Evangelical theologian NT WRIGHT calls for a more mature, biblical response to evil.

Everybody is talking about evil. After September 11, 2001, President Bush declared that there was an "axis of evil' out there somewhere, and that we had to find the evil people and stop them doing any more evil. Tony Blair declared ambitiously that we should aim at nothing short of ridding the world of evil. The day I drafted this chapter I glanced sleepily at the newspaper being read in the seat in front of me in an aeroplane and saw an enormous headline inviting us to look at "the evil faces' of two members of the Real Irish Republican Army. The public and the press cried "Evil' at the terrible murder of two little girls in the English town of Soham in 2003; and we say the same about the sudden rise of gun crime in the streets of our cities, or the violence which followed the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.

The odd thing about this new concentration on evil is that it seems to have taken many people, not least politicians and the media, by surprise. Of course they would say that there has always been evil; but it seems to have come home to the Western world in a new way. The older discussions of evil tended to be more abstract, with so-called natural evil (represented by the tidal wave) and so-called moral evil (represented by the gangsters). Just as in the previous generation, at least for those who allowed themselves to reflect on it, Auschwitz posed the problem in a new way, September 11 2001 on the one hand, and the "natural' disasters of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean and the hurricane on the American Gulf Coast, have now kick-started a fresh wave of discussion about what evil is, where it comes from, how to understand it, and what it does to your worldview whether you're a Christian or an atheist or anything else. And, not least, what, if anything, can be done about it.

From the Christian point of view, there will be in that sense no more sea in the new heavens and the new earth. We are committed, within the worldview generated by the gospel of Jesus, to affirming that evil will finally be conquered, will be done away. But understanding why it's still there as it is, and how God has dealt with it and will deal with it, how the cross of Jesus has anything to do with that, how it affects us here and now, and what we can do here and now to be part of God's victory over evil " all these are deep and dark mysteries which the sudden flurry of new interest in evil open up as questions, and to which many of us, myself included, have not been used to giving much attention, let alone to offering answers.

Despite the horrific World War I battles of Mons and the Somme, despite Auschwitz and Buchenwald, despite Dostoevsky and Barth, people still continue to this day to suppose that the world is basically a good place, and that its problems are more or less solvable by technology, education, "development' in the sense of "Westernisation', and the application to more and more regions of Western democracy, and, according to taste, either Western social-democratic ideals or Western capitalism, or indeed a mixture of both.

This state of affairs has led to three things in particular which I see as characterising the new problem of evil. First, we ignore evil except when it hits us in the face. Some philosophers and psychologists have tried to make out that evil is simply the shadow side of good; that it's part of the necessary balance in the world, and that we must avoid too much dualism, too much polarisation between good and evil. That of course leads straight to Nietzsche's philosophy of power, and by that route back to Hitler and Auschwitz. When you pass beyond good and evil, you pass into the realm where might is right, and where anything that reminds you of the old moral values " for instance, a large Jewish community " stands in your way and must be obliterated.

But we don't need to look back 60 years to see this. Western politicians knew perfectly well that Al-Qaeda was a force to be reckoned with; but nobody wanted to take it too seriously until it was too late. We all know that chronic national debt in many of the countries of the globe is a massive sore on the conscience of the world; but our politicians, even the sympathetic ones, don't really want to take it too seriously, because from our point of view the world is ticking on more or less alright and we don't want to rock the economic boat. We want to trade, to build up our economies. "Choice' is an absolute good for everyone; therefore if we offer both Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola to starving, AIDS-ridden Africa, exploiting a huge untapped market while adding tooth decay to its other chronic problems, we are furthering its wellbeing. We all know that sexual licentiousness creates massive unhappiness in families and individual lives, but we live in the 21st century, don't we, and we don't want to say that adultery is wrong (we should perhaps note that only two generations ago many communities regarded adultery the way they now regard paedophilia, which is worrying on both counts).

Second, we are surprised by evil when it hits us in the face. We like to think of small English towns as pleasant, safe places, and are shocked to the core when two little girls are murdered in Soham by someone they obviously knew and trusted. We have no categories to cope with that, but nor do we have categories to cope with the larger renewed evils, with renewed tribalism and genocide in Africa. We like to fool ourselves that the world is basically all right, now that so many countries are either democratic or moving that way, and now that globalisation has in theory allowed us to do so much, to profit so much, to know so much.

We ignore evil when it doesn't hit us in the face, and so we are shocked and puzzled when it does.

We are faced today with the problem of evil on our streets and in our world, and it won't wait for clever metaphysicians to solve it. What are we going to do? If we are not to react in an immature way, either by ignoring evil, or by declaring it's all the other person's fault, or by taking the blame on ourselves, we need a deeper and more nuanced way of answering the question many, not least the politicians, are asking: why is this happening? What (if anything) has God done about it? And what can we, or should we, be doing about it?

For the Christian. the problem is how to understand and celebrate the goodness and God-giveness of creation and how, at the same time, to understand and face up to the reality and seriousness of evil. It is easy to "solve' the problem by watering down one side of this or the other, either saying that the world isn't really God's good creation or that evil isn't really that bad at all.

If we can work towards understanding and being the willing agents of both the divine tears over the world's evil and the fresh creativity that sends out the dove to find the olive branches emerging from the waters of chaos, we shall, I think, be on the right track. The sea is powerful, but God the creator is more powerful still. Evil may still be a four-letter word. But so, thank God, is love.

NT Wright is the Bishop of Durham and a member of the International Anglican Doctrinal and Theological Commission. This is an edited extract from his latest book, Evil and the Justice of God, published by SPCK. Used by permission of the publisher.