1.1 Evil and the question of dualism

Mani, the founder of the religion of Manichaeism, lived from 216 to 276 CE. He was born in the Sassanian empire, in what is now Iran. Manichaeism spread not only eastward (including into parts of China and India) but also west through North Africa and the Roman Empire. Mani’s self-description included that he was an ‘apostle of Jesus Christ’, and Manichaeans in the Roman Empire presented themselves as the true Christian believers, in contrast with failed or partial Christians (Gardner and Lieu 2004: 2). Thus one way to conceive of Manichaeism is as a competitor to what eventually emerged as mainstream Christianity.

The Manichaean cosmology held to the existence of two principles, or two kingdoms, the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness. At the beginning of time, the two realms were fully separate, existing in different locations: the kingdom of darkness lay to the south of the kingdom of light. But conflict arose, with the powers of dark desiring to possess the light. This gave rise to the second period, the era in which humanity finds itself, in which the light and dark have become partly mingled. The task to which Manichaeism calls its members is to contribute towards the liberation of the light from the dark; this is at the heart of the religious life of a Manichaean. In the third period, at the end time, the light will be fully liberated, and the dark permanently bound so that it cannot again threaten and contaminate the kingdom of light. The Father of Light could not initially prevent the invasion by the forces of darkness, but good will triumph completely in the end.

In this view evil is linked to matter, as well as to darkness and lust. Goodness and light, while at a distance from matter, are nevertheless also spatial and physical. For instance, some foods are to be preferred to others and ought to be eaten because they have a greater component of light in them. Reproduction on the other hand ought to be avoided because in creating further human beings it makes a bad situation worse, embedding the light into more and more evil matter.

Manichaeism presented a serious religious possibility during the early centuries of Christianity. One can see this from the life of St Augustine of Hippo, who spent nine years as a Manichee. It is also Augustine, however, who offered the paradigmatic statement of the privation theory of evil, the Christian theological tradition’s main alternative to dualism.

In Book 7 of his Confessions, Augustine narrates his struggles to conceive of what evil is. He had become disillusioned with the Manichaean system, and was convinced that it could not make sense to imagine God forced into battle with, and harmed by, the powers of darkness. He came to believe that God created everything, souls and bodies alike. Yet he continued to be intensely troubled over how to understand where evil comes from, if God made everything and the materialistic and dualistic vision of the Manichees is set aside. Below is a portion of a dialogue Augustine reports having with himself at this stage, after his rejection of Manichaeism but before his full conversion to Christianity:

So where does [evil] come from, if the good God made all things good? He is the greater good, to be sure, the supreme good, and the things he has made are lesser goods; nonetheless creator and creature are all good. Whence, then, comes evil? Was something bad in the material he used, so that though he formed it and disposed it in order he left in it some element that was not turned to good? But why? Did he lack the power so to convert and change it all that no evil would remain, he who is omnipotent? In any case, why would he have chosen to use it for making things, rather than using this same almighty power to destroy it entirely? Or could it have existed against his will? Or again, if matter was eternal, why did he allow it to exist so long, from infinite ages past, and then at last decide to make things out of it? Or if he suddenly decided to act, surely he, being almighty, could have acted in such a way that it should cease to be, and he alone should exist, he, the complete, true, supreme, infinite Good? Or, supposing that it is unseemly for him who is good not to fashion and build something good as well, ought he not to have done away with all the bad material and destroyed it, and himself originated some good matter instead which he could use to create everything? If he were able to construct good things only with the help of material he had not constructed, he would not be omnipotent. (Augustine of Hippo 1997: 120)

At first glance this passage might look quite familiar to a modern reader: is it not Augustine grappling with the theodicy question – God is good, God is all powerful, why is there evil? In fact, however, if the passage is considered more closely, and in its context, it is clear that the flow of questioning moves in the opposite direction. Augustine does not ask about the existence of God, and whether belief in this existence can be maintained. Instead, the existence, goodness, and power of God are for him fixed points, the starting commitments of his thinking. In light of them the unresolved question he must wrestle with is the nature of evil. He is struggling in particular – as he circles around the possibility of a flaw in the stuff out of which God created – to escape a conception of evil as somehow connected to matter.

