Truths About Evil, Sin, and the Demonic : Toward an Integral Theodicy for the Twenty-First Century

Cartas de um Terráqueo ao Planeta BrasilThe survival of faith in each generation requires that the problem of radical evil is carefully addressed and that explanations are lucidly communicated, including reasonable grounds for living a God-centered life. But what happens if we fail at this hard task? Allow me to paraphrase both Dostoevsky and Nietzche: If the God of tradition cannot be affirmed, then “everything is permitted,” crimes will go unpunished, and all the boorish rhetoric about Christian morality is suited only for weaklings and fools.For these and other reasons, theologians have often been driven to formulate “solutions” to the perennial quandary of evil and the gross suffering that results. In ancient times the problem was first addressed with systematic depth in St. Augustine’s so-called free-will defense of God’s goodness. Only much later did this endeavor become the precarious technical discipline of theodicy, which isolates the problem of evil and submits it to theological and philosophic analysis. This book puts what I believe are the best of these efforts on display for your consideration.I will ask questions such as these: Have such efforts provided real benefit? Have they rescued theism and sincere faith by reconciling the God of love with the depredations of evil? The short answer, as you will see, is both “yes” and “no”: Yes, because most of the classic theodicies seem plausible, and no because they often point us in such different directions that we are often left bewildered and even demoralized.This book escorts readers on this journey of millennia and is guaranteed to lead to a few surprises. One of them is that a quest for an integral theodicy, a grand synthesis of the best insights of all prior views, may provide our best hope for a rational approach to the challenge of evil. Moreover we may find important support from a purported revelatory text that seems to address key theodicies of the past in ways that support such an approach. The Problem of Evil and the Predicament of Theodicy As Christians or theists we are moved to share the truth of God's love for humankind. But how can we speak of such providential care in a world rife with crime, war, racism, genocide, and even ecocide? In response to this predicament, a theodicy proposes a rational "defense" of God's goodness that offers consolation to victims and hope to all believers. Truths about Evil, Sin, and the Demonic provides a sweeping history of the discipline of theodicy that focuses on its strategic turning points and its possible future. Belitsos argues that, because of the atrocities of the last century and the threat of horrendous evils in the coming century, we need to marshal the most explanatory elements of all previous theodicies and then drive toward an "integrative" model based on a creative synthesis. The author also turns to a modern revelatory source that supports his argument for such a "meta-theodicy." He concludes by critically engaging with this source and the entire tradition in his call for an apophatically informed integral theodicy.