Evil and Christian Ethics

New Studies in Christian Ethics

by Gordon Graham

Genocide in Rwanda, multiple murder in Denver or Dunblane, the gruesome activities of serial killers--what makes these great evils, and why do they occur? In addressing such questions this book interconnects contemporary moral philosophy with recent work in New Testament scholarship. The conclusions to emerge are surprising. Gordon Graham argues that the inability of modernist thought to account satisfactorily for evil and its occurrence should not lead us to embrace an eclectic postmodernism, but to take seriously some unfashionable premodern conceptions--Satan, demonic possession, spiritual powers, cosmic battles. The book makes a powerful case for the rejection of humanism and naturalism, and for explaining the moral obligation to struggle against evil by reference to the New Testament's cosmic narrative.

260 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Gordon Graham is Director of the Edinburgh Sacred Arts Festival. He previously taught philosophy at the University of St Andrews, University of Aberdeen, and Princeton Theological Seminary. The author of twenty books on a wide range of subjects in aesthetics, politics and moral philosophy, he has also published extensively on the Scottish philosophical tradition. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and winner of an Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies Society Lifetime Achievement Award, he was founding editor of the Journal of Scottish Philosophy and general editor of the Oxford History of Scottish Philosophy. His books include Scottish Philosophy after the Enlightenment (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).