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2.6 Job as Existentialist
A story that I heard second-hand from a meeting of phenomenologists
has two philosophers driving together to a conference. They must have
rented a car at the airport, because the passenger is reading the
informational material stuffed in the glove compartment.
"Hey," he says, "Do you know that there's a fine for burnt out lights
in this state?"
"No," replies the driver, "I didn't, and I didn't check them either.
I'd better pull over and make sure they're in good shape. Why don't
you go around the car and check the bulbs?"
"Okay" says the passenger, as he opens his door and walks around to
the front of the vehicle.
"I'm checking the turn signals," shouts the driver, "are they
working?"
"Yes!", came the reply,"Wait, No! Yes! No! Yes!..."
Like those philosophers, the truth we extract from Job depends
crucially on our expectations of truth. This chapter is designed to
disappoint everyone's expectations. Those of you who thought I was
going to follow in the footsteps of great theologians and philosophers
of the past, the "ground of being" and all that will be
disappointed as will those who find in Job an irrational God who
steps outside all of our understanding. For it seems to me absurdly
futile to construct rational arguments proving the essential
irrationality of the Universe. Yet both intensely conservative and
thoroughly intellectual people have done just that, arguing that the
message of Job is intentionally illogical and irrational. What could
have enticed them into such dire straits? Who incited them to abandon,
even scuttle, the ship of reason in such perilous waters? Finding the
answer to these questions reveals more about the captain and his
choice of the Charybdis of despair than about the Scylla of
suffering. For the writer of Job, by putting truisms in the mouths of
the enemy, and enigmas in the mouth of God, cleverly forces the reader
to make choices about what constitutes truth. Thus this chapter will
not be about Job so much as it is about modern man and his encounter
with Truth.
- Kirkegaard, Chambers and Barth
What do Soren Kirkegaard*,
Oswald Chambers and
Karl Barth all have in
common? Besides all being Europeans born in the 19th century, they
were all deeply religious men who found a refuge for faith in divine
irrationality. In each case, they were responding to sacrilegious men
who used the cover of rational argument to draw the Church into
heretical behavior. This did not, of course, prevent their philosophy
from being used by the same sacrilegious spirit as a weapon against
the Church. For the Truth cannot be protected by defenses of Men, he
can only be encountered by the sincere of every age. Inasmuch as
rational argument or irrational faith clears a path through the
choking weeds of this world's irreverent philosophy and leads us to
Truth, so it becomes our true journey of faith.
In response to the creeping eighteenth century rationalism and its
trivialization of the Church, Kirkegaard saw true faith opposed to
reason. He saw in Abraham the anguish of belief, as God demanded from
him his sole heir and son, Isaac, where the only deliverance from this
anguish became Abraham's blind faith in a loving God. Kirkegaard
generalized that anguish to all of life, and by that step made blind
faith essential to all of life. It was a bold step, but a desperate
one, which now repeated countless times, has left atheistic
rationalists in firm control of reason, and cast the Church adrift on
the stormy seas of irrational faith. Soren would have
approved.
Likewise Karl Barth was appalled by the blatant appropriation of the
Church's sacred symbols by the Prussian army, the wholesale theft of
holy scriptures. When the very belt buckles of the army had imprinted
on them "Gott mit uns", God with us, it suggested that the generals
had made God their mascot, their lucky talisman against the enemy. In
contrast, Barth argued that God is beyond our beckoning, beyond our
understanding, and it is therefore absurd to imagine we know on whose
side God stands. In a similar way, this was the answer of the American
doughboys who responded to the German banner by raising a hand painted
sign from their side of the barbed wire, "We got mittens too." Karl
only said it more elegantly.
Oswald Chambers was a relatively young man when he died in 1917,
leaving only a few of his works. His semi-mystical
My
Utmost for His Highest has become a best-selling devotional
book in some circles, rivalling the more famous
The Imitation of Christ. In addition, his wife collected
his daily sermons on the
book of Job, made at the YMCA Hut Zeitoun Camp in 1916. In this short
book, Baffled to Fight Better, Chambers
addresses the question of why England should be suffering through the
first world war. Some godly people had inferred that God must be very
angry at England and must be disciplining its people. Chambers'
answer, strangely enough, echoes Kirkegaard and presages Barth, when
he denies any causal relationship and says that God has "no reason" we
can understand, just as God gave "no reason" for afflicting Job. I
focus on this book for two reasons: first, Chambers has an impeccable
reputation with conservatives unlike the other two men; and second,
Chambers addressed an entire study to the book of Job. If we
understand Chambers, then, I believe, we will understand much of the
modern response.
