Introduction

This course of lectures was given in Cambridge in February 1963 under the auspices of the Divinity Faculty. But they were open lectures, i.e. addressed to the University as a whole, not to theological students. It is much to be desired that representatives of the different Faculties should take opportunities of speaking to as large a public as possible, so overcoming the academic tendency to a narrow specialization or departmentalism. The aim of the lectures, which are here published practically as they were delivered, was not to provide answers to objections to Christian belief. There is a spate of books which set out to do that. We hold that it is more important to try to plumb the depths of the objections, without complacently assuming that answers are readily available. Above all in a university, Christians must seek to understand the fundamental doubts to which their faith is exposed in this age of the world.

These lectures were intended to contribute to that kind of understanding. They were thus intended to be disturbing rather than reassuring. Belief in Christianity, or in anything else, if it is to be mature, must want to face the worst that can be said against it and to evade no difficulties. As W.H. Hallock said, 'no one is fit to encounter an adversary's case successfully unless he can make it for the moment his own, unless he can put it more forcibly than the adversary could put it for himself, and take account not only of what the adversary says, but also of the best he might say, if only he had chanced to think of it.'

It may be thought that objections to Christian belief would be more convincingly stated by unbelievers than by believers. Certainly Christians should listen attentively to all who submit their beliefs to an acute and sensitive criticism. But the objections are likely to be perceived and felt even more keenly by people who, maybe for many years, have been living with one foot in Christian belief and the other resolutely planted in the radical unbelief of the contemporary world, so that they are, as it were, torn between the two. If there is to be a profound recovery of Christian belief - or a profound rejection of it - it will surely come out of such an experience rather than out of an awareness of only one side of the question.

It has been said that 'the problem of evil is pregnant with mysteries. Perhaps it is more important and shows more insight to be aware of these mysteries, and even of the impossibility of solving them, than to find consolation in an easy and hence illusory logical issue out of this most issueless and tragic of all problems' (E. Lampert). There is not very much that is new in the problem of evil, but as a result of advances in the sciences, of a larger moral sensibility and of changes in the philosophical climate there are today genuinely new or greatly intensified challenges to Christian belief. It is some of them that these lectures were concerned to explore.

A.R. Vidler
King's College
Cambridge