Rob
Sheldon, MAReligion, Westminster Seminary © 1999
Juan
Gris:Landscape with Houses at Ceret (1913)
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Mark
Copeland's Executable Outline of Job (Live)
Hope
College's Intro to Wisdom Literature (Live)
Job
Britannica Online (Live)
Biblical
Literature and Its Critical Interpretation: Old Testament
literature: THE KETUVIM: Job Britannica Online (Live)
job:
Encarta Concise (Live)
Job:
Easton's Bible Dictionary (Live)
J.
W. McGarvey's Class Notes on Sacred History (Live)
Gerald
Larue's OT Life and Literature (Live)
Short
Overview of Job
(Live)
Introduction
to Job as Literature
(Live)
Wes
Morriston's Philosophy of Job
(Live)
Semeia
Modern studies in the Book of Job
(Live)
RBC's
Commentary on Job
(Live)
Matthew
Henry's Concise Commentary
(Live)
Robert
Jamieson, A. R. Fausset and David Brown's Commentary Critical and
Explanatory on the Whole Bible
(Live)
Dennis
Hink's Bible Study
(Live)
Wayne
Gann's Overview on Job
(Live)
Rolling
Hills Covenant Church Bible Study
(Live)
Bruce
Cameron's Bible Study
(Live)
Peter
Ruckman's Commentary
(Live)
Geneva
Commentary (Live)
Wesley's
Commentary (Live)
Gary
Stone's nutshell
(Live)
Biblenote's
nutshell (Live)
Amazing
Grace Bible Class
(Live)
Fr.
William Most's Summary
(Live)
Books
in Print at Amazon.com
(Live)
Wisconsin
Lutheran Seminary's List of Old Testament Commentaries on Job
(Live)
Adam
Smargon's Term Paper
(Live)
Jessamyn
Birrer's Term Paper
(Live)
(Live2)
Guy
Ritter's poem/song about Job
(Live)
Blake's
painting of Satan afflicting Job with boils
(Live)
Roger
Eaton's conversion of Job to a drama
(Live)
Richard
Sewall's Literary Criticism of Tragedy and Job
(Live)
Lela
Soulier's Fairy Tale on Job
(Live)
Jim
Robert's Song Lyrics
(Live)
Joseph
Coleman's Pop Culture Nihilism
(Live)
If
God were a programmer
(Live)
(Live)
Pope
JohnPaul II's Salvici Dolores sermon on suffering
(Live)
John
Barnett's sermon
(Live)
Dan
Dozier's sermon on Job
(Live)
John
W Brown's 1996 sermons on Job
(Live)
A
RBC Ministries Devotional on Job 1
(Live)
Ligonier
Ministries "TableTalk" series on Job
(Live)
Bible
Pathway Ministry's 1996 study
(Live)
Ray
C. Stedman's 1977 Sermon series
(Live)
Gary
Petty's Sermon on Suffering
(Live)
David
Sisler's article on Suffering
(Live)
Some
sermons of Charles Spurgeon
(Live)
A
sermon of John Wesley
(Live)
Four
sermons of Fred Anderson
(Live)
John
Reisinger on Affliction
(Live)
Ivan
Maddox 01
02 (Live)
George
Kirkpatrick likes Elihu
(Live)
Tom
Brown's "Why Job Suffered"
(Live)
David
Reid's "Why Me, Lord?"
(Live)
Hudson
Taylor's "Blessed Adversity"
(Live)
Jeffrey
Maehr against Satan
(Live)
In
defense of Satan
(Live)
Satan
a fallen angel (Live)
More
against Satan (Live)
More
against Satan (Live)
Purpose
of Satan (Live)
Jack
Barr's Description of Satan
(Live)
Charlie
Hale's Personal Testimony
(Live)
The
Battle against Satan
(Live)
Pop
Culture defence of Satan
(Live)
Satan
and Suffering (Live)
The "Free
Will Defense"
(Live)
RBC
Tract: Does God Want Me Well?
(Live)
RBC
Tract: Reasons to Believe in a God Who Allows Suffering
(Live)
RBC
Tract: Why We Believe
(Live)
Michael
Connelly (Live)
DIALOGOS
Issue Nov. 96 (Live)
Ken
Cauthen's position
(Live)
A
Theodicy bibliography
(Live)
Another
Theodicy bibliography by B.-T. L. Whitney
(Live)
Greg
Koukl's 60 second theodicy
(Live)
Forrest
Baird's analysis of the theodicy audience
(Live)
Doug
Erlandson's new defense
(Live)
Glenn
Miller's Theodicy material
(Live)
Tim
Stall's Theodicy
(Live)
Doug
Muder's Personal Theodicy & Commentary on Kushner
(Live)
Louis
Goldberg: Apologetics-Ch.16: The Existence of Evil
(Live)
Mark
Copeland's Outline on Suffering
(Live)
Tim
Bulkeley's Glossary of Biblical Terms
Tim
Bulkeley's Hypertext Post-Modern Bible (Live)
Glenn
Miller's thoughts on Feminism in the book of Job
(Live)
Roger
Eaton's links to other Job sites
(Live)
Links
to Information on Mesopotamia
(Live)
Psalm
127
Unless the LORD build the house, its builders labor in
vain.
Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchmen stand
guard in vain.
In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling
for food to eat--
for he grants sleep to those he loves.
This
commentary would not have been possible without a long list of
friends and enemies. Topping the list is my wife, Sunmi, to whom I
owe my not only my survival at Westminster
Seminary, but great
credit in listening to the rough draft of this work many times yet
showing unflagging enthusiasm for its completion. Two of my seminary
professors will see much of their lecture material incorporated into
this book, Dr.
Vern Poythress and
the late Dr.
Ray Dillard. I only
hope they are not distressed to see the use I have put their teaching
to. Finally I thank the faculty of Boston University, who showed me
the necessity of beginning this work earlier rather than later.
Te
gloriam Deo
The book of Job has had a bad reputation, perhaps because the Hebrew it is written in is obscure, and some earlier translations gave confused readings. Perhaps because it is written in poetry, which is harder to understand than the historical writings. Or perhaps because the topic is too painful and the answers not comforting. For whatever reason, there have been too few studies of the book of Job, and fewer that I have found encouraging. Yet it is a book that holds a magnetic attraction for me, a book I keep coming back to year after year. When I feel discouraged, when I feel persecuted, when I feel abandoned by God, I stop and reread this book. The answer I find changes with each reading, the answer deepens and brings with it fresh wonder and awe. With each new disappointment in life I find a resonance in Job, and a new revelation in his reply. It is out of that appreciation for Job, for how he lived and how he spoke, that I am writing this short study. If I can convey a small fraction of the comfort I have received, then this effort will be well spent.
The requisite section before beginning any book study is a semi-exhaustive list of the historical context, the sources, the authors, and the theology of the book. I have neither the knowledge nor the resources to write such an introduction, though some of these points will be made at other places in the study. Instead I want to describe the approach I take to this book. It is both objective and subjective, scholarly and personal, observer and participant, strategic and tactical. Without analyzing the objectives of the book we will get lost in the debates, but without participating in the dialogue we will completely miss the rebuttals. Therefore the early part of this study will be all strategic, laying out the battleground, the weapons, the known tactics of the belligerents. The later part of this study will be the thrust and parry, the heat and the dust of the battle. The stakes are high: Job's very life and perhaps his salvation hangs by a thread. The tactics are brutal: accusations, innuendoes, words that cut like knives. The outcome: well, unexpected.
There is no doubt, wrote one
critic, that the text of chapters 24 to 30 is clearly jumbled.
"There is nothing for it but to reorder the text as best we
can, realizing that the original order is probably lost forever."
I take this "lost forever" to mean that we will never get
a majority of Hebrew scholars to agree on any particular reordering,
because, alas, when we do as best we can, we change the meaning of
the text, since reassigning text to Job or to Zophar or to God will
have a significant effect on the meaning. What are we to do?
The
problem is potentially fatal, since our interpretation of Job will
dictate our reordering (not to mention our textual emendations).
Thus we find ourselves in the vicious circle of subjectively
deciding the objective outcome. Since the only ordering all Hebrew
scholars can agree on is the present one, I think the most objective
approach is to leave the ordering alone. If this makes our
interpretation difficult, so be it. The God who caused Job to
suffer, who caused the book to be written, surely is responsible for
the sad state of the text today. One might even conclude that he
wanted Hebrew scholars to share, if ever so slightly, in Job's
suffering.
The loss of meaning, or the loss of information,
must not be pinned to a single word, or a phrase or even a poor
ordering of the text. If there is a consistent theme throughout the
book, if there is an overarching message, it will overcome all such
difficulties. The approach we take to this book, therefore, is
particularly designed for addressing ambiguous problems, for solving
the situation of partial information. Perhaps an analogy will
clarify this approach, by showing how the human brain (unlike a
computer) is unusually adapted for solving such problems.
