Evil and the God of narrative: Four types of contemporary Christian theodicy (Alvin Plantinga, James Cone, Dorothy Soelle, David Griffin, John Hick)

Since the middle of the twentieth century, there has been a proliferation of western Christian academic treatments of the problem of evil. With this increase of works on this subject, there has come a need for categories that can serve as organizing tools and lenses through which to view this mass of material. This dissertation builds on the previous work in this area by John Hick, Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, and Kenneth Surin in order to present a new typology for this material, one that will account more adequately than these previous attempts for the complexity and diversity of contemporary Christian theodicies.; The assumption underlying my typology is that the central challenge for a theodicy is to address at what point(s) in the Christian narrative God deals with or acts with reference to evil and suffering. In light of this assumption, the thesis of this work is as follows: there are four main answers that have emerged to this challenge, with some writers focusing on God's activity in creation; others on the life and death of Jesus Christ; some claiming God primarily overcomes evil in the present; and others, aware of the existence of so much unredeemed suffering, saying God will only fully deal with evil at the end of time. That is to say, in the contemporary period, there are four main types of theodicy: protological, Christological, enestological, and eschatological.; In the work that follows, Alvin Plantinga (protological), James Cone and Dorothee Soelle (Christological), David Griffin (enestological), and John Hick (eschatological) serve as paradigmatic representatives of these types. Through a consideration of these authors, I conclude that each of the four types contributes key insights into a Christian approach to the problem of evil, and that none can be bypassed without also losing its concomitant strengths. As such, a maximal Christian theodicy will be one that somehow integrates elements of all four approaches into its response to the reality of evil.