On Evil's Elimination

Later this year, the University Fellowship of Christians have their God vs. Evil events. I'm really looking forward to them, and I figure now is a good time to prepare for it by getting my head back in the game, so to speak.

Obviously, you could scarcely manage to be a Christian for as long as I have without giving evil/suffering/pain considerable thought. For instance, I particularly appreciated Henri Blocher's, Evil and the Cross.

More recently, I liked Alvin Plantinga's video interview on CPX a couple of years ago (the last part of the interview, especially).

But just today, I read the transcript of this address by Greg Clarke, also from CPX. It's entitled, The Elimination of Evil.

At one point, Clarke compares a popular estimation of God's judgement with a biblical picture:

This gracious act of Jesus, as God incarnate, is an entirely different kind of act to what people expect of a perfect God who is judging evil. It is almost the opposite of what Zizek [...] calls ‘divine violence’ [...] a gleeful divine punishment, pleasurably handing out what the evil creatures deserve. But the message of Christianity is vastly different.

Well worth a read. And it comes with a bonus: Clarke also includes a lengthy quote from Bono, which is bang on target.