*(if the Kierkegaard link doesn't work, type in kirkegard.html for
a plagiarized version of the Stanford page)
The War
It is impossible to understand the attraction of existentialism
without understanding the milieu in which it developed. The nineteenth
century growth of scientific rationalism and the Hegelian triumph of
the spirit had spread the message of the imminent arrival of the
millennium, a 1000 year period of unparalleled peace and prosperity
that immediately preceded the return of Christ. To put it in
perspective, the amount of world trade and the growth in the gross
world product of the 1890's had produced an excess of disposable
income and prosperity that was not seen again until the latter half of
the 1980's. This rosy view of civilization was destroyed by two
bloody, senseless, exhausting, and destructive world wars. The
aftermath left more than nations in ruins, it destroyed the philosophy
and moral fiber of three generations, it produced despair. Thoreau
had written 50 years earlier that "most men lead lives of quiet
desperation". That desperation had visibly changed, so that in the
first half of the 20th century one could say "most men lead lives of
deepening despair". It was to that subvocal cry that Chambers directed
his study of Job, and it is the test of his answer that we ask "does
his solution bring hope?"
The Negation
As with many other studies of Job, Chambers begins by negating other
interpretations. Chambers begins with a provocative sentence, It is
in such a book as Job that many suffering souls will find consolation
and sustaining, and this because no attempt is made to explain the
why of suffering... In the second paragraph he
denies that Job was perfected by suffering because he was blameless to
begin with. In the third paragraph he argues that the only explanation
for Job's suffering lies in the heavenly court, not in Job's earthly
behavior. In the following paragraphs he argues that Satan cannot be
blamed for instigating or causing Job's pain, leaving God alone, as
chief of the heavenly court, responsible for Job's pain. A little
later Chambers argues that a changing "dispensation" cannot account
for Job's suffering either. He makes the point more than once that
there is no rational explanation for Job's suffering based on past
experience or expected outcome. Job's trial was in essence,
tragic.
Already at the end of the first chapter, Chambers is developing the
theme of tragedy. He argues that Job's faith had been built on
circumstance, on cause and effect. Then came calamity after
calamity, everything Job believed about God was contradicted, and his
creed went to the winds. The explanation for Chambers'
interpretation can be seen in his application of this calamity to the
present. Today there is in our midst a crop of juvenile skeptics,
men who up to the time of the war had had no tension in their lives,
and as soon as turmoil embroiled them they flung over their faith and
became cheap and easy skeptics. The man who knows that there are
problems and difficulties in life is not so easily moved....Many a man
through this war has lost his form of belief in God and imagines that
he has thereby lost God, whereas he is in the throes of a conflict
which ought to give birth to a realization of God more fundamental
than any statement of belief. Chambers apparently sees in tragedy
the only way to divorce one's faith from a rational empirical belief,
a step which requires complete tragedy. One such thing the war has
done is to knock on the head all such shallow optimism as telling
people to 'look on the bright side of things' or that 'every cloud has
a silver lining.' There are some clouds that are black all
through!
The Despair
Chambers does not leave us in any doubt as to the outcome of
tragedy. Facing facts as they are produces despair, not frenzy, but
real downright despair, and God never blames a man for despair. The
man who thinks must be pessimistic; thinking can never produce
optimism....The basis of things is not reasonable, but wild and
tragic, and to face things as they are brings a man to the ordeal of
despair.
I quote these sentences from Chambers because otherwise you might
think I was quoting Kirkegaard or Sartre. I find the amazing
similarity of their thought can only be explained, not by their common
faith, but by their common background. We who live at the end of the
20th century know the result of choosing Charybdis, but we must
appreciate the many lethal heads of Scylla before we condemn such a
choice.
