The central tenet of Christian faith, namely, that God, through the
incarnation, has immersed Godself in human history and undergone its
terrors, does not dispel the mystery of the world’s pain and may indeed
make the mystery that much more profound. This volume examines both the
implications of the doctrine of incarnation for the understanding of
human suffering and the attempts to provide a theologically responsible
account of this article of faith. It combines biblical and
systematic-theological reflection with a thoroughgoing survey of the
panorama of responses to human suffering developed during the course of
Christian history, ranging from the early Christian martyrs, across the
medieval mystical tradition and the Reformation, and into modernity.
Moreover, it examines late- and postmodern attempts to come to terms
with human suffering, by means of either retrievals, or thoroughgoing
revisions, of traditional theological conceptuality, and considers
non-Christian attempts to address the perennial problem of human pain
and death.