My
brother-in-law was born with a auditory nerve hearing loss that
prevents him from hearing any frequencies above middle C. Most of
the consonants, such as "s" and "t" consist
entirely of high frequencies, that sound to him like silence. Try
speaking a sentence out loud, voicing only the vowels. "Ow ah
ou?" That's the general idea. At an early age he was taught to
lip-read and does phenomenally well. The doctor told his parents
that there would be some things he could never do, such as talk on
the telephone. The doctor was wrong. I just finished getting
directions to his house from him, over the telephone. How does he do
it? Frankly, I don't know and I don't know anyone else who has this
ability. He tells his telephone callers to identify themselves using
their full christian names, the more syllables the better. If he
doesn't know who you are, or what you will be talking about,
conversation is well nigh impossible. But once he knows your name
and your potential message, he follows remarkable well. He fills in
the missing information from context and sometimes asks that you use
longer words to explain something. His brain is constantly comparing
all the potential expected messages to the minimal information he
can hear and filling in the gaps. The more context he can associate
with the message, the easier it is for him to follow. This then is
our approach to the book of Job.
We obviously lack
information at many levels of the book of Job, from the translation
of ambiguous words to the ordering of the text, from the purpose of
Job's suffering to the normally clear meaning of God's prophecies.
Some of this is intentional, some of it is accidental. But the
meaning can still be extracted when we apply the same principles as
my brother-in-law applies to telephone conversations: context, both
real and potential. Like him, we must look at all the potential
messages in this book, constantly comparing them with what we
actually read, and filling in the gaps. The truly difficult part of
this process is narrowing down the choice of potential messages.
Those decisions are in part subjectively determined by our interests
and experiences. Thus this little book acts as a test of our
abilities, if we fail to find coherence, if we fail to solve the
apparent paradoxes, we have failed the final exam. This book is as
much about the journey to truth, as it is about the truth itself.
Traditionally, theological
institutions divide the areas of study into "Systematic
Theology" (a topical approach to the Bible) or
"Biblio-Historical Theology" (a more chronological
approach to the Bible). One can find all sorts of specialties within
these broad categories: "Apocalyptic Theology", or "The
Doctrine of Salvation" might be subcategories under the first,
whereas "Pauline Theology" or "The Historical Jesus"
might be subcategories of the second. This art of categorizing is
both a strength and weakness in human thought, with examples that
can be drawn from every age, from the Garden or Hammurabi to the
present. Sometimes it is essential to knowledge and progress,
sometimes it is a deep pit. For example, learning the difference
between the genders is an important step in every child's
development of "self-identity" and cannot be overplayed,
but associating that distinction with power, significance or
privilege is a pit from which our society has yet to escape. Thus
the skill of making right distinctions is the art of creating unity
from diversity, of weaving many colored threads into a single
tapestry, of combining both systematic and historical theology into
compelling knowledge of God.
For without any distinctions,
consequences seem arbitrary, decisions mysterious and conclusions
unfulfilling; we become merely witnesses of a secret rite in a
foreign language. Yet with inappropriate distinctions, actions
appear staged, decisions predetermined, and conclusions predictable;
we become the shamans, proud of our intricate steps. The path to the
knowledge of God lies between these extremes and it is treacherous
and full of pitfalls. It means sometimes knowing too little (what
was God thinking when he gave Satan permission to abuse Job?) and
sometimes knowing too much (if only Job's friends heard God say he
was a blameless man!) And more often than not it means taking a
different path each time one reads the book of Job. False humility
aside, I am just a dabbler in this field, and can only suggest some
of the distinct threads running through this rich tapestry of
history, poetry, didaction and worship that we call the book of Job.
I can only hope that my handling of this subject sets the proper
tone between monotony and cacophony, between dogged interpretation
and incredible constructs; that it find the transcendent melody of
God's love and salvation that dips and rises like an angel song
playing briefly on the edge of our hearing and then is gone.
What is
multiperspectivalism? It is the art or skill of viewing a single
work of literature from many different perspectives. Now not every
perspective is meaningful for a particular work. Only history can
tell whether the feminist critique of Newton's Principia will stand
the test of time, but it is my opinion that such perspectives reveal
much more about the reviewer than the work reviewed. My goal,
inasmuch as I can objectively view it, is to let the book of Job
tell its timeless story without interference from my late 20th
century perspective. My goal is to explore, to mine the richness of
a human story told well, of a divine story with human actors, of an
ageless story rooted in a historical time, objectively applying
every potential perspective that can unlock the riches of this
work.
Does this work use stage sets reminiscent of a law
court? Then let us analyze the work as a human court scene, perhaps
it will explain the mysterious unannounced entrance of Elihu as "a
friend of the court". Does this work use military language?
