All deeply spiritual and emotional suffering invites compassion. The best part of us, as humans, responds in ways that seek to heal the wounded heart. In Human Anguish and the Power of God, David Kelsey worries that often the frames of response shaped by particular engagements with the Christian theological tradition are not helpful and perhaps even theologically harmful: unhelpful in that they further the suffering; theologically harmful in offering a deeply flawed understanding of God's relationship to the situation. While the book broaches a general concern given voice across a spectrum of religious practitioners, Kelsey has specific concern for those tasked with the work of pastoral care. The book is focused on theological formation for and by pastoral care givers. To be a bit more specific, it is shaped by and addressed to pastoral theology in its existence as a field of practice in theological education.

I don't want to mislead here and suggest the book situates itself as a critique of current practices in the field of pastoral theology. Far from it. Rather, Kelsey takes up a more general theological issue – conceiving and talking about God's power, which has particular import for the pastoral care of those suffering great loss. The overarching argument of the book is that, properly understood and communicated, the idea of ‘God's power’ can be a balm and not just a salve to the wounded heart. Kelsey takes as his task offering just such an account that draws deeply on the Christian philosophical and theological tradition. He does this in four parts.

The first movement is to anchor the entire conversation in the life of the triune God. By beginning just here, Kelsey seeks to accomplish two big things. The first is to suggest that, however God is related to suffering and loss, it is intrinsic to the life of God and not a matter of external relations. With this move he challenges the implicit assumption of much theological discourse in the West that roots God's relationship to suffering in the caprice of power (namely, God saves whom God will). The second is to reshape the idea of God's sovereignty such that it does not become the grounding principle for human devotion. When it is so conceived, sovereignty is reduced to a site of motivation to regard precipitated by monarchical power (think fear of the Lord in its most literal sense). Capricious sovereignty is then at the root of Kelsey's concern about portrayals of God's power by trajectories of Christian thought that routinely underappreciate the depth of human anguish in the midst of suffering. Addressing this tragic shortcoming requires, in Kelsey's estimation, an account of God's very aseity which can enfold such anguish as something other than distraction.

If the first movement of book argues for an account of God which neither renders human anguish as beside the point nor serves as proof that whatever power God has is vacuous in the face of it, the next movement reframes two theological categories as a remedy by reconceiving God's glory and sovereignty. Integral to this reframing is the already mentioned location of this entire conversation in the life of the triune God. Thus situated, the glory of God finds its fullest expression in the relationship of the triune life to everything else. I say ‘fullest expression’ because on Kelsey's account the glory of God draws our devotion – not just our fear. Such devotion then migrates from simple response to constitutive reality. This becomes critical to his argument, because if the glory of God, as the dimension of the triune life most immediate to that which is other than God (i.e. us), is intrinsically part of the fabric of our being, then God can be present with and not just to human anguish. This I think is the entire point of Kelsey's proposal: namely, to offer an intellectually credible way to offer certainty of God's presence in the midst of anguish while not presuming to offer surety of its outcome.

At this point, I will admit an unease I have with the structure of the book. In the closing chapter Kelsey introduces us to three fellow theological educators and scholars, each of whom has suffered the anguish which motivated this work. It was in reading their stories that the whole of project made vastly more sense. The deft use of texts which each of them had written in their journey through anguish illumined not only the question which provoked this work but also the explicit need to engage the theological project as it does. Perhaps the ‘Aha!’ moment which the placement of this chapter occasions is yet another dimension of the desire around which this book is organised: to avoid the expected.

Human Anguish and God's Power provides an interesting study of theological method in addition to the basic argument of the book. Kelsey's approach to using the tools and ways of the systematic theologian to address one of the deep surds which enfolds pastoral theology is fascinating. The way the project displays both the commitment to internal coherence and an intellectual rigour which can retain a vibrant coexistence of mystery and a resistance to credulity in the face of it is notable. What is particularly interesting is the way that Kelsey draws strands of the Christian tradition together using sometimes idiosyncratic linguistic usages. For example he refuses to recycle the language of ‘the church’, instead preferring variations of ‘communities of Christians’ who gather around the ‘canonical Christian Scripture’. Anyone familiar with his work knows there is something afoot in these usages. I suspect that positioning this book as being at once a performance of academically ‘respectable’ theology while yet not wanting to loose the bonds to living and breathing Christian communities is part of it. Such loosening would, after all, defeat the stated purpose of the work. In the end, the book is about theological humility and subjective certainty, the space of tension in which suffering becomes anguish.