Open theism is a view of the divine nature and the God-world relationship that arises out of what may be called the free will tradition of Christian thought. Although this theology of openness is not new in most respects compared to traditional Christian theism, it contains particular emphases and several new elements that together render it distinctive. This essay briefly summarizes open theism and then provides an approach to the problem of evil from this perspective.
According to openness theology, the triune God of love has embarked on a project in which God decided to create beings capable of experiencing the divine love. It is God’s desire that we enter into reciprocal relations of love with God as well as with our fellow creatures. God freely and sovereignly decided to create (ex nihilo) a state of affairs conducive to this goal.
A key aspect of this project is that God has decided to make some of his actions contingent upon our requests and actions. God elicits our free collaboration in his plans for the achievement of his goals. Hence, God can be influenced by what we do, and God truly responds to what we do—God is “open” to creation. God genuinely interacts and enters into dynamic give-and-take relationships with us. In order to bring this about, God has chosen to exercise a general rather than a meticulous form of providence. Meticulous providence means that God tightly controls everything that happens; nothing happens except what he specifically intends to happen in each and every situation. General providence means that God grants creatures considerable freedom, allowing space for us to operate. Consequently, God has chosen to take some risks by not determining everything that happens. Concomitant with general providential control and in order for truly personal relationships of love to develop, God endowed humans with libertarian freedom (the ability to do otherwise than we actually do).
Moreover, God has flexible strategies. Although the divine nature does not change, God reacts to contingencies, even adjusting his plans, if necessary, to take into account the decisions of his free creatures. God is endlessly resourceful and wise in working toward the fulfillment of his ultimate goals. However, God’s plan is not a detailed script or blueprint, but a broad intention that allows for a variety of options regarding precisely how his goals may be reached. For example, in the Old Testament, if the Hebrew midwives had feared Pharaoh rather than God and killed the baby boys as they were ordered, then God would have responded accordingly and a different story would have emerged. Moses’ refusal to return to Egypt prompted God to resort to the plan of allowing Aaron to do the public speaking instead of Moses. What people do and whether they collaborate with God makes a difference concerning what God does. God is genuinely open to creation, and he does not “fake” the story of human history by allowing us to believe mistakenly that our choices make a difference in how the future unfolds.
Finally, the omniscient God has “present knowledge.” God knows all that is logically possible to know and understands reality as it is. Consequently, God knows the past and present with exhaustive definite knowledge and knows the future as partly definite (closed) and as partly indefinite (open). God’s knowledge of what we call the “future contains both knowledge of that which is definite (what God has decided to bring about unilaterally and those natural events that are determined to occur) and knowledge of possibilities (that which is indefinite). Hence, the future is partly open or indefinite and partly closed or definite. God knows all that can possibly happen, so God is not caught off guard—he has foresight and anticipates what we will do.
Open theists tend to view Jesus as the unique disclosure of the nature and purposes of God (Heb. 1:3). In Jesus we see a God who is loving, wise, faithful, and almighty. The love of God manifested in Jesus is self-giving and self-sacrificing (agape). In this respect the apostle Paul’s description of love is also applicable to God:
“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful…. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Cor. 13:4-5, 7, NRSV)
If love does not force its way, and if this is how God acts toward us, then God may be said to endure our lack of love. Divine forbearance means that God is not blind to the evil infecting us. Rather, God evaluates our situation and takes the steps necessary to try to prevent the beloved from destroying herself and to bring about reconciliation. God’s wisdom is adept at overcoming obstacles that stand in the way of accomplishing the divine project. God is competent and resourceful in working with recalcitrant sinners. Moreover, God is faithful to his project. Instead of giving up on it and becoming resentful, he bears with us and endures the suffering we bring upon him when we refuse to live as he intended. Finally, God is almighty in that he has all the power necessary to deliver and care for us. However, God does not override our free will and force us to love (which would not be love anyway). Some open theists refer to God’s “self-limitation” in this regard, but it is better to say that God “restrains” the use of his power, to avoid the implication that God has lost power.
