Noe’s Literature Review

During John Noe’s doctoral program a few years ago and as part of his second course on systematic theology, he wrote a paper on “The Origin of Evil.” The course required a comprehensive survey of articles related to this topic in two theological journals and one major Christian magazine. He picked the following:

• Journal of Evangelical Theological Society – conservative (a 23-year period).
• Encounter – the journal of Christian Theological Seminary—liberal (a 19-year period).
• Christianity Today magazine – conservative (a 32-year period).

The purpose of Noe’s paper was to demonstrate that the failure to biblically account for the origin of evil accounts for much of the equivocating, mumbo-jumbo language, confusion, conflict, compromise, and ambiguity in the literature. In this brief topic point we will only share a few excerpts as examples from the articles he uncovered. Every article, however, that he found could be classified either as an attempt to:

1)     Protect, relieve, or exonerate God of the responsibility for evil—insisting “God did not originate evil – this would be incompatible with his holiness.” Therefore, He only “allows,’ “permits,” or “tolerates” it.

2)    Tamper with or compromise one of the trilemma components:

• Impose limitations on one of God’s two divine attributes—God is not wholly good, because He allows these bad things to happen and will not eliminate evil.
• Or, God is not totally omnipotent, preferring the concept of a good God Who cannot intervene.
• Or, (the 3rd component) maintain that evil does not exist—it’s only an abstraction and not real.

Source:

1 Why Not Evil? (future book – est. 2014) by John Noe