The position Augustine eventually comes to is that, if everything which is is created by God, and therefore everything which is, insofar as it has being of any kind, must be good, then evil can only be to do with non-being, an absence of being. Evil is not a substance; it has no being in itself, but it is a privation, a defect, in that which is. Evil actions, in particular, arise from a defect in our will:

I inquired then what villainy might be, but I found no substance, only perversity of a will twisted away from you, God, the supreme substance, toward the depths – a will that throws away its life within and swells with vanity abroad. (Augustine of Hippo 1997: 130)

This account of evil also explains, Augustine thinks, the inexplicability of evil: just as you cannot see darkness or hear silence, you cannot come up with a cause for an evil will.

For when the bodily eye runs its gaze over corporeal objects, it sees darkness only where it begins not to see. So also, no other sense but the ear alone can perceive silence; yet silence is perceived in no other way than by not hearing. Thus, too, our mind perceives intelligible forms by understanding them; but when they are deficient, it knows them by not knowing them; for ‘who can understand his failings’? [Psal 19.12]. (Augustine of Hippo 1998: 508)

As a result, Augustine advises that no one should ‘seek to know from me what I know that I do not know; unless, perhaps, he wishes to learn how not to know that which we should know cannot be known’ (Augustine of Hippo 1998: 508).

This understanding of evil is taken up by Thomas Aquinas, with a helpful further classificatory step: while evil is the absence of good, not all absences are evil. More specifically, Aquinas distinguishes between ‘negative’ and ‘privative’ absences of the good. Speed and strength are goods, for instance, but the fact that a human being is not as fast as a deer or as strong as a lion is not an evil – these are only negative absences. On the other hand, the absence of something which ought to be there – blindness is Thomas’ example – is a privation, and therefore, on his view, an evil (Summa Theologiae 1.48.3).

The privatio boni (privation of the good) theory of evil leaves many unsatisfied, suspecting a sleight of hand involved somewhere. After all, we may still be left wondering how such defects can come into a good world created by the good God. Furthermore, there is a concern that this account undercuts the seriousness of evil, the sense of the sheer weight of evil in the world: can it do justice to the phenomenology of suffering – can the experience of intense physical or emotional pain truthfully be described simply as the absence of some good?

Whatever its difficulties, the privatio boni account continues to attract adherents and defenders. Perhaps this is because it is in the end unavoidable, if one is to retain a conviction that there is nothing in the world which is not made by God, no second source of things beyond the good creator of all. From this point of view, one might consider privatio boni as closer to a way of naming the inexplicability of evil than a way of analysing it. Yet privatio boni does also, as a way of framing evil, have practical implications, at least in the way that it encourages us to pattern our thoughts. To adopt this view is to insist that evil never comes first, that good is always more fundamental than evil. One can never try to understand evil in itself, but only as parasitic upon – and a distortion of – a prior good. One avoids granting evil too great a dignity, or any kind of priority, in one’s view of things. It does not have an attraction of its own, or a power of its own, but is always dependent on that which it distorts. Evil is framed by good, rather than good by evil.

In 1963, the German-Jewish émigré philosopher Hannah Arendt published an account of the trial of Adolph Eichmann for his role in the murder of millions of Jews, and with it introduced into contemporary philosophical discourse the concept of ‘the banality of evil’ (the book’s full title was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil). Arendt’s concept can be understood as a partial restatement, in a modern context, of the privation theory of evil, even though Arendt herself did not make this claim, and was in fact partly critical of the privatio boni tradition.

One thing Arendt evoked in Eichmann in Jerusalem was a jarring contrast between the scale and horror of the crimes committed and the uninteresting shallow character of the man who committed them. Eichmann’s, she wrote, ‘was obviously […] no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical anti-Semitism or indoctrination of any kind’ (Arendt 2006: 35). A ‘phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial’ was that ‘Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth’ (2006: 283). There was no depth to him, nothing really special about him: ‘with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann’ (2006: 286).

