Word: evil
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sure, traditionalist Catholics and Evangelical Protestants still talk of individual evil, original sin, even of the devil and demons-and did so in the wake of what happened in the jungles of Guyana. But these concepts have not exactly been popular among more liberal theologians. Brown University's John Giles Milhaven, for example, refuses to attach the label "evil" even to Jonestown. "I think what really happens with people like Hitler and Jones," says he, "is simple psychological sickness. The only response [to Guyana], it seems to me, is pity for everybody involved, not moral horror. Psychological illnesses that...
...University of Toronto's Gregory Baum, like Milhaven a former Catholic priest, agrees. The enormity of the Rev. Jim Jones' deed, he maintains, in no way discredits the liberal emphasis on social and institutional evil as opposed to individual sin. Yale's Margaret Farley also defends the modern de-emphasis on personal evil. "One of the advantages of looking to social evil is that you don't neutralize evil at all, but you don't become paranoid about it either...
While Jonestown may raise questions about upbeat liberal theologies, it also raises a classic problem for orthodox belief, one as old as the Book of Job or as current as next week's list of senseless murders: Why does evil exist at all? If God is benevolent, and if he is all powerful, why does he not prevent evil? If evil exists, so the argument runs, then either God's love or his power must be limited...
...Orleans' Loyola University summarized it last week: "God freely decided to limit his own freedom and put no limit on ours. We certainly are capable of making a botch of it." If God had programmed all human beings to be good, he explains, there might be no evil, but there would be no virtue either. God chose to let man choose...
Philosopher Alvin C. Plantinga of Michigan's Calvin College offers an intricate, logical refinement of Augustine's theory in God, Freedom and Evil (1974, reissued in 1977 by Eerdmans). He contends that it is unreasonable to argue that an omnipotent God could have created a world in which moral evil is nonexistent and, at the same time, man's spirit is free. Plantinga concludes that the existence of evil does not render the existence of God improbable, much less preclude it. But he grants that this does not solve the problem of "theodicy," the effort, in John...