We live in a world acutely sensitive to difference, but also blindly insensitive to forced sameness. Myriad choices proliferate, but many people do not have much choice about which choices to make, about whether or not to be bombarded with advertising while driving to the supermarket. The contemporary world's most stable selves would seem to be those non-Westerners or marginalized Westerners who lack the means to destabilize their identities—although they increasingly face such instability anyway, at the hands of the new colonization we call "global capitalism." Such postmodern peculiarities are the context for A Theology of Compassion by Oliver Davies, who was appointed to replace the late (and much beloved) Colin Gunton as Professor of Christian Doctrine at King's College London. Since its publication in Britain in 2001, followed by a U.S. edition in 2003, Davies' book has generated considerable attention, dealing as it does with this question of our age: Can I really feel another's pain—especially if I cannot even identify who "I" am?

Davies' work is perhaps abnormally ambitious. Within part 1, "The Metaphysics of Compassion," he appropriates phenomenology as he seeks to reaffirm traditional Christian commitment to the necessity of metaphysics. At the same time, he also seeks to reform ontology in light of narrative categories oriented to compassion and thus kenosis (self-emptying, referred to in Phil. 2:6–11). Part 2, "A Theology of Compassion," proceeds to specify the content of such a "kenotic ontology" based on compassion defined by Christian doctrine, especially in light of the Triune God's Incarnation in Jesus Christ.

The project ranges from challenges in contemporary (often "postmodern") Continental philosophy to the information consumerism fostered by media to the stubborn reality of the Holocaust:

We are left therefore with a sense that Auschwitz is not an alien phenomenon imposed upon European history by a rogue state at an exceptional historical time but is rather, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has argued, the 'apocalypse' of tendencies that are concealed in the very nature of modern European civilization, with its science, technology, Christian inheritance and advanced administrative and legal systems.

Grand philosophical projects excluded difference to the degree that they explained everything; even modern dismissals of them (e.g., Nietzsche) fostered or presumed assertions of cultural monopoly. If the apocalyptic modern "civilization" is a legacy of philosophy's drive to understand "being" in a unified way, then the Christian tendency to pursue metaphysics must be carefully reconsidered.

Accordingly, the book refers to three women whose lives were marked by horrendous suffering: Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jew who volunteered to go to Westerbork, a camp on the way to Auschwitz, where she worked in the hospital for over a year before being killed; Edith Stein, a Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and, having seen her own death in Auschwitz as a call to share in Christ's sufferings, was canonized in 1998; and finally, an unnamed Bosnian woman who refused to condemn a captured opposition soldier despite believing her own family to be dead at Croatian hands.

The book's breadth is bracing; specialists in theological journals could have a field day debating the details. Davies' accounts of figures as various as Parmenides, Augustine, and Derrida are generally quite clear and at least plausible, although many may accept his invitation to skip chapters 3-6 in favor of the constructive material. Likewise, the readings of biblical texts in part 2 are in the main credible; Davies' effort to include biblical theology while formulating his constructive proposal, however debatable some of its results, is refreshing and commendable. A Theology of Compassion appeared amid an ongoing British debate regarding the way theology should be done; if you're curious, see the 1999 Scottish Journal of Theology interchange between David Ford and John Webster, over Ford's book Self and Salvation. Davies appropriates Ford positively; while aspiring to somewhat stronger unity of thought and method, he still displays extraordinary, almost diffuse, conversational range in his own approach—bringing the Bible and Catholic tradition into dialogue with everything from poetics to diaries, while moving beyond the typical subjects and concepts of "dogmatics."

Details aside, how seriously should we take the buzz over this book? Davies contends that modern Christian metaphysics remain trapped in "the self-positing cogito" (quoting Paul Ricoeur), the thinking self which has not faced up to "the multiple alterities of biological, psycho-analytical, linguistic and socio-economic deconstructions." Yet Christians cannot simply reject the systematic language of "being." So far this sounds terribly familiar. What's distinctive about Davies' argument is the course he plots to escape this impasse. The way out is via compassion.

What does compassion have to teach us about the nature of selfhood, about who we fundamentally are? To live as fully human, we must cultivate an inner sense of how other people think and feel, how they hurt—and we both fear and pity those who lack this knowledge. So: "If intersubjectivity is the interweaving of self and other, then its most intensive form is compassion." Compassion is a particular subset of love, self-dispossessing without being self-destructive, a state of mind that (unlike mere pity) assuredly results in virtuous action: the sufferings of others become "the cause of our action as if they were our own."

Davies claims that "an analysis of the intentionality of compassion gives access to the very structure of consciousness itself, and thus provides a resource for articulating a new language of being"—if one makes certain phenomenological and hermeneutical moves that bind being to language. Ultimately, Davies would support such moves theologically, tying together the Trinity and creation through a particular understanding of the Incarnation of the Logos. Here he builds on rabbinic readings of Exod. 3:14, in which divine presence is "simultaneously creativity and compassion." As this self-naming of God's being comes to fulfillment in Jesus, the harmony of self and other in the divine life can be our own experience, not simply as a model or analogy applied to us but as a reality in which we participate. For by the Spirit, God's human creatures participate in the Trinitarian dance of divine communication, first in Jesus but then the rest of us as well.

