The Problem of Evil in Reformed Thought

Abstract

IT has long been recognized that the Reformation of the sixteenth century represented, theologically, a revival of Augustinianism.¹ Luther and Calvin both quoted extensively from Augustine and regarded him as presenting the best wisdom of the ancient Church, uncontaminated by the subsequent aberrations of medieval Scholasticism. But it was always the biblical and theological rather than the more speculative and philosophical sections of Augustine’s writings that appealed to the Reformers.² They were Augustinian on the Pauline, not on the Neo-Platonic, side of his thought. This means, so far as the theodicy-problem is concerned, that the Reformers have no general theory of the nature of evil such as Augustine offered in his privative analysis, his use of the principle of plenitude, and his conception of the aesthetic perfection of the universe. On the other hand, they share to the full, and even cany further, Augustine’s strong doctrine of the fall of man and its paradoxical counterpoise in an equally strong doctrine of predestination.