Christian Theodicy: A Critique of William Gass’s Anti-Theology

This paper presents a justification for a Christian theodicy. It starts by critiquing William H. Gass’s depiction of Christianity as superstitious, ignorant, and evil. It shows that his view is based on a caricature (that is, God as a quasi-gnostic Demiurge) of the Christian understanding of God and evil and totally ignores and misses the contributions of (what I call) the Classical View of theodicy within the Christian intellectual tradition (that is, from Origen to Karl Barth). I also evaluate the underlying nihilism of Gass’s writings as self-refuting and furthermore argue that a Christian theodicy overcomes this nihilism and encourages a “vocation of the good”.