631 - The Protest and the Silence: Suffering, Death, and Biblical Theology

The Protest and the Silence: Suffering, Death, and Biblical Theology
By G. Tom Milazzo
Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1992. 182 pp. $12.95.

"Protest" is the dominant word, printed boldly in bright red, on the cover of this eloquent book whose author teaches religious studies at Saint Leo College. Milazzo's theme is suffering and death, which motivate his protest against God. His protest takes the form of a question. Milazzo refers repeatedly to "the death question," by which he means that death calls into question-it raises a question against-the reality of God, which theological reflection cannot presuppose. He insists that taking God's existence as a given "misunderstands both the nature of the biblical experience of God and the nature of theological reflection itself." Milazzo joins these two natures in one subject, biblical theology, but he is quick to distance himself from the biblical theology movement of times past. He does so in his initial chapter, which describes that movement's demise. Milazzo's book is not a proposal for a new method in biblical theology, but an argument, drawing on the Bible itself, about the problem confronting any theology. The problem is precisely the reality of God.

Milazzo devotes three of his book's four remaining chapters to showing that the Bible itself raises "the death question"-that it questions and protests God's silence, God's unyielding absence. Chapter Two, "Suffering, Death, and the Reality of God," summarizes earlier studies of the topic. Milazzo judges them to be lacking in one crucial respect: They do not recognize how radically Israel, especially in its laments, raised the issue of God's complicity in human suffering and death and of God's very reality. In the face of Israel's questions and protests, God remained silent, refusing to answer and even to face the persistent question, Why? God demands, God rages, and God torments, but God does not answer. Milazzo continues to press this point in his third and fourth chapters, which survey apocalyptic and wisdom literature. In this literature, too, he finds the same oppressing void: "The psalmist, the sage, and the seer all speak the name of God even unto death. But where is the God to whom they called?" God's jealous love turns to a lust destructive of humanity. God's law creates

632 - The Protest and the Silence: Suffering, Death, and Biblical Theology

an indebtedness that engenders fear, and "fear of God overshadows and precludes love of God"-a claim that Milazzo identifies as "the whole point of this book." If that is its point, its conclusion is this: "The experience of suffering and death finally precludes affirmation of God,"

Perhaps this is not so much the book's conclusion as it is its axiom. It is in effect at the beginning, and it remains remarkably unaffected by the very diverse biblical texts to which Milazzo refers in abundance. All of them are submitted-and the passive voice seems just right-to Milazzo's axiomatic death question, which has no answer. Building on Job and Qoheleth, Milazzo's book has about it a kind of resolute despair, or a resigned faith, which gains its own voice and mounts its own protest in a fifth and concluding chapter that quotes frequently and foundationally from Nietzsche and Camus. It is an "absurd" faith that stands with the cross, about which, and about the one who died there, "nothing can be said." This is a heroic faith, determined to "love God unto death." It is faith beyond orthodoxy (represented by Moltmann) and atheism and beyond Israel's faith; Milazzo names it "protest theism."

It seems churlish to criticize a book so passionate and eloquent, but I will risk the offense. Milazzo conducts virtually no exegesis, and recognizes no troubling exegetical questions. For example, he simply asserts of Job 42:5-6 that YHWH's display of power forces Job to repent. While this is one of the most difficult and vigorously debated passages in the Bible, with regard to both text and interpretation, Milazzo neither admits any difficulties nor alludes to any controversy. He cites Isa 41:17-20 in support of his claim that "restoration follows upon the return of Israel's wayward heart," while the text itself exactly reverses the logic. Milazzo seems to treat his secondary sources with similar inattention. In support of his mysterious claim, against the biblical theology movement, that analogical language has no referent and is thus meaningless, he cites Langdon Gilkey, exchanging Gilkey's "equivocal" for "analogical." He quotes Gerhard von Rad as saying that "Death radically called human being and all that it lived for into question," but von Rad actually says just the opposite: "It would be wrong to assume" that, for Israel, death radically called humankind into question (Old Testament Theology 1, p. 389, italics added). The problems are not limited to careless reading and misquotation. It is often difficult to distinguish Milazzo's own convictions, or axioms, from those he attributes to biblical texts. When he says, "In the shadow of death..., faith cannot stand," in a chapter on apocalyptic texts, we do not know if this is a generalization from experience or history, a personal confession, an exegetical conclusion, or a matter of logic. In turn, this makes it difficult to know how to argue with Milazzo, or if it would matter.

In spite of its evident passion, in crucial points Milazzo adopts the cooler language typical of theodicies, whose answers he rejects:

634 - The Protest and the Silence: Suffering, Death, and Biblical Theology

Contrasting alternatives, either/or, appear frequently, alongside arguments "if..., then." This need not be a problem, but Milazzo asks us to accept alternatives and premises that already commit us on just those matters in question: God, humankind, and death, for example. The afflicted poetry of Job warns against this.

The book provokes and sometimes vexes-as when it insists on referring to God and even to YHWH, for mistaken reasons, as it. It also compels the reader to turn repeatedly and carefully to the Bible, which is a major benefit.

Ben C. Ollenburger

Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries
Elkhart, IN