Review of T&T Clark Handbook of Suffering and the Problem of Evil
Grebe, Matthias, and Johannes Grössl, eds. T&T Clark Handbook of Suffering and the Problem of Evil. London, New York, and Dublin: T&T Clark, 2025, pp. 727, $58.95, paperback.
Now, despite these concerns, I would warmly recommend this book to audiences of all sorts: to students, established academics, and interested laypeople alike. The student of biblical and theological studies in particular will find much of use and interest within its pages: it is an excellent first-stop to familiarize oneself with existing discussions, and is generally good at signposting to other pertinent literature.
Writing the whole of Matthias Grebe’s title might well put me over my word limit; suffice it to say he is an Anglican vicar and theologian based at St. Mellitus College in England. Johannes Grössl is the Chair for Fundamental Theology and Comparative Religious Studies at the University of Würzburg, and he comes from a Roman Catholic background. They jointly edit this volume as friends who first met during their student days in southern Germany and reunited a decade or so later after completing their theological training (p. xiii). This is no mere, trivial biographical remark: it serves rather to frame their editorial approach, which is to encourage theological scholarship that is “done as a conversation between friends, even friends who disagree” (p. xiii).
This book is what it says: a handbook, showcasing 80 stand-alone chapters which consider the problems of evil and suffering (PES) from an astonishingly wide range of different perspectives. It begins with a short introduction (the content of which suggests it might be better placed elsewhere in the volume), and then proceeds in five parts. Part One considers PES in conversation with biblical books, themes, and personages, and Part Two explores the contributions of various prominent historical and contemporary thinkers. Part Three looks at PES as it relates to Christian doctrines like creation, the divine attributes, Christology, and providence (among others), while Part Four addresses philosophical issues, most notably the various approaches to the problem of evil found in contemporary analytic philosophy. Finally, Part Five considers PES from the standpoint of non-Christian religions and miscellaneous interdisciplinary perspectives.
This handbook is, on the whole, very good. It features a great number of stellar contributions conspicuous for their erudition, topical relevance, and lucidity of argument. A few—most notably chapter 9—add to this already impressive catalogue the virtue of raw devotional power. Many others, which from time to time slip in any of these departments, are nevertheless compelling, interesting, and certainly useful in other important respects, and so contribute to an aggregate sense of the book’s ultimate success qua handbook. Few readers will come away from this book unconvinced that a polyphonous approach to PES is necessary. Fewer still will come away having learned nothing or having been challenged but little in their thinking about PES. Again, this is a good book, a successful book, and I will doubtless be pulling it off my reference shelf often. That said, there are a few editorial issues the rectification of which would go a long way to making it a truly excellent edited volume. These can be broadly classed under the following headings: (1) editorial direction; (2) essay curation; (3) typographical errors.
Editorial Direction
Grebe and Grössl tell us at the outset they have “decided against a unified approach and intentionally sought a wide range of voices” (p. xiii). They claim, perhaps rightly, that this volume is “unique in its scope and has widened the circle of conversation partners” other handbooks have offered (p. xiv). I have no problem with this in theory. But, rereading this after having finished the book, I can’t help but wonder if these remarks are not in part an attempt to justify what strikes me as the employment of an overly laissez-faire editorial philosophy. All too often we encounter essays that wander rather aimlessly, lacking a central thesis or organizing principle. More worryingly, no fewer than 19 of the chapters (my notes tell me) fail to engage PES more than tangentially; a telling refrain encountered in the early pages is “x doesn’t talk much about PES” (e.g., pp. 51, 92, 127, 150, 173). This, of course, invites the question as to why these chapters are included in a handbook about suffering and the problem of evil at all. In Part 2, where authors already plainly struggle with the narrow space constraints, essays alternate engaging a thinker’s entire corpus, one work only, or even one small part of one work, giving the impression that there were few editorial directives beyond, “please write something or other about x and suffering orevil.” This sense recurs often enough in the other parts as well, and generally in proportion to a topic’s prima facie relatedness to PES. This is not to say that this did not result in some seriously fascinating chapters; it is only to say that the unwanted fruits of eschewing a more “unified approach” sometimes show: too often, chapters seem to have no clear purpose apart from the aforementioned widening of the discussion circle. Returning to a parenthetical above—and in addition to providing more definite instructions for authors—matters may have been helped by the inclusion of a short introduction discussing the relevance and import of the forthcoming material, as well as, perhaps, a word on selection criteria. This could have gone some distance in allaying the persistent feeling that not enough organizational oversight has been exercised, and that contributors have been entrusted with perhaps a bit too much freedom.
