The Emergence of Evil as a Theological Problem | Fr. Timothy Bellamah, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given on February 21st, 2025, at Dominican House of Studies.

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About the Speaker:

Fr. Timothy Bellamah, O.P. (Commissio Leonina) was born and raised in Washington, D.C. He entered the Order of Preachers in 1991 and was ordained a priest in 1998. He studied at Wake Forest University (B.S., 1982), the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception (M.Div. and S.T.B., 1997; S.T.L, 1999) and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, (Ph.D., Section des sciences Religieuses, 2008). He has previously taught at Providence College in the Department of Theology and the Department of the Development of Western Civilization. From 2010 to 2018 he served as editor of The Thomist and is a member of the Leonine Commission, a team of Dominican scholars responsible for the production of critical Latin editions of the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. He is also currently preparing a critical Latin edition of the Commentary on John’s Gospel by one of St. Thomas’ Dominican contemporaries, William of Alton.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tumistic Institute podcast.
0:06.1	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church,
0:10.7	and the wider public square.
0:12.3	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute chapters
0:17.3	around the world.
0:18.7	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:21.7	Thomistic Institute.org. Before us this evening, we have this question of evil, and as you may
0:29.1	have noticed on your handout, we're talking about the emergence of evil, but notice that we're
0:32.7	not talking about the emergence of evil as such. That's another story. We're talking about the emergence
0:39.5	of evil as a theological problem. Now notice that this is helpful to keep in mind because
0:48.2	as we have in the book of Genesis and as you have noticed, in all sorts of other primordial
0:58.2	creation narratives, I'm thinking of especially Greek mythology, but also some ancient
1:06.9	near-eastern cosmogonies. Anuma Ailish comes to mind where we have accounts or
1:13.6	narratives concerning the first human beings on this earth and their relations with the gods,
1:21.6	there is evil right there. But notice that evil as we're going to consider it, and as you might have noticed on this
1:34.5	handout, is a specifically Judeo-Christian problem, theological problem.
1:42.3	So if we ask the question of whether or not non-Christians, people have
1:48.4	never heard the name of Jesus Christ who have never had any contact with biblical religion,
1:54.0	I'm talking about Christians, very largely speaking, or Jews or even Muslims.
2:03.2	I know that some of these questions are controverted
2:05.9	is the extent to which these three world religions
2:10.7	constitute some sort of whole,
	...

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