Chambers develops the theme of despair to argue that it is not
temporary, but permanent. The sense of the irreparable is one of
the greatest agonies in human life....There are things in life which
are irreparable; there is no road back to yesterday. Job's sense of
the irreparable brought him face to face with the thing God was face
to face with, and when a man gets there he begins to see the meaning
of the redemption. The basis of things is not rational, common sense
tells him it is not; the basis of things is tragic, and the Bible
reveals that the only way out is through redemption.
The Irrational
In this last quote we see Chambers developing the theme of the
permanent character of despair and its intimate connection with logic,
with rational reason, with empirical belief. In contrast, Chambers
holds up the irrational redemption of God. Reason is our guide
among the facts of life, but it does not give us the explanation of
them. Sin, suffering, and the book of God all bring a person to the
realization that there is something wrong at the basis of life, and it
cannot be put right by his reason. Our Lord always dealt with the
'basement' of life, that is, with the real problem; if we only deal
with the 'upper story' we do not realize the need of the redemption;
but once we are hit on the elemental line, as this war has hit people,
everything becomes different. There are many men today who for the
first time in their lives find themselves in the midst of the
elemental with no civilized protection, and they go through appalling
agony. This war has put an end to a great deal of belief in our
beliefs....A man up against things as they are feels that he has lost
God, while in reality he has come face to face with Him....There are
many things in life that look like irresponsible blunders, but the
Bible reveals that God has borne the responsibility for these
things.... God accepts vicariously the responsibility for dealing with
sin, and on the basis of the redemption men find their personal way
out and an explanation.
The Explanation
Here, on page 28 of a 142 page book, Chambers presents his
thesis. God's irrational redemption that only allows a personal
interpretation. No one else can interpret it for you, no one else can
explain it for you, but when you take the mighty leap of faith,
without reason, without experience as a guide, only then is an
explanation found. The remainder of the book becomes merely an
elaboration on these themes. Let me skip to the end of the book, in
Chambers explication of Job 42 where he summarizes the answer.
Everything a man takes to be the key to a problem is apt to turn
out another lock....Everything that man attempts as a simplification
of life, other than a personal relationship to God, turns out to be a
lock, and we should be alert to recognize when a thing turns from a
key to a lock. The creed Job held, which pretended to be a key to the
character of God, turned out to be a lock, and Job is realizing that
the only key to life is not a statement of faith in God, nor an
intellectual conception of God, but a personal relationship to
Him. God Himself is the key to the riddle of the universe, and the
basis of things is to be found only in Him. If a man leaves out God
and takes any scientific explanation as the key, he succeeds only in
finding another lock....
We sometimes wrongly illustrate faith in God by the faith of a
businessman in a check. Faith commercially is based on calculation,
but religious faith cannot be illustrated by the kind of faith we
exhibit in life. Faith in God is a terrific venture in the dark; I
have to believe that God is good in spite of all that contradicts it
in my experience....
There is a great difference between Christian experience and
Christian faith. The danger of experience is that our faith is made to
rest in it, instead of seeing that our experience is simply a doorway
to God Himself. The reason many of us refuse to think and discover the
basis of true religion is because evangelical Christianity has been
stated in such a flimsy way. We get at Truth through life and
personality, not by logic or scientific statements....Intellect asks,
'What is truth?' as if truth were something that could be stated in
words. 'I am the Truth', said Jesus. The only way we get at Truth is
by life and personality. When a man is up against things it is no use
for him to try and work it out logically, but let him obey, and
instantly he will see his way through. Truth is moral, not
intellectual. We perceive Truth by doing the right thing, not by
thinking it out....we shall find that the Truth is not in a creed or a
logical statement, but in Life and Personality. This is what Job is
realizing.
A Postscript
What was it about the two world wars that produced such deep despair?
Why is it that this despair was not found in America, though she had
fought in both wars? What is so European about Existentialism? As I
puzzled over this, I thought, perhaps because the world wars were not
fought on American soil. But then, 50 years previously the United
States had fought the bloodiest war in history on its own soil, the
American Civil War. Yet this war had not produced profound despair.
What could be different about these wars? Surely it was not the
weapons of mass destruction. The machine gun was first deployed in the
Civil war, as was the introduction of trench warfare. Nor was it the
immediacy of tragedy; one of every four men in the South died during
this war. The duration of the wars were all about the same as
well. Something else must be different.