This handbook is, on the whole, very good. It features a great number of stellar contributions conspicuous for their erudition, topical relevance, and lucidity of argument. A few—most notably chapter 9—add to this already impressive catalogue the virtue of raw devotional power. Many others, which from time to time slip in any of these departments, are nevertheless compelling, interesting, and certainly useful in other important respects, and so contribute to an aggregate sense of the book’s ultimate success qua handbook. Few readers will come away from this book unconvinced that a polyphonous approach to PES is necessary. Fewer still will come away having learned nothing or having been challenged but little in their thinking about PES. Again, this is a good book, a successful book, and I will doubtless be pulling it off my reference shelf often
Essay Curation
While most of the obvious candidates for inclusion in a book about PES are present, there are nevertheless a few surprising omissions. First and most conspicuously, neither the doctrine of the Fall nor Original Sin more generally are given even a single chapter of their own. Indeed, they are barely given a subsection of a chapter, and even in the essay about the origin of evil where we should most expect to find it. (Remarkably, the Fall is here given the same amount of airtime as zimzum.) I am all for questioning the traditional consensus on Original Sin. But not to highlight its historical dogmatic prominence and the substantial theological and philosophical work it was commissioned to do is, if I may be forgiven for saying so, rather careless. This omission is the more alarming in light of the periodic concession that Original Sin did so operate (e.g., pp. 5, 123, 147, 210, 229, 430, 541). That readers unfamiliar with historical theology may come away from this book thinking the origin of evil was seldom discussed by Christians before Moltmann introduced a fantastical piece of early modern esotericism is, to my mind, a fairly serious indictment of some aspects of the essay curation process (more on this shortly).
A second, slightly less problematic omission pertains to historical rivals of Christianity. I have in mind particularly the various Gnosticisms which flourished around (and sometimes within) Christian communities in the first few centuries AD, and some of whose important elements resurfaced occasionally in later theological history (not least in certain streams of mystical literature). These all had a great deal to say about evil and suffering, and certainly helped shape central aspects of Christian discourse in one way or another (Against Heresies, anyone?). This omission would make slightly more sense if only orthodox Christian perspectives were considered, but Part 5 makes abundantly clear this is not the case.
The final thing I will say around essay curation is that, at times, one suspects the overrepresentation of certain theological perspectives. Doubtless, theological passibilism and process-adjacent contributions abound inordinately, with the former sometimes being presented as if it were the uncontroversial, historical dogmatic rule rather than the hotly contested contemporary exception (e.g., chapters 38–40, 46). Again, Moltmann and zimzum emerge time and again as theodical silver bullets, with little in the way of criticism (though there is some). And there are questions to be asked about inclusions and omissions of certain thinkers in Part 2, though I fully appreciate the difficulties involved here (included: Dante, Hooker, Heschel, Weil; omitted: Hume, Hegel, Orthodox thinkers, figures in the martyr tradition [e.g. Ignatius], devotional writers, voices in the redemptive suffering school [e.g., John Paul II in Salvifici Doloris—indeed, the salvific capacity of suffering is barely touched on at all in the whole book]).
Typographical Errors
Lastly, a brief word on copyediting. I count 166 typos or severe grammatical infelicities across 687 pages (most amusingly, I learned that “God cannot create a square circle or make 7 + 5 = 12” [p. 437]). I am not sure how good or bad this ratio is (roughly 1:4, and they’re big pages), but there were certainly enough errors—and from the very beginning—to consider it worth my while to count. As we would expect, most of these errors are author-specific. The majority of chapters are mostly clean, with outliers containing two, three, or sometimes even four errors on a single page. Of course, not all such errors will be caught, but the majority of these can only have been missed on the assumption that certain chapters were not read carefully at all before publication.
Now, despite these concerns, I would warmly recommend this book to audiences of all sorts: to students, established academics, and interested laypeople alike. The student of biblical and theological studies in particular will find much of use and interest within its pages: it is an excellent first-stop to familiarize oneself with existing discussions, and is generally good at signposting to other pertinent literature. For all its faults, it is still a fine handbook, an important work in a notoriously tricky field, with something for everyone. Whether a senior scholar or an undergraduate, readers will be richly rewarded by perusing even a small selection of its chapters. If a diverse, introductory approach to (most) key issues surrounding suffering and the problem of evil is what is sought, this latest volume in the T&T Clark series will not disappoint. Imperfect though it is, it does the job a handbook is meant to do.
