Like a Woman in Travail: Human Suffering in Biblical Perspective
Ebook
Have you struggled with making sense of suffering--whether in your own life, in the history of God's people, or just in the world around you?
-What if the "secret" to the enigma of suffering, far from being shrouded in impenetrable darkness, is transparently set forth at the very beginning of the Bible, in God's immediate response to human sin, from where it is progressively unfolded as the inner dynamic of so-called "salvation history"?
-What if suffering, in its essence, is a form of precisely those birth pangs through which a new creation, enucleated in the body of the risen Christ, is being brought into existence to replace the old?
-What if you could come to see your own suffering as pain that is intended to be productive of new life?
This is precisely what John A. Porter argues in this study of the biblical perspective on suffering. He discerns in birth pangs the key to a profound understanding of the place of suffering in God's redemptive plan, not only for humanity but for the cosmos, and especially in the life of the Church and the individual Christian.
“Father John Porter has made a profound and—shocking as it is to say—novel contribution to the discourse on the problem of suffering. Displacing chilly soul-making theodicies of the past, Like a Woman in Travail presents an illuminating biblical case for interpreting all suffering—indeed, all of God’s saving work—through the lens of birth-pains. The central thesis of this book will inform my own teaching for a lifetime.”
—Ben Jefferies, rector, The Good Shepherd Anglican Church
“Father Porter sets death and suffering in the larger arc of the story of redemption, where the tomb of suffering and death becomes the womb of new life. The birth pangs of Israel bring forth the Messiah, those of Christ in death bear the church, the church’s own bears the Christian, the Christian’s death to sin gives birth to Christ in them, and the earth’s great travail on the Last Day brings forth the return of Christ.”
—T. L. Holtzen, professor of historical and systematic theology, Nashotah House Theological Seminary
- Title: Like a Woman in Travail: Human Suffering in Biblical Perspective
- Author: John Porter
- Publisher: Wipf and Stock
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9798385207084, 9798385207077, 9798385207060
- Resource ID: LLS:9798385207084
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-02-01T21:45:50Z
John A. Porter is an Anglican priest and translator who lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His most recent publication is Anglican Dogmatics (2021), an annotated abridgement of Francis J. Hall’s Dogmatic Theology. His translation of the classic collection of Greek folk poetry, Selections from the Songs of the Greek People, is forthcoming. He is currently working on the translation from modern Greek of an epic poem about the eighteenth-century Albanian warlord Ali Pasha.