Then it occurred to me, the Civil War was a war about ideas.
Separatism versus Federalism, Slavery versus Industry, the Knight
versus the Guild. All the players in this conflict knew to a greater
or lesser extant that this was a war of ideas. Lincoln agonized over
the responsibilities he faced in waging war on his brothers, his
Gettysburg address is a clear statement of his recognition of this
battleground of ideals, the experiment that was the United States. The
Abolitionists interpreted the war as apocalyptic judgment on the sin
of slavery; the famous battle hymn of the republic began "Mine eyes
have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, He is trampling out the
vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, He has loosed the
fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword..." And because this war
was viewed as a holy war, it had a simple interpretation. It caused
suffering, vast suffering, but it was suffering for a reason.
But there were no such easy explanations for the two world
wars. Rationalism was rampant in both camps, and rationalism seemed
incapable of stopping the conflict, worse, it justified the
conflict. Christianity had become a trapping of state, and was
voiceless and powerless to stem the tide of war. Greed, power, pride,
and fortune, these were the instigators of the war, but hardly worth
dying for. The wars of Europe were wars of men against themselves,
they were self-inflicted, holocausts of hubris. The reaction of
Chambers then, is the correct response, for it recognizes the deep
emptiness, the dark pit into which Western Europe had stumbled. It is
in such a bear trap of despair that a man might cut off his leg to
save his soul. We can empathize with Chambers, but we have lost the
lesson if we emulate him.
A Summary
I hesitate to summarize such a complex thinker and proponent of the
faith as Oswald Chambers, yet a few points might be made without doing
him great injustice. He has indeed adopted much of the terminology and
arguments of the Existentialists, yet at the same time he gives a
curious twist to the ending of his book. He argues for the
irrationality of Truth, yet simultaneously for the application and
morality of Truth. Other philosophers pick up on the theme of truth
equated to moral action, but few have found the answer to universal
suffering in a personal Truth. Though not emphasized by Chambers, this
personalization of Truth appears to me to be the crux of the argument,
for it is the hope he advances against despair. Therefore I frame my
questions in the light of this Truth.
Was the disease of 18th century rationalism so deadly that it required
such radical surgery? Is life truly tragic? Was the solution of
"faith in a personal God" just another pit for a religion based on
empirical experiences? Was the rational demand that we avoid all
rationalizing an impossible task, like "not thinking of pink
elephants"? Is it possible to separate the "rationalism" of man from
the "rationalism" of God in the person of Truth? Why should it be
necessary to make Reason and Life antagonists in the person of Truth?
Do we have any justification in believing Job himself could find this
hope that Chambers ends with? I raise these questions because I
prefer not to examine Job in the same manner as Chambers. That study
has already been done. Rather I would like to write the epilogue to
Chambers, to take his Existentialism into a new Epistemology, to the
knowledge of personal Truth.
- Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar
In the light of Existentialism, these 3 friends would be used as
counter-examples, as men who held on to a indefensible belief in the
rationality of God long after such belief was rendered incredible. In
explaining this strange situation, many commentators present these men
as priggish, stick-in-the-mud, reactionary demagogues who cannot
conceive of a transcendent, supra-rational or, heaven forbid,
irrational God. Chambers takes such a line, equating these men with
dogmatic, judgmental Christians. A variant shows up in the Appendices,
where Roger Eaton presents Bildad as a doddering, well-meaning old man
with outdated advice. A strange hybrid appears in many "conservative"
commentaries where the three are presented as essentially correct, but
with serious attitude problems that hindered their message.
All of these analyses possess a common denominator, they do not merely
attack or refute or defend the message of the three--the necessity of
a rational God--but rather the attitude and presentation of the
three. These abundant analyses are about more than the psychology of
these men, though certainly psychology plays an important part, but
they are about the interface between psychology and truth. This
indicates that the writer of Job is successful at drawing the reader
into the debate about what constitutes truth: words? actions?
attitudes? a combination? If I will be allowed to call that
epistemology, then the book of Job is about the certainty of
knowledge, the quality of truth, the search for understanding: the
epistemology of God.