Then let us describe the combatants, perhaps it explains the odd
presence of "Satan", "The Adversary", in the
heavenly realms. What is unexplained with one perspective may become
crystal clear in another. The richness of human thought and
literature lies in this essential ambiguity. No one perspective
invalidates another, each contribute to the web of meaning. The
skills learned in diagramming this web are skills directly
applicable to all of life, for are we not all engaged in a lifelong
struggle to extract meaning from our brief existence?
Multiperspectivalism is more than a literary technique, it is a
lifestyle.
But like Shakespeare and
other great works of literature, this endeavor is bound to fail
precisely because the greatness of this book lies in its ability to
hold a mirror to my opinions and prejudices. I cannot remain
objective when reading Job, I must take a stand, I must react to the
enormous claims, either with indignation or with worship. On my
first reading I was indignant with Satan, on my second reading I was
mad at God, on my third I was upset with Job, on the fourth I was
angry at Elihu, and most recently, I was shocked by the 3 so-called
friends. This then is the dilemma confronting us; we must make
objective distinctions from many subjective perspectives to even
begin to understand this human drama on a heavenly stage that is the
book of Job, but if instead we apply subjective distinctions from an
"objective" perspective we will extract only what we
already know. For example, we know (from reading the end of the
book) that both God and Job were upset with the three friends, yet
if we then assume that everything the three friends say is
theologically flawed, we will miss both the power and the truth in
their arguments. Instead we must view the book from the perspective
of these friends if we are to fully appreciate Job's response.
But
how is it possible, if the book demands a subjective response, to
objectively apply such different perspectives to it? Will not our
gut response subjectively color the perspective we seek to
understand? Can we really apply Eliphaz' perspective to Job when we
are appalled at his tactics? I think we can accomplish this feat the
same way that an actor can convincingly portray an unwholesome
character, and portray him night after night while knowing the
ending of the drama. That is, by being a participant, by immersing
oneself so completely in the character that the dialogue is "new"
and "fresh" every time. If it is a defining characteristic
of humans to make distinctions, then it is also a defining
characteristic to unmake them, to empathize, to vicariously
experience what a fellow human being is undergoing. If the God who
created man in his own image was introduced to us in Genesis 1 as
the God who distinguished between the earth and the sky, then He is
also the same God who empathized with us in our suffering in Isaiah
53.
We are neither observers
nor shamans of the book of Job, but participants in this rivetting
drama. As we absorb with Job the next body blow to our psyche, our
emotions well up fresh each time. Yes, they are colored by our
previous reading, but also deepened. We can begin to feel beyond the
raw anger to the disappointment, the pity, and yes, the hope that Job
speaks in his reply. Then when life deals me the short stick, the
cutting comment, the unexpected disaster, I can hear Job's voice
guiding me, "no don't put your trust there, here is your real
hope." and his words are like steel girders to my soul.
Just about any book can be better appreciated by locating it in spacetime. I always check the copyright date after reading the jacket cover and before starting the preface. Job is an exception. We are given a Hebrew manuscript, in a nondescript location in "the land of Uz", (which always reminds me of a famous fairy tale) that has no historical precedents. Then we are given no temporal help at all, no kings, no kingdoms, no other historical references. The dialogue is reminiscent of the stories of God talking to Abram, definitely pre-Mosaic covenant, so many scholars put it in the patriarchal period. Linguistic studies of word usage suggest some influence from Edom, and place it in the south, somewhere in that millennium. It could have been written much later, say, during the monarchy, but placed in a patriarchal setting. Clues are so scarce, one might even believe that it was intentionally vague. It is as if the writer were telling us, "Forget the Mosaic Law, forget the covenant of circumcision, this could have happened to anyone, anywhere, at any time, this could have been you."
The position of the Book of
Job in the Bible reflects the difficulty that ancient scholars had
when they attempted to group together similar books. Is Job a
historical book, a poetic book, a prophetic book, or a wisdom book
(e.g., Proverbs)? In the English Bible it is sandwiched between
history and poetry using St. Jerome's order, but in previous editions
it surfaced between poetry and prophets (Septuagint), or between
songs and wisdom (Alexandria), or between law and history (Peshitta).
Why is it so difficult to classify? Harrison
writes, "The book derived its title from the Hebrew name of its
principle character, and by any standard of comparison it ranks among
the most significant pieces of world literature. Certainly it is
unmatched in the writings of the Old Testament for its artistic
character, its grandeur of language, depth of feeling, and the
sensitivity with which the meaning of human suffering is
explored...Pfeiffer held the book to be one of the most original
works in the entire corpus of human poetry, and of such a kind as to
defy classification in terms of lyric, epic, poetic, reflective, or
didactic categories." But couldn't the book be all of the above
and still be easily classified? This is an important clue, and
perhaps one worth delving into.
