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As the subtitle of the book makes it clear, the work is not a philosophical theodicy. Rather it is a reflection on the relationship between God and evil from the perspective of the Christian faith as embodied in Scripture and Tradition.

Thiel begins his theology of evil with the affirmation that there is innocent, undeserved suffering, and indeed, that unjust suffering is the most scandalous of evils. This apparently obvious assertion flies in the face of a central assumption of received Christian wisdom, first fully articulated by Augustine, that all evils are divine punishments for sin, original and/or personal (the “legal explanation”). Thiel also rejects what he terms the “providential explanation,” according to which God allows (not necessarily causes) evil but will eventually overcome it.

Thiel sees the denial of innocent suffering present in current theological answers to the problem of evil which he categorizes into three types: pre-modern, modern, and post-modern. The first, represented by Augustine, denies innocent suffering by holding that all humans are guilty, either by the original sin or their personal sins. The second also denies innocent suffering by holding either that this world is the best-of-all-possible-worlds (Leibniz, John Hick, and Richard Swinburne) or that God is the best-of-all-possible-Gods (David Griffin). The third also denies innocent suffering by making God’s providence responsible for the whole of history and not for the individual’s personal fate (Paul Lakeland).

In contrast to all the three positions above, Thiel holds that it is logically possible and theologically illuminating to hold together three positions traditional considered incompatible: (l) God is absolutely good, omnipotent, and omnipresent; (2) there is innocent suffering, not making all sufferings into punishments for sins, or into means for moral self-development, or into neutral and amoral events outside of the scope of God’s providence; and (3) God neither permits, nor wills, nor causes any kind of suffering or death at all.

To show how these three positions can be harmonized Thiel appeals to a crucial distinction between “precedent evil” and “precedent sin.” The former is not caused by anyone, divine or human; the latter is the result of a bad free choice and act. With this distinction in place, Thiel says that not all suffering is punishment for “precedent sin” and therefore there is innocent suffering. The most we can say of sufferings is that some are caused by or may be deserved by “precedent sin” while others are caused by “precedent evil.” But because “precedent evil” is not caused by anyone, either God or humans, God and humans who suffer because of it are innocent!

If innocent suffering exists (and no Christian can deny this in the case of Jesus!), then one of the most urgent ethical duties is not to blame the sufferers but to “act innocently.” Thiel notes that his theological proposal encourages us to “think of innocence not only as a quality of being that human beings share with God in an analogical way but also as an active virtue that believers enact in order to imitate the divine nature of Jesus, the same nature that Jesus shares with God who is Father and God who is Spirit” (168).

“Precedent evil” is a deus ex machina; calling it deus is not inappropriate, it allows us to affirm the existence of innocent evil, but at a great theological cost. Thiel himself is very aware of the fact that his proposal is liable to dualism, posing “precedent evil” as another god, uncreated and uncaused. He asks: “Whence, then, the kind of evil … an evil rampant in the world and for which no personal cause can be assigned’? My answer can only be an admission of ignorance” (98).

But there is another more pernicious result evacuating Thiel’s ethical project of “acting innocently.” If “precedent evil” is not the result of anyone’s personal action, how can it be removed, either by humans acting out their innocence as an “active virtue” (incidentally, it is hard to understand how innocence can be an “active virtue”) or, more importantly, ultimately by God? How can God have any influence on anything that is not within God’s creative sphere?

This raises the question of whether one can affirm the existence of undeserved suffering without having to posit “precedent evil.” That there is innocent suffering is beyond doubt, and Thiel deserves our gratitude for drawing our attention to this obvious fact (it is very easy for one to overlook “obvious” facts, especially when conditioned by a certain type of theology). We also are grateful to him for his pointed critique of Augustine and Anselm. We applaud as well his firm adherence to the affirmation of the Christian faith regarding God’s perfection, omnipotence, and omnipresence.

