“Facing Suffering: Courage and Hope in a challenging world” | Book review

Roberto Badenas is a Seventh-day Adventist who specialises in Bible studies and is a New Testament teacher, with a theological leadership career that reflects his concern for people.

With a PhD in theology from Andrews University (Michigan, USA), Badenas held the position of Dean of the Adventist Theological Seminary at Collonges-sous-Saleve University (France) for nearly a decade. For another 11 years, he was chairman of the Biblical Research Committee, and director of the Department of Family and Education in the Inter-European Division of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Author of numerous books published and translated into Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan, Roberto Badenas is appreciated by a diverse non-specialist audience, thanks to his warm writing, which clothes the consistent and solidly documented messages of the book in authenticity and practical spirit.

By appealing to numerous life experiences of his own or his family, friends, but also the parishioners he served as a pastor, Roberto Badenas demonstrates a deep and direct understanding of the complexity of human suffering, the dilemmas it legitimately raises in the lives of people who believe in God, but also an understanding of ways not yet fully understood in which faith heals pain, though it does not diminish it.

“Facing Suffering”[1] has three parts: the first demonstrates an awareness of the human condition, subject to suffering; the second explores the multifaceted religious enigma of pain; and the third (the longest) deals with the most common contexts of suffering, providing practical and sensitive guidance for each of them.

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The reader familiar with the field of theodicy (the theological study of God’s relationship to suffering) will not be surprised by an innovative approach to the subject, but the reader who is more concerned with matters of practising one’s faith will be satisfied with the seriousness with which the subject is explored, with the high-quality sources quoted by the author, and the discovery of less popular landmark ideas in mass Christian literature (such as the concept of God’s presence in the absence).

“Facing Suffering” excels at taking a taboo-free approach to the suffering contexts that many of us experience today in isolation, without discussing them in depth with others: old age, terminal illness, accompanying someone at the end of their life, facing the prospect of death, and mourning.

Alina Kartman is senior editor at Signs of the Time Romania and ST Network.

Footnotes

[1]„“Facing Suffering. Courage and Hope in a challenging world”, by Roberto Badenas; 239 pages, Safeliz Publishing House, 2013.”

Notes

„“Facing Suffering. Courage and Hope in a challenging world”, by Roberto Badenas; 239 pages, Safeliz Publishing House, 2013.”