What is literary
classification? Plato would have said that it is recognizing that
this piece of human literature reflects some aspect of the divine
literature, a poor reflection of God's library. Aristotle would have
said that God's library is all in our heads, that we unconsciously
group together items so as to make more efficient use of our brain
cells. But perhaps the two fellows are not that far apart. Computer
scientists have spent decades trying to get million dollar computers
to recognize, say, a horse. According to Scientific American, they
succeed only 30% of the time, they cannot duplicate what an average 2
year old is capable of. Perhaps it is Plato's divine gift to maximize
Aristotle's brain cells. In any case, we develop categories based on
experience and common use.
Whether I knew it or not at the
time, my first stumbling attempt at writing rhyming verse to a lady
joined centuries of previous efforts in the category of "bad
love poetry." It was new to me, but a well-known classification.
Is it possible then, to do something unique, say, to write rhyming
verse to a pig and start the category "porcine poetry"?
Certainly it's possible. If you succeed in starting a trend you get
elected professor; if you don't, you must rejoin the work force and
your effort gets classified with "miscellaneous bad poetry"
anyway. If then Job is impossible to classify, I draw three
conclusions: that he must have started a trend that was impossible to
duplicate; that everyone applied a different category to which no two
can agree; and that he did too good a job to be thrown into the
miscellaneous bin with all the other riffraff. Let me rephrase this.
If no one will relegate the book to the miscellaneous bin, then I
think it is fair to call this book "objectively excellent".
If, on the other hand, no one can agree as to a category, I would
call it "subjectively understood". And if it has never been
duplicated, thereby starting a trend, I would call it "divinely
inspired".
Has this ever been done
before? Let me admit my bias and say that I believe St. John the
Divine's gospel bears the same relationship to the other gospels as
Job's book bears to wisdom literature. He took an existing format and
modified it to his own, very subjective purpose with a genius that
can only be divinely inspired. If I can be permitted to coin a
phrase, this "transformational" genre is more common in
world literature than perhaps is appreciated. I just finished reading
a novel to my children and noted that the jacket cover had the quote
"Few books could be easier to enjoy or harder to describe than
C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces." which then goes on to
make the three points above. What makes this genre so difficult to
replicate is the very subjectivity of the treatment. No, I'm not
saying that using the first person is unique, but that the book is
written to elicit a subjective response, a reaction that inserts the
reader into the story to become a participant. This is a "meta-genre"
based not so much on the objective content of the book, but on the
subjective response of the reader.
Now if the response
desired is transparently obvious, we would call this type of
literature "propaganda" or "educational",
depending on our bent. Wisdom literature falls into this infinitely
repeated, obvious category. The writer of Job then, bases his book on
the well-known characteristics of wisdom literature in order to
spring his trap on us; he uses our tendency to ask "where's the
moral?" to draw us into this amoral morass where God speaks
riddles and men speak the truth. Transformational literature, unlike
wisdom literature, does not reveal to us something we already know,
but changes what we already know into something else. Since wisdom
literature was the writer's starting point, let us then examine some
of the characteristics of this genre.
1 R. K. Harrison, Introduction to the Old Testament
In
the methodology preface, I spoke on "multiperspectivalism",
the attempt to view a piece of literature (or life) from many
different perspectives. This list of perspectives I have assembled
here is by no means complete, indeed, as long as God continues to
reveal Himself in the world, it can never be complete. Rather I have
listed the perspectives that I found interesting and fruitful. I have
even listed the "feminism" perspective, not because anyone
could mistake me for a feminist, but rather to demonstrate that one
need not hold/believe/defend a particular perspective in order to
learn from it. Perhaps someone will oblige me and write a Marxist
perspective on Job, it would be equally interesting though, as I said
elsewhere, not every perspective is as equally illuminating of the
text, some are more revealing of the proponent.
In addition
to taking these different perspectives, I have done my best to allow
one perspective to illuminate another. These inter-relationships of
perspectives produce what I call "the web of meaning". Webs
are not absolute truth, nor do they exist independent of people, for
a a Marxist or a Materialist would certainly have a different web
than mine. But webs are complex enough to be unique to individuals
and convey a "personality", or a "world-view".
Therefore I am not using "multiperspectivalism" to create a
smoke-screen of viewpoints behind which hides a cowardly
fundamentalist, rather I am encouraging you, the reader, to take your
theology to a higher (meta)plane; to weave your own web; to find a
web that might accomodate both religion and science, reason and
experience, laws and life. This is my effort. This is theology.