But is not possible to avoid ontological dualism inherent in the concept of “precedent evil” by refining our understanding of suffering and evil? Is each and every suffering always and necessarily “evil”? Is death itself, with all its horrors and torments, not always “evil” but a welcome blessing (St. Francis’s “sister”), not because it is an opportunity to atone for one’s sins, nor because it is an occasion for “soul-making,” nor because it is simply a natural end of an animal life, nor because it is a gateway to eternal life, but merely “liberation”? Can we not, like Buddhism, speak meaningfully of life as “suffering” without invoking the ontological and ethical concept of evil and yet at the same time urge a way of life that leads us out of suffering? Can we not see in what Thiel terms “precedent evil” ontological finitude over which God’s love, power and presence hold total sway and over which we humans have a limited influence through our personal “innocent” actions? Is not God’s eschatological reign the new heaven and new earth, which is God’s promise and God’s deed, in which ontological finitude is no longer “dreaming innocence” but, without being transmuted into absoluteness (Tillich), participates in the fullness of divine life?

The topic of suffering is never far from the lips of theologians or those who take seriously their relationship with their God. In light of the horrific events of Sept.11, 2001, the questions posed by suffering, especially innocent suffering, seem especially pertinent for examination. John E. Thiel, a professor of religious studies at Fairfield University, Conn., has given us a serious book that takes up this task. This highly analytical, rather theoretical, yet accessible book explores the age-old question: why do the innocent ones suffer? It is Thiel’s contention that God is not the cause of suffering or death in any way, and to name God as the cause of evil renders it impossible for us to believe in God.

Thiel insists from the beginning that he is not undertaking a theodicy, because he is not arguing for reconciliation between God and evil. Nonetheless he does argue quite vehemently in support of specific attributes of God, namely God’s omnipotence and omnipresence. It is no longer fashionable to do a theodicy, yet I wonder if those of us who are especially interested in the topic of suffering are not “closet theodicists,” for we do desire to defend particular understandings of divinity in the face of evil and suffering.

It is to Thiel’s credit that he does not want to solve the “problem” of suffering. What he hopes to achieve is an adequate account of God’s relationship to evil while maintaining God’s omnipotence and omnipresence. He also wishes to affirm that innocent suffering does take place in our world and such suffering must be allowed to exist in its own right. The author demonstrates a great sensitivity to the reality of innocent suffering and how it plagues us all. I am grateful to Thiel for fully exploring the faulty human assumption that one person’s innocence requires someone else’s guilt-and more especially, as is pointed out, requires someone’s evil agency. This book will help put to rest the idea that God causes evil and suffering.

One very useful aspect of this book, from the standpoint of classroom teaching, is that it gives the reader a good overview of various aspects of the Christian response to suffering. St. Augustine’s theological contributions are highlighted, as well as the story of job, a brief history of theodicy, the arguments of contemporary theologians and references to the Holocaust. I was pleased to see that Thiel occasionally draws upon the wisdom of women theologians, but those who have done significant work in the field of suffering, e.g., Rebecca Chopp and Wendy Farley, are conspicuously absent. While his nod to the great work of Elie Wiesel is appreciated, I think it is important to draw other names from the long list of Jewish theologians who write with an eye to the Holocaust.

Thiel argues from the authority of Scripture and tradition as he lays out his understanding of divinity in the face of innocent suffering. He is most willing to reframe the traditional understanding of original sin in order to support his thesis. But he is most unwilling to reframe other aspects of the tradition, such as the power of God, that have been highly problematic. He wants us to know that our omnipotent God cares for us and is filled with concern for victims of innocent suffering; but the ways in which this attribute has been manipulated over the centuries to oppress others are ignored. I also found myself asking, “What of our triune God’s ability to relate to human beings? Why must this attribute take second place to God’s omnipotence?”

