Short notices

Matthias Grebe and Johannes Grössl (eds), T&T Clark Handbook of Suffering and the Problem of Evil (London: T&T Clark/Bloomsbury, 2023); 727 pp.: 9780567682437, £140 (hbk)

This very substantial and thoughtful collection will be a valuable reference book for theological libraries, even if, until it is published as a paperback, it will be beyond the pockets (and probably needs) of most individual buyers. I fear that expensive hardback first issues are now often vital for the economic viability of publishers in non-lucrative academic areas.

The first 226 pages are particularly useful, giving succinct, well-informed and fresh accounts from biblical times to the present of theological and philosophical responses to the problem of unwarranted suffering/evil for belief in God. Although other collections have offered similar surveys, this one is particularly thorough and is introduced by an excellent summary, written by Johannes Grössl, a lecturer at Würzburg University, of the various possible positions. From that point on, however, articles become longer and more diffuse, consisting of studies on evil and suffering more generally, whether related or not to their challenge to monotheism. Perhaps this matters less for a library reference book – many of the authors here are also experts – than for a teaching handbook, for which its price, length and diffuseness will be prohibitive. It is certainly not a book to be read consecutively. One curiosity is that its cover depicts the devastating 1755 earthquake and tsunami that provoked Voltaire’s influential satire of contemporary theodicies, but his satire is unmentioned in the text – despite having featured prominently in David Fergusson’s scholarly The Providence of God (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Séverine Deneulin and Clemens Sedmak (eds), Integral Human Development: Catholic Social Teaching and the Capability Approach (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2023); 387 pp.: 9780268205706, $65 (hbk)

This is an impressive (and less expensive) collection that I have already reviewed for Church Times, so I will not repeat that review here. It grapples with a central issue in political theology – namely, how can Catholic theological concepts (such as the common good, solidarity and subsidiarity) be deployed effectively within pluralistic Western societies, compared with Amartya Sen’s supposedly secular ‘capability approach’? It basically argues that, if public theologians act humbly and refrain from making explicitly theological justifications, they can work in the public realm effectively to supplement the ‘hidden values’ in Sen’s approach. The two editors and their 13 Catholic contributors are commendably eirenic and thoughtful. An important book.

Ian Bradley, Breathers of an Ampler Day: Victorian Views of Heaven (Durham: Sacristy Press, 2023); 193 pp.: 9781789592917, £14.99 (pbk)

Ian Bradley, Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at St Andrews, first came to academic attention with his excellent book The Call to Seriousness: the evangelical impact on the Victorians (1976), a study of those Victorian Evangelicals who helped to make prisons, factories and hospitals more humane (but also promoted censorship and prohibition). He worked, initially, as a journalist (for The Times) and broadcaster (for the BBC), before becoming a lecturer in practical theology at Aberdeen and then at St Andrews, as well as being ordained as a Church of Scotland minister. His numerous books – variously on hymns, pilgrimage, Celtic Christianity and monarchy – reflect both his popularist journalistic past and his serious scholarship as a historian of the Victorians, as does this new one. It offers a fairly swift overview of the opinions about heaven of a number of Victorian poets, including Tennyson and Christina Rossetti, church leaders, including Newman and F. D. Maurice, hymn writers, including Ellerton, Lyte and Neale, and sceptics, including J. S. Mill, Matthew Arnold and Henry Sidgwick. It is swift, rather than profound, but enjoyable to read.

Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology , 4th edition (Grand Rapids MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2023); 536 pp.: 9780802882851, £28/$34.99 (pbk)

This very accessible introductory textbook was first published in 1991, with the second edition in 2004 and the third in 2014. Now long retired from a chair in systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, the Presbyterian Daniel Migliore has updated his references, added a personal ‘letter’ to readers charting his long interest in liberation theology, Karl Barth and critical biblical scholarship, and written a welcome, entirely new, chapter on the Cosmic Christ in relation to climate change and the ecological crisis, making good use of Pope Francis’s influential Laudato si’. Sadly, he also dedicates this new edition to his wife, who was thanked for her help in earlier editions but who died in 2017.

