The Christian debate about what we call the problem of evil is front and center in the New Testament. In Matthew, it’s a shadow over not just God’s Son, but others, beginning with the infant boys of Bethlehem. As I began to work on this sermon, Dr. Mark Davis’ scripture blog[1] made a reference to a sermon he had written three years ago.[2] For most of the twentieth century, two brothers stood, together with a very few others, at the top of the field of Christian ethics, Reinhold Neibuhr, who taught at Union Theological Seminary, here in the city, and Richard Neibuhr, two years younger, who taught at Yale Divinity School.
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