I was baffled by Thiel’s outright dismissal of process theology. It seems that this theology has nothing to offer when dealing with the reality of evil and suffering. I cannot accept Thiel’s declaration that process theology is unworthy because many believers “would be reluctant to pay the high price exacted by the process understanding of God.” In some areas Thiel stands open to acknowledging the value of randomness, change and chance with regard to divinity, but this openness disappears when the attribute of omnipotence emerges. While God’s omnipotence (especially God’s ability to defeat death) is the basis of faith for many believers, God’s omnipotence is troubling and problematic for many others. I was hoping for a further exploration of power as perhaps a process of interaction between persons or a paradigm of mutual influence. Thiel takes no account of the fine theological work challenging the overemphasis on God’s omnipotence. This, in my view, is the major weakness of his book.

The great strength of the book is that it makes a sound case for God’s omnipotence as a moral witness to innocent suffering. The reader will be moved by the acknowledgment that God bears witness to that which we cannot understand. Thiel offers us a God whose presence fills up the void left by such suffering. It is easy to see why omnipotence is so essential to his argument. This is a God who must be able to defeat death and emerge victorious. It is also a God who seems to be male, authoritarian and in control. Again, I voice my concern that Thiel’s use of omnipotence as the main attribute for God pushes all other understandings of God to the sidelines.

The modern project known as “theodicy” has been with us a long time—at least since Leibniz’s book of that title published in 1710. The theological appeal of this project is undeniable. No religious person wants to believe that his or her God is a monster who sends planes crashing into buildings or wills a child’s death by cancer. On the other hand, theodicy’s critics—and they have been many—have wondered if the price to be paid is too great. Is not the God of theodicy a rationalized deity, constructed according to human needs and purposes? Don’t pious attempts to make sense of evil tend toward rendering it tolerable? It is understandable if some prefer to endure the mystery of evil in faith, rather than offering blasphemous explanations for its existence.

John Thiel’s God, Evil, and Innocent Suffering is one long, determined effort to resist the temptations of theodicy. Thiel seeks to offer a theological account of evil and suffering that “move[s] within the language of scripture and tradition,” its rationality governed by “the most basic Christian claims of faith” (3). At the same time, Thiel is not entirely happy with the ways in which the classical tradition has approached these issues. His book seeks to chart an alternative course within the tradition that can better address the mystery of evil.

The key term of his inquiry is found in the book’s title: innocent suffering. Thiel argues that for much of the tradition, there is really no such thing as innocent suffering. Augustine believed that most human suffering could be accounted for on the basis of the Fall. This theological answer reflects a deep religious urge to see God as just and loving. If innocent suffering exists, then God is indeed a monster; so if God has the character we attribute to him, then suffering cannot be innocent. As Thiel rightly says, “the denial of innocent suffering lets the Christian God be the Christian God” (12). But this orthodox explanation does not sit well with our experience. We know there is innocent suffering in the world. From the Book of job to Eli Wiesel’s The Trial of God, the protest rises that some suffer all out of proportion to their supposed guilt. The usual example brought forward in modernity is the suffering of children—those we tellingly refer to as “innocents.”

Yet it is not only the Augustinian tradition that has problems acknowledging innocent suffering. Thiel argues that modern theologians who construe suffering as educative, such as John Hick or Richard Swinburne, likewise evade the issue. While Hick certainly does not think people deserve to suffer, he does see them as responsible for “transforming” suffering into meaning. Here is the familiar free-will defense: a world of suffering is better than a world without, because it is better to be free than to be determined. Thiel correctly sees a problem here. Doesn’t Hick’s view reduce horrendous evil to an opportunity for personal growth? A different version of this problem is found in process theology, whose finite God is capable of turning the caprices of nature and history into a joyous future. Here, too, scandal dissolves within a scheme of evolutionary progress.

If both modern and premodern approaches to suffering fail, what is the alternative? Thiel’s own constructive proposal seeks to hold together three assumptions: (1) traditional Christian beliefs in God’s absolute goodness, omnipotence, and omnipresence are to be affirmed; (2) innocent suffering is real, and must not be softened in an attempt to render it “meaningful”; and (3) God neither permits nor wills evil in any form. This third point is crucial. More specifically, Thiel’s account seeks to “reject the view that God is the cause of suffering either by permitting the evil victimization of some by others, or by willing suffering through natural means, including the limitations of the human condition such as disease, old age, and death. Indeed, I shall argue that God neither permits, nor wills, nor causes any kind of suffering and death” (59).