It is important to be clear that Arendt does not treat mass murder and attempted genocide as a banality, nor does she deny the evil of this man who was so involved in organizing it. Yet the form of this evil in him was nothing exciting, nothing substantial or dramatic, nothing profound and glittering, but a kind of thoughtlessness, something missing, an absence where there should have been something. He didn’t have any interestingly bad motives, but merely went along with things, seeking his own advancement and obeying orders. This fits with Augustine’s comments on the ungraspability and inexplicability of evil – the frustration our thinking meets when it tries to come to terms with something which is simply missing.

Arendt’s account of the banality of evil is interesting in part because it offers a bridge between typically modern patterns of thinking about evil – as almost unthinkably extreme cases of badness – and the theological tradition’s much broader use of the term. She offers a study of a man guilty of extreme crimes, and shows that there is nothing at all extraordinary there.

1.2 Sin, suffering, and death

If the privation theory is an attempt to give an account of what kind of thing evil is (namely, not a thing at all), it still leaves open a second question, about what kinds of things are evil: what types of phenomena count as examples of evil?

When this question is approached from the point of view of philosophy of religion, the greatest attention is usually on suffering, and especially on suffering which is not attributable to human responsibility, because it is this which seems to pose the greatest challenge to those who would construct a theodicy. In the Christian theological tradition, by contrast, the primary focus has been on sin – this is an unambiguous instance of evil, since it is by definition in contradiction with God’s will. Sin can be understood in various ways – as a particular action, as a state, as Original Sin, as social or structural sin – but however it is understood, it is that which is against God and which God is against.

If sin is unambiguously to be counted as an evil in the Christian tradition, the status of suffering and death is not as clear. For much of the tradition these have been understood as evils consequent on the fall; they are the punishment, or at least the inevitable consequence, of sin. If sin had not entered the world, neither would suffering and death. They are genuine evils, on this view, though not the primary evil. Yet for some theologians, especially a number of modern theologians, death and suffering are construed as a part of human nature, constitutive elements of the finite good of creaturely life, and therefore not evil at all.

Karl Barth offers an interesting, if somewhat complex, example of this position. The contrast between joy and sorrow is woven through our lives, and this is simply the way it is meant to be:

It is true that in creaturely existence, and especially in the existence of man, there are hours, days and years both bright and dark, success and failure, laughter and tears, youth and age, gain and loss, birth and sooner or later its inevitable corollary, death. […] creation and creature are good even in the fact that all that is exists in this contrast and antithesis. In all this, far from being null, it praises its creator and lord even on its shadowy side. (Barth 1960: 297)

Both suffering and death are intrinsic to our being as creatures; they are not evils, but part of the whole for which we can be grateful.

There is another side to this, however. As well as treating death as natural to us, woven into our nature as creatures, Barth also presents it, in line with the tradition, as punishment for sin. It is therefore simultaneously both natural and unnatural to us. We fear death: it threatens and menaces and casts a gloom over our lives, because we sense in it the judgment of God, the punishment of sin, the terrifying expression of divine wrath. But then, according to Barth, this death, the death of utter divine rejection, has been suffered by Christ, and because of this, our death ‘is already behind and beneath us’ (Barth 1960: 613). The defeat of death that Barth believes Christ to bring, however, is the defeat of death as divine judgment and rejection. It is not the defeat of death as the end to a finite life, because this death does not require defeat – it is part of the goodness of creation.

The chief grounds Karl Barth offers for considering death a good rather than an evil is Christ’s own death:

And if [Christ’s] dying […] is the sum total of the good which God has shown to the world, how can we dare to understand man’s mortality as something intrinsically negative and evil? (Barth 1960: 632)

In an analogous way, though from a different strand of the Western Christian tradition, one also sometimes finds suffering presented as intrinsically, or at least potentially, of great value because of its link to the cross. Since Christ’s passion, Christ’s suffering, is at the heart of the story of redemption, suffering can come to be understood, at least when united with the suffering of Christ, as of great redemptive value. Such a view can point to Col 1:24 for support (‘in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church’). It makes itself felt in some medieval and early modern mystical writings, in certain Catholic spiritual traditions of modernity, and in St John Paul II’s 1984 Apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris. In such contexts, while suffering may be acknowledged as an evil in one sense, its primary associations are with love, sacrifice, and redemption. In such contexts suffering is primarily approached, not as an evil alongside of or as a consequence of sin, but as an experience which can contribute to the resolution of the problem of sin.

