Marilyn McCord Adams

Marilyn McCord Adams (1943–2017) was an American philosopher of religion, medievalist, and ordained Anglican priest. After earning her PhD at Cornell (1967) and a DD from Princeton Theological Seminary, she held positions at UCLA, Yale, Oxford (Regius Professor of Divinity, 1999–2009), the University of North Carolina, and Rutgers. Her work bridged medieval philosophical theology and contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Her two-volume William Ockham (1987) remains a standard study of Ockham's metaphysics and epistemology. In philosophy of religion, she is best known for Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (1999) and Christ and Horrors (2006), in which she argued that standard analytic theodicies (Plantinga's free-will defense, Hick's soul-making theodicy) fail to address evils that prima facie destroy the meaning of a participant's life. She proposed instead a Christology-centered response, holding that only intimate divine identification with sufferers—through the Incarnation and beatific vision—can defeat horrors. Adams pressed against value-theoretic approaches that abstract from particular sufferers, drawing critique from Eleonore Stump, William Hasker, and others who questioned her departure from generic theism toward distinctly Christian resources. She also wrote on the metaphysics of the Eucharist (Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist, 2010). Married to philosopher Robert Merrihew Adams, with whom she frequently collaborated, she helped shape the field of analytic theology and the renewed engagement of analytic philosophers with confessional Christian doctrine.