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.

Table of Contents

Preface The Greater Good The Intellectual and the Existential The Problem of Evil and the Problem of the Slightest Toothache The God of Love Is God an Agent? The Real God Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author

ANDREW GLEESON Lecturer in Philosophy at the Flinders University of South Australia. He has previously taught philosophy at the Australian Catholic University and the University of Adelaide. He has published articles in the philosophy of mind, ethics and the philosophy of religion.

Reviews

"This is a marvelous book. Gleeson's suggestion that it is God's love, not His moral goodness, that should occupy central place in our thinking gives to the problem of evil a shape radically different from that familiar in contemporary philosophy of religion. But the significance of the book reaches well beyond these issues: for Gleeson's approach challenges the conventional distinction between an intellectual and an 'existential' enquiry -- between the philosopher and the human being -- that will be of interest to any philosopher who is seriously concerned about the character of his or her work." - David Cockburn, University of Wales Trinity Saint David's, UK. "This is a very readable, sensitive and thorough rethinking, incisively critical of recent work in theodicy and of over-anthropomorphic conceptions of God. Gleeson's account of God as love itself - as disclosed from an existential rather than an impersonal, objectifying, perspective - is a movingly insightful interpretation of the logic of Christian faith. Philosophers of religion will be prompted by Gleeson's work to pay increased attention, in the continuing debates over God's existence, to exactly what it is that is at stake!" - John Bishop,University of Auckland, New Zealand.