Can God Be Trusted?: Faith and the Challenge of Evil

209 Pages·1998·8.61 MB·English

by  John G. Stackhouse Jr.

Can God Be Trusted?
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Can God
Be Trusted?
Faith and
the Challenge
of Evil
John G. Stackhouse, Jr.
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1998
Oxford University Press
Oxford NewYork
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and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1998 by John G. Stackhouse, Jr.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, NewYork, NewYork 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stackhouse, John Gordon
Can God be trusted? : faith and the challenge of evil /
John G. Stackhouse, Jr.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-511727-1
1. Theodicy. 2. Good and evil. 3. Trust in God—Christianity.
1. Tide.
BT 16o.S82 1998
2311.8—dc21 97-50588
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint
several selections from Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov,
trans. David McDuff, © 1993.
9876S4321
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
to Mom and Dad
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction I
PART ONE: PROBLEMS
CHAPTER ONE
Is There a Problem? II
CHAPTER TWO
What Is Evil? 30
CHAPTER THREE
Further Problems 45
PART TWO: RESPONSES
CHAPTER FOUR
Other Angles 57
CHAPTER FIVE
A Good World After All? 68
CHAPTER SIX
The Fork in the Road 88
CHAPTER SEVEN
Thinking and Living 154
Notes 177
Index 195
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WRITING THIS BOOK WAS MADE EASIER
because of grants received from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada and because of a research leave granted
for the academic year 1995—96 by the University of Manitoba.
The resulting book is better than it would have been because of
the help of a number of generous people. Jon Pott of the Wm. B. Eerd-
mans Publishing Company and Rodney Clapp of InterVarsity Press
furnished me with several pertinent books from their worthy lines.
William Hasker kindly sent me several of his excellent articles on
related subjects. Michael Peterson's fine anthology on the problem of
evil, cited in the notes, introduced me to key texts early in my
research. Alvin Plantinga tutored me patiently in the finer points of his
philosophy, although I may yet not have gotten it quite right. Mark
Fretz, David Frum, and Philip Yancey graciously offered advice to this
ivory-tower scholar on the world of trade publishing. And my
research assistants Rachel Van Caeseele and Patricia Loewen were
models of cheerful industry and high competence.
Audiences of lectures I have given on this subject at the University
of Manitoba and at Regent College, Vancouver, provoked me by their
questions to revise my thought in several places. The following readers
each offered wise advice on earlier versions of the manuscript: Bruce
Annan, Rob Boschmann, Matt Floding, Larry Hurtado, Klaus Kloster-
maier, Marie Loewen, Valerie Lunau, Anne McKenzie, Chris Manuel,
Martin Marty, Mickey Maudlin, Charlie Newsom, Joni Nicolou, Sheila
Parks, Clark Pinnock, Michael Stack, Brent Stackhouse, and Cindra
StackhouseTaetzsch. These readers must be excused from any respon-
sibility for what I have done with their good counsel, of course, espe-