Writing in a wonderfully lucid, ego-free way Hick subjects the traditional, literal understandings of the Incarnation to a searching philosophical analysis and concludes that there is no way to make sense of the idea except as a Metaphor. This realization he hopes can liberate Christians so that they can embrace the rest of believing humanity instead of excluding it from their unnecessarily narrow notions of salvation.

What did Jesus believe and teach about his own identity? John Hicks provides a brief overview of how Jesus became Christ and explains why the Christian dogma of God Incarnate has never been satisfactorily elucidated. As Hicks demonstrates, the dual nature of Jesus as both God and man is not a divine mystery but a human-created one. The book also discusses the problems surrounding the doctrine of blood atonement and the negative historical effects of Christianity's superiority complex. This is not a hostile attack on traditional Christianity but a sincere attempt to provide a credible alternative by reinterpreting the idea of God Incarnate metaphorically. While Hicks'desire to reform Christianity may be unrealistic in light of the present strength of fundamentalism, for those seeking an intellectually satisfying way to embrace the Christian faith, this book is a good starting point.

Most books covering the topic of suffering and God's involvement in His world and with His people can be placed in one of two categories. They are either (1) personal, experiential studies of the author's faith walk in a crisis or (2) reasoned, theological studies of the questions surrounding the existence of evil and pain. Experiential accounts or personal stories, although inspirational and effective witnessing tools, come up lacking in their limited scope and applicability to all readers. Theodicies and studies of pain and suffering, although sound teaching, come up lacking often as cold and impersonal in their aloof, clinical approach to the problem. John Mark Hicks' book Yet Will I Trust Him: Understanding God in a Suffering World is a rare work that does not fit into either of these categories. This book is neither a personal testimony appealing only to the heart and emotions nor a philosophical theodicy appealing only to the mind and reason. The work is a hybrid containing Hicks' personal experiences, emotional and faith struggles, and his search for understanding as a young theologian seeking to make sense out of tragedy and crisis in his own life and the lives of God's people. This book speaks to the heart and mind of the sufferer and those ministering to the sufferer. According to the author, this book is the product of twenty years of study and research in which Hicks taught graduate students, but behind each statement of rational, theological truth are the painful life experiences of the author. In April 1980 Hicks' wife of three years died at home of a blood clot following surgery. Hicks says at that time that his simple faith in God and scripture was tested as his and his wife's plans for missionary work and their lives together in service to God and God's people were destroyed. Hicks question was that of every suffering, lamenting Christian -- "Where is God?" (meaning the "good" God that he knew in his young faith). Hicks lists two other crises that have acted as faith-shaping experiences in his life: the death of his father in 1994 and the terminal illness suffered by his adolescent son. Fourteen-year-old Joshua is afflicted with a genetic disorder that has left him unable to speak and dependent upon his family for every need. It is obvious to the reader that his son's illness and the accompanying anticipatory grief over the loss of his only son have had the most profound impact on the author in his struggle to understand pain and suffering in the world. As he did at the loss of his wife Sheila, Hicks struggles again with destroyed plans. This time the destroyed plans are those he had for his son as a leader in the church. The author's thesis is that each person can only come to an understanding of the pain and tragedies of their individual life story by looking through the lens of what God is about: what God has done, what God is doing and what God will do. Hicks had originally named the book "What on Earth is God Doing?" By refocusing on God and His story, the sufferer can see how his or her story intersects with and is impacted by God's story. The result of this refocusing on God is peace, hope and a meaning in life that is not found in a fallen world reeling under the weight of unspeakable pain and suffering. Hicks goes through God's story using a series of eleven questions....

John Mark Hicks is a professor at the Harding Graduate School of Religion in Memphis, Tennessee. His first wife died after 3 years; his son has a genetic illness that will bring his death at an early age. Mix these two elements together and you see a scholar with a heart that knows pain and all the questions to ask God. Most books that I have read on human suffering are wrapped in emotion, but contain all-too-little real answers from Scripture. Not so with "Yet Will I Trust Him." This book brings help and healing for the mind and the heart. It digs deep into the heart and mind of God in the search for answers. But it also opens up the hurt of the wounded, broken heart so that others can experience the pain. John Mark Hicks has written a book that can help the hurting. But don't expect easy reading. The Scriptural thoughts are deep and require full concentration and continued study. But careful reading will bring abundant blessing.