Clearly, from this brief summary, open theists fall within the free will tradition of Christian thought but emphasize certain elements of that tradition more than usual. For example, though the traditional free will defense in response to the problem of evil agrees that the world is not the way God wants it to be, open theism emphasizes that God takes risks of some kinds and that God is vulnerable to grief when we fail to love. Furthermore, open theism emphasizes God’s responsiveness to creatures in reciprocal give-and-take relations. In terms of the standard terminology regarding the divine attributes, this means that open theists agree with traditional free will theists in rejecting strong immutability and impassibility. Moreover, along with many free will theists, proponents of openness reject the concept of divine temporality in favor of everlasting temporality: they argue that it does not make sense to talk about divine grieving, responding, and the like, and at the same time affirm God’s timelessness. The open theist view of omniscience is most distinctive. Granted that God knows all that can be known, open theists maintain that the future actions of genuinely free creatures can only be known as probabilities, not certainties, and they deny that God has “middle knowledge,” that is, the knowledge of what every individual will do or would have done in all possible sets of circumstances. Having surveyed the essential features of open theism, I now turn to the question of how proponents of this view might address the problem of moral and natural evil.
OPEN THEISM AND MORAL EVIL
The problem of evil should be framed in the context of what God intended to accomplish via his creational project. According to open theism, God’s purpose in creating was to bring forth beings who could respond to his love by loving God in return as well as by establishing loving relationships and social structures among creatures. This implies that God did not want moral evil to arise—it was not part of his plan. The Christian scriptures attest that God is implacably opposed to moral evil and that his heart breaks over the sinfulness of his creatures (e.g., Gen. 6:6; Isa. 2:10-15; Eph. 4:30). The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are portrayed as standing opposed to the harm we bring on one another. The world simply is not the way God wants it to be; creation has miscarried. For open theism, there is no “happy fall” (O felix culpa) into sin. Evil is not part of a divine blueprint ordained by God. Though a soul-making theodicy can have a limited role in an open theist theodicy, it is the free will defense and God’s work to redeem evil that take center stage.
A question that must be raised is whether God can create free beings and at the same time guarantee that they never do evil. The answer is yes, if God creates us with a so-called compatibilistic type of freedom, for then God simply has to ensure that we have the proper desires in order to guarantee that we “freely” never commit evil. If God creates us instead with a libertarian freedom, God could still guarantee that we never do evil if God can do the logically impossible. However, if, as open theists affirm, God cannot do the logically impossible and God creates us with libertarian freedom, then God cannot guarantee that we will always do what is good.
Since God desires relationships of love and since these cannot be coerced, the divine love is vulnerable to being rejected due to our use of our libertarian freedom. Since God enacts general rather than exhaustive control, the possibility exists that what God wants to happen in any particular situation may not happen—God’s will can be thwarted by our actions. God simply cannot guarantee that we will act in loving ways toward one another. God is solely responsible for creating a world with the conditions in which love was the desired possibility and the failure to love was also a possibility. But God is not responsible for evil actually occurring.
This position is better called the “logic-of-love defense” rather than the “free will defense.” The free will defense is grounded in God taking the risk of creating people with libertarian freedom and refusing to exercise meticulous control (specific sovereignty). Proponents of the free will defense sometimes emphasize the intrinsic, as opposed to instrumental, value of libertarian freedom. Instead of beginning with human freedom, however, it is better to start with the nature of the divine project of producing significant others who are able to enter into reciprocal fellowship and collaboration with God. The logic-of-love defense is thus framed in terms of God’s purposes in creation rather than merely in terms of the supposed intrinsic worth of human freedom.
In order for the conditions of love to be met, God exercises general rather than specific sovereignty. That is, God has established the overarching rules by which creation operates and allows them a good deal of autonomy. God does not meticulously control every detail of our lives, so God takes the risk that we might not do what he desires. This is in contrast to the specific sovereignty or meticulous providence view, described above, according to which God tightly controls everything that happens such that nothing happens except what God specifically intends to happen. God takes no risks because humans do precisely what God wants them to do in each and every situation.
Although God exercises general sovereignty, the theology of openness, unlike process theology, affirms that God has the coercive power to prevent any and all instances of evil. God could prevent humans from harming one another, so a problem for open theism is to explain why God does not intervene, or at least does not intervene more often, to prevent moral evils. A number of points may be made in response.
