La responsabilidad moral del cristiano ante el problema del mal y del sufrimiento humano

Abstract

This PhD research project aims to lay out, in general terms, the dilemma between philosophy (from the reasoning perspective) and theology (from the perspective of faith) of the christian individuals and their moral responsability when facing the question of evil and human suffering, emphasizing the responsability of the Christian ethics concerning the moral evil in the world (mundane evil) and in the life of mankind (human evil). Evil and distress are experiences present within the cosmos in which we are and exist, and these experiences are sometimes invisible, inexplicable, silent or intangible, but they reveal themselves as inherent to life and to the imperfect and finite condition of the current reality. As a matter of fact, we could say that these experiences lead humans to consider their own mundane nature, their historical actuality, and their reason to exist and to take action in the world. We ponder over evil when we think about natural disasters affecting human beings, whether individually or collectivelly; when we perceive or become aware of immoral, heartless inhumane actions; when we suffer firsthand or someone close suffers realities such as illnesses, pain, suffering, ageing or death, these realities highlight that human life is frail, finite, and that it has an expiry date. All in all, we do have a rational-emotional knowledge and understanding of evil. Evil, in its many ontological and phenomenological appearances, disturbs humans and make them question their origin, their nature and their purpose, to the extent of questioning the foundations of their own entity (ontodicy of evil), due to the responsability than man can or must have over it (antropodicy and ethicodicy of evil) as well as the role that God has or must have for Himself in the interlinked concurrence with all beings and in His endless providence in history (theodicy of evil). If we speak about evil from the Christian theology perspective it will necessarily lead us to analize more controversial topics related to this one, and also to determine the different faces or paradigmatic performances of evil in the life of humans, which we will refer to as "moral evil theologies" (theology of frailty, of finitude, of fatality, of pain, of suffering, of sickness, of ageing, of death, of human evil, of evil cooperation, of existential meaning, of eschatological hope, etc.) to which the Christian moral must offer, from a wide and open horizon of understanding, a well founded answer, which is coherent and believable, from both the ethic and anthropological side as well as from the eidetic and doxastic scopes