This book considers, from the perspective of Christianity,
the salvation of souls who are religious, but whose religions are
not Christian. Are these people damned, because of the accident
of birth, geography, or other condition, rendering them shut off
from the saving grace of Jesus Christ? Or are they, somehow,
saved because of a genuine, though misguided, faith in whatever
their religions happen to be?

The world contains many more of God's creatures adhering to
other religions than there are Christians. How, then, can we
reconcile the Cross of Christ as the source of all grace with the
love of God who loves all creatures with an equal and unlimited
love?

One way is to agree that other religions are conditionally
true so far as they do not contradict the Christian message on
decisive points.

Another is to recognize that there are grace-filled elements
in other religions that lead the people to act like Christians,
worshipping the divine and loving their neighbors. Such persons
manifest the direct influence of the Spirit of Christ, and can be
reckoned as true Christians, even though they don't know it.

But is it not presumptuous to suppose that the only ways to
accommodate people of other religions are to impose conditions or
include them in ours as anonymous Christians? The will of those
who are, after all, not Christians, and do not want to be
Christians, is not respected. Although Christ taught us humility,
we have approached them with arrogance.

Indeed, rather than insisting that other people must attain
their salvation through Christ, can't we find something that
other religions have in common with Christianity whereby we can
accept their attainment of salvation on their own terms?

Perhaps we can find common ground in the religious urge to
relieve the pain and suffering of the countless poor and
downtrodden of the world? That is the basis of Liberation
Theology. Rather than Christ, or even God, if we center our
religious impulse on that kind of human salvation, especially for
those who, because of injustice are most in need of it, could we
not consider those religions which share that impulse to be on an
equal footing with us?

Another common ground could be the element found in most
major religions in which salvation consists of a radical
transformation from natural self-centeredness to a new
orientation centered in the divine or the transcendent. Just as
the Christian is saved by denying himself and following Christ,
other religions, to the extent that they have the same type of
salvific transformation, can be equally valid traditions which
stand between the individual and the divine. If you envisage
Christ as the lens through which we attain our awareness of God,
so the other religions are the lenses through which their
followers attain their awareness of the divine by whatever name
he or it is known.

These are some of the views presented in this volume which
is a revised edition of the book that was first published in
1980. Only four of the original eleven selections have been
retained. Globalization having made the issue more relevant than
ever, the eleven selections here contain a wealth of divergent
opinions making for exciting reading.

I first encountered the theology of John Hick in his *The Metaphor of God Incarnate.* I was impressed and wanted to know more. In *Disputed Questions* Hick expounds on the same ideas in much greater detail: problems surrounding the traditional interpretations of the trinity, the atonement, and Christian exclusivism. The scope of this book is much broader, however, in that it also explores the nature of religious experience in general, suggests the applicability of Buddhist doctrines to the problem of pluralism, and theorizes about various life-after-death scenarios. I am not a person with a theological background--just a spiritual seeker--but I find Hick's writing to be highly accessible and his arguments to be exceedingly reasonable. This book was helpful to me in resolving some important issues in my personal Christian faith, and I would recommend it to anyone who finds traditional Christian doctrine untenable yet desires to remain within the Christian tradition.