One specific objection is that God, on the analogy of a human parent, ought to act more often to prevent harm and suffering. After all, what parent would stand by and allow his or her child to be assaulted by someone if there was any means of preventing it? The open theist response is that although God is in some respects like a human parent, God is not completely like a human parent, for God is uniquely responsible for upholding the ontological, moral, and relational structures of the universe. God has a role that is unlike the role of any human. Even in our own lives we play different roles. For instance, though I have responsibility for the health of my children, it is not my role to prescribe drugs for them or perform surgery on them. In his role as the one who established and sustains his creational project, God cannot also bring it about that he abandons the very conditions for the project. The Almighty could veto any specific human evil act, but if he made a habit of it, this would undermine the very type of relationships he intends. God cannot prevent all the evil in the world and still maintain the conditions of fellowship intended by his purpose in creation.
Another objection is that God should allow only those people to come into existence that he knows would love and trust him. This objection fails, however, because open theists affirm the present knowledge view of omniscience. Accordingly, God does not know prior to creation that any given individual will become, for example, a child abuser, a murderer, a tyrannical leader of a small country, or a CEO who rips off his company. The God of open theism does not have either middle knowledge or simple foreknowledge whereby he could know such things.
Even so, could not God at least act to remove moral monsters, such as Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin, when he becomes cognizant of their intentions? But this assumes a too individualistic understanding of human life. The Hitlers and Stalins of the world do not act alone; neither do they develop alone. Their personal development and their horrendous actions arise out of complex social frameworks and the choices and actions of many others. Hence, it is not simply a matter of God removing a single individual and thereby correcting the problem. One does not necessarily put a halt to the Holocaust or the massacres in Rwanda merely by preventing one or a few individuals from harming others. If God were to act to prevent such terrible evils, then God would have to radically alter the conditions of the project of his creation. It is not self-evident that the elimination of any given tyrant or other evildoer would mean that no one else would take that person’s place, possibly making matters even worse. Given the web of social relationships, God may not be able to prevent moral monsters from arising without abandoning the type of project he established. Also, recall that the God of open theism has only present knowledge and so cannot know with certainty what would occur if a particular individual were removed or blocked.
Nevertheless, most open theists hold that God does intervene in specific situations. Some people are healed, for example, in response to prayers. Why, then, does God not heal everyone? Does God play favorites? The God of open theism would certainly anticipate that something dreadful was about to happen, and that God has the power to prevent it, so why does God not prevent it? This is a difficult question for open theists as well as for all theists who hold that God has the ability to intervene, but in fact a number of responses are available.
Although none of us has any claim or right to a special act of God, for God is not at our beck and call, the question of divine favoritism remains if some people receive protection or healing and others do not. Establishing that God was showing favoritism or was acting arbitrarily, however, would require access to all of God’s knowledge and intentions, and that simply is not possible. Additionally, it is at least reasonable to speculate that God is much more active than we can ever identify but that most of his work, like an iceberg hidden below the surface, goes on unseen by us. God may be doing much in any given situation even if we do not detect his presence or if it is not the sort of help we desire.
Furthermore, free will theists, in contrast to proponents of meticulous providence, can say that one reason for God’s choosing not to intervene in a particular situation is his unwillingness to interfere with the libertarian freedom of the people involved. Some open theists hold that God might occasionally override and violate the free will of a human, while others maintain that God never does this. The question still arises for the former group: why does not God override free will more often in order to bring about a better world? David Basinger, for one, replies that we cannot know the extent to which God is already doing this. Perhaps, he says, God has already maximized the extent to which he may profitably violate human freedom.
The critic claims that the world would be better if God vetoed certain human decisions (or did so more often). It is not easy to know how this claim could be established. Although initially it might seem a simple matter for God to change someone’s decisions and thus improve a situation, this may not be so simple given the interaction of people with one another. A 2004 movie called The Butterfly Effect portrayed a college student whose friend is abused by her father. The young man finds a way to go back in time and change one of the variables so that his friend would not end up in this abusive situation. However, the slight change he makes does not bring about the general results he desired; for now, though his friend is not abused, other bad events occur in her life. Again and again he goes back in time, trying to fix the situation so that it turns out as he wants. However, no matter what variables he changes, things continue to go badly for those he loves. The critic’s notion that God could change this person a little here and that person a little there and thus make the world an overall better place may not be realistic. We simply do not know all the variables in life and the effects of slight changes in them. A God with middle knowledge would know precisely how things would turn out if a specific change were made in a situation, but a God with middle knowledge still has to be lucky enough that among his options are ones in which people respond more positively rather than less so (more on this topic below). Open theists, however, reject the concept of God’s middle knowledge. A God with present knowledge would not know for certain what would, in fact, happen if a specific human decision were vetoed. Hence, God could not guarantee that the world would definitely be better if God vetoed more, or even any, libertarian choices by humans. The open theist who maintains or accepts the possibility that God does occasionally override human freedom can say, at most, that a God with present knowledge would know the probabilities of various responses to his actions and that God has the wisdom to act on this knowledge prudently.
