Certainly, The Suffering of God is not a popular level book, but it is also not so technical as to exclude ministers or seminary students from its audience. While reviews have been very positive, they have raised three serious critiques of the work. First, in his effort to emphasize the imminent and relational nature of God, Fretheim neglects to adequately address themes like holiness as a balance to his relational theology. Without the tension provided by God's holiness, relational theology can be pushed too far, and Fretheim sometimes is guilty of this. Dale Patrick points out that while Fretheim does not deny that much of the God-talk in the Old Testament does fit into the traditional paradigms which emphasize holiness, sovereignty, and transcendence he ignores these elements claiming that the organismic is predominant. Patrick argues that the task of biblical theology is to present a comprehensive image of God rather than simply a prominent one. Some have claimed that Fretheim's process theology (a term Fretheim himself never embraces) is to blame for the lack of material on holiness. However, given Fretheim's presupposition that transcendence and sovereignty have been overemphasized, it is easy to see why he doesn't spend time affirming them. His stated goal is not to replace ideas of holiness, but to bring balance to them. As previously stated, Fretheim uses a wide variety of texts to support his position, but the vast majority of these come from the Psalms and the prophetic literature. As Elizabeth Bellefontaine notes, Israel's wisdom traditions are conspicuously absent. Despite his heavy criticism of those who “remove certain materials from the OT theological repertoire” for the purposes of theological convergence (p. 20), Fretheim himself offers a nod to the wisdom literature and then completely ignores it. This would be less relevant were it not for the fact that much of the wisdom literature stands in tension if not opposition to his own theology. While Fretheim's catch phrase, “Metaphors matter,” can be universally affirmed, he is sometimes guilty of thinking that they matter too much. This leads him at time to engage in an overly literal reading of scripture. Metaphors reveal God to us, but they are not God himself. “The modern interpreter’s challenge, which is not adequately confronted in this book, is to discern how the Old Testament understood its metaphors.” He overstates his case when discussing incarnational metaphor and theodicy.