A blessedly particular theology of evil

While some lectureships invite academics to speak to posterity and produce unread tomes, others seem to draw academics out to talk to ordinary civilians. (One of the most influential books in 20th-century liberal Protestantism, H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, originated as a short series of lectures at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.) John Swinton’s new book falls into this second category.

Deliver Us from Evil began life as a series of lectures at Nazarene Theological College in Manchester, England, in 2020. They are blessedly, beautifully particular. They dive right into the murder of George Floyd, COVID and its repercussions, and the authoritarianism racing around Western democracies. The book also engages less recent but still haunting events, such as the Rwandan genocide. Swinton unpacks complex thought in ways that any reader will be able to comprehend: Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” Walter Brueggemann’s blistering prophetic voice and Ellen Davis’s gentle one, and recent Pauline research on the powers and principalities by Susan Eastman. Swinton bravely tells us what he thinks without hiding behind academic jargon. His department at the University of Aberdeen has become a go-to for confidently voiced Protestant theology at a time when others flee confessional specificity.

This book is not quite a theodicy. That graveyard of modern theology and philosophy often ends up trying to explain the unexplainable, and Swinton is too interested in God to fall into that trap.