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Can God Be Trusted? Faith and the Challenge of Evil, by John G. Stackhouse, Jr. (Oxford University Press, 196 pp.; $25, hardcover). Reviewed by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who teaches literature, history, and women's studies at Emory University.

If God is all good and all-powerful, how can evil exist? The problem, known to theologians as theodicy, has haunted Christianity from its distant origins in the Old Testament. Why should God have visited untold miseries upon Job, his most exemplary and faithful servant? How may we explain, much less accept, the death of "innocent" babies? The destruction of "good" people and their homes through tornadoes or earthquakes? The indiscriminate ravages of famines, floods, and plagues?

If anything, human impatience with pain, suffering, and destruction seems to have increased with the passage of centuries, perhaps because we moderns have become more arrogant about our ability to judge the good and the bad in human affairs and more presumptuous about our ability to control so many of life's normal vicissitudes. Increasingly reluctant to recognize either sin or suffering as inherent in the human condition, we grow rebellious against a God who could subject us to either. In this slim volume, John Stackhouse, Jr., sets the daunting challenge of evil within the context of Christian faith, recasting the problem of God's willingness to tolerate evil as the question of whether God can be trusted.

Throughout, Stackhouse's language is deceptively direct and accessible, and he more than fulfills his self-imposed task of translating the work of philosophers and theologians into terms that ordinary Christians can understand. His admirable avoidance of intellectual pretension and technical jargon should not be mistaken for philosophical simplicity. He neither obscures the intractability of the central problem nor claims to have fully "solved" it. Rather, he graciously invites readers to progress with him through the steps in an argument that must inevitably end with the mystery with which it began.

Stackhouse divides his book into two parts: "Problems" and "Responses." The first begins with the question of whether the existence of evil does pose a problem. Many religions revere an omnipotent god capable of capriciously wreaking hardship upon his faithful without jeopardizing their devotion. In contrast, Christianity worships a God whom it celebrates as ultimately and absolutely good. This emphasis upon God's goodness opens the possibility that he may be powerless to prevent evil and, hence, not be omnipotent. Stackhouse, following orthodox Christian tradition, rejects this explanation, reminding us that Christians condemn the Manichean heresy that would raise Satan to equality with God in a struggle to control the world.

But if God is both good and omnipotent, then why does he inflict evil upon the children he claims to love? We must begin, Stackhouse suggests, by examining our idea of evil. First, we may view evil from either a subjective or an objective perspective. Our subjective perception includes the anger, pain, or outrage we feel when evil directly befalls us or those we cherish, or perhaps offends our convictions about how things should be. The objective perspective, in contrast, adopts a certain distance on specific events, permitting us to acknowledge our own inability to see and assess distant consequences: Even the most painful apparent evil may turn out to further a larger good.

Such objectivity does not, however, offer emotional satisfaction, nor does it let God "off the hook or out of the dock." Stackhouse acknowledges that God's works everywhere confront us with apparent inconsistency and moral contradictions, which make it impossible to "derive a consistent ethic from the available phenomena around us." To complicate matters further, evil itself does not follow consistent patterns: some evil results from natural phenomena over which we have no control; some evil results from our own moral failings—from our proclivity to choose sin rather than virtue.

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July 13 1998, Vol. 42, No. 8