John Hick's Evil and the God of Love (1966) is the most influential theodicy of the twentieth century and the philosophical work that revived 'soul-making' theodicy - the argument that God permits evil and suffering as the necessary conditions for the development of genuinely virtuous, loving, and spiritually mature persons. Hick drew on the second-century theologian Irenaeus, who had distinguished between being made in God's 'image' (Genesis 1:26 - the raw material of personhood) and being made in God's 'likeness' (the eschatological goal of perfection), to argue that human beings are not created perfect but are created with the capacity for perfection, which they develop through a challenging world-environment. This 'Irenaean' type of theodicy - which Hick developed in contrast to the 'Augustinian' type (the fall of a perfect creature from an original state of perfection) - has generated extensive debate and remains the dominant approach to theodicy in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion.
The Thinker and His Work
John Hick (1922-2012) was a British philosopher of religion who taught at Cambridge, Cornell, Princeton, Birmingham, and the Claremont Graduate University in California. Evil and the God of Love was his first major work in systematic philosophy of religion, written when he was a professor at Cambridge. His later work developed in a more pluralistic direction - Death and Eternal Life (1976) argued for reincarnation as the mechanism of the soul-making process; An Interpretation of Religion (1989) developed a Kantian religious pluralism arguing that all major religious traditions represent different cultural responses to the same ultimate reality - developments that many considered departures from orthodox Christian theism.
Biblical Texts Engaged
Genesis 1:26 - 'Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness"' - is the key text for Hick's Irenaean framework. Hick follows Irenaeus's distinction between 'image' and 'likeness': the 'image' (Hebrew tselem, Greek eikon) is the formal capacity for personhood - rationality, freedom, moral agency - with which humans are created; the 'likeness' (Hebrew demut, Greek homoiosis) is the moral and spiritual perfection that is the eschatological goal. If humans were created with only the 'image' and not yet the 'likeness,' then they were created as immature beings with the capacity for development rather than as perfect beings who subsequently fell. This Irenaean reading makes the development of human character through challenge and difficulty a constitutive part of God's creative intention.
Romans 5:3-4 - 'we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope' - is Paul's account of the transformative function of suffering. For Hick, this is not a comforting bromide but a genuine theological claim: suffering has the potential to develop virtues (patience, compassion, courage, trust) that a perfectly comfortable life could not produce. The world is designed not as a hedonist paradise but as a 'vale of soul-making' (borrowing Keats's phrase).
James 1:3 - 'for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness' - confirms the Pauline point: testing (peirasmos) is not merely an unfortunate by-product of a fallen world but a necessary condition for genuine virtuous development. A world without difficulty, challenge, or suffering could not produce genuine faith, courage, or love.
Core Argument
Hick's central argument is that the existence of suffering and evil is compatible with an all-good, all-powerful God, not because God directly intends evil, but because God has created a world designed for 'soul-making' rather than for immediate enjoyment. A world perfectly suited to maximizing human comfort would not be a world suited to developing fully virtuous, free, and spiritually mature persons.
Hick distinguishes between 'moral evil' (evil caused by human choices) and 'natural evil' (evil caused by natural processes - disease, earthquake, famine). Moral evil is permitted by God because the genuinely free will that makes genuine virtue possible also makes genuine wickedness possible: there cannot be genuine freedom to choose good without genuine freedom to choose evil. Natural evil is more difficult to justify: Hick argues that a world with predictable natural laws - including laws that sometimes harm humans - is necessary for genuinely autonomous moral agency, since a world in which God constantly intervened to prevent suffering would not be one in which human beings could take responsibility for their actions and their world.
Intellectual Context
Hick was writing in dialogue with Leibniz's 'best possible world' theodicy (which he found too optimistic), with Plantinga's free will defense (which addresses moral evil but not natural evil), and with the atheist philosophers J.L. Mackie and Anthony Flew, who had argued that the existence of evil provides strong inductive evidence against theism. He was also engaging the 'logical problem of evil' - the claim that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God - and arguing that the soul-making framework dissolves this incompatibility.
Reception and Critique
Marilyn McCord Adams's Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (1999) offers the most searching critique from within theism: Adams argues that Hick's theodicy fails to address 'horrendous evils' - evils of such magnitude (genocide, child abuse, radical disfigurement) that they threaten to overwhelm any claim that the sufferer's life has been overall worthwhile. Adams argues for a theodicy centered on God's intimate solidarity with the sufferer through Christ's crucifixion rather than on the abstract justification of evil's role in character development.
Miroslav Volf's Exclusion and Embrace (1996) and The End of Memory (2006) address the problem of atrocity from the perspective of the perpetrators and victims of ethnic cleansing, arguing that justice and memory are constitutive requirements of any adequate theodicy - not merely an account of suffering's potential for character development.
Legacy
Hick's soul-making theodicy established the Irenaean alternative to Augustinian theodicy as a serious philosophical option and generated the most extensive academic literature in the field. His reading of Genesis 1:26's image/likeness distinction - original to Irenaeus but developed by Hick into a complete theodicy - has influenced systematic theology, pastoral theology, and the spirituality of suffering in Christian communities worldwide.
Key Passages
'God's purpose was not to construct a paradise whose inhabitants would experience a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of pain. The world is seen, instead, as a place of soul-making in which free beings, grappling with the tasks and challenges of their existence in a common environment, may become children of God.' (Evil and the God of Love, ch. 16)
Contemporary Relevance
Hick's soul-making theodicy has been applied in pastoral and practical theology to help people make sense of suffering without denying its reality or attributing it directly to God's punitive will. His framework - that suffering is not wasted, that it can be the means of profound moral and spiritual development, and that the God of the Bible is the God who works through suffering rather than simply rescuing from it - resonates with psychological research on post-traumatic growth and with the testimony of survivors who have found meaning through suffering. It has also been applied in the theology of disability and illness, where the question of God's relationship to physical limitation and chronic pain is existentially urgent.