The first comprehensive study of Ibn Sînâ’s Theodicy.

Only the most naïve or tendentious among us would deny the extent and intensity of suffering in the world. Can one hold, consistently with the common view of suffering in the world, that there is an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God? This book argues that one can. Wandering in Darkness first presents the moral psychology and value theory within which one typical traditional theodicy, namely, that of Thomas Aquinas, is embedded. It explicates Aquinas's account of the good for human beings, including the nature of love and union among persons. Eleonore Stump also makes use of developments in neurobiology and developmental psychology to illuminate the nature of such union. Stump then turns to an examination of narratives. In a methodological section focused on epistemological issues, the book uses recent research involving autism spectrum disorder to argue that some philosophical problems are best considered in the context of narratives. Using the methodology argued for, the book gives detailed, innovative exegeses of the stories of Job, Samson, Abraham and Isaac, and Mary of Bethany. In the context of these stories and against the backdrop of Aquinas's other views, Stump presents Aquinas's own theodicy, and shows that Aquinas's theodicy gives a powerful explanation for God's allowing suffering. She concludes by arguing that this explanation constitutes a consistent and cogent defense for the problem of suffering.

As a traditional theological issue and in its broader secular varieties, theodicy remains a problem in the philosophy of religion. In this remarkable book, Sami Pihlström provides a novel critical reassessment of the theodicy discourse addressing the problem of evil and suffering. He develops and defends an antitheodicist view, arguing that theodicies seeking to render apparently meaningless suffering meaningful or justified from a ‘God’s-Eye-View’ ultimately rely on metaphysical realism failing to recognize the individual perspective of the sufferer. Pihlström thus shows that a pragmatist approach to the realism issue in the philosophy of religion is a vital starting point for a re-evaluation of the problem of theodicy. With its strong positions and precise arguments, the volume provides a new approach which is likely to stimulate discussion in the wider academic world of philosophy of religion.

The seven essays collected in this book address the history of modern ideas and contemporary cultural issues. The first is the discourse of Marquard's acceptance of the Sigmund Freud prize; the second addresses the equivalence of modernity and the theodicee; the third confronts the idea of "meaning"; the fourth considers the notion of world history; the fifth addresses world alienation; the sixth deals with the human sciences; and the seventh is a mediation on chance and luck as essential aspects of the human condition. "

Tsunamis, earthquakes, famines, diseases, wars -- these and other devastating forces lead Christians to ask painful questions. Is God all-powerful? Is God good? How can God allow so much innocent human suffering? These questions, taken together, have been called the "theodicy problem," and in this book Thomas Long explores what preachers can and should say in response ... he offers biblically based approaches to preaching on theodicy, guided by Jesus' parable of the wheat and the tares and the "greatest theodicy text in Scripture"--The book of Job. - from book jacket.

Herbert McCabe was one of the most original and creative theologians of recent years. Continuum has published numerous volumes of unpublished typescripts left behind by him following his untimely death in 2001. This book is the sixth to appear. McCabe was deeply immersed in the philosophical theology of St Thomas Aquinas and was responsible in part for the notable revival of interest in the thought of Aquinas in our time. Here he tackles the problem of evil by focusing and commenting on what Aquinas said about it. What should we mean by words such as 'good', 'bad', 'being', 'cause', 'creation', and 'God'? These are McCabe's main questions. In seeking to answer them he demonstrates why it cannot be shown that evil disproves God's existence. He also explains how we can rightly think of evil in a world made by God. McCabe's approach to God and evil is refreshingly unconventional given much that has been said about it of late. Yet it is also very traditional. It will interest and inform anyone seriously interested in the topic.

Many ministers and faithful Christians instinctively recoil from "washed in the blood" theology, but they hesitate to discuss the subject. This book, by one of the world's leading authorities on atonement doctrine, shows how the "purchased by the blood" idea is out of step with the teachings of Jesus, who said that God reaches the pure in heart without any sacrificial payment. The successors of Paul took the Apostle Paul's sacrificial metaphors far too literally and turned them into an imagined "mechanics" of salvation in which God is "paid off." Over the centuries, this manipulative idea has been the source of confusion and mischief, from the anti-Semitic superstitions of the Middle Ages, to the pedagogy of shame taught in many fundamentalist churches today. Our understanding of Christ will be enhanced if we can recover the original apostolic Christology, which was based on Christ as Creator and life-giver.

As news reports of the horrific December 2004 tsunami in Asia reached the rest of the world, commentators were quick to seize upon the disaster as proof of either God s power or God s nonexistence, asking over and over, How could a good and loving God if such exists allow such suffering? In The Doors of the Sea David Bentley Hart speaks at once to those skeptical of Christian faith and to those who use their Christian faith to rationalize senseless human suffering. He calls both to recognize in the worst catastrophes not the providential will of God but rather the ongoing struggle between the rebellious powers that enslave the world and the God who loves it wholly.

My thesis--Theodicy and Anti-Theodicy: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Theology--examines the collapse of theodicy by critically engaging the writings of Richard Rubenstein, Eliezer Berkovits, and Emil Fackenheim. These three Jewish theologians testify to how modern religious sensibilities irrevocably shift after Auschwitz. They illustrate in unique (even exaggerated) form how contemporary Jewish thinkers strategically reinvent theological and literary traditions in response to historical change. My research indicates that modern scholarship on religion needs to be radically rethought under the impact of non-Protestant religious cultures. I have found (based on readings of biblical, rabbinic and post-Holocaust Jewish texts) that religious life and thought are neither as theocentric nor as exercised by theodicy as western scholars have heretofore assumed. The methodological focus of my research is two-fold, both theological and literary. Theologically, I examine how Rubenstein, Berkovits, and Fackenheim displace theodicies found in rabbinic and modern philosophical strands of Jewish tradition. Instead, they engage a mode of discourse that I call anti-theodicy--by which I mean religious responses to catastrophic suffering that do not justify, explain, or accept the relation between God and evil. Instead of vindicating God, anti-theodicies defend afflicted human persons even against God and providence. My dissertation's second focus concerns the use of traditional texts. Rubenstein, Berkovits and Fackenheim reinvent tradition by sifting through a broad corpus of classical tropes and texts. They jettison time-honored theodicies and adopt a heretofore marginalized anti-theodic stance. Their revisions, I argue, reflect a powerful and distinctively "post-Holocaust" shift in the theological and readerly canons of modern Judaism.

Animal suffering constitutes perhaps the greatest challenge to rational belief in the existence of God. Considerations that render human suffering theologically intelligible seem inapplicable to animal suffering. In this book, Dougherty defends radical possibilities for animal afterlife that allow a soul-making theodicy to apply to their case.