Suffering and death are not confined to the human species, though at least the Western theological tradition has been heavily anthropocentric in the focus of its attention. In recent years some Western theologians have, in dialogue with more holistic elements in the Eastern theological tradition as well as with biology, begun to make efforts to move beyond such anthropocentrism.

When attention is broadened beyond the human, the history of suffering and death is significantly extended, as is the sheer quantity of what is brought before the imagination. The phenomenon of species extinction enters the picture, alongside individual suffering and death. It is possible to think of nature itself as suffering, and perhaps even as unjustly suffering – something which ‘the cry of the earth’, a phrase of Leonardo Boff which has been taken up by Pope Francis, gestures toward. Whether sin is also a category appropriate in relation to some non-human species (e.g. primates) is a subject of discussion.

1.3 Paradigm cases of evil

While sin, suffering, and death are broad categories, thinking about evil in both theological and secular contexts is often shaped by and oriented around a specific event. For the European Enlightenment, this was the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. For many since the second half of the twentieth century, including secular, Jewish, and Christian thinkers, the paradigm case of evil has been the Holocaust. In some contexts it is colonialism and slavery which play this role. It may be that ecocide will emerge, before too long, as the central example of evil around which, for many, reflections revolve.

Such paradigm cases, whether operating explicitly or implicitly, introduce into discussions of evil a certain emotional and moral weight. In the face of the paradigm case, we respond with shock, horror, revulsion, perhaps anger, perhaps guilt. They can become a constant test case against which we explore the adequacy of intellectual proposals about evil – whether these are theories about its nature, or conceptions of divine response to it, or purported explanations of the ‘why’ of evil.

Some theologians or philosophers avoid these culturally-prominent paradigms, focusing instead on simpler and less freighted examples. One might for instance explore the privatio boni theory with reference to a hole in a sock, or explore the nature of suffering by considering a toothache.

There are risks associated with both styles of reflection on evil. Those who reason with the help of small, clear, and relatively trivial examples (the toothache, the hole in the sock) risk offending readers by seeming insensitive to the gravity of evil. There is also the possibility that, in taking the simple case as the paradigm case, they miss an important dimension of the reality of evil. It could be that the complex entanglement of sin and suffering in, for instance, slavery and colonialism, is itself a point of real theological significance, and to focus attention only on simple examples of sin (‘I tell a lie’) and of suffering (‘I have a headache’) is to miss that which is most important to see (Kilby 2022).

Those committed to taking evil seriously through attention to some of the worst cases, on the other hand, also face risks: how seriously is seriously enough? How much recounting of particular evils must one impose on a reader in order to be sure that the demand to take evil seriously can be seen to be met? Effort to take evil seriously, and to exhibit that one has done so, can at times interfere with quality of thought and the search for truth. This is not always the case. Some, such as Alistair McFadyen and Marilyn McCord Adams, are able to combine attention to the reality of serious evil with careful analysis and arguments geared towards advancing understanding. Contributions like these require an unusual combination of intellectual and emotional discipline.

1.4 Demons and the devil

A source of considerable embarrassment for much theology since the Enlightenment, particularly for theology in the Global North, is the steady presence in authoritative sources of Christian tradition of reference to supra-human evil, personal powers of opposition to God and to humanity. Reference to such supra-human agential evil is sparse and sometimes ambiguous in the Old Testament, but strikingly pervasive across the books of the New Testament. Supra-human evil is envisaged in New Testament texts in both singular and plural terms under a wide variety of descriptions, including the devil, Satan, the evil one, the adversary, the ruler of this world, the tempter, demons, thrones, principalities and powers, authorities, and dominions. The devil consistently plays a role in the writings of the church fathers, appears in official Catholic teaching at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and is very much a part of the theology of Reformers of the sixteenth century.