- The Argument
Doing gross injustice to the debate recorded for us in Job 3-30, this
is my brief summary of the argument. The friends argue that the laws
of nature and heaven require that all evildoers be punished and all
the righteous blessed. Why? Because God is running the universe and
God, by definition, is just. Thus a just God implies a just creation,
which in turn implies a just retribution for man's actions. Job's
accuser's invert the equation to say that the existence of good or
evil in our life is directly traceable to God's retribution. However
this conclusion may be an error in logic.
Without getting too deeply into symbolic logic, we can demonstrate
that one cannot easily invert the "implies" relationship between
subject and predicate. Look at this syllogism:
- (A) Rain implies that rainclouds are overhead.
- (B) It is raining.
- (C) Therefore, there are rainclouds overhead.
Now let us attempt to invert it by switching (B) and (C).
- (A) Rain implies that rainclouds are overhead.
- (B') There are rainclouds overhead.
- (C') Therefore it is raining.
Clearly we have seen cloudy weather without rain, showing that an
implication is too weak an argument to support inversion.
Thus Job's friends are making a much stronger statement when they
infer that Job must be guilty of great sin. They are saying that the
linkage between Heaven and Earth is more than a chain, it must be as
stiff as steel, that God's justice is equivalent to perfect
retribution. The connection must be bi-directional to be
invertible. To appreciate the strength of this statement, let us
invert the predicate and the subject: Man's actions require
that a just God respond appropriately.
- The Defense
Now there are easily a dozen ways one can attack or defend this
statement, each one leading to a different view of God. Many of these
arguments are listed in the Theodicy appendix. Let me suggest a
partial list of defenses that could be made.
- Our knowledge of the laws of heaven is inductive (generalized
from observations) and not deductive (a priori
necessary). Therefore the "law of retribution" is an imperfect human
generalization of God's divine justice, which may not be infallibly
construed by our finite understanding.
- God's interaction with humans, His revelation, is only limited by
His essence (e.g., God cannot lie). But human behavior cannot limit
God, for God is free to do whatever is not contrary to His
essence. Thus God is never required to respond in a certain
way, to perform a perfect retribution for human behavior.
- God's choices are inherently beyond our comprehension, for God is
transcendent, Man finite. All so-called "laws of heaven" are
accidental regularities interpreted by men as "laws". God is in
essence, irrational or supra-rational.
Note the progression in the above list concerning the link between
Heaven and Earth. The first says something about man's limitations in
holding his end of the link. The second says something about the link
itself, and the third completely abolishes any link
whatsoever. Existentialism takes the third approach, performing
radical surgery on man's relationship to Truth. Calvinism and medieval
nominalism both adopt the second approach. C.S. Lewis in
That
Hideous Strength and others including possibly Karl Barth argue
for the first approach.
There are strengths and weaknesses for each position. Clearly the
third position silences all rationalism but at the very real danger of
cutting the Church adrift from the stays of the historical creeds and
confessions. The second position saves God's face, but at the risk of
making it inscrutable or, even worse, hardened. The first may divert
the frontal attack, but is vulnerable to a flanking motion of
rationalism making additional claims on truth and justice. (See the
Theodicy appendices.)
- Trinities
Perhaps these arguments can be crystallized by analogy to the trinity
of communication in which three steps are needed: intention, execution, and
comprehension.
- Intention: As I write this chapter, I have in my mind what it
is I want to say. This has a real, though perhaps intangible
existence.
- Execution: I then attempt to write it on the page, editing and
rewriting until it comes close to my ideal. The final product is the
written word, with potentially eternal existence.
- Comprehension: Finally you, the
reader, with laudable perseverance, convert those words into ideas in
your head as well, which have both an intangible and perishable
existence.
Now let us apply these steps to the transfer of truth,
to the understanding of heavenly laws, to the knowledge of God.
- The first defense argues that man's comprehension is limited.
- The second defense argues that God's execution is arbitrary.
- The third defense argues that God's intentions are irrational.
The chain of truth can be
broken at any link to halt the heresies of deterministic
rationalism. But can it be broken without setting the ship of reason
adrift?
