The problem of evil and the issue of theodicy has also had an im-
portant place in fictional writing during the modern period.
Particularly noteworthy are Fedor Dostoevskii’s The Brothers
Karamazov, translated by David Magarshack (London,
1964), esp. bk. 5, chap. 4; Albert Camus’s The Plague, trans-
lated by Stuart Gilbert (New York, 1948); and Elie Wiesel’s
Night, translated by Stella Rodway (London, 1960).
A sign of how much the problem of theodicy is a Western concern
is that no comparable body of literature exists on the theodi-
cy problem in Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. Nevertheless,
there are some discussions worth noting. Max Weber’s treat-
ment of theodicy in his Religionssoziologie (Tübingen, 1922)
is a pioneering effort to look at the problem of suffering and
theodicy in a comparative context. This essay is translated as
“Theodicy, Salvation, and Rebirth” in Weber’s Sociology of
Religion, translated by Ephraim Fischoff (Boston, 1963).
Weber’s view is critically examined and developed by Ga-
nanath Obeyesekere in his article “Theodicy, Sin, and Salva-
tion in a Sociology of Buddhism,” in Dialectic in Practical
Religion, edited by E. R. Leach (Cambridge, 1968).
A good survey of the problem of suffering in diverse religious tra-
ditions (and in Marxism) is provided by John Bowker’s Prob-
lems of Suffering in Religions of the World (Cambridge, 1970).
Both Arthur L. Herman’s The Problem of Evil and Indian
Thought (Delhi, 1976) and Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty’s
The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology (Berkeley, 1976) con-
tain useful information on the diversity of responses to suf-
fering in Indian religious traditions.
Unfortunately, there is less explicit discussion of this issue in Is-
lamic writings or in writings about Islam, and what sources
do exist are largely in Arabic. The best available review of this
issue is the doctoral dissertation of Eric Lynn Ormsby, An
Islamic Version of Theodicy: The Dispute over Al-Ghaza ̄l ̄ı’s
“Best of All Possible Worlds” (Princeton University, 1981).
Brief mentions of this problem may also be found in Ken-
neth Cragg’s The House of Islam, 2d ed. (Encino, Calif.,
1975) and W. Montgomery Watt’s What Is Islam (London,
1968). Watt’s Free Will and Predestination in Early Islam
(London, 1948) is an influential discussion of the determin-
istic themes that have tended to minimize the presence of
theodicy in this tradition. On the other side of the issue, Jane
I. Smith and Yvonne Haddad’s The Islamic Understanding of
Death and Resurrection (Albany, N. Y., 1981) provides a use-
ful review of the themes of accountability and recompense
that form an implicit theodicy in this tradition.
New Sources
Adams, Marilyn McCord. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of
God. Ithaca, N.Y., 1999.
Adams, Marilyn McCord, and Robert Merihew Adams. The Prob-
lem of Evil. New York, 1990.
Alford, C. Fred. What Evil Means to Us. Ithaca, N.Y., 1997.
Basinger, David. “The Problem with the ‘Problem of Evil.’” Reli-
gious Studies 30 (1994): 89–97.
Boyd, Gregory. God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict.
Downers Grove, Ill., 1997.
Leaman, Oliver. Evil and Suffering in Jewish Philosophy. New
York, 1995.
Pinn, Anthony. Why Lord? Suffering and Evil in Black Theology.
1995; rpt. New York, 1999.
Rowe, William, ed. God and the Problem of Evil. Blackwell Read-
ings in Philosophy. Malden, Mass., 2002.
Sands, Kathleen. Escape from Paradise: Evil and Tragedy in Femi-
nist Theology. New York, 1998.
Swinburne, Richard. Providence and the Power of Evil. New York,
1998.
RONALD M. GREEN (1987)
Revised BibliographyTHEODORE OF MOPSUESTIA (350–428),
Christian biblical exegete and theologian. Theodore was
born in Antioch about the same time as John Chrysostom,
who became his friend and fellow student. Since Theodore
belonged to the noble class, he attended courses given by the
most renowned professor of rhetoric at that time, Libanius.
He was later admitted to the Asketerion, the famous school
near Antioch, of Diodore (later bishop of Tarsus) and
Karterios. Even after his ordination as bishop of Mopsuestia,
in Cilicia, he occasionally lectured at the school, where his
reputation as a teacher attracted such distinguished pupils as
Rufinus, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and Nestorius. His work in
uprooting the remnants of polytheism in his province was
very successful.
Theodore wrote widely on various subjects, but only a
part of his literary production has been preserved. A pioneer
in biblical exegesis, he basically followed the hermeneutic
principles of his teacher Diodore, although he diverged from
them in some important points. He showed greater confi-
dence in his personal understanding than in the authority of
traditional hermeneutics, with the result that he rejected the
canonicity of many books of scripture.
Only four of his commentaries have been preserved: On
the Twelve Prophets, parts of On the Psalms, On John, and On
the Epistles of Paul. In all of these he uses critical, philological,
and historical methods and rejects the Alexandrian method
of allegorical interpretation. Also of great importance are his
Catechetical Homilies, which were discovered in a Syriac
translation.
As an indefatigable combatant against the heresies of his
time, Theodore’s attention was particularly directed toward
Apollinaris of Laodicea. Theodore’s dogmatic fragments that
have been preserved, especially On the Incarnation, are direct-
ed against him. Theodore’s extreme position on the two na-
tures of Christ is largely a response to Apollinaris’s teaching
about the mutilation of Christ’s human nature. Following
the Antiochene line of thought, which combined the spiritu-
al element with the material in such a way that they are not
confused, Theodore admitted that the two natures of Christ
are perfect and also remain two. His only concession on this
subject was to conceive a single person only in reference to
the union of the two natures; in this case the being of the
person is not in essence, but in God’s will, and the union is
not natural but moral. Accordingly, Mary, the mother of
Christ, is only nominally theotokos, mother of God.THEODORE OF MOPSUESTIA 9121