Open theists also affirm that God is at work in many ways and that our lives are affected by numerous human and nonhuman forces that resist and seek to undermine God’s program, whether we are aware of them or not. And whether we think of these powers as demonic beings, as does Gregory Boyd, or as malevolent social forces, the point is the same: God is hard at work keeping creation from disintegrating. These forces demand God’s competence, wisdom, and power to keep creation going in the direction he intends without overturning the very rules he established at creation. Open theists believe that God is doing all he can, short of overriding his project, to prevent what evil he can, and, for that evil that does occur, God works to bring good out of those situations (Rom. 8:28).
Moreover, open theists, as opposed to theological determinists, can say that God in no way wants the evils of this world. They are not part of a detailed plan of God by which absolutely everything occurs for the sake of a specific greater good. In the natural realm, it is not God’s desire for creation that a young child contracts a painful and incurable cancer. In the moral realm, neither is it God’s intention for creation to include evils such as rape, terrorism, corporate theft, or abuse of the natural environment. Such evils are gratuitous or pointless, for they were not intended with the purpose of attaining a greater good. Proponents of specific sovereignty sometimes claim that such evils are for the purpose of helping us learn a lesson. Although free will theists can certainly affirm that God works to bring good out of evil situations and that we may, indeed, learn something from our suffering or the suffering of others, it is impossible to maintain that God always succeeds in his efforts. We humans simply do not always respond in loving ways to suffering. Some of us become embittered or hateful and perpetrate further violence on others. Though some of us respond in redemptive ways to evil, not all of us do. Given our libertarian freedom, God cannot guarantee that a greater good will arise out of each and every occurrence of evil.
A number of criticisms of the openness approach to the problem of moral evil have appeared in recent years. Three will be addressed here since they help to highlight the differences between openness theology and other theological perspectives. First, proponents of meticulous providence, or theological determinists, claim that open theism comes to the same conclusion as they do regarding the mystery of why God intervenes in some situations and not others, and thus offers no new insight. This is not the case, however. Theological determinists maintain that God providentially controls each and every action of humans, including each aspect of each action. Even though we call certain events, which seem evil from our vantage point, accidents or tragedies, from God’s perspective they are necessary for achieving the greater good. There is no pointless evil. The openness position, in contrast, is quite different. It is one thing to say that God, for reasons we do not fully understand, allows autonomous agents to do tragic and terrible things. It is quite another thing to say that God deliberately plans and intends for all these evil things to happen, so that in no single respect would God want the world to be any different than it actually is. A consistent theological determinist would have to say that God does not grieve over the rape of a little girl, for it is exactly what God intended to happen. For open theists, God does not intend such evils, he grieves over them, and he seeks to redeem them.
Another criticism comes from Molinists, who claim that a God who takes risks is abhorrent and the epitome of moral recklessness. Proponents of middle knowledge hold that God cannot take risks because, from all the feasible worlds that God could have created, he selected and created the one he deemed best. Since God knew what each individual would do in any given circumstance, God chose to create this world, knowing in exhaustive detail exactly what would happen in it. Open theists have several replies to this. First, the idea of divine risk taking has been part of the soteriological landscape from the beginning of Christian theology, as shown in the common assertion that God desires each and every human to experience redemption but will not force anyone to participate in it (1 Tim. 2:4; 2 Pet. 3:9). Assuming that universalism is false and that some individuals ultimately reject God’s grace, this means that God takes the risk, in creating such a world, that some people will be lost—an outcome that he does not want. This view has been upheld, for example, by the majority of the early church fathers, the Eastern Church, Arminian-Wesleyans, and Pentecostals. Except for Molinists, free will theists affirm the traditional free will defense in a form that entails divine risk taking. Open theists simply highlight this notion.
