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Hick has identified with a branch of theodicy that he calls "Irenaean theodicy" or the "Soul-Making Defense". [27] A simplification of this view states that suffering exists as a means of spiritual development. In other words, God allows suffering so that human souls might grow or develop towards maturation.
John Hick used the term "soul-making" in his theodicy Evil and the God of Love to describe the kind of spiritual development that he believes justifies the existence of evil. This defense is employed by Michael Murray, [31] who explains how, in his view, divine hiddenness is essential to soul-making. It may seem that it is not hard to imagine a ...
In the 20th century, John Hick collated the ideas of Irenaeus into a distinct theodicy. He argued that the world exists as a "vale of soul-making" (a phrase that he drew from John Keats), and that suffering and evil must therefore occur. He argued that human goodness develops through the experience of evil and suffering.
In his introduction to process theology, C. Robert Melse argued that, although suffering does sometimes bring about good, not all suffering is valuable and that most does more harm than good. [40] Process theologian David Griffin contested "the utility of soul making". He argued that the Irenaean theodicy supposes that God inflicts pain for his ...
Erik J. Wielenberg draws upon Lewis's broader corpus beyond The Problem of Pain but also, to a lesser extent, on the thought of two other contemporary proponents of the soul-making theodicy, John Hick and Trent Dougherty, in an attempt to make the case that Lewis's version of the soul-making theodicy has depth and resilience. [153]
The 10th-century Rabbi called Saadia Gaon presented a theodicy along the lines of "soul-making, greater good and afterlife". [107] Suffering suggested Saadia, in a manner similar to Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 5, should be considered as a gift from God because it leads to an eternity of heaven in afterlife. [108]
Its object was to solve the problem of evil, that is, to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering in the world with the existence of a perfectly good, all-powerful and all-knowing God, who would seem required to prevent it; as such, the name comes from Leibniz's conceiving of the project as the vindication of God's justice, namely against ...
First edition. The Myth of God Incarnate is a book edited by John Hick and published by SCM Press in 1977. James Dunn, in a 1980 literature review of academic work on the incarnation, noted the "...well-publicized symposium entitled The Myth of God Incarnate, including contributions on the NT from M. Goulder and F. Young, which provoked several responses."