Out of a range of scriptural, apocryphal, and other motifs a detailed and elaborate account of supra-human evil has coalesced, an account which – it is important to note – ought not be read back into any particular biblical reference to devil or demons. This includes a more or less elaborate origin story (the fall of Satan), a character analysis (the role of pride), a detailed role description (including in relation to the management and staffing of hell), a social analysis (how exactly the devil relates to his subordinates), and even a physical depiction (horns, tail, pitchfork, etc.).

At least one element of this elaborate account of the devil does have a significant place in the mainstream of the theological tradition, and this is as the depiction of the devil/demons as fallen angels, spiritual beings created good but fixed in freely-willed rebellion against God. This interpretation enables the priority of God, creation, and the good to be maintained. There is nothing that exists save what God creates, so the demons need to be of God’s making. There is nothing that God makes that is not good, so the evil quality of the devil or demons resides not in their very being but in the choice they have made. The evil that they represent is parasitic on the prior good of their being.

While in popular imagination God and the devil might be envisaged as equal and opposite forces, it will be clear that in the mainstream theological tradition they have never been understood in this way. The existence of devil and demons is dependent on God. Their power and activity is dependent on God’s permission and providence. It is never ultimately outside of God’s control. One might then ask why God allows this rebellion to exist and to operate within God’s world. This question is as fraught as any other around the ‘why’ of evil, and the response a theologian or theological system gives will tend to reflect the answer they give to other forms of what is essentially the same question.

Modern theology of the Global North has marginalized and ignored the role of devil and demons, of non-human agents of evil, in the Christian vision. This may in part be a response to the over-elaborated account of the devil mentioned above – a reaction against what Johnson describes as the ‘misapplication’ and ‘overextension’ of New Testament motifs (Johnson 2011). In part it is also a consequence of the distorting effect of the pressures of Enlightenment rationalism on modern theology.

2.1 The suffering of God

One particular debate about God’s response to evil has become important relatively recently in theology. The overwhelming consensus of the theological tradition until sometime in the late nineteenth century was that God is ‘immutable’, not altered or changed by anything outside God, and therefore that God does not suffer (is impassible). However, as the ‘why’ question (to which we will turn next) has risen to prominence in theology – as the theodicy problem has been felt with increasing intensity – impassibility has become a matter for intense debate. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s pithy phrase ‘[o]nly the suffering God can help’ captures the mood of a large swathe of theologians of the past century and a half (Bonhoeffer 1967: 197). To suffer with it must, it is thought, be part of the divine response to the evils afflicting a suffering world.

Those who espouse a suffering God do so in part on biblical grounds – the Old Testament depicts the Lord as passionate, involved, responsive, grieving, and so on. They argue also based on the very nature of love – ‘a God who cannot suffer cannot love either’ (Moltmann 1981: 38). They see the traditionally-conceived God as static, unmoved, and cold, and attribute the older theological tradition’s conception of God to the corrupting influence of Greek metaphysics on the thought of the church fathers and those who followed them. Above all they see divine suffering as, if not an answer to the question of evil, at least the heart of a response; the attribution of suffering to God somehow reduces the overall pressure that the theodicy question places on belief. By focusing on divine participation in suffering, thought is reoriented away from issues of divine responsibility for suffering.

While the proponents of divine suffering seemed for some time to have established a new consensus, in recent decades increasingly strong resistance to this position has emerged. A range of thinkers have argued for a more sympathetic reading of the classical tradition, and for the necessity of affirming divine impassibility as part of a coherent understanding of God as creator. Thomas Weinandy’s magisterial Does God Suffer?, published in 2000, marked a key moment in this resistance to the modern passibilist movement.

If God is truly creator of the world ex nihilo, out of nothing, then God cannot be one more actor within the world, shaped by it and interacting on the same plane as other creatures. It is the logic of this doctrine of creation which requires impassibility, and it is important to note that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo emerged in contrast with, rather than in derivation from, the philosophical sources on which early theologians drew. Critics of passibilism worry that to attribute suffering to God is to give suffering a disturbingly positive status, implicitly treating it as good and indeed divine. Thus, while there have been a range of political theologians who have championed the idea of a suffering God, there are also political dangers to this direction of thought.