Three important questions arise in reaction. (1) Creation and fall: If compassion is so primordially true of self-and-other oscillation, then has Davies inscribed suffering too necessarily within the Christian story? Do we have to suffer? Christian tradition has struggled long over the nature of the fall's necessity; here that question is not acknowledged explicitly enough. (2) The Fall and the Trinity: Did God have to suffer? Davies adopts a position similar to that of Jürgen Moltmann and others, wherein God absorbs non-being through the Son's Passion. The Spirit is construed in relation to divine silence, "which is the kenosis of the Spirit . . . God's own loving embrace of the otherness that he willed in the creation, and which he now takes within himself." This Spirit-silence we come to inhabit as an aspect of our faith. Here the question is, have finitude and fallenness collapsed into each other? (3) Creation and the Trinity: What sort of participation in the divine life does Davies assume for us? This question arises throughout, as alternately the book affirms the "exteriority" of creation to God along with fairly strong language about creation being "in" God or nothing being "external" to God. How directly is God's Triune life a model for human inter-personal communication? The answer hinges on what sort of participation we experience in that life.

It is difficult to know what to make of the book on this point. After the first two questions surface, one suspects that some form of panentheism (with the world being in God) might be in play, but this is never explicitly argued. Regardless, issues of this sort cluster around any serious attempt to relate Trinitarian theology, Continental postmodern philosophies, and the ethical concerns of a post-Holocaust world. We could wish for greater clarity and, at certain points, support for Davies' doctrine of God in light of Christian tradition—which has held to divine impassibility (inability to change or "suffer," as has been recently expounded, defended, and nuanced in works such as Thomas Weinandy's Does God Suffer?). The Shoah grievously forces us to face many critical questions, but it does not instantly settle the argument.

Still, having suggested some central questions, I commend A Theology of Compassion for raising them in responsible and compelling ways. Davies does not often lapse into the glib Trinitarian appeals that can characterize contemporary theologies. He seems to accept aspects of a "social" approach in which the divine life becomes an ontologically suggestive account for human selfhood, but with more acknowledgment of tradition regarding divine unity and mystery. He is probably right to suggest that in any particular account of the Trinity, privileging either God's oneness or threeness will be inescapable—and not fully adequate.

Given the complexity of the book, A Theology of Compassion is not for the faint of heart. Still, at compelling points I suspect that serious readers could dip in with considerable profit. My own reading occurred during intense decision-making about who I am and will be. And I could not escape the reassuring reminder that the Bible characterizes our Triune God as gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. Thus self-protective strategies of enclosure ("The one who would save his life . . .") simultaneously refuse divine grace and authentic human life (". . . will lose it"). Davies unfolds the theme of compassion so as to make Christian faith both publicly inviting and personally challenging, given the terrors that both the differences and monopolistic sameness of the contemporary world can evoke. I needed both the personal reminders and the book's suggestive possibilities for public argument.

I will not be truly my God-given self if I refuse the pain of others in this world, or even if I feel that pain without prayerful action. God is characterized by compassion and, yes, that has ontological implications for the meaning of human selfhood. "I" emerge when another's suffering moves me to action, for then I am most characteristically (in a cursed world) the self God has created and redeemed after the image of Christ. Davies should be commended for opening the Christian self to worldwide pain, in dramatic events of evil such as the Holocaust, yet neither does he neglect concrete ethical engagement with God and the local other; we are not left with the burden of saving the world, for in our finitude by the Spirit we encounter Jesus Christ, both divine and human. Ours is a participation in his compassion.

Davies could say more clearly that it was not always so—that there was a primordially good world in which being toward the other was fundamentally to fellowship in joy, not to feel another's pain. But as he has shown, the love of God is so other-centered (so eccentric!) as to meet now fallen creatures in their suffering, with the perfect communion of the Trinity manifesting the possibility of harmonious communicative relationships. Into such a future Christians should invite contemporary culture(s), and our invitation will be more compelling via the crucial theme Davies highlights. Reconciled by God's compassion, we will share in the more primordial communicative harmony modeled by the Trinity—yet in a manner befitting human finitude. The kenosis of Phil. 2 is a model for our vocation, even if it may not relate us to God in a general ontological theory.

We can only find our lives by losing them. While many Western Christians have long superimposed such a slogan on suffering others, we should, instead, start taking these words of divine compassion to heart ourselves.

Daniel J. Treier is assistant professor of theology at Wheaton College. He is the author of Virtue and the Voice of God: Toward Theology as Wisdom, forthcoming from Eerdmans.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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