bible and theology on Evil

Evil is a parasite, not an original thing.

Evil is the force of anti-creation, anti-life, the force which opposes and seeks to deface and destroy God’s good world of space, time and matter, and above all God’s image-bearing human creatures.

Evil is easy, and has infinite forms.

Evil has no substance of its own, but is only the defect, excess, perversion, or corruption of that which has substance.

Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissolubl...

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

Evil is but the shadow, that, in this world, always accompanies good. You may have a world without shadow, but it will be a world without light – a mere dim, twilight world. If you would deepen the in...

I once heard a preacher say evil is live spelled backward. Anything that goes against what helps us live is therefore evil. And evil is always ugly.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.

While the language is a bit difficult, sociologist Lionel Tiger describes how different evil is interpreted in modern society. Evil used to be easily identifiable, now, it has “gone underground.” Mode...

There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.

Somehow, strangely (and to us sometimes even annoyingly), the Creator God will not simply abolish evil from his world. The question that swirls around these discussions is, Why not? We are not given...

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

The man who does evil to another does evil to himself, and the evil counsel is most evil for him who counsels it.

Sin is not confined to the evil things we do. It is the evil within us, the evil which we are.

A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it.

To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.

The sad and tragic truth is that evil is never far away. Not far from where you sit right now, men, women, and children, are being forced into every type of slavery and prostitution, by people so fera...

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

The Western world has largely rejected this dimension of evil that the Bible gives us, and as a result, we, like Job’s friends, are always underestimating—and sometimes misdiagnosing—the power of evil...

God would never permit evil, if He could not bring good out of evil.

At the end of the first Harry Potter book, J. K. Rowling has a puppet of the Dark Lord Voldemort say, “Lord Voldemort showed me . . . there is no good and evil, there is only power.” I think Rowling i...

Good can exist without evil, whereas evil cannot exist without good.

You cannot contain evil by shaming it, or making people feel guilty, but only by revealing it for what it is, and then seeing the good as better.

In this stirring and thoughtful argument, N.T. Wright illustrates the complexity of evil by telling the story of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his return to his home country of Russia after many years in...

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.

May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.

While the illustration is somewhat dated, it brings up some of the crucial issues related to a modern approach to the subject of evil: Several television specials have been broadcast [on the subject...