User:Thomasmeeks/Evil and the God of Love

NOTE: I userfied this page and took the liberty of giving it more of an encyclopedic layout. &mdash; Deckiller 05:09, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Evil and the God of Love is a theological book written by John Hick and published in 1966.

Synopsis
The Preface states that: “The fact of evil constitutes the most serious objection there is to the Christian belief in a God of Love.” The book briefly examines treatments of monism and dualism as to good and evil in Plato, Mill, and Brightman and the Christian Science view of evil as illusion. It then considers the Augustinian theodicy, which looks back to the fall and sin from misused freedom, and its historic resonances in Catholic and Reformed thought. Irenaeus, the first systematic Christian theologian, wrote two centuries before Augustine. His theodicy, a different rendering of Biblical and Hellenistic thought, was developed as flowing from man’s weakness and immaturity, which call forth God’s love and compassion. In it, the world remains systematically ambiguous, interpretable in either naturalistic or theistic terms. Moral evil is a mystery that may conceal “a future so good as to render acceptable, in retrospect, the whole of human experience.“ The last section is “A Theodicy for Today.”