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This article aims to demonstrate that Thomas Aquinas's metaphysics of being, in which evil is considered a privation or lack of perfection introduced only by the creature against God's intention, is a remarkable starting point for solving the main problems involved in the modern and contemporary debate on the problem of evil. It also seeks to prove that Aquinas's position is neither reducible to an 'optimistic theodicy' -such as Leibniz's theodicy- nor to a 'free will defence'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article raises the question whether Christianity might itself, at least in part, be responsible for the modern waning of belief in God because of its New Testament teaching, unlike that of the Old Testament, that God is 'love.' After examining whether the Bible does in fact present two incompatible views of God, the article looks at some signs of how the traditional Western view of God might be changing, in response to modern sensibilities. It concludes by considering how it might still be possible to speak about the God of Christianity despite the new cultural conditions of today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I examine the idea that evil is to be understood as a kind of absence or a privation. I put forward two arguments against this idea. The first claims that if evil is an absence it becomes causally powerless, which seems strongly contradicted by experience and revelation. The other argument says that the idea that evil is an absence cannot do justice to the evil of depression. Depression is a set of feelings which are all too real, and so cannot be understood as literally identical with a set of absences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experience of human suffering presents an ongoing challenge to believers who seek to sustain their relationship with God in the face of the tragedies of human history. Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P. is a seminal Christian thinker who has made a conscious attempt to take into account the harsh reality of suffering in his systematic theology. Rejecting theoretical attempts to reconcile belief in a good, all-powerful God with the reality of evil and suffering, Schillebeeckx employs the categories of narrative and memory in his articulation of a Christian response to evil and suffering. He tells the story of Jesus as the story of God. The God who is disclosed in the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus is the God who is “pure positivity”– the source of life and the opponent of evil and suffering. God's action in and through Jesus provides clues to the way in which God is present and active in the lives of suffering human beings. This revelation summons Christians to become people of memory and of praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]