A Frightening Love: Recasting the Problem of Evil Hardback

Philosophers assume the problem of how a good God can create a world with so much evil divides into an intellectual problem and a personal problem, philosophers attending to the former. Many philosophers offer answers to this problem -- called theodicies -- that are moral failures. A Frightening Love argues that the problem of evil is a struggle for the human heart between a God who is Love itself, and a morality of compassionate indignation that stands up for the victims of evil. The problem does not thereby cease to be intellectual, though we need an enlarged understanding of what that is. That understanding can free us from the assumption that reality is a univocal notion and the consequent picture of God as an immaterial moral agent postulated to explain the world. The alternative is that God is love itself, a reality of a very different sort.