Raging with Compassion: Pastoral Responses to the Problem of Evil Book

How do you cope and still trust God when you face suffering caused by evil? John Swinton offers an outstanding response to this question with crystal clear and engaging theology, thoroughly rooted in everyday experience.

In the first section he thoroughly annihilates the traditional arguments for theodicy (theological solutions for the puzzle of how a good God can allow good people to suffer). Traditional theodicy, he argues, ends up blaming victims for their suffering and is not only untrue but pastorally damaging, and causes people to abandon their faith.

Rather than asking the 'why' question of suffering, which he argues is ultimately unanswerable, Swinton favours the more practical question of 'how' - how to keep faith in the light of suffering caused by evil. His answers to that question are insightful and beautifully argued, looking in turn at the Christian values of silence, lament, thoughtfulness, forgiveness and hospitality. His chapter on silence is worth the entrance fee alone - it is outstanding.

John Swinton was formerly a mental health nurse and his empathy and shrewd psychological understanding of people is a real strength of this book. You won't find easy answers here, yet he is definitely after answers rather than impenetrable mysticism, making it wonderfully practical. His logic is razor-sharp, his arguments dramatic and compelling, and it is peppered with relevant life stories to illustrate everything.

I had two quibbles: one was his definition of evil, which I found confusing, and I was disappointed that he was only covering suffering that was caused by human hands rather than natural disasters or illness too. The other was his chapter on forgiveness - he drew on Miraslav Volf's classic Exclusion and Embrace quite a bit, but overemphasised our obligation to forgive at the expense of looking at the obligations of the offender to offer reparation, whereas Volf's view was more balanced.

These quibbles are tiny, however, in comparison with the immense achievement of this work. It is a must-read for anyone in pastoral ministry, or anyone struggling with evil by others, and I will be referring to it in future pastoral theology lectures. This deserves to become a classic. Highly recommended.