When I was a younger man, I
had the privilege of being the best man at the marriage of a friend
and classmate. To my horror I discovered that the best man must begin
the feast by toasting the newlyweds. I had been raised a teetotaller,
and while I thought I could handle a wineglass almost like a pro by
gripping it tightly at the stem between my thumb and forefinger, the
only toast I knew was "cheers". My panic must have shown,
because the MC, another classmate, came over and suggested that I
recite an ancient Jewish blessing. I was so grateful I would have
recited it in Hebrew, but here is the English text. "May you
have the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job and the children of
Israel."
"The patience of Job". A short phrase
that I have never fully understood, since Job appeared to be anything
but patient. Or perhaps in my family patience meant something
different, something closer to comatose--"Just be patient and
you will get your turn too!". Nevertheless, it is a phrase more
widely known than the character it was intended to describe. This is
an example of wisdom literature: a short, pithy saying that attempts
to capture a lifestyle, an attitude, or a worldview. "Spare the
rod and spoil the child" was another favorite in my family. The
book of Job is replete with such examples. Perhaps this accounted for
its continued popularity during the dark ages of the KJV when the
obscure Hebrew made for opaque English. Even when the plot line was
too tangled to follow and the rebuttal had lost its logical thread,
one could still extract gems such as "Man is born to trouble as
the sparks fly upward." If you will allow me to gloss over the
intervening millennia, surely something similar kept scribes busy
copying this book from age to age, and before them, maintained the
oral tradition. If this then is the enduring legacy of the book of
Job, it would behoove us to examine it for those qualities common to
wisdom literature.
One needs only a passing
glance at the Book of Job to see that it looks a lot like the Psalms
or Isaiah, little short sentences that do not fill the column. A
slightly closer look verifies that indeed, the sentences do not tell
much of a story, but have about as much plot as a dictionary. This
is a characteristic of poetry, which a quick glance at Proverbs will
show us, is also a characteristic of wisdom literature. A slightly
closer look will reveal that the first chapter and the last chapter
have a much better story line, and read like history, it's the
chapters in between that are poetry. A comparison with other wisdom
books in the Bible reveal that this is exactly the structure of
Ecclesiastes. So evidently it was a well known style or technique to
have a historical introduction to a known drama or morality lesson,
and then switch to poetry for the body of the book, finally wrapping
it up with a bit of historical epilogue.
This isn't such a
surprising format, when one thinks about it. If I drag out my high
school literature book, that is exactly how famous pieces of
literature were handled. There would be the historical introduction
of the battle at Gettysburg, then President Lincoln's speech, then
some homework problems and thought questions at the end. It's a
didactic approach, introducing the student to a piece of important
literature without forcing the student to read everything ever
written by Lincoln preceding this event. One might even say it's an
efficient approach to education, summarizing the long boring stuff,
and just hitting the highlights where necessary, wrapping it up with
an epilogue that finishes the rest of the story.
Clearly
then, the writer of Job was teaching a lesson. He summarized what we
needed to know about Job's circumstances and suffering quickly, and
then took us to the meat of the story, Job's response and that of
his friends. This organization reveals to us that what was most
important to this ancient teacher was not the history of Job, nor
the explanation at the end, but the very personal responses in the
middle. What was most important, he is telling us, is the subjective
response, so pay attention class, because the pop quiz on this
material will be the unexpected suffering in your own life.
Wisdom literature has a long
tradition in the ancient cultures of the middle east. It was so
popular that people made large collections of the sayings of the
wise and even translated them into neighboring languages. They have
been found in the Akkadian, Egyptian, Ugaritic, Sumerian and Hebrew
languages extending over many centuries of time. Such great
similarities exist between an Egyptian book of wisdom The Wisdom
of Amenophis and sections from the Book of Proverbs that
scholarly debates have raged as to which came first. What made them
so popular, and why do we find so many copies in different languages
for such long periods of time?
From a Marxist viewpoint, such
platitudes are the natural result of squeezing a large population
into a small area; to avoid friction, one must "socialize"
the next generation, teaching them how to live in close proximity
without conflict. The "fertile crescent", the valleys of
the Euphrates, the Jordan and the Nile rivers, closely bounded by
arid and semi-arid deserts, produced not only a high concentration
of humanity, but a conduit for trade and for war. The waves of
conquerors and the conquered produced a heterogeneous mixture of
many cultures, many languages, many gods, and many governments. Into
this highly volatile mix (yes, even more so than the middle east
today!) these collections of wise sayings provided continuity,
stability, and perhaps even a cross-cultural "cosmopolitan"
unity. Thus one would expect these maxims to stay away from "hot
buttons", from mentioning names of local deities, or preferred
forms of government. One would expect them to laud the stabilizing
aspects of culture, the family unit, the workplace, the judicial
system, and to avoid mentioning the destabilizing aspects of
society, the military, the stratification of rich and poor. How
right Karl Marx was, to call this the "opiate of the peoples"!
