Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

EVIL: QUESTIONING AND CHALLENGING THEOLOGY AGAIN AND AGAIN 117evil. Such a discourse must develop if we are to affirm that thehuman being is a being endowed with meaning and dignity.The problem of evil and the problem of God are thereforebound tightly together. Walter Kasper expresses this connectionin soteriological terms:We would not be able to suffer from our situation unless wehad an at least implicit pre-apprehension of an undamaged,happy fulfilled kind of existence; unless we were at least implicitlylooking for salvation and redemption. Only because we as humanbeings are meant for salvation do we suffer at our disastrous situationand rebel against it. If we had no “longing for the whollyother” (M. Horckheimer), we would make the best of what is andaccept what is not. Experiences of suffering are experiences ofcontrast; it is precisely in our wretchedness that we also experienceour greatness (Pascal)… If hope is to be at all possible in theface of the universal situation of suffering and disaster, if in theface of injustice that cries out to heaven human beings are not tosurrender their dignity, then a new beginning must be possiblethat cannot be driven from the conditions present in our situation,and there must be a final authority that is above all injusticeand will have the last word to say at the end of history… For hopein the face of despair is possible only in the light of redemption. Itwould be futile to seek an absolute meaning without God. 52Only where theology speaks of evil by drawing on the richnessof faith and with the necessary sensitivity toward modernman, and thus gives an account of the hope that is in Christianfaith, will theological discourse uncover the real and immeasurabledepths of evil as well as the possibilities of overcoming it.Only where God and His action are introduced into the examinationof the origin, essence and the way out of evil, will theexperience and challenges of evil assume their realistic featuresand their true proportions as a personal and existential drama.What the scholastic scholar Charles Journet wrote remainstrue: “Our progress in the knowledge of evil must be made byprogress in the knowledge of God; and likewise our progress in52Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ, 160-161.