Customer Reviews

Good and Evil: Interpreting a Human Condition

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This work by Edward Farley, a theologian at Vanderbilt University, is a refreshing and comprehensive theory of good and evil and how they transform the human condition. Its strength-- academic scholarship-- might be considered a weakness by some readers, but I can testify that it is well worth your time. I have read and reread it.

Let me give an example of his method: in the chapter dealing with agential evil (evil by individuals) he describes the human condition as tragically structured (as all living beings are), and how human beings respond to that situation through the dynamics of evil (idolatry) until they are finally transformed by the divine ground of all existence (God). Thus, the work is divided into two parts: Part I is philosophical, Part II is essentially theological. The context he describes is the context in which God has become meaningful to me.

After reading it and studying it, you are convinced many of his conclusions are common-sense things you always believed. But it takes a great work of scholarship to found those conclusions and articulate their complexity. And finally, as with all great books, you feel a debt of gratitude to the author. Thank you!

Edward Farley has written a superb book on what it is to be human. While drawing on the riches of the Christian theological tradition, he remedies some of the tradition's deficiencies--especially with regard to the tragic aspect of life. Farley is particulary insightful with regard to how human beings are made in the image of God and yet are temptable and fallible. Farley is to theology as Tolstoy is to fiction: both manage somehow to be unblinking observers of human wrong who yet see and report not with malice but compassion.