This book is one of a growing list of titles addressing the issue of terror, although the editors make it clear that the text was completed before the events of September 11, 2001 suddenly gave these studies a heightened importance and relevance.

The essays collected here were written to honour the Korean scholar, David Kwang-sun Suh whose extraordinary experience of terror is described in an opening autobiographical chapter. Brought up as the son of Korean missionaries in Manchuria, he suffered first under the Japanese and then under the Chinese as the Red Army marched into Korea at the end of the Pacific War. Later still he found himself on the receiving end of nightly American bombing, ending up in the South Korean navy where he learned ‘how to endure physical and mental harassment’. David Suh eventually became a leading figure in korean minjung theology which he describes as ‘an indigenous Korean theology against the reign of terror’.

Appropriately, this opening chapter is followed by a Japanese response from Kosuke Koyama who engages in a humble, critical and profoundly honest reflection on the terrors inflicted by Japan on Korea throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Koyama pulls no punches: Japanese colonialism was ‘outright repressive and repulsive’ and his own nation’s treatment of the Korean people is a cause for shame and penitence. Koyama explains Japanese behaviour in terms of an ethnocentrism that resulted from the false cult of the emperor, so creating a culture ‘saturated with the Japanese version of manifest destiny’. His Christian critique of this ideology is both perceptive and courageous, but in a salutary reminder that the perversion exposed here is far from being exclusive to Japan, he warns that all civilisations are ‘dangerously ambiguous’ and that only the crucified Christ reveals God’s righteous judgement and exposes the sin of a fabricated transcendence’.

A further 19 chapters follow, contributed by an international group of scholars, dealing with the history and sociology of terror and offering biblical and theological analysis of this most alarming and intractable of modern problems. Inevitably the quality of the chapters varies. There is a strangely muted and disappointing contribution from Jürgen Moltmann, but an outstandingly good one from Donald Shriver who denounces the ‘sentimentalists’ who ‘want to treat the trenches of World War I, the city-killing of World War II, and the train of genocides … as mere diversions from an otherwise hopeful history of homo sapiens’. More than ever before, Shiver insists, our violent, blood-stained world faces the ultimate question: ‘to be or not to be?’. This is a searching, desperately serious analysis of the ‘terror within ourselves’ and it brings a solidly theological perspective to bear on the discussion.

A final thought: I looked in vain here for a contribution that might be described as distinctly evangelical and this left me wondering what exactly such a chapter might look like? What does evangelical theology have to say to a world stalked by terror and overwhelmed with violence?

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