The Theodicy That Requires a Cross
What if the best free-will answer to evil creates a problem it cannot solve?
Free-will theodicies defend God by pointing to the goods of libertarian freedom and freely given love. They also quietly make some sufferers the condition of others' goods. The usual replies try to outweigh that cost, or to wait until the victim sees their horror differently. This book argues that both moves fail - and that honesty about the failure is the beginning of a better answer.
Devon Wright develops a free-will theodicy that terminates in the Cross without treating sufferers as means. The claim is not that the Cross is a towering good that justifies evil (Plantinga's felix culpa). It is the reverse: a successful free-will theodicy leaves a residue of instrumentalisation, and only a God who freely bears that cost - restoring the victim's own standing, which can still be refused - answers it. Against Marilyn McCord Adams, Eleonore Stump, J rgen Moltmann, and deep-incarnation theologies, the book maps a crowded destination and claims a narrow, structural increment: participation as entailment from the theodicy's own axiology, not as a theological given or an outweighing paradigm.
Pressed to its end, the most ordinary free-will theodicy does not stop short of Christology: it arrives there. The Cross is the residue-answer the defence itself generates, and at the same time the crowning case of the axiology it required - love freely given, held under the greatest pull. If this theodicy is right, Incarnation and Cross are exactly the move maximal love would make; and the Christian claim is that God made that move. For readers who want rigor without consolation-by-accounting - and who suspect that Ivan Karamazov's ticket cannot be bought back with a better sum - that is the excitement worth following through.
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