When Faith is Tested

When Faith is Tested. By Jeffry R. Zurheide. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997. 85 pp. $15.00 (paper).

The publication of this book by Baptist pastor Jeffry Zurheide adds another rich contribution to the breadth of valuable material contained within the Creative Pastoral Care and Counseling Series. With the opening words of his Introduction, Zurheide personally engages the reader as he acknowledges that "nothing assaults a pastors theology and emotions as does a visit to someone who is suffering and dying or who is grieving a tragic death. All of one's personal issues surrounding pain and finitude are summoned forth. All of one's presuppositions about God are challenged" (p. 1).

By locating this issue in such a personal way with the person of the pastor, Zurheide establishes an essential link between embodied pastoral presence and God's empathic presence. Those engaged in pastoral ministry to the sufferer are literally "the somebodies with skin on" (p. 5). How we prepare to enter the pastoral encounter and discern at depth what it is the sufferer seeks from this encounter is as important as anything that may be said or done. To enter the encounter as embodied presence is to enter with a sense of humility, openness, privilege and "with a generous helping of silence" (p. 9), acknowledging that our felt sense of inadequacy in the light of suffering may well tempt the caregiver to fill the silence with words. It is to consider that in entering the domain of the sufferer it is as if we are "entering a sanctuary-a holy place" (p. 9). Zurheide claims quite rightly that for pastoral caregivers to be accurate in their empathy "demands such a stance" (p. 10).

Zurheide deals well with the particular temptations that face pastoral caregivers, wanting to move too quickly to neat theological answers when in fact the sufferer may not actually have posed a theological question which demands such a response. By identifying and critiquing the three commonly suggested answers to the "Why me" question, Zurheide reveals the inherent and subsequent paucity of such responses. Zurheide then seeks to articulate what he considers to be a more satisfactory response to the issue of theodicy: How can a good and righteous God permit evil and suffering? This material in the middle section of the book is quite dense in comparison to its frame but such is the nature of Karl Barth's theology which Zurheide now draws upon, and the nature of any credible theological inquiry into the issue at hand. In drawing on Barth's understanding of the omnipotence of God, Zurheide addresses the limitations of current popular theological frameworks such as Harold Kushner's writing in When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Zurheide identifies accurately the difficulties posed when God as "Great" is removed from the tension of God also being "Good." What then, asks Zurheide, becomes the source of hope beyond the immediacy of the present all-encompassing situation?

Central to Barth's understanding of the power-ominipotence of God is the paradoxical revelation of God incarnate in the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. This seeming weakness, vulnerability and impotence of the crucifixion event "becomes the very channel through which God displays God's omnipotence" (p. 39). This notion of power is as implicitly paradoxical as is the nature of God's revelation. It will be found from within the very experience that would seek to annihilate. Pastors incarnate this hope through the "lending of their eyes." "Through you they may have caught a glimpse of present or future hope, a vision that could either display itself in the ability to plod on in the therapeutic process or aid them in making their peace with the illness in a more intentional resignation" (p. 55).

There is nothing trite or superficial in this pastoral response. Pastoral encounters with suffering must be approached with humility and an acknowledgement that one is walking on hallowed ground. Zurheide begins and ends this important pastoral inquiry with the same affirmation. While brief in volume, this book is by no means shallow in its depth of content and theological enquiry.

MARY CAYGILL

St John's/ Trinity Theological colleges

Auckland, New Zealand

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Winter 1999
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