Further, risk taking is not always bad; it is necessary for various aspects of our relationships. For example, in order for trust to develop, we must make ourselves vulnerable. Open theists maintain not that God risks for the sake of risk but rather that God risks for the sake of love. Moreover, open theists do not hold that God places everything at risk but rather only that some elements of the divine-human relationship are at risk.
A final point with respect to the Molinist critique is that though a God with middle knowledge does not take risks, such a deity, still, will be either lucky or unlucky. Molinists severely downplay the element of luck, yet it is an essential component of their view since the counterfactuals of freedom (what humans with libertarian freedom would do in any given circumstance) are not under God’s control. If God is lucky, then there is at least one feasible world where humans do, for the most part, what God wants them to do. If God is really fortunate, then there is a feasible world in which creatures always do exactly what God desires them to do. Clearly, God was not that lucky. If God is unlucky, then God may have had to settle for a world of modest good and great evil.
A third, very general critique—which is sometimes voiced by process theologians—is that open theism simply fails to advance the discussion on the problem of evil. Since the God of open theism is omnipotent and can intervene in human affairs, the open theist is still left with the question as to why God does not intervene to prevent some evils. In response, although open theism does not claim to have the final word on the problem of evil, it has strengthened the free will defense in a number of important ways. Open theism emphasizes divine risk taking and its theological significance; arguably, open theism is the most logically consistent form of free will theism when it comes to affirming divine passibility (God suffers with and for his creatures), divine temporality, and God’s implacable opposition to evil. Because open theism maintains that God has present knowledge rather than either simple foreknowledge or middle knowledge, it avoids the claim that God must be held responsible for creating a world in which he knew that evil would inevitably arise. Furthermore, for the open theist, God cannot be said to want or intend the evil in the world. For these reasons, open theists can justifiably hold that their model is most faithful to the biblical narrative of God’s actions in his creational project, is more logically consistent than other forms of free will theism, and yields fruitful ways in which to live the Christian life.
OPEN THEISM AND NATURAL EVIL
Among open theists, two overall responses to the problem of natural evil are discernable. Many resort to a natural law theodicy in which so-called natural evil is part of the necessary structures of creation. The structures in themselves are not evil; they are necessary aspects of the created order. For example, water sustains us, but we can also drown in it. Lightning brings essential nitrogen to the soil, but it may also strike us dead or start forest fires. Certain genetic traits that are beneficial for some things may make us susceptible to other problems. We are learning more and more that certain natural forces that we have labeled “evil” actually have beneficial effects. As our knowledge of the structures of creation and the interconnectedness of the forces of nature increases, we cannot easily imagine alternative structures that retain the good elements but lack the ones that can cause us harm. If God created a world in which air currents and water vapor bring needed rain but these same elements sometimes form hurricanes, then God takes the risk that people will suffer from them. God does not want creatures to be harmed by these natural forces, but it may be the case that he cannot have creational structures that nurture creatures without the possibility of harm. The risk of human suffering is simply not avoidable in the world as we know it. A determinate order in nature is extremely beneficial for our lives since we can plan and live accordingly. God cannot simply remove the possible harm that those structures can bring without removing the very determinate order that makes life possible. Those who argue that nature could be governed by fundamentally different laws, equally suitable or more suitable for supporting life, must shoulder the burden of proof and show the plausibility of such an alternative.
The second strategy employed by some open theists is to ascribe natural evil to the work of demonic beings. Gregory Boyd, for instance, argues that God is at war with supernatural beings who are attempting to destroy God’s project. Though he does not believe that demonic forces are the sole cause of all natural evil, he proposes that they are responsible for many birth defects, floods, diseases, and the like. Boyd argues that Jesus regarded infirmities and diseases as the results of evil powers and not as part of God’s intentions for his creatures. Though Boyd believes the natural law theodicy is useful, it must be supplemented with an appeal to demonic activity. Boyd seems to subsume “natural” evil under moral evil; he then uses the free will defense to argue that, just as God cannot remove human freedom to cause harm without undermining his creational project, so God cannot remove the free will of fallen angelic beings to cause harm.
