Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-wq484 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T08:48:03.762Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Evil and the Problem of God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

George D. Chryssides
George D. Chryssides
Affiliation:
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Plymouth Polytechnic
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The purpose of this article is to develop a solution to the problem of evil within the context of a ‘revisionist' concept of God. The traditional approach to the problem of evil has been to assume one particular model of God, and then to ascertain how evil can be reconciled with that model. I hope to demonstrate that this is a mistake. What needs to be done, rather, is to acknowledge the existence of evil, and to ask whether this problem is generated by a faulty model of God. What I shall contend is that it is the traditional concept of God which generates this area of philosophical and theological perplexity, not the nature and function of evil. In particular, I shall attempt to show that the problem admits of a much more acceptable solution if the Christian believer abandons the notion of God as ‘a person’ or a disembodied agent, and conceives of God in a less overtly ‘personalistic’ manner.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , December 1987 , pp. 467 - 475
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 467 note 1 This was first read as a paper at the Assembly of the World's Religions, New Jersey, 1985Google Scholar, and appears by kind permission of the organizers, to whom the author wishes to express his thanks.

page 467 note 2 Chryssides, George D., ‘God and the Tao’, Religious Studies, XIX (1983), 1–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 468 note 1 Tillich, Paul, Systematic Theology (Welwyn: Nisbet, 1953).Google Scholar

page 468 note 2 Ibid.

page 468 note 3 Ogden, Schubert M., Christ Without Myth (New York: Harper, 1961)Google Scholar, and Bultmann, Rudolf, Kerygma and Myth, ed. by Bartsch, W. H. (London: SPCK, 1962, 1964), p. 168.Google Scholar

page 468 note 4 Wittgenstein, L., Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. by Barrett, Cyril (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970).Google Scholar

page 468 note 5 Braithwaite, R. B., An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief (Cambridge University Press, 1955;Google Scholar reprinted in Mitchell, B. G. (ed.), Philosophy of Religion (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

page 468 note 6 Buren, Paul M. van, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (London: SCM, 1963).Google Scholar

page 468 note 7 Cupitt, Don, Taking Leave of God (London: SCM, 1980).Google Scholar

page 468 note 8 Swinburne, R. G., The Existence of God (Oxford, 1981).Google Scholar

page 468 note 9 The United Reformed Church, Alternative Order for Service of Ordination, with Responses, Schedule D (revised, 1983).Google Scholar

page 469 note 1 Tzu, Lao, Tao Te Ching, transl. by Lau, D. C. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), vv. 56, 117.Google Scholar

page 469 note 2 Hick, John, Death and Eternal Life (London: Fount, 1979), p. 453.Google Scholar

page 469 note 3 E.g., Daly, Mary, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973).Google Scholar

page 469 note 4 McFague, Sally, Metaphorical Theology (London: SCM, 1983).Google Scholar

page 470 note 1 Matthew 7.1; New International Version (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979).Google Scholar

page 470 note 2 I have explored this issue further in my ‘Meaning, Metaphor and Metatheology’, Scottish journal of Theology, vol. 38, 1985, 145–153.

page 471 note 1 Phillips, D. Z. has already ably argued this point in his chapter entitled ‘Superstition and Petitionary Prayer’, in The Concept of Prayer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 112–30.Google Scholar

page 472 note 1 Aquinas, St Thomas, Summa Theologica, Part I, ch. xlix (London: Thomas Baker, 1906), p. 125.Google Scholar

page 473 note 1 See Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, transl. by Macquarrie, John and Robinson, Edward (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), Sect. II.1, 262, p. 307.Google Scholar

page 474 note 1 Cupitt, Don, Taking Leave of God (London: SCM, 1980), p. 86.Google Scholar Cf, e.g., Psalm 139.

page 475 note 1 Flew, Antony, in Flew, Antony and Maclntyre, Alasdair (eds.), Theology and Falsification (London: SCM, 1955), pp. 96–9.Google Scholar