James Wheeler’s Reviews > Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion: A Contemporary Theodicy > Status Update

I had to re-read chapter 5 again because it was so good. Title: The Phenomenology of Divine Love.

For Farley, compassion is not only a passive feeling of sympathy for others, although that is part of it, but compassion is "the intensity of divine being as it enters into suffering, guilt and evil to mediate the power to overcome them." 112

"The power to resist and redeem evil will not be like the power that dehumanizes people. Redemption requires liberation and healing; power that dominates, orders or manipulates is not the kind of power that can free and restore the human spirit." 69

Every pastor should read chapter 2 of this book. How callousness, deception and bondage complicate the simple definitions.

"The obscenity of such a [trauma] event annihilates the possibility of soothing ourselves with theories that justify the ways of God in an evil world. In the wake of such wanton cruelty, defenses of a divine order of justice become bitter mockeries." 21