Although there are probably as many theodicies as there are people in the world, Stephen Davis does a fine job selecting scholars who represent various, major viewpoints on the classic problem of evil to elucidate their positions. John Roth represents a theodicy of protest whereby it is insinuated that God may not be totally good. God, says Roth, has a dark side and so must be persuaded by human protest and prayer to do what is right. Hick, of course, represents the position of an Irenean theodicy where God is portrayed as simply unable to stop all evil since evil is born our of free will and God cannot contradict the free will He gave us (lest it cease being free will). More than that, however, God has created a world in which trouble and evil exist in order that, by virtue of our free will, we might grow in character through the hardship. God, says Hick, is in the business of soul-making and has an overall plan for us as His creation to grow into spiritual maturity through the joys and sufferings of this life. Davis takes the classic Christian perspective position that evil is the result of human sin, that Jesus died to redeem us of that sin. We are responsible for the evil in the world, but God has created a way to redeem the world by taking sin on Himself in the form of Jesus Christ. By recieving Christ into our lives, not only are we promised a future in eternity without evil, but we are able to grow through the sufferings of life instead of shun them as worthless. He argues that there is no logical contradiction between the Biblical God (omnipotent and omnibenevolent) and the existence of evil in the world. Griffin represents the process theology position that God is evolving with the creation and so is learning as He goes. Matter, says Griffin, is eternal like God and has its own kind of "free will." Complexity in the arrangement of matter, furthermore, is tied to the amount of free will something has. Thus a rock can do less evil and yet God is less able to use it for good, but something as complex (and thus having more free will) as a human is capable of doing much more evil by resisting God and much more good by submitting to God. Finally, Sontag takes a highly skeptical position about God's goodness. God is unpredictable and violent at times and all we can do is hope for the best. We must acknowledge God's existence and power, but Sontag's god is semi-demonic in nature which explains evil in the world and why he doesn't stop it.

Of course, this small review doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the indepth and well written arguments of each of these scholars. The book is complex enough for college and graduate classes but written with the lay-person in mind as well (the writers are careful to define their terms in most cases). Also, I really enjoyed the fact that each contributor has the opportunity to critique the other's theodicies and then the chance to defend against the other's critiques. This point/counterpoint approach was excellent and informative.

My only critique of this book is the subtitle ("Live Options in Theodicy"). While the five views represented in this book are indeed reflective of five major worldviews of the problem of evil, they are not the only *live* options. To suggest so implies that any theodicy significantly different than those represented in the book is not a valid option. But because the problem of evil is more of a mystery and less of a logical problem to be solved with a fancy syllogism, it can be approached in a number of ways -- not just five.

In this book R. Douglas Geivett attempts to argue for several theses. First, the success or failure of the theodical tradition known as the "augustinian" tradition (which traces its roots to Augustine) has close ties with the success or failure of the project of natural theology. Second, John Hick's theodicy is an example of a different theodical tradition which is known as the "soul making" theodicy (which traces its roots to Irenaeus), and Hick adopts this theodicy because he feels that the augustinian theodicy is incapable of overcome crucial objections against it. Third, Geivett argues that Hick's reasons for rejecting the augustinian theodicy are not adequate. The augustinian theodicy and its related project of natural theology can be successfully defended against Hick's objections. Fourth, Hick's theodicy is fraught with its own set of difficulties from which it cannot successfully recover.

This books is based on Dr. Geivett's PhD dissertation at USC and is a good example of careful historical and philosophical research. By carefully reading this book, one will learn a great deal about both the subject matter of theodicy as well as natural theology (Geivett defends a modern version of the cosmological argument known as the kalam cosmological argument).

A unique feature of this book is that it contains a critical review of itself which is written by John Hick.

A full index makes this book easier to use.

Yearn to obtain book again. Most thought provoking read in 5 years of college. Philosophy course at St. Louis University was required reading. The synopses of great thinkers are direct and to the point. The reader gets much for the money.

Hick uses the common ground of mysticism to explore the Real, Transcendent Other behind religions and what may lie in store for us after death. He stresses the optimism of all the systems (the good news) and the need for selfless humanitarian action (love) in this world.

Being a health care executive, I feel I am fairly qualified to write a review on health care books. This book was very impressive, and I especially liked hearing what other executives of health care companies think about the future of the industry. I have read too many business books by unknown authors-this was finally one with some insight from people in industry. I highly recommend this book to any one interested in health care or in the health care industry.

It's a tough question. Three years of rigorous Christian seminary is still not enough to convince me that they go to Hell. It's nice to know that Knitter and Hick feel the same way. If you are looking for a cogent, scholarly approach to the kind of pluralism that most of us accept logically but have trouble defending theologically, this is the book to buy. In addition, its bibliography is outstanding.