A Theological Exploration of Immanuel Kant’s Theodicy and Its Implications for African Churches

Edward Inem Onyeije

doi:10.56201/ijrcp.vol.10.no4.2025.pg136.147

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A Theological Exploration of Immanuel Kant’s Theodicy and Its Implications for African Churches

Edward Inem Onyeije

Abstract

Theodicy is an intellectual and theological effort to defend God’s existence and goodness, despite evil and suffering, justifying God’s nature with reality of evil. The phenomena of evil and theodicy have become a perversive menace in African ecclesiology. The story of Job, Habakkuk and the man born blind are good examples of theodicy in the Bible. The usual complex questions that remain unanswered are “why does evil exist and why do the righteous suffer and the wicked move freely? Sadly, several attempts made to respond to these questions oftentimes submerge people in more complexities. Immanuel Kant’s theodicy emphasizes human freedom as what constitutes both good and bad human decisions or choices. He contends that radical evil is committed when moral laws are contradicted. He posits that human knowledge is limited in understanding the reality of evil and proposes that instead of focusing on the reality of evil that people should strive to advocate for morality, which can enable them to mitigate evil. Kant’s theodicy challenges African churches to pursue evangelism, discipleship, community support and care, teaching of morality and interceding for the suffering communities. Notably, these will help to examine people’s lifestyles and also alleviate suffering and evil that have become a global plague in African churches. Most importantly, knowing that human knowledge is inadequate to understand the existence of evil and suffering will compel people to absolutely depend on God who not only knows everything, but also has power to deliver human kind from all sufferings and evil.

Keywords

theodicysufferinggoodand evil

References

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A Theological Exploration of Immanuel Kant’s Theodicy and Its Implications for African Churches

Abstract

Keywords

References

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