BOOK REVIEWS

171 SUFFERING: A TEST OF THEOLOGICAL METHOD ARTHUR C.MCGILL Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982. Pages 130. pb.

This book made hardly a stir when it was first published in 1968. Thomas Altizer, Harvey Cox, and4 'religionless Christianity" where the vogue in that annus terribilis. Now that the necro-theologies have gone the way of all fads, Westminster Press has reissued the late Arthur McGill's exemplary essay, together with a foreword by Paul Ramsey and William F. May. Though modest in tone and slender in size, McGill's treatise shows how theology is done in the grand manner. He takes what is surely the most vexing modern problemthe reality of violent sufferingand subjects it to vigorous analysis by way of the Christian theological tradition. The essential, indeed the rending modern problem, McGill contends, is the fear that an awful destruction will fall upon us unawares. Physical disease, mental illness, political terror, mechanical calamity, total warall the complaints of modern life seem to threaten us with a dread unexpectedness, even an occult improbability. To the surprise of many, we have been made once again to confront what Scripture calls the demonic. Evil is not merely the perversity that originates in humanity. It is also the abusive transnatural power that entangles and subjects us to its own terrible energy of violation. What kind of God, we must ask, will not or cannot obstruct these demonic forces that beset us all around? In answering so troubling a question, McGill makes no attempt at theodicy. Christian faith in the good God does not need to be defended so much as clarified and proclaimed. To deal with our modern perplexity over the demonic, McGill resorts ingeniously to the ancient controversy between Arius and Athanasius. The real issue between them, he shows, was the nature of God's own trinitarian lifenot only what God does toward us, but what he is in himself. For Arius, God is pure transcendence, the Absolute who is wholly self-contained, independent, and incommunicable. For Athanasius, by contrast, the decisive mark of God's divinity is the charity whereby he gives all things to the Son, who in turn yields all glory back to the Father. To say that God is the power of surrender and self-giving love is also to make a radical claim about the nature of evil. As the parody and ape of God, the demonic rules by dominationby the desire to subordinate and subjugate everything to its own selfish will. Its fundamental assumption is that we have identity and security in the things we possess as uniquely and solely our own. Our need to draw a circle of certainty about ourselves thus becomes the oc-

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PERSPECTIVES IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES

casion for demonic power to invade our lives. Because it can deprive us of what we think to be the source of our fundamental identity, it has the strength to kill. Sin is never, in this reading of evil, a choice between the good and the bad. A merely ethical approach to our condition is itself a demonic delusion. Our basic life-decision lies between two kinds of power that we must acknowledge as having sway over us, and that we must worship as the final Reality of the universe: the power of domination or the power of redemption. We live and we die, in New Testament terms, "according to the king who holds [us] and the kingdom to which [we] belong" (92). The great Scriptural adjurations are not for us to do good, therefore, but to love the self-giving God revealed in Jesus. McGill understands the life and death of Jesus as one continuous act of dispossession. His crucifixion exposes violent possessiveness in all of its futility and vapidity. The who rules by coercive domination has been met and conquered in the Jesus who yields up his own identity as the world understands it: He seeks not to possess but to surrender himself, offering his life in adoration to God and in service to his fellows. His resurrection abolishes the satanic pretense by showing that demonic control and destruction are not the ultimate facts of life. This risen Lord enables Christians to confront demonic violence not in despairing fear, McGill concludes, but in sorrow and joy. In sorrow, because our own lives and the world itself remain largely enthralled by the ungodly power. Yet finally in joy, because of our unyielding confidence that the world is ruled by the God of Jesus Christ. Such assurance is the only true grounds for living an unselfish life, and thus for answering the problem of evil existentially as well as theoretically. Compared to most books that attempt either to vindicate or indict God for the world's violent suffering, McGill's modest work will endure. It ought to become a standard text in courses on the problem of evil.
RALPH C. WOOD WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY WINSTON-SALEM NC

BEYOND NIHILISM NIETZSCHE WITHOUT MASKS OFELIA SCHUTTE Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Pages 233. $22.00. Professor Schutte has rendered a great philosophic service in her book on Nietzsche, for she has found a distinction that clarifies a whole range of is-

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