INTRODUCTION: GOD AND EVIL?

What about evil? If the genuine self is supposed to be – “ought” to be – for-the-other, how about the countervailing weight of being, being-for-itself, selfishness, refusal of the other, the “as for me”? Even if we cannot have a good conscience, after all the horrors of the twentieth century, are we really expected to continue to take any ethico-religious tradition seriously? After all, did not the Holocaust take place in the most Christian part of the world? And even if, to explain the failure of Christians and Christian Churches, one were to offer explanations based on contingent events, on fear, Nazi power, intimidation, would one not, with the best of good wills, still be trapped by a theo-logic incapable of accounting for evil, and then – built on this incapacity, and worse – also incapable of standing up to evil?