The medieval Slavs approached Byzantine speculative thought with caution. This essay explores Slavic hesitancy towards Greek theoretical ambition within the writings on visions of the Bulgarian theologian Euthymios of Tarnovo. Whereas the Greek hesychast theologian Gregory Palamas argued that the saints behold God's glory without mediation, Euthymios took a more modest approach, asserting that angels arbitrate between heaven and earth and bestow visions on the saints. Earlier scholars have described Euthymios as a ‘hesychast’, yet his views on visions align more closely with Palamas’ opponents and the Corpus of Pseudo-Dionysios.

Being deeply embedded in the mythological framework of old-school Christian angelology, the theodicy presented in this article outlines a thoroughgoing and unexpectedly simple solution to the problem of evil. Unlike other Satan-oriented theodicies, whose central idea is that natural evil is reducible to moral evil by taking the malevolent actions of demons into consideration, it accounts for both natural and moral evil in perfectly familiar deal-making terms. Of particular interest is that it makes no appeal to the overriding importance of free will nor to the inscrutability of God’s ways. Instead it envisions a primordial agreement on which everything depends. If it stands up to scrutiny, it offers an intriguing explanation for why God permits such an awful lot of badness.

This article explores Eric Mascall’s contribution to theodicy and (possibly) providence. It offers a taxonomy of Christian responses to the problem of evil: those which see suffering as instrumental to the purposes of God, those which see suffering as inevitable within the purposes of God, and those which see suffering as inimical to the purposes of God. It offers a critique of all three families of such responses. It then locates Mascall’s theodicy on that ‘map’. It argues that Mascall’s proposal, if accepted, removes the main argument against the inimical family of responses, which it sees as fitting best with the healing ministry of Jesus, as being most unambiguously committed to the goodness of God, and as being the most pastorally sensitive of the three categories. It also raises, without advocating, the possibility that all divine action may be indirect, thus safeguarding the non-coerciveness of God without compromising eschatological hope.

Rebel Angel Theodicy – often called Satan Theodicy – is the thesis that horrendous evils are directly or indirectly caused by angels who disobeyed God. In this article, I defend it, developing Gary Emberger’s suggestion that they influenced the course of evolution. After defending speculative theodicy, I expound Rebel Angel Theodicy and reply to seven objections that explicate the widespread judgement of implausibility:

1. 1. That the existence of angels is metaphysically problematic.

2. 2. That God has no good reason to create angels.

3. 3. That angels have no power to harm human beings.

4. 4. That God, foreknowing the possibility of rebellion, would not delegate to angels the power to guide evolution.

5. 5. That even if there was a good reason for God to delegate this power to angels it is metaphysically impossible for an omnipotent God to do so.

6. 6. That God, knowing of the angels’ rebellion, would subsequently intervene to put evolution back onto the preferred divine plan.

7. 7. That there is no plausible motive for angels to rebel.

It is a reasonable worry that God would not truly love us and want our salvation if He fixed a definite point after which He will no longer offer us the graces to repent of our sins. I propose that Thomas Aquinas succeeds in showing us that God would not be cruel or arbitrary in setting up a world where embodied agents end up after death in a state where they will inevitably fail to repent of their sins. Aquinas proposes that being disembodied is to be in a state where a person cannot be mistaken about what they want, given that they know themselves perfectly. If the disembodied state were like this, it would not be surprising that being in that state makes repentance impossible, since a soul would become fully integrated around whatever one desired, without any conflicting desires that could prompt repentance. Thus, humans would persist in whatever desires they had at the moment of death and disembodiment. I conclude by arguing that, while this scenario stands in need of fuller theodicy, Aquinas’s scenario is helpful in defending a view that God is not cruel or arbitrary for creating a world in which post-mortem repentance is impossible.

In this paper, I examine several sources of authority to which Origen laid claim as he set about the task of interpreting scripture. On occasion, in both his commentaries and his homilies, Origen provided accounts of his access to three different, though connected sources of authority that contributed to his self-presentation as an expert interpreter. These sources are as follows: 1) participation in the lineage of the apostles, particularly his exegetical role model, Paul. The second source of authority is a result of the first: 2) direct communication from the Logos, whom he understands to be Christ himself, and 3) angelic assistance and engagement with his pastoral exegetical project. In some instances, Origen even claimed to be on par with two of these sources of authority; he can be found claiming to have exegetical abilities similar to Paul's and, on some rare occasions, to have reached the same epistemological level as the angels. This analysis provides us not only with a case study of the kind of self-fashioning and authorising strategies used by elite scriptural exegetes in the first few centuries of the common era, but it also allows us to shift our focus away from exegetical methods towards the figure, personality and social position of the exegete him or herself. From this shift of focus we gain a better appreciation of a topic to which exegetical authors themselves dedicated considerable energy: just who it was that could occupy the office of authoritative Christian exegete and why.

Aquinas holds that after death, the human soul can no longer change its basic orientation either toward God or away from him. He takes this to be knowable not only from divine revelation but by purely philosophical reasoning. The heart of his position is that the basic orientation of an angelic will is fixed immediately after its creation, and that the human soul after death is relevantly like an angel. This article expounds and defends Aquinas's position, paying special attention to the action theory underlying it.

My ‘Would St. Thomas Aquinas baptize an Extraterrestrial?’ argued that intelligent extraterrestrial life with sufficiently different matter from human beings would not share a human nature and would therefore not be integrated into the Mystical Body of Christ in the same way as human beings, through Christ's sacrifice and the sacraments. Marie George, in ‘Would St. Thomas Aquinas Baptize an Extraterrestrial? Revisited’, demonstrated that the angels are fully incorporated into the Mystical Body of Christ in the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, and therefore posited that St. Thomas would not object to intelligent extraterrestrials of a different nature being baptized. This article revises my contentions about the Mystical Body and then shows that St. Thomas's theology excludes angels from the sacraments on the grounds of lacking a shared nature and argues that, while both extraterrestrials and angels can be saved by Christ, the sacraments have been given only to those who share a human nature with Christ.

This note provides an edition of the Latin text of a quodlibet by the Parisian master Peter of Auvergne concerning the knowledge of angels about the coming of Antichrist. The introduction to the edition argues that this quodlibet was not made in response to Arnald of Villanova's De tempore adventus Antichristi. Rather, it is best understood as a hypothetical inquiry regarding the ability of angels to communicate revelation to human beings.