Against what he sees as the tradition’s tendency to make God an agent of death, Thiel simply denies that this is so. Key texts within the canon portray God as the author of life, and therefore as the enemy and overcomer of death (“he will swallow up death forever” [Isa 25:7]; “Death will be no more” [Rev 21:4]). A consistent understanding God as life-giver means that there is no “place” for suffering, even in the sense of God’s permissive will. Death and suffering are simply what God resists with every power at his disposal. Thiel holsters his case by highlighting the biblical theme of promise and by appealing to the Christus victor motif in the Fathers. Far more so than Anselm, the “dramatic” theory of atonement allows us to see God’s relation to death as one of sheer opposition.

Thiel’s penultimate chapter seeks to find a way of affirming the force of the doctrine of original sin-humanity’s radical need for grace-while denying one of its corollaries: death as divine retribution. With God removed as agent of suffering and death, we are left with the suffering that innocents experience at the hands of others and from what Thiel calls “precedent evil” (his term for “natural” evil). God does not cause, but is present to our suffering. The final chapter attempts to rethink Christology and discipleship in light of innocent suffering. Like many contemporary theologians, Thiel places the resurrection rather than the cross at the center of God’s purposes. Christ’s suffering and death are not the means by which God saves the world, but show us “God’s solidarity with humanity in the midst of its own innocent suffering. Jesus’ suffering reveals God’s judgment on death’s dehumanizing power” (163).

My major worry about the book is whether the central notion of innocent suffering is made to do far too much work. On the one hand, Thiel is surely right to criticize the traditional equation between suffering and divine retribution. The Bible itself questions this view, most decisively in the teaching of Jesus himself (e.g., the tower of Siloam, the man born blind). On the other hand, Thiel’s desire to distance God as much as possible from suffering and death may lead to a rather tepid doctrine of creation. God may not have created the creature’s bondage to decay, but God did make creatures who were vulnerable to decay, and who therefore suffer. Death is not “natural,” but finitude is-and it is difficult to imagine creatures who do not die, in at least a physical sense. God’s relation to suffering and death is extraordinarily complex. I worry that Thiel’s account may, despite his best intentions, result in a dualism in which God’s moral purity is preserved at the cost of his concrete involvement in the world. What is needed here is a nuanced account of the relation between creation and redemption. Such an account is made difficult when a single notion (“innocent suffering”) is made to bear too much weight.

Despite these problems, the book is a creative and challenging exercise in Christian theology. Thiel’s intellectual clarity does not come at the expense of moral passion. He invites us to ponder how to respond faithfully to the mystery of suffering in a world created by the God of life.

Roy Varghese a Templeton Award-winning author and editor known for his works that discuss the relationship of religion to science and philosophy, takes on the strange reports of Eucharistic miracles in his upcoming book, “God Fleshed,” to be published by Crossroad in 2001.

Staunchly Catholic and active in several apologetics projects, Varghese wanes that these miracles, which frequently involve the transformation of the bread and wine into flesh and blood, should not distract us from the fundamental mystery of the Eucharist, Rather, “The ultimate importance of eucharistic miracles is in drawing our attention to the fact that bread and wine actually become the Body an Blood of Christ at every valid consecration,” he writes. “Every consecrated Host is as worthy of our adoration as a Host that changes into visible human flesh.”

Indeed, such miracles – regardless of whether they are reported by saints, endorsed by popes or witnessed by hundreds of the faithful – are not necessary elements of Catholic belief by any means. Like Marian apparitions, the Shroud of Turin and other such claims and alleged revelations are strictly optional matters. Catholics are free to believe or ignore these reports, and some believers have fallen into error and confusion by making such miracles far too much a focus of their faith.