- Job
Job's defense against the attack of the three uses elements from the
entire chain. He argues that God's intentions are deliberately hidden,
so that he is unable to understand God's actions. Now Job is not
saying that God is normally incomprehensible, rather the opposite,
that this is unusual behavior for God. Second, Job argues that God is
always free to do as He pleases, that the wicked do prosper and the
righteous perish; one counter-example is enough to demolish the
equivalence relation of the three friends. But note again that he does
not think this is good or just behavior, it is incomprehensible, yet
it is God. Third Job argues that Man cannot stand in God's presence,
that despite God's apparently unfair actions, it is not possible for
him or anyone else to present a case before God. This is not a problem
with man's intellect, but a problem with man's spiritual
condition. Thus without impugning God, Job argues that the chain of
Truth connecting Heaven and Earth is seriously rusty and occasionally
non-functional.
Is this Existentialism? Well, probably not. Job would say that
normally God does behave rationally, otherwise his suffering
would not be atypical. Job is not saying that God is always
unreasonable, but rather that God has been much more approachable in
the past. Nor does Job restrict God or condemn God for His actions, if
only He would do it in person. Job is devastated by more than the
calamities that have befallen him, he is devastated by God's apparent
absence. Carefully note the difference between this feeling of
abandonment with Kirkegaard and Chambers' sense of tragedy. For
Kirkegaard, it was the non-believer who must make the leap in the dark
to find the light of God's presence. But for Job, it is the believer
who finds, as C.S. Lewis writes in
A Grief Observed, not only
does God not answer the door, but one hears the sound of the latch
being locked and the bolts being thrown. Existentialism may arise from
the despair of the skeptic but Job's cry is the voice of the abandoned
child.
- Elihu
Elihu's attack, coming as it does at the end of Job's speech, has no
countering argument. This has led some commentators to suggest that
Elihu holds the answer to Job and the three. However, if we view Elihu
with the above filter, we see that Job has already answered
him.
Elihu abandons the doomed attempt of the three to prove equivalence
between God's justice and Man's behavior. Instead, Elihu argues, we
need only consider God's activities and our response. Thus the
connection between Heaven and Earth need only be uni-directional, the
"implies" connection is sufficient for men to understand God's
demands. In contrast to Job, Elihu argues that God's directives to men
are clear and straightforward, that God's actions are perfectly
understandable, and His intention is plain: the creature must worship
the Creator.
To Elihu, Job's insistence on a personal touch is therefore ludicrous,
why God would absolutely swallow him up. No, Elihu says, we should
instead submit to God's chastisement patiently and reverently. That's
the way the Universe is constructed, and the way it runs. Man is
completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and any
attempt by Job to hog the limelight puts far too much attention on
this miserable creature. In fact, Job is in real danger of heresy by
associating himself with man-centered pagans. Job's sin, according to
Elihu, is in not keeping that stiff upper lip and proper subservience to
God. God is free to do what He wants, we are not. In essence, Elihu
adopts the second position that God's actions are arbitrary.
I said earlier that Job has answered Elihu, however, Job never
condemned God, as Elihu seems to have heard, rather Job is stating the
facts: God has abandoned him. Job says the chain of communication
from Heaven to Earth has broken, Elihu refutes Job by telling him it
never was a two-way street. If Elihu turns that broken chain and Job's
pain into a virtue, then he is not judging Job, but condemning
himself.
- God
God's response, on the surface, appears absurd, lending support to
those who say God is irrational. One almost gets the feeling that the
plot has been developing for 37 chapters, building an air-tight case
that God cannot refute, and the author in desperation resorts to
a non-sequitor in place of a proper climax. Certainly these final
chapters are a major disappointment for those of us who expected an
answer to the deep philosophical paradoxes presented by the
dialogue. But perhaps this disappointment was intentional, and by it
we learn something that a purely philosophical reply would
overlook. Let us begin then in the darkness of absurdity and grope
towards the light, let us begin with what exists and search for the
essence.
