Belief in God in the face of suffering is one of the most intractable
problems of Christian theology. Many respond to the spiritual challenge
of evil by ignoring it, blaming God, or insisting on the inherent
meaninglessness of life. In this book, William Greenway contends that we
don’t have to deny our moral selves by either ignoring evil or
abandoning our moral sensibilities toward it. We can open our eyes fully
to suffering and evil, and our own complicity in them. We can do so
because it is only in this full acceptance of the world’s guilt and our
own that we make ourselves fully open to agape, to being seized by love
of others and God. Inspired by the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas
and the Christian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
The Challenge of Evil
lovingly explains how we can look squarely at the overwhelming
suffering in the world and still, by grace, have faith in a good and
loving God.