Walter T. Wilson, The Wisdom of Sirach (Grand Rapids MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2023); 620 pp.: 9780802881762, £69.99/$85.99 (hbk)

This is the second book that Walter Wilson, Professor of New Testament at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, has contributed to the very welcome Eerdmans Critical Commentary series. It is well written and, from the outset, acknowledges Ben Sirach’s obvious patriarchy and ‘moral stereotyping’, especially about wives and daughters. Wilson’s first book was on Matthew. The series aims, admirably, to be ‘rigorous, up-to-date and diverse’, ‘free from a specific confessional stance’, and ‘accessible to academics and serious general readers alike’. Some contributors to the series have provided their own translation of their chosen text, but this one simply uses the Revised Standard Version. There is much of interest to explore in this new addition on a biblical book regarded as canonical for Catholics and Orthodox, but as apocryphal for Jews, Anglicans and Lutherans, and variously known as Ben Sira or Ecclesiasticus. Wilson depicts it as ‘a vast instructional text covering a host of topics germane to the art of living wisely, offering us a window into the life of a community undergoing significant political, cultural, and religious change’ (p. 1) – changes all too familiar to many Western churches today.

Karl Ludwig Schmidt, The Framework of the Story of Jesus: Literary-Critical Investigations of the Earliest Jesus Tradition , translated and edited by Byron R. McCane (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2023); 307 pp.: 9780227178874, £27.50 (pbk)

Originally published in German in 1919, this seminal book by Karl Ludwig Schmidt (1891–1956) has now been translated into English by Byron R. McCane, Professor of Religion at Denville, Kentucky, appearing first with Cascade in 2021 and now with James Clarke & Co. It is a book that contributed early to the development of the form criticism made famous by Rudolf Bultmann. This translation is long overdue and very welcome.

Books by James Clarke

A speciality of James Clarke is to republish, or publish in a fresh translation, mid-twentieth-century books that are still popular among conservative Protestants in the USA and UK. These three were published in 2023:

Emil Brunner, Eternal Hope and Faith, Hope and Love (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2023); 234 pp. / 72 pp.: 9780227179222 / 9780227179192, £22.50 / £20 (pbk)

Two reprints of classic 1950s books by Emil Brunner (1889–1966) by the publisher James Clarke. Brunner was often seen as a Reformed rival to Karl Barth – notoriously clashing over the salience of natural law theology. Both books, popular at the time, can probably be located more frugally second-hand.

Jacques Ellul, To Will and To Do: An Introduction to Christian Ethics , vol. 1, translated by Jacob Marques Rollison (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2023); 253 pp.: 9780227179345, £22.50 (pbk)

Rollison edited the 2022 collection Jacques Ellul and the Bible for James Clarke. Now he translates the first volume of Ellul’s ambitious (but never completed) 1964 introduction to Christian ethics, with a second volume to follow. It joins Lisa Richmond’s 2017 translation of Ellul’s 1948 Presence in the Modern World for James Clarke, and contains many of the Barthian themes of that work (Ellul was distinctly less enamoured with Brunner). The biblical citations of To Will and To Do, on their own, indicate its theological perspective: within the New Testament, citations from Romans predominate (with no citations from Luke and only one each from Mark and John and two from Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount), whereas within the Old Testament, citations from Genesis 1—4 predominate. This new translation reads fluently.

A similar book by Lutterworth:

Edward Irving, The Doctrine of the Incarnation Opened: An Abridgement with Introduction and Response , edited by Alexander J. D. Irving (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2023); 222 pp.: 9780718896652, £22.50 (pbk)

This book reproduces abridged versions of the sermons of the dissident evangelical Church of Scotland minister Edward Irving (1792–1834), who became a celebrated London preacher but was disowned by the Church of Scotland two years before he died. The editors argue that his contentious (at the time) claim that Jesus Christ assumed a fallen human nature influenced Karl Barth, T. F. Torrance and Colin Gunton, although his teaching also inspired millenarian ‘Irvingites’ and the fairly short-lived, sectarian Catholic Apostolic Church.