God, Passion and Power

The reality of suffering in today's world, in our personal lives, is for many especially Western Christians an obstacle for entering into a relationship of faith with the One who bears the name "Almighty". Touched by this crisis the author inquires whether the theology of Thomas Aquinas (1224/5 - 1274) can help us find a way out. In this book some distance is taken from the crisis itself, in order to take a closer look at our faith regarding Christ's sufferings and how God almighty is related to these <<nexus mysteriorum>>. For what is more obvious for a Christian thinking about suffering and God's relation to it, to start with the consideration of the sufferings of Christ and how God is related to them? Questions like "Did and/or does God suffer too?", "How are we to understand 'God is love' (1 Jn 4,8, 16) in view of this?" and "What do Christians actually mean by the word 'almighty'?" are dealt with.

Thomas' questions and associations may often not be ours. And yet it turns out that his approach opens up new, or rather (almost) forgotten and therefore to us surprising, and hopeful perspectives.


Mark-Robin Hoogland C.P. (1969) is a Passionist priest. At the time of preparation for this dissertation he lived and worked in the Passionist Inner City Mission at East End London (U.K.) and he was active in youth work there and in The Hague (the Netherlands). While he was a resaerch-fellow at the Catholic Theological University (KTU) at Utrecht, he also worked for three years at Mesos Medical Centre at Utrecht as a hospital chaplain and after that in several parishes where for a shorter or longer time no priest was available.

At present he is preparing a study on Thomas Aquinas regarding God and human suffering, in the context of Stauros International, a Passionist Institute.