Book Review: God at Work in the World: Theology and Mission in the Global Church by Lalsangkima Pachuau

Abstract

together closely enough to warrant collecting them in a single monograph. An introductory chapter that lays out the aim of the project from the beginning would have allowed the reader more easily to situate Cho’s explorations in the context of his larger project. Another somewhat problematic issue is that Cho’s generally careful and insightful close readings of the biblical texts sometimes read more into the text than is actually there. Two representative examples include Cho’s reading of Job and Judah. With regard to the latter, Cho presents Judah as an example of a biblical character who exhibits a willingness to die on behalf of others in the Joseph story, but while Judah does tell his father, Jacob, that he will “stand surety” for Benjamin (Gen 43:9) and later offers to take Benjamin’s place as a slave (Gen 44:33), he never actually offers to die for him. Cho says that in the former case Judah “in effect” says, “I am willing to die,” and in the latter he accepts the prospect of the “symbolic death of slavery” (p. 149; emphasis mine). One may question, however convenient it would be for Cho’s purposes, whether any sort of death, figurative or otherwise, is truly at issue in the text. Likewise, in his discussion of “Job and the Problem of Suicide,” Cho reads Job’s desire for “strangling” (Job 7:15) as a reference to death by his own hand (p. 42), but it is far from clear that Job’s declarations concerning his desire to die represent an actual contemplation of suicide. One can express a willingness to die without wanting to kill oneself or indeed without even truly wanting to die. On this, the interested reader may benefit from putting Cho’s volume in conversation with Hanne Løland Levinson’s recent monograph The Death Wish in the Hebrew Bible. Despite these quibbles, though, Cho’s exploration of the willingness to die in the Hebrew Bible demonstrates to Christian readers of Scripture that the central theme of Christ’s self-sacrifice on behalf of others is already foreshadowed by and ultimately dependent upon themes and values found in the Hebrew Scriptures. While the precise formulation of the idea of a deity who dies on behalf of others is foreign to the Hebrew Bible, the Christian soteriological claims surrounding death, suicide, and vicarious sacrifice are not entirely original to the New Testament, but ultimately represent reformulations of ideas already present in the Hebrew Bible.