An overview of findings from an in-depth inductive study of ‘the lexical, exegetical, conceptual, and theological study of evil from the Hebrew text of Genesis’ provides key insights into the broad use of the primary lexeme(s) for evil (ra as an adjective, raa as a verb, and raah as a noun). The use of evil is followed sequentially through each occurrence in Genesis to assess its meaning and concept contextually. The plot conflict of good and evil is observed from the beginning to its bookend. Evil is never called good nor found to be the absence of good, but rather, the corruption of creational and covenantal goodness. God is found to work in and through flawed and dysfunctional humans to overturn evil and accomplish his good creational and covenantal purposes.

Logical arguments from evil against the existence of God are the strongest form of arguments from evil. They maintain that the all-good, all-powerful God of traditional theism is logically incompatible with the evil in the world. Given that the most well-known logical argument from evil remains the argument put forward by John Mackie over fifty years ago, I begin by setting out Mackie’s argument in detail as well as Alvin Plantinga’s well-regarded critique of it. I then discuss Mackie’s not well-known confusing response to Plantinga’s critique along with attempts by Hugh LaFollette and Quentin Smith to support Mackie’s argument, which fail to take into account Mackie’s own concession to Plantinga’s critique. I then discuss my own attempt in 2019 to provide a Mackie-style logical argument from evil and the reception it has received. I end by suggesting that further discussion might best be pursued by taking up the related question of whether an objective ethics can by adequately supported without appealing to the existence of the God of traditional theism.

A Christian approach to suffering, sin, and evil cannot offer now a full theodicy. We now ‘know in part’ only regarding divine purposes in allowing suffering, sin, and evil. We can clarify instead how God interacts in righteousness with people as their God of promise and voucher in the midst of suffering, sin, and evil. To that end, this article illuminates a divine effort toward human reconciliation with God in righteousness and resurrection, despite our gaps in explaining suffering, sin, and evil. It identifies current reconciliation with God and resurrection by God that do not fully explain suffering, sin, and evil, but can be a voucher now in human experience and life for eventual eschatological reparations promised by God. If the Spirit of God can be such a voucher, so also can the reconciliation and resurrection now empowered by that Spirit. This article recognizes a special role for the divine ‘fruit of the Spirit’ identified by Paul. It also explains how this role figures in spiritual resurrection with Christ now, in advance of any resurrection of the body. The article contends that the spiritual resurrection in question emerges through reconciliation with God now in volitional cooperation with God’s unique moral personality traits.

This paper brings together several issues in Aquinas’s thought on God’s primary causality, providence, and the reading of scripture. Herein I argue that God’s primary causality is to be understood in terms of His being the source of all actuality. From there I go on to integrate Aquinas’s account of providence with the account of God’s primacy. With God’s primary causality and providence in place, I then go on to address the theme pertinent to this special edition, and that is God’s response to sin in Aquinas’s reading of scripture.

This contribution proposes an interpretation of Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy of mathematics. It is argued that Aquinas’s philosophy of mathematics is a coherent view whose main features enable us to understand it as a moderate realism according to which mathematical objects have an esse intentionale. This esse intentionale involves both mathematicians’ intellectual activity and natural things being knowable mathematically. It is shown that, in Aquinas’s view, mathematics’ constructive part does not conflict with mathematical realism. It is also held that mathematics’ imaginative reasoning is coherent with Aquinas’s doctrine of formal abstraction and his realistism. It focuses on some of Aquinas’s texts, which it places within their textual and doctrinal context and interprets them in the light of some historical elements.

This essay endeavors a correlation between Bernard Lonergan’s ‘four-point hypothesis’ – a theological proposal integrating trinitarian theology and the supernatural order of ‘created grace’ – and the sacraments of initiation. The same formal structure that Lonergan discerned in the experience of grace, itself a means of participation in the life of the Trinity, is replicated in the sacramental reception of that grace in those ritual acts whereby one is made a Christian. This at once serves as a ‘proof of concept’, lending credence to the Lonerganian proposal, and provides a speculative framework for understanding how it is that the sacraments introduce Christians into the divine life.

Significant attention has been devoted to the problem of ‘divine hiddenness’ proposed by JL Schellenberg. I propose a novel response that involves denying part of the empirical premise in divine hiddenness arguments, which holds that nonresistant nonbelievers are capable of relationship with God. While Plantinga and others in ‘reformed’ epistemology have at times appealed to original sin as an explanation for divine hiddenness, such responses might seem outlandish to many, given the way that many find nonbelievers to be no more or less epistemically or morally blameworthy than believers. Further, such appeals to original sin seem to give a ‘just-so’ story that at least leaves the situation dialectically balanced. I show that a classically Augustinian notion of original sin can provide a sufficient response to those objections, and that appeal to original sin can form an empirically grounded response to the divine hiddenness problem, beyond a simple defense. If the possibility of original sin-type scenarios is compatible with God’s perfect love, then the phenomenon of apparently nonresistant nonbelievers would push us toward considering the possibility that humans have lost those capacities for relationship with God by a Fall-like event in the past.

In the first part of this paper I draw on some reflections offered by Descartes and Malebranche on the dangers of anthropomorphic conceptions of God, in order to suggest that there is something misguided about the way in which the so-called problem of evil is commonly framed. In the second part, I ask whether the problem of evil becomes easier to deal with if we adopt a non-personalist account of God, of the kind found in Aquinas. I consider the sense in which God is termed ‘good’ on this latter conception, and while not proposing that it can justify or explain the evil and suffering in the world, I suggest that the world’s manifest imperfections are compatible with the existence of a loving creator who is the source of the existence of the world and of the goodness found in created things.

This article considers the claim that miraculous healings are essential to present-day evangelization. I contrast this perspective with that of the Baroque scholastic theologian John Poinsot. Like his contemporaries, Poinsot is concerned with offering a robust defense of the Christian faith but is rather circumspect with respect to the role that the miraculous should play. I argue that Poinsot’s reasons are not only valid, but the positive framework he develops for defending the articles of the faith helps contemporary evangelists successfully navigate the pitfalls of postmodernity.

Virtue ethics tells us to ‘act in accordance with the virtues’, but can often be accused, for example, in Aristotle’s Ethics, of helping itself without argument to an account of what the virtues are. This paper is, stylistically, an affectionate tribute to the Angelic Doctor, and it works with a correspondingly Thomistic background and approach. In it I argue for the view that there is at least one correct list of the virtues, and that we can itemise at least seven items in the list, namely the four cardinal and three theological virtues.

This article outlines one way in which Joseph Ratzinger’s eschatology could contribute to reducing the risk humanity now creates to its own survival. Studies of ‘Existential Risk’ warn that hazards arising from Artificial Intelligence, Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change, and Engineered Pathogens require mitigation to safeguard the future of the human race from a calamitous end. Preventative measures, however, entail sacrifice, and there is no shortage of resistance to regulation of behaviours and technological development. Ethics of empathy, utility, and duties reach breaking point when stretched to overcome the temporal and moral gap between present agency and future well-being.

This article proposes that Ratzinger’s theology of history and commitment to eschatological realism offers an intertwined double benefit: his warning about the danger of conflating hope in God’s Kingdom with hope in a future world humanity could perfect for itself opens up the uniquely rich ground of a trans-historical hope in Jesus Christ, in which an impactful relationship of love for humanity’s future can put down roots today.