- The God who is there
The most significant event, independent of the content of these
chapters, is simply that God appeared. If God had never come, Job
would have died broken-hearted and despairing, a man without hope;
even had his fortunes been restored, I doubt that he would have lived
long enough to father ten more children. I am hypothesizing, of
course, yet the importance of God's presence to Job cannot be
overplayed. This dialogue about epistemology could not be resolved
without an appearance by God. Contrast this with the theodicies listed
in the appendices, do any of them resolve the problem of evil by a
mere appearance of the Almighty? Yet this was the main, if not the
only thing Job needed. It is as if the stained glass in the cathedral
or the icons in the shrine were a better answer to the problem of evil
than St. Augustine's logic. Why?
In the Garden, was it more important that God gave a reasonable
command about the Tree, or that God commanded? When my son had a
nightmare and woke up crying, was it more important that I proved the
absence of monsters with a night light, or that I was present? For
Job's eloquent complaint, was it more important that God gave a
comprehensive answer, or that God answered? Perhaps for pain, Sartre
is right, existence does precede essence. In many of these most
basic, and therefore childlike difficulties, it is not the intellect
that must be satisfied, but the heart that must be comforted. God's
message, by frustrating the intellect, speaks to the heart of this
abandoned child. God's presence, in bypassing reason, goes beyond
abstract knowability, it proves His Fatherhood and His
huggability.
- The God who speaks
However God does more than make a stage appearance, He speaks. And His
speech is comprehensible, it is second person singular, it is direct,
it is personal. God establishes a two-way, person-to-person,
trans-finite, static-free, auditory communication channel. Not only
does His presence not "swallow up" Job as predicted by Elihu, but He
uses neither dreams, nor circumstances, nor angels to speak with Job.
Nor does He communicate with movies, with multimedia, with hyper-linked
browsers, with sensory overload or underload, but with words. Just as
Adam walked with Him in the Garden, so the Truth is transmitted in
person using common speech with ordinary perception.
Why is this so significant? Because many people, including Eliphaz and
Elihu, argue that God cannot communicate to us in ordinary ways; Job,
on the other hand, expected it. Does this negate their arguments for
an infinite God and finite human understanding with its categories and
filters? Not really, what it is telling us is that there is nothing
common about common speech. Just as we argued that God in His essence
is outside spacetime, yet in His revelation to men is both temporal and
causal, in exactly the same way His communication with men spans the
gulf between Heaven and Earth, it is trans-finite.
Consider Job's complaint. If no one heard it, its existence would be
fleeting and ephemeral; sound waves leaving no imprint on earth or
sky. But once his words were written down and "engraved on lead
forever", they would last untold generations. And once God had heard this
complaint, those words would become eternal and unchangeable. What has
happened? Something very human, something physiological, something
created by lips and teeth and breath has become eternal. Yet imagine
that Job spoke not Hebrew, but Minoan B, would one still say that his
words were everlasting? No, but if through translation the meaning of
the words survives, can we not say that both the word and its idea
partake of the eternal?
God's greatest gift to man was speech. Genesis records that God
"breathed into his nostrils the breath of life", the same breath used
for speech. Man's first act and first responsibility was to name the
creatures, to speak, to create eternal ideas out of his fleeting
perceptions. None of the other creatures speak, excepting angels and
the serpent. If we view the serpent as a mouthpiece for Satan, then
Man alone among mortals is the sole owner and caretaker of the gift of
speech. Science tells us that not only are monkeys (and most other
animals) physiologically not equipped for speech, but only humans have
special portions of the brain "hard wired" for language. Rephrasing
the comment made very early in this study, God's divine gift to
Aristotle was to equip and enable him to speak of Plato's
ideals. Appearing as it does, as the first thing Man does, "hard
wired" into his flesh, essential to his psyche, can we separate this
function, this essence from his existence? If it is then part of his
existence, could it not be "the image of God", the umbilical cord to
Heaven? For this gift, the human-divine word, spans the darkness, the
chaos that lies between the Heavens and the Earth.
- The God who examines
We have said that speech was the umbilical cord, but speech alone is
not enough, it is a necessary but not sufficient condition or otherwise
rhetoric would still be taught in our institutions of higher learning.
That is, I can lecture my students on Astronomy, but I have no clue of
their comprehension until I examine them. Now some schools of thought
hold that examinations are a waste of time, but nearly everyone would
agree that there is some objective, testable criterion of
comprehension, of conveyed truth. Examination presupposes that truth
can be conveyed, that truth can be grasped, that there are objective
criteria to evaluate this transfer. Thus when God examined Job
(and also, I believe, the three friends), it was more than an appearance,
more than a speech, it was an expectation that Man can know, can really
comprehend the Truth.
