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List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Dialogue with a Suffering Servant
Part I: The Suffering Servant of Second Isaiah
What Scripture Says About the Suffering Servant
What Scholars Say About the Suffering Servant
The Servant as a Polyphonic Hero
What God says to the Servant
What the Servant says to God
What the Servant says about Suffering
What the Nations say about the Servant
The Voice-idea of the Suffering Servant
Part II: Dialogue with Jared, a Suffering Servant
Meeting Jared
Sacred Spaces
Wrestling with God
God's Call
Beatification of Suffering
The Reluctant Servant
Life and Death
Bibliography
Abbreviations
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About the author
David Wyn Williams is an author, journalist and consulting theologian based in Auckland, New Zealand.
Summary
David Wyn Williams presents a literary reimagining of the Suffering Servant of Second Isaiah through the lens of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, offering insight into how the servant’s prophetic characterisation dismantled an exiled nation’s ideologies of suffering and called the people to understand their plight as part of a redemptive story on behalf of the nations.
While Williams devotes the first half of this volume to a close examination of the scriptural servant, the second half is given wholly to the experiences and thoughts of a contemporary ‘suffering servant’ whom Williams interviewed throughout his final days, setting up a dialogue between the two in order to raise important questions around our corporate and individual responses to suffering. This book is a timely reflection on how an ancient people responded in faith to a national calamity, and how a prophetic figure who features in but a handful of poems inspired the nation to endure and rewrite its own narrative of suffering. The servant’s example in the midst of today’s uncertainties could not be more poignant.
Foreword
Examines the motif of the suffering servant through the lens of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin.
Additional text
In his conversations with Isaiah and Jared, David Williams offers readers a beautiful vision of God’s co-suffering love. He marries scholarly rigor and moving real-life engagement so that I felt both heart and mind, Word and Spirit speaking to my own world of suffering.
