376 - Suffering and Hope: The Biblical Vision of the Human Predicament

Suffering and Hope: The Biblical Vision of the Human Predicament
By J. Christiaan Beker
Philadelphia, Fortress, 1987. 93 pp. $4.95.

J. Christiaan Beker, the Pauline scholar from Princeton Theological Seminary, engages in this book the problem of suffering, prompted by memories of the Nazi German occupation of his native Holland. Normative for his reflections is the Pauline trust in the ultimate cosmic triumph of God in the face of a world subject to evil. "Scripture insists that hope cannot be built on a foundation that denies the reality of suffering. Likewise suffering is not to be 'suffered' without hope."

Beker writes from a deep sense of the suffering of the world. "When I survey our world," he writes, "I detect more reason for hopelessness than for hope-especially because so many expressions of hope are simply projections of false hope." His fundamental question is: "Is authentic Christian hope able to respond to our questions about suffering in all its enormity and complexity and its seemingly tragic dimensions?"

For the biblical view of suffering, Beker considers texts from both parts of the canon. His discussion of the Hebrew Scriptures ranges from the Deuteronomic view of suffering as punishment for violation of the moral order, which insures "a coherent relation not only between suffering and punishment for evil but also between hope and reward," to the shattering of that view when the pious suffer and the wicked prosper, which leads to a crisis of faith.

In the New Testament, Beker first points to the view of I Peter that suffering is "joyful because it confirms the bond between Christian discipleship and Jesus Christ," urging Christians "to accommodate themselves to the political reality of Rome" in the hope that the world will respond positively to the gospel. Contrary to this view, the political reality of the world is experienced as so oppressive in Revelation that one can only curse the power of Rome, and the experience of suffering is "so severe and so empty of redemptive possibilities... that suffering becomes essentially a 'passive' suffering, a form of victimization by oppression and persecution."

In this situation, Beker finds Paul especially significant, "because, in contrast with other New Testament authors, he draws distinctions between various kinds of suffering," specifically, "between redemptive or creative suffering and tragic or meaningless suffering." Paul allows for both kinds. Redemptive suffering comes to expression in his understanding of the church as "the place where authentic hope is made possible because the suffering of human injustice is overcome," the church established "to exhibit a new form of life and to found a new

377- Suffering and Hope: The Biblical Vision of the Human Predicament

basis for human hope and fulfillment." Yet the church is not an escape from the world. For Paul, the church's mission has a peculiar twofold nature, "to resist the world's idolatrous powers...and to claim the world for God's redemptive purpose."

Tragic suffering is encountered in the face of death, transcending ,'more often than not the domain of human responsibility and guilt. In contrast to the suffering of injustice, the curse of this form of suffering is its numbing and isolating power. It leaves us speechless." The world itself is overwhelmed by evil, and yet, here too, for example, in Rom. 8:18-30, the church "against and separated from the world is...juxtaposed with a picture of the church for the world, that is, by a church in solidarity with the world and its suffering."

Beker concludes that "the biblical perspective posits the coming triumph of God as a reality which embraces and glorifies the created world rather than annulling or destroying it." This does not permit us "to give the last word to despair and meaningless suffering or to speak about God's world as a place of permanent ambiguity, if not absurdity!" The gnawing question nevertheless remains: "Can the present, unjust suffering of one child of God be righted and compensated for by that sufferer's future restoration in the Kingdom of God?"

Beker finally appeals to Albert Camus' portrayal of absurd confidence in the face of overwhelming suffering as the means of maintaining hope in a world without hope. "According to Camus, this absurdity is born of the human longing for happiness and for affirmation in the face of the insensitive silence of the world: 'The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human call and the irrational silence of the world.' " It is a kind of absurd trust, contrary to the evidence, for which Beker could also appeal to Paul, Who presented Abraham as the example of such a trust, even if in a less radical form, when "in hope against hope he believed that he would become the father of many nations" even as he pondered his own impotence and that of his wife Sarah (Rom. 4:18-21), and who himself, notwithstanding overwhelming evidence to the contrary, was able to remain confident that in the end "all of Israel would be saved" (Rom. 11:26).

Hendrikus Boers

Candler School of Theology
Atlanta, Georgia