In his research, Varghese visited several sites of alleged miracles. The book includes the stories of wafers turned into human flesh, wine transformed into blood, Eucharistic bread preserved for centuries and visions of Jesus witnessed during the consecration. It also includes stories of saints and holy persons whose only food was the Eucharist and other miracles that transcend natural laws.

“Claims of miracles of the Eucharist cannot be dismissed as hallucinations because the subjects of some of these miracles are still available for tangible observation,” he writes, nothing also that today there are still cases of Eucharistic miracles being reported, such as those involving a South Korean woman and a youg girl in Massachusetts.

In the case of some of these host-to-flesh miracles, scientific analysis has proven that the product is indeed human flesh. How some of these specimens from centuries ago could retain their original characteristics despite exposure to physical, biological and atmospheric contaminants is inexplicable on a natural level.

In other instances, analysis has confirmed that blood specimens had the same sero-proteic makeup of fresh blood. Although blood usually begins to decay almost immediately, blood samples in several instances have lasted for hundreds of years without any preservative.

Eucharistic miracles have been reported from the days of the catacombs. St. Tarsicius was martyred in the third century for protecting the Eucharist, which is said to have miraculously disappeared when he was murdered. St. Cyprian, writing circa A.D. 258, said” “How many apostates do we behold who have met an unhappy end? This one, attempting to [received Communion] amongst the faithful, is seized by horrible convulsions. That one, striving to open the tabernacle in which the body of the Lord was preserved, sees flames issuing forth.” Miracles were also reported by Church Fathers such as St. John Chrysostom (d. 407), who reported that the Eucharist turned to stone when consumed by a heretic, as well as St. Gregory of Nazianzus (d. 389) and St. Gregory the Great (d. 604).

Perhaps the best known of the eucharistic miracles is that of Lanciano, Italy. Around A.D. 700, a priest celebrating Mass prayed for divine assistance in sustaining his faith in Jesus’ eucharistic presence. The hos and wine turned to flesh and blood during the consecration. The flesh and five pellets of blood remain on display after more than 1,200 years.

Samples from Lanciano were clinically studied by two Italian scientists in 1970. The concluded that the flesh is muscle issue of the hear, that both the flesh and blood belong to the human species and have identical blood types (AB), and that blood proteins and minerals are in the same proportions as that of the normal fresh blood.

Other miracles where the Eucharist turned into flesh and blood include a host stolen by a woman in Augsburg, Germany in 1194, which is still preserved. In 13^th-cetnruy Portugal, a woman stole a host and took it to a sorceress to make a love potion. The host began to drop blood. This prodigy is still on display in Santerem.

Some contemporary miracles discussed in Varghese’s book include those of Stich, Germany (1970), and Betania, Venaezuela (1991). In both cases, samples were reportedly analyzed and found to be human blood. Since 1988, wafers have been reported to have descended form the air and turned into flesh and blood in Naju, South Korea. These transformations have been witnessed by many, and the hosts have been medically analyzed.

The book contains numerous examples of consecrated hosts that defied laws of nature by rising in the air surviving fires and glowing, There are also stories of visions of Christ during the consecration. One of the most starling occurred in Regensburg, Germany, in 1258. When a priest began to doubt the Real Presence during Mass, the hand of Christ on the crucifix reached out and took the chalice away, only to return it when the priest repented.

Two holy women of the 20^th century, Therese Neumann of German and Alexandrina da Costa of Portugal, are among those mentioned in “God Fleshed.” These women lived by consuming no food but the Eucharist for many years, even under continuous medical observation.

With such evidence, we can say with the priest of Lanciano: “O fortunate witnesses to whom the Blessed God, to confound my disbelief has wished to reveal himself in this Most Blessed Sacrament and to render himself visible to our eyes. Come, brethren, and marvel at our God so close to us. Behold the Flesh and Blood of our most Beloved Christ.”