This compelling study by J. Christiaan Beker provides a moving, triumphant answer to one of life's greatest mysteries - the presence of suffering in God's world. Now an established classic in the discussion of the problem of evil, Suffering and Hope plumbs the Old Testament's response to earthly pain as well as Paul's own dealings with 'redemptive suffering.' Beker seeks to understand how the Bible's view of suffering relates to our present experience of suffering and to the Christian hope for the future creation. His concern is with the quality and character of bothe suffering and hope in a world where the question of suffering is inescapable. This powerful new edition features a foreword by Ben C. Ollenburger that describes the story behind the book - the dehumanizing conditions Beker endured as a slave laborer during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and the ways in which they helped shape the particular poignancy of his view of suffering. Readers will be moved both by Beker's personal transparency and by his biblical vision of 'hopeful suffering' - the apocalyptic trust in God's eventual victory over the power of death that poisons his creation.

In this book, the author discusses the reception of Paul in the modern day church, and argues that Paul and his gospel are the least understood parts of the New Testament in the church today. Beker examines the deutero-Pauline literature to reveal how the earliest churches received Paul's message. Refreshingly, Beker doesn't assume that the deutero-Pauline letters are a corruption of Paul's message. Rather, Beker's reconstruction reveals the ways Paul's gospel was adapted to the particular situations of the deutero-Pauline texts, and this becomes a model for the church today in receiving Paul afresh.

This book reflects J. Christian Beker's experience of more than twenty years of teaching an introductory course in New Testament. In distinction from a history-of-religions approach, he aims at allowing the theological thrust of the New Testament to become transparent for today's readers.

The special character of Paul's interpretation is marked by his ability to embody in his thought and praxis the movement of the incarnation, that is, the condescension of God into the depth of the human condition, so that the eternal Word of the gospel is able to become ever anew a word on target for the people to whom the gospel is addressed.