But wait, you say, God is asking questions for which either there is
no answer or the answer is "I don't know". What kind of teacher gives
an examination where the entire class receives a score of 0? Well, one
could imagine a number of scenarios. Perhaps the class had not taken
the lessons seriously enough. Perhaps they had the mistaken impression
that they knew the material, or perhaps they had a completely
erroneous perception that needed correction. As we discussed in
earlier chapters, an examination is a much more effective teaching
strategy for certain types of problems, for just as self-discovery of
the truth is more exciting than lectures, so also self-discovery of
error is likely to be far more effective than a reprimand.
If we adopt this view that God's impossible exam was a reprimand, what
was the erroneous perception, or what was the overlooked truth He
wanted us to learn? Looking through the questions posed by God, I
detect the following types (not counting Hebrew parallels twice):
Clearly the first message God wants to convey is the inability of man
to act like God. The second message is that man has limited
knowledge. The third message is that God is neither limited in ability
nor in knowledge. The remaining miscellaneous questions ask who it is
that is challenging God, or is bringing a claim against Him.
Embedded in these categories, is a metaquestion, a question about the
categories themselves. In 38:36 God asks, "Who endowed the heart with
wisdom or gave understanding to the mind?" The close proximity of this
verse to the 11 examination questions concerning human knowledge must
be intentional, it must be probing more than "what man knows" and
asking "how can man know?", it must be a question about epistemology.
Simultaneously, coming as one of the 6 questions about God's
abilities, it expects the answer "God". So this question appears to
say that God has the power to overcome Man's learning disabilities.
This is key, because God is not saying that Man can never understand
spiritual truths, but rather that Man depends upon God's gift of
understanding. Thus God not only expects Man to know the truth, but
He grants the ability to do so.
Summary
In conclusion we see that the three friends, in an attempt to explain Job's
suffering, are guilty of a sacrilegious rationalism that makes God a
puppet to Man's choices. In response to this deterministic
rationalism, Job and Kirkegaard and many others have attacked the
chain of truth that connects Heaven to Earth. Using the analogy of the
trinity of communication, the knowledge of God can be broken at three
points: intention, execution and comprehension. Although Job's
statements are not as radical as those who follow after him,
nonetheless he finds the chain dysfunctional in his
circumstances. God's reply re-establishes every link of the chain,
while simultaneously superceding the requirements.
- His presence proves more than His rational intent, it demonstrates
His Fatherhood.
- His speech says more than His ability to communicate, it
establishes the divine character of the human word.
- His probing questions examine more than finite human abilities,
they establish the basis for all human knowledge.
These trinities we have discussed are neither a comprehensive list,
since one could discover nearly an infinite number of them, nor an
accidental similarity, the way two philosophers might have similar
facial hair, rather they point to the very personal character of
Truth, to the requirement of dialogue with the Truth. The Truth cannot
be conveyed otherwise. Be it objective or subjective abstraction, an
abstract concept of truth is immediately subjected to the rationalism
of the three friends and the existentialist counter-reaction, it is as
much a failure of comprehension as the man who watched the blinker
bulbs. For only personal truth can rebuild the chain to answer the
heart as well as the mind. And if the Truth is a person, we will only
know the Truth when we are in relationship with him.
- Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest
Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc., New York., 1935.
- Oswald Chambers, Baffled to Fight Better
Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566 Grand Rapids MI 49501, 1931.
- God Questions Man's Ability
Job 38:12,16,20,22,31,32,34,35,37,39.
Job 39:9,10,11,12,19,20,26,27.
Job 40:9,24. Job 41:1,2,3,4,5,6,7,13,14.
- God Questions Man's Knowlege
Job 38:4,6,17,18,19,24,28,29,33. Job 39:1,2.
- God States His Ability and Knowledge
Job 38:5,8,25,36,41. Job 39:5.
- Miscellaneous Questions
Job 38:2. Job 40:2,8. Job 41:11.
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Copyright © 1997 Rob Sheldon