Therefore from our 20th
century perspective, it seems rather surprising that wisdom
literature speaks so often about God. The opening lines of Proverbs
begin with "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom",
a sentiment echoed by Job himself in chapter 28. If wisdom is
defined as we did above, as the oil that keeps the gears of culture
moving, how can religious sentiment help? Won't contrary religious
feelings (e.g., Catholics vs. Protestants, Christians vs. Moslems)
do more to destabilize society than steady it?
Again, the
response to this sort of question reveals more about the answerer
than the answer. An agnostic or atheist might attempt to explain how
religious sentiment is an abstraction for a concrete problem. The
problem might be one of universal law; one cannot justify shoulds
and shouldn'ts without appealing to consequences,
consequences that require a universal enforcer. Local deities
wouldn't do, for the reasons above, so one produces a quite generic,
universal sort of enforcer, the big one, the creator-God. Or one
could pick a different concrete problem, the stratification of
society into the have's and the have-not's. To avoid
the difficulties that Marx observed, there must be a restraint to
unbridled power, wealth and privilege. Unfortunately government
(kings) were often the worst abusers of power. Therefore one needed
a "king of kings" who brought even royalty to account, who
embodied the concept of "fairness". Hence the idea of God
was a necessary development for the success of wisdom
literature.
Well one could multiply these humanistic
explanations ad infinitum, all of which violate the
definition for wisdom given above, "the fear of the Lord",
since one can't very well fear something one has invented. Were
these cosmopolitan authors really as backward as the Stone Age
tribesmen of Papua New Guinea, worshipping the gods of their own
creation? Can we really believe that no one saw through such obvious
deception in the ensuing centuries of popularity? At the very least,
one must admit that the writers of wisdom literature believed,
feared, respected, admired, and yes, worshipped this God of wisdom.
If wisdom literature arose out of human aspirations, we must
confront the contradiction of self-awareness and selflessness, the
clash between human desires and divine commands.
Do not think
for a minute that Job or his friends were unaware of this tradition
when they debated the purpose of God and of wisdom. In a profound
sense, this book is about itself, about the role that wisdom
literature has in society. Job's friends were humanists, though
unlike today's agnostic/atheists, they valued the tradition, this
wisdom handed down from their ancestors. But just as Kurt
Gödel's incompleteness theorem
showed mathematicians that they could never hope for Platonic
self-consistent perfection in their earthly endeavors, so also Job
proved to his friends that wisdom literature was internally
inconsistent with God and with life. Job's emotional and verbal
response was so catastrophic to the whole body of wisdom literature,
to the whole stability of cosmopolitan unity espoused by his friends
and their sources, it was such subversive nonsense that those three
friends felt it must be opposed at all costs, even at the cost of
destroying a friend with the friendship.
I want to focus on the
nature of this subversion, this incongruity that characterizes the
entire book of Job. Yet I fear that we, the modern readers, are so
removed from the debate that we might falsely construe the utter
seriousness of the players as an abstract comedy of the absurd. But
it remains subversion still, for the book of Job continues to ask
how these collected sayings of anonymous pagans became canon, how in
stark contrast to the sanctified history of God's chosen people,
these platitudes of worldly wisdom made it into the Bible.
To
state it from a 19th century churchman perspective, how did such
uninformed heathens produce a body of literature that mimicked the
inspired Word of God so closely? Or what was the nature of the "holy
water" that sanctified this product of pagan minds and made it
worthy of the Word of God? Is it true, as some have claimed, that
there are different paths to God in different ages, so that the
denizens of the middle east in the millennium before Christ had a
local highway that brought them tantalizingly close to the pearly
gates (closer than their brethren by the Yellow River)? Or is it
true, as another wise man has said, that God is the natural
destination of the unfettered, rational mind, the conclusion of
wisdom, so that all wisdom literature points to God? To rephrase
this, was this wisdom a product of a specific culture that was
blessed by God, or the product of a great human intellect, which
accidentally found itself in this culture, or the arbitrary decision
of a incomprehensible God?
If I am allowed to equate wisdom
with God and God with Christ, then the question becomes, what is the
relationship of Christ and Culture? A question that existed not just
for the modern church, but for the ancient Hebrews, for the
patriarchs, and yes, for the entire Ancient Middle East. If the
difficulty for an agnostic interpretation of wisdom literature is
self-consistency, how an invented Christ could claim sovereignty
over culture, then there is an equal difficulty for a theist who
observes syncretism, the absorption of culture into Christ. The
problems remain even if I am not allowed to make the equation of
wisdom and Christ, for a culture-bound wisdom is of little modern
use, while a wisdom-bound culture has likewise been shown to be a
Hegelian myth that two world wars erased forever.
