Long, Thomas G., What Shall We Say? Evil, Suffering, and The Crisis of Faith. Wm B.

Eerdmans Publishing Company; Grand Rapids. 2011.

Chapter One: The Shaking of the Foundations

Long offers readers a rationale for his presentation in the Preface where he astutely observes [in this book] theodicy is about how believers can hold together important faith claims that seem, on the surface anyway, to be incompatible: that there is a God, that God is loving and just, that God is powerful, and that there is undeserved suffering in the world (p. xii). This book, then, is a work of homiletical pastoral care. It is an attempt to stand with preachers, who then will stand with their parishioners, in thinking through how faith in a loving God holds together with the facts of life in a suffering world (p. xiii). To be sure there have been invaluable attempts to explain how the concept of a loving God can be reconciled with the harsh facts of human reality. But none like this one. The first chapter is a tour-de-force that not only needs to be read, it needed to be written and it needed to be written years and years ago. Here Long describes the horrors of the Lisbon Quake of 1755 and offers the opinion that that very event was the turning point, the central event, in theological history in terms of the question of the goodness of God. The destruction of Lisbon which commenced at the very moment when most of the city was on its knees in prayer with an earthquake and followed up by a fire and a tsunami (all in short order) sitting, as it did, on the cusp of the Enlightenment, changed everything. Citing Susan Neimans notion that The eighteenth century used the word Lisbon much as we use the word Auschwitz today it takes no more than the name of a place to mean: the collapse of the most basic trust in the world (pp. 4-5). It changed not just life in that city but life in Europe as well; and the rest of the world when news spread. It toppled faith. Long makes all of this terribly relevant theologically by pointing out that One way to describe this theological change is that the doctrine of particular providence was yielding to the doctrine of general providence. If your

architect neighbor comes to rescue you from your collapsing house in the middle of a gale, thats particular providence. If your architect friend doesnt have to come to rescue you because he has engineered your house to withstand the storm, thats general providence (p. 10). Accurately does Long note that, as a consequence of this theological transition from general confidence in God to widespread questioning of God, we are all children of Lisbon. Belief in a loving and powerful God is deeply challenged by the irrationality and inexplicability of innocent suffering (p. 17). That is certainly true and no one, neither Pastor nor Theologian can afford to pretend otherwise. Hence the remainder of the volume is an exploration of the issue aimed at helping Pastors and Theologians speak to their contemporaries the truth. This is, even at this early stage, an exciting and stimulating work. Long has done us all a great service by so clearly framing the issue. Next installment, chapter two.

Jim West Quartz Hill School of Theology