Abstract
Theologian Kelly M. Kapic has undertaken in these pages neither a theodicy nor a theology of suffering. Kapic, whose wife suffers the relentless, chronic pain of connective tissue disease, chooses instead to draw alongside sufferers and co-sufferers, bringing personal faith and theological inquiry to bear on the agonizing questions of those who suffer, as well as those who bear witness to their pain. His approach is not autobiographical; we do not learn details of his wife’s daily struggle with chronic pain; rather, Kapic focuses on the questions with which praying, believing Christians must grapple in a “pain-soaked” world. Central to the book are questions about how sufferers and co-sufferers can relate to the God of biblical faith and the God who is fully present in and to a world where suffering is an inescapable part of human experience.
Notably, Kapic limits his reflections to the struggle of Christian believers who strive to hang onto faith in the face of serious illness or physical pain. In a time when whole human populations are targeted for oppression, persecution, and violence, some may wish for a broader vision of the nature of suffering; yet, Kapic’s focused approach keeps pain and life-constricting illness, as theological issues, front and center.
Kapic’s exploration of the contours of faith amid unrelenting pain and suffering unfolds in three major sections. Part I takes stock of crucial dimensions of the theological struggle into which Christian believers are plunged by serious illness or physical pain—their own, or that of significant others. Along the way, Kapic sets aside false “solutions”—for example, simplistic answers (or any answers) to the question “why?” Essential channel markers for a Christian’s struggle with chronic pain and suffering include hard questions asked about God and of God, the embrace of our embodied humanity despite the suffering that entails, and a language of faith that includes the enraged, hurt protest and anguish captured by biblical lament.
Of the book’s three main sections, part II is the most explicitly and systematically theological. Here, the focus is on God’s self-embodiment in Jesus Christ as a clue to God’s engagement with human suffering. Kapic emphasizes the thoroughgoing divine commitment to embodiment, including the suffering and dying of the body that incarnation entails. For Kapic, God reveals Godself in Jesus of Nazareth as God bodily with us and God who is vulnerable for us. Moreover, God Incarnate is the one who is “risen and remaining.” Jesus’ bodily resurrection represents and contains our own inheritance of a changed future. The risen Christ, Kapic notes, hosts both faith and doubt among those he encounters. His risen life assures our salvation, one day, not only from sin and sorrow, but from suffering and physical pain.
What Kapic does not interrogate as deeply as one might wish is how Christ’s suffering, death, and rising saves us in the present and not just in the future, within the ongoing experience of unrelenting pain. Courage, and the knowledge that it will not always be this way, can help; but more might be said about God’s engagement with us in those times when despair prevails, and the sufferer can come up with neither faith nor hope. To a degree, part III indirectly addresses such despair. In this closing section, Kapic develops the role played by the wider Christian community in the personal suffering of its individual members. Corporate worship remains important for sufferers, sustaining vision and hope through its core practices, including the sacraments.
Particularly interesting is Kapic’s discussion of the role of confession and assurance of pardon for sufferers. Kapic astutely observes that, no matter how certain we may be in pain-free times that physical illness and suffering are not “pay-back” for sin, the tendency to connect the two is persistent and, at times, gripping, for those plunged into physical suffering.
Also arresting is Kapic’s insight that it is necessary for the sufferer not only to benefit from the presence and support of a living, embodied community of faith through a sustained personal suffering, but to contribute to the community’s life. Kapic cites the experience of close friends who, navigating a cancer diagnosis, sought to sustain outward-focused hospitality, generosity, and curiosity, lest their lives be consumed by cancer in ways far beyond the physical.
Near the close of the book, Kapic ventures that the primary “working principle” of his theological meditation is “realism”—a determination to take seriously both physical suffering and the challenges to faith and faithfulness that it precipitates. Readers of this book will recognize and appreciate that realism, even as they may find themselves scribbling challenges and questions in the margins of Kapic’s pages. I suspect he would be honored by such challenges, for it is just such engaged wrestling in the company of other Christians that Kapic hopes to encourage.
Sally A. Brown
Princeton Theological Seminary