Contemporary defenders of impassibilism do not suggest that imagining God as static, unloving, and distant is the price to be paid for a proper doctrine of creation, but rather that a traditional conception of creation and of the ontological difference between God and world leads to an understanding of God as radically, intimately involved and unimaginably closely present to creation. Weinandy also sets out with great clarity how a properly-understood classical Christology plays a role in thinking about the divine relationship to suffering: suffering is not divine or part of the divine nature, but a specifically human experience of suffering as well as death is through the incarnation assumed by the Second Person of the Trinity.

3.1 The problem of evil in the philosophy of religion

Philosophers of religion have introduced a number of distinctions to order the discussion. Natural evil is distinguished from moral evil, based on whether the source of the evil is in the free choice of (usually) a human being. Some might wish to extend the range of potential perpetrators of moral evil to certain primates or other non-human species. Murder and torture are examples of moral evil, illness, or the destruction caused by a tsunami typical examples of natural evil.

Alvin Plantinga was the first to distinguish between a theodicy and a ‘defence’: where a theodicy aims to account for why God allows evil, a defence more modestly aims to rebut the argument from evil, offering some account of why God might have allowed evil. A defence trades on possible reasons, not needing to make any claim about actual divine reasons.

Another, and related, distinction often made is between the so-called logical problem of evil and the evidential problem: are propositions about God’s existence, goodness, and power and the existence of evil logically incompatible, so that the coexistence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God and evil in the world are simply impossible? This was argued vigorously by J. L. Mackie in a classic article in 1955. Or is it rather that the evil in the world (including its nature and quantity) make the proposition that God exists less likely to be true? A classic version of this line of argument can be found in William Rowe’s ‘The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism’ (1979).

The predominance of interest in recent years has been in responding to evidential versions of the problem of evil: many hold that the logical version of the argument from evil was satisfactorily dealt with by Plantinga’s response to Mackie in God, Freedom and Evil (1974).

Attention to the world-view offered by evolutionary biology seems on the face of things to make a response to the evidential problem of evil more difficult. Since it is plausible to interpret ‘natural evil’ not only in terms of human suffering and death, but also with a view to what happens to individual animals and whole species over the long course of evolution, the collection of ‘evidence’, the sheer range, quantity, and duration of suffering and loss which must be accounted for, grows enormously. It is not only a matter of quantity. If death and indeed species extinction are a necessary part of the mechanism of evolution, and evolution itself is a means by which God creates the world, then it would seem there is a close link between God’s will and the millions of years of individual and species loss, of death and extinction, that we learn of from biology.

A variety of ways of responding to the problem of evil (in the specific sense of the argument from evil to the non-existence of God), have been explored, and a variety of ways of categorizing the different possibilities. Particularly rich and interesting ‘defences’ have been developed by Marilyn McCord Adams and Eleanore Stump. It is also worth noting that in recent decades ‘sceptical theism’ has attracted a good deal of attention and discussion. Here the emphasis is not on providing reasons, either possible or actual, for believing in God’s existence, power, and goodness in face of the existence of evil, but instead on denying that we ought to imagine we have access to such reasons. If God is as classically understood, then one ought not to expect that finite and limited creatures such as ourselves would be capable of understanding God’s reasons. Another possibility is to revise the classical understanding of God: process theology is built on a conception of God’s power and the divine relation to the world which, while departing significantly from classical Christian commitments, opens the way to a relatively easy and clear resolution to the problem of evil, as David Griffin has shown. A related if less radically revisionist approach is developed in Thomas Jay Oord’s ‘open and relational’ theology through the introduction of the concept of ‘necessary kenosis’ (2017).

While the perspective of evolutionary biology can broaden and intensify one’s sense of the problem of evil, those who examine it have by and large chosen from a similar range of possible responses to the problem as have other thinkers.

