The Suffering of God

This is the most important book I read in seminary because it has fundamentally changed my idea of God. Like most Christians, I was raised to picture the God of the Old Testament as a holy, transcendent God, perennially angry and punitive, distant and strict. I was a closet Marcionite in the respect that my image of the God of the Old Testament was discontinuous with the God Jesus calls Father. As Fretheim says . . . the picture of Jesus presented often stands at odds with the commonly accepted picture of God. Attributes such as love, compassion, and mercy, accompanied by acts of healing, forgiving, and redeeming, tend to become narrowly associated with Jesus, while the less palatable attributes and actions of holiness, wrath, power and justice are ascribed only to God. . . . Jesus is friend and God is enemy . . . the atonement gets twisted so that Jesus is seen as the one who came to save us from God. [Fretheim, 2] In The Suffering of God Fretheim wants to lift up Old Testament metaphors for God, particularly those that have been neglected, like nonmonarchical images that show a God more in line with the New Testament, a God so involved with humanity that God suffers with and for humanity. In order to do this, Fretheim rehabilitates anthropomorphic metaphors for God that have been discredited by Old Testament scholarship since Philo, in particular by scholarship that wants to focus on God as transcendent, immutable, free, sovereign monarch and therefore essentially "other" than human. In the continuity of anthropomorphic metaphors throughout the Old Testament, Fretheim sees an indirect but continuous portrayal of a God who gets ever closer to humanity until finally this God becomes incarnate in Jesus Christ. "In the incarnation, God has acted anthropomorphically in the most supreme way." [Fretheim, 6] By focusing in The Suffering of God on these neglected anthropomorphic metaphors, Fretheim wants to expand the number and kind of metaphors we use "so that our operative fund of them will be more congruent with the biblical witness and our experience of God in the world." [Fretheim, 9] In addition, Fretheim believes that these neglected metaphors are really canon within the canon and that they can help us interpret the whole of the Bible and bring together our thinking about seemingly polar opposites, like God's sovereignty and God's grace [Fretheim, 11]. Fretheim essentially redefines God's freedom, God's ability to change, how much God knows, and how God exercises power in the world by showing a God in continuous relationship with humanity from the very beginning. . . . the Old Testament reveals a fundamental continuity between God and world. God is graciously present, in, with, and under all the particulars of the creation, with which God is in a relationship of reciprocity. The immanent and transcendent God of Israel is immersed in the space and time of this world. Such a perspective reveals a divine vulnerability, as God takes on all the risk

As other reviewers have noted, the idea of God's vulnerability is often overlooked in church and theological conversations - the immutability of God and omnipotence of God would seem to contradict the idea of a God who feels, much less suffers, in the way the human beings can understand. Fretheim's wonderful text, part of the Fortress Press series of Overtures to Biblical Theology, explores images and situations found in the Hebrew scriptures that would indicate and illustrate this aspect of the divine. Fretheim writes about God's relationship with the world - this includes aspects such as human understanding of God (anthropomorphic metaphors), the reality of God's relationship, God's internal relationship with the world, foreknowledge, and God's suffering. Fretheim expands upon this idea significantly - God is a God who suffers because, with, and for creation. God's suffering because of creation has to do with the idea of covenant and relationship - much of the narrative of the Hebrew scripture is built upon the covenants God makes with humanity (the implicit covenant from the Garden of Eden, the explicit covenants with Noah and Abraham, etc.). The call of the prophets and the lamentations and sorrowful psalms all speak to the breach of these covenants, particularly the covenant of Abraham, and how this causes God to suffer. Fretheim uses passages such as the text of the prophet Hosea to show that God is not like a military leader or political leader dealing with insubordination or rebellion, but more like a loving parent dealing with a troublesome child. Fretheim states that this takes more of the image of mother than father. God's suffering with the people has roots in the Exodus story, but carries forward in many situations through the narrative strand. 'God sees the suffering from the inside,' Fretheim states. God is not powerless in this situation, but God is intimately aware of the suffering of the people, and this has great implications for later understanding of God. Fretheim shows that this suffering-with is not reserved just for the Israelites - in Isaiah and Jeremiah, God's weeping and mourning for Moab is significant. God also suffers for the people - while this takes on dramatic form in Christian contexts, where Jesus takes on the suffering for all people, the idea of God taking on the weight of sin and suffering for the wrong-doing of the people is also present in the Hebrew scriptures, particularly in the suffering servant imagery, but also elsewhere. The comparison with Rabbi Abraham Heschel's monumental work, 'The Prophets', is very apt; companionship with authors such as Reinhold Niebuhr and William Placher ('Narratives of a Vulnerable God') are also worthwhile explorations. This book will expand the way God is understood in dramatic, and dramatically human, ways.