Whether the structural or demonic explanation for natural evil is given, open theists agree that God does not want the suffering that these forces bring. Neither should suffering be understood in general as God’s punishment of human sin. Although some scriptural texts enjoin Christians to interpret their suffering, typically that brought about by persecution, as divine discipline (itself not necessarily punishment), scripture nowhere turns this into a general principle that all suffering, particularly from natural evils, should be interpreted in this light. In fact, Job, Ecclesiastes (8:14), and Jesus in the Gospels (Luke 13:1-3; John 9:1-6) reject the idea that all suffering is God’s punishment of sin.
Finally, it should be noted that much of what we call “natural evil” is the result of human decisions. For instance, the agricultural practices dictated by the governments of Ethiopia and Sudan have produced famine in these countries. The policies of humans have had disastrous consequences in nature time and again throughout human history. The choices we make, individually and corporately, about how to use our resources greatly affect our lives. If we cut down the rain forests or build cities on fault lines with inadequate buildings, we may bring devastation on ourselves that God never wanted. If we spray certain chemicals on our food supply to protect them from insects but then acquire cancer, is God to blame?
CONCLUSION
Open theism seeks to develop from within the free will tradition an approach to the problem of evil that emphasizes divine risk taking. It emphasizes that evil is not part of God’s plan for creation, that God experiences suffering because of our evil, that God is working temporally in human history to overcome evil, and that God did not know prior to creation exactly how his creational project would develop. Open theists may make use of a variety of theodicies: natural law, soul-making (in a limited fashion), and even theories of spiritual warfare. The main theodicies, however, will be those of the logic of love and God’s work of redemption. The logic-of-love defense provides a way of understanding the structures in which suffering and evil could come about in God’s creational project, even though he never intended such evil. The structure of love, coupled with general sovereignty, yields the conclusion that there is gratuitous evil. Horrible events happen that God does not specifically want to occur. This was a risk God took in establishing these structures.
Open theists are under no illusions that they have the perfect solution to the problem of evil. Every response to the problem of evil has difficulties, and which view one favors often comes down to value judgments regarding the difficulties with which one is willing to live. Nonetheless, open theists believe that the approach stated above yields some beneficial practical results. For instance, a woman who has been abused by her husband need not believe that it was “God’s will” that she suffer so. God did not ordain such evils for her to learn some lesson. This alone should relieve a great burden from many people who have been taught that everything that happens to us is part of the divine blueprint for the greater good. A fair number of people in churches are angry at God, though it is considered improper to confess it. The anger arises because people have been told to believe that God ordained their cancer or the death of a daughter for the sake of some unknown good. However, if God did not ordain such evils, then we need to think of God’s relationship to such events differently. We are free to grieve such losses and work to redeem what we can from them.
Moreover, if such things as famines, wars, racism, and exploitation of children are not “all for the best” and are not sent by God, then we can understand that we are called by God to be collaborators with him against such evils. Contrary to theological determinism, it is not true that whatever happens is God’s will. Consequently, to remain passive in the face of evil is to go against God. Instead, God wants us to actively combat and redeem evil. The open theist is free to challenge the status quo and must reject the notion that “whatever is, is right” since God wants it that way. By collaborating with God against evil, we go beyond the logic-of-love defense (against the logical problem of evil) to actively working to overcome evil. William Hasker argues that “we need to shift from the prospective justification of evils to the retrospective redemption of those same evils.” It is not enough merely to defend God; we are called to participate in his redemptive activity, for the Christian God is actively working to bring good out of evil (Rom. 8:28).
The biblical narratives amply demonstrate that events did not always go as God desired. God is not exercising exhaustive control over the world, but neither does he stand impotent before it. God’s powerful love is demonstrated in a definitive way through the cross and resurrection of Christ. In the face of both moral and natural evil, Jesus stands fundamentally opposed to them and seeks to overcome them by suffering and resurrection. The resurrection is our sign of hope that the future will bring a transformation of our present conditions. Suffering and death do not have the final word. Love and life triumphed over the forces of evil through the cross and resurrection. Moreover, the Holy Spirit continues to work to redeem the evil situation. God is not yet finished, and as long as God is working there is hope that the future will be different from what we presently experience. These reasons give us courage to be God’s fellow laborers in the struggle for shalom, working to extend God’s victory over evil to every aspect of life.
John Sanders, “God, Evil, and Relational Risk”, in The Problem of Evil, ed. Michael L. Peterson (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 2017), 327–343.