosophy symposium, printed in Reason and Religion, ed. Brown, Stuart C. (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 115–18.Google ScholarSurin, (1986: 83–5) echoes Phillip's sentiments.Google Scholar

page 4 note 1 Plantinga's most detailed treatment of the problem of evil appears in The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) pp. 164–95.

page 4 note 2 The best statement of Hick's theodicy is the revised edition of Evil and the God of Love, especially Part IV. Swinburne's theodicy is well expressed in his The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 180–224.

page 4 note 3 I follow Surin (1986: 74) in casting Plantinga as a theodicist even in light of the important distinction Plantinga draws between a defence of theism's consistency and a full-blown theodicy.

page 5 note 1 See Plantinga (1974: 184–9) for his formal definition and discussion of transworld depravity.

page 5 note 2 In order to stretch depravity and freedom to cover all the evil of the world, it would be necessary to reduce natural evil to species of moral evil. Plantinga (1974: 191–3) is quite prepared to make such a reduction. He submits that it is logically possible that natural evil is always the malicious influence of nonhuman moral agents, such as fallen angels.

page 6 note 1 Cf. Adams, Marilyn McCord, ‘Redemptive Suffering: A Christian Solution to the Problem of Evil,’ in Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment, ed. Audi, Robert and Wainwright, William J. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 250–1.Google Scholar Adams presses a similar criticism against Plantinga's overly restricted treatment of the philosophical problem of evil.

page 7 note 1 See Swinburne, (1979: 200–14) for a fuller account of the connection between natural laws and theodicy.Google Scholar

page 8 note 1 Hick, (1978: 361).Google Scholar

page 8 note 2 Hick, (1978: 364).Google Scholar

page 8 note 3 Jaspers, Karl, Tragedy is not Enough, trans. Reiche, Harald, Moore, Harry, and Deutsch, Karl (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), pp. 38–9.Google Scholar

page 9 note 1 I have been much edified by the discerning discussion of tragedy in Barbour, John D., Tragedy as a Critique of Virtue: The Novel and Ethical Reflection (Chico: Scholars Press, 1984).Google Scholar

page 9 note 2 Ricoeur, Paul, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Buchanan, Emerson (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 226.Google Scholar I would venture here, however, a meagre qualification of Ricoeur's observation, which may nevertheless suggest why Jaspers overstates his point against the possibility of tragedy in the Christian scheme of redemption. As long as hell, the place of eternal damnation, remains a part of a religious tradition's spiritual geography (as may still be the case in Christianity), that tradition ipso facto acknowledges some evil to have fallen beyond redemption. The eternal suffering of the damned in hell seems to outrun whatever could be accounted for in terms of the just punishment for sins, and the resulting gap between desert and damnation opens theology to tragedy. Whether the evils of hell have anything ultimately to do with the acknowledgment of tragedy depends, of course, on what one wants to make of hell. Not many contemporary theologians or philosophers, least of all the theodicists among them, have found the subject of hell worthy of much discussion. I cannot help but think, though, that we are sometimes too ready to outgrow tradition, as if, in the case of hell, its hold on the Western moral imagination has been due solely to the habits of superstition and mean-spiritedness.

page 12 note 1 Soelle, Dorothee, Suffering, trans. Kalin, Everett R. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), p. 178.Google Scholar

page 13 note 1 A shorter version of this paper was read before the Mid–Atlantic Regional Meeting of the American Academy of Religion. I would like to thank the Program Director, Prof. Peter H. Van Ness of Union Theological Seminary, for the opportunity to address a critical audience in a congenial atmosphere.