3.2 Theodicy, anti-theodicy, and theology

While philosophers of religion, especially in the analytical tradition, have paid a great deal of attention to the problem of evil, Christian theological discussions have often been marked by a forceful rejection of theodicy, at least in its theoretical forms. One can find such rejections in the writings of, to name a few, Terrence Tilley, Kenneth Surin, Rowan Williams, John Swinton, David Burrell, David Bentley Hart, and Karen Kilby. The theodicy that is rejected is typically understood in the broadest terms (i.e. to include ‘defences’), and the rejection is not so much of individual arguments but of the very practice of searching for answers to the problem of evil. Some theologians dismiss all theodicy, while others introduce a distinction between theoretical and practical theodicy, and reject the former in favour of the latter – what is needed is practices of resistance to evil rather than theories to account for evil. The ‘anti-theodicy’ position has also had certain longstanding representatives among philosophers of religion (e.g. D. Z. Phillips) and begun to gain some degree of attention and discussion in analytic philosophy of religion circles (cf. Trakakis). However, it remains a relatively marginal issue in that context; among systematic theologians, by contrast, at least among those who have not been trained in analytic theology, the dismissal of theodicy is very much a mainstream position.

Apart from noting that the widespread concern with theodicy is a peculiarly modern enlightenment phenomenon, theologians typically raise two kinds of objections. The first is theological, in the narrow sense of the word. The ‘God’ who is discussed, whose existence is to be believed or disbelieved according to the outcome of the wrestlings of the philosophers of religion, is an abstraction, a being who can be philosophically conjured with the help of a few ‘omni’-concepts (omniscience, omnipotence, omni-benevolence). Theologians often maintain that to try to think about God apart from the biblical narratives and the wider context of Christian thought and practice, without discussion of the Incarnation or the Trinity, is not to think properly about God at all. They are wary of the idea that there is a universal concept of God, available to pure reason and philosophical analysis, which is only secondarily clothed with ‘extra’ concepts from a particular religious context. They are also often suspicious that the philosopher of religion’s God might be one being among others, bigger and better than all other beings but fundamentally on the same plane of existence. They worry, in other words, that a proper understanding of divine transcendence, of the fundamental difference between God and all other beings implied by the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, is missed in this philosophical construct.

Theologians also, secondly, offer moral objections to theodicy, and it is here that the greatest weight is typically placed. The concern is that to offer a theodicy is in one way or another to justify evil. It is to put the thinker into the wrong relationship to evils. The practice of theodicy leads us to look at all that is horrifically wrong in the world and persuade ourselves that in one way or another it is not really so bad. It encourages us to attempt to adopt a perspective in which we can accommodate ourselves to evil, in which we can perceive a sort of intellectual harmony within which evil has its place. Often these critiques of theodicy have an element of exaggeration or unfairness to them – the worst, most morally tone-deaf exemplars of theodicy are made to represent the whole. Whether the most interesting and sensitive of the work of the philosophers of religion – the writings of Adams or Stump, for instance – can be accused of the sorts of moral failings theologians sometimes scathingly attribute to all theodicy is not clear. It is arguable, furthermore, that sceptical theism, which does not so much give reasons for the existence of evil as giving reasons for an inability to give reasons, also evades these critiques.

The morally tinged – or even morally scandalised and indignant – antitheodical posture is not only the preserve of recent Christian theologians. Voltaire’s novella Candide can be seen as an eighteenth-century non-Christian anti-theodicy, ferociously satirizing Leibniz’s claim that we live in the ‘best of all possible worlds’. One reading the book of Job also constitutes a morally tinged anti-theodicy: the Lord, appearing in the whirlwind, offers no explanation of why Job has suffered, or why more generally the innocent suffer. One of the few things that is unambiguously clear is that Job’s comforters, who presume they understood the place of suffering in the divine order, are in the wrong. Job, who has railed against the order of things and asked questions without answers, has ‘spoken rightly of me’, according to the Lord, while his friends, presuming to understand, have put themselves into a false relationship to their God. Their situation can only be set right through the offering of sacrifices.