This is not a book for casual reading. The language is college-level and, at times, difficult. Heavy with scriptures, "The Suffering of God" is WELL WORTH every minute spent in it. A real eye-opener for those who have always perceived God as being cold, distant, and uninvolved in the affairs of this world.

I was introduced to this text in a seminary class on Biblical theology and found Fretheim's discussion challenging and provocative. Fretheim demonstrates that the notion of a omniscient,omnipotent God simply is not borne out in the biblical narrative. Rather, we have a portrayal of God as one in a loving relationship with God's people. A loving relationship, by its very nature, implies give-and-take and no one party is allowed control or dominance. Fretheim demonstrates example after example in the scriptures where God is portrayed as influenced, persuaded, surprised,and even confused by the behavior of the people. This is a God who suffers when the people suffer, not a God who is above all and beyond human experience. I have had the privilege to hear Dr. Fretheim speak in person and he is an engaging and challenging theologian with much to offer both the professional student and the arm chair theologian.

Terence Fretheim's _The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective_ is an outstanding book, particularly for those concerned with the long-neglected subject of Divine pathos. It is an excellent corrective for two equally disturbing trends in much of the currect thought about God: First, the view of God as a grandfatherly, essentially innocuous figure--Niebuhr's "God without wrath Who sent a Christ without a cross into a world without sin"; second, the view of God (especially prominent in certain Christian circles) as an omnicausal, impassive Unmoved Mover. Fretheim's book masterfully navigates between this latter-day Scylla and Charybdis.The last five chapters of the book ("God in Human Form"; "God Suffers Because"; "God Suffers With"; "God Suffers For"; "Prophet, Theophany, and the Suffering of God") are especially insightful, beautifully complementing Abraham Joshua Heschel's thoughts on Divine pathos in _The Prophets_.The concluding chapter--"Prophet, Theophany, and the Suffering of God"--is especially powerful. Today, the Prophets are mined primarily for eschatalogical and/or apologetic insight-- oftentimes, sadly, to the detriment of other, no less vital matters, such as the pathos of God. So very much may be learned from these remarkable souls, in whose words one cannot help but hear (i.e., apart from any prior philosophical convictions!) God weeping and raging, and not only for His chosen people, the Jews, but for all mankind and even the earth itself, its very flora and fauna (see, for instance, "God as Mourner" [pp. 130-36]).The very idea of such intense Divine vulnerability is staggering, not to say liberating: No longer is one faced with an impassive God Who sits on high, micromanaging every last detail of history to His chosen ends; one sees how very _gracious_ God is, how He has entered into dynamic relations with the world in such a fashion the He, too, may suffer pain, rejection, abuse. As Fretheim makes abundantly clear, though, the ways of God are not the ways of man: Where a human would become bitter or callous or simply remove himself/herself from such suffering, God remains ever faithful, ever merciful. Even when judgement ultimately falls, one cannot divorce God's wrath from His pathos. Truly, His compassion fails not!I cannot recommend this book too highly. It is essential reading for any who wish to enter into genuine intimacy with God.