If Job's
plight and Job's wisdom is relevant for today, if the righteous are
not rewarded, and the wicked do prosper, then all of us with two
cars and three children should be memorizing Job's speeches in
anticipation of our own day of judgment. If, on the other hand,
Job's wisdom is NOT directly relevant then we can extol his virtues
independent of his own reporting. That is, we can concatenate
chapters 2 and 42, reducing this book to a simple object lesson on
obedience and dismiss the poetry as irrelevant and a trifle
misguided. Despite a high regard for scripture, this latter view
seems to dominate in conservative circles, which begs the question
of the relationship between wisdom and culture. If the information
contained in chapters 3--41 is by God and is therefore of value, we
must be very careful that we are not found negligent in our handling
of this wisdom that cost Job so dearly.
Is Job for or against
God? Is Job for or against wisdom? Is God for or against Job? Is God
for or against wisdom? Can wisdom be for or against either? These
are the sorts of questions this book raises, while simultaneously
attacking any answer we give. The majority of the sermons listed in
the appendices will answer these questions: Job is for God; Job is
against wisdom; God is for Job; God is for wisdom; Wisdom cannot be
for or against anything. But the majority of modern (20th century)
academics will say: Job is against God; Job is for wisdom; God is
against Job; God is against wisdom; Wisdom is against both. Both
groups will defend their positions with impeccable logic and
extensive quotes. And woe betide the fool who compromises either
camp! Like Job's comforters, we spare no pain to correct the errant
sufferer, and so perpetually invoke Job's curses on ourselves.
I hope that the previous section convinces you that Job remains as controversial today as he was 3000 years ago. One might ask whether any other author has managed such longevity. From a Hegelian perspective, any controversy of thesis/antithesis is eventually resolved by synthesis. So why is it that 3000 years of recorded history is unable to synthesize Job? Certainly not from lack of trying, as the appendices can attest. May I suggest that the writer of Job attains this dubious distinction by brilliant use of self-referentiality.
Just as Kant was awakened
from his dogmatic slumber by Hume's Treatise,
so I was awakened from my rational stupor by Gödel's
Incompleteness Theorem.
Like David Hume two centuries before, Bertrand
Russell at the dawn
of the 20th century was skeptical of the philosophy of his day and
of the religion
of his fathers.
Endless arguments seem to revolve around ambiguities inherent in
language and thought. Enamored of the success of 19th century
mathematics and equipped with a sharp mind and sharper pen, he
attempted to reduce the very language of philosophy and theology to
mathematical symbols, to capture Aristotle's
Logic in
pure crystalline form. The tool he created, symbolic logic, was
wielded ferociously at these thickets of fuzzy thinking. The
proponents of Russell's agenda were branded "Logical
Positivists" whose single-minded goal was to rid the world of
equivocation and religion through mathematics and science.
Their
mount was given a fatal wound when a young German named Kurt Gödel
published a mathematical proof, using symbolic logic, that no
matter how simple or complicated the rules of symbolic logic
became, one could still equivocate. For any system of axioms
imagined would always be incomplete, because one could formulate
statements which were neither true nor false. That is, no matter
how many special cases Russell included in his rulebook, he could
never prove by logic alone that God did not exist. How did Gödel
single-handedly pull off this stunt, stymieing the advance of the
Logical Leviathan? By using self-referential arguments. Consider
the statement: This sentence is False. Now I ask you, is
that true or false?
Russell goes to great lengths to
exclude such constructions from his logic, but Gödel pursued
him relentlessly. If Russell will add a rule that such
constructions are invalid, then Gödel will construct a
statement about that rule: "All rules which falsify
self-referential constructions are False." and so on ad
infinitum. Logical positivism did not survive this and similar
counter attacks, leaving behind a rear guard of scientists who seem
vaguely mystified by the disappearance of their champion.
Gödel's proof should
not have come as such a surprise to Logical Positivists, for
self-references litter recorded history. Literary criticism is
permeated by discussions of "irony", which is perhaps the
identifying characteristic of modern prose. One cannot go to the
movies without finding references to previous movies--art imitating
life imitating art imitating life. One cannot observe the latest
fashions without being aware of self-conscious references to
previous fashion. We end the 20th century in a decade of
self-referential "retro" styles.
Douglas
Hofstetter, who popularized Gödel's proof in his book Gödel,
Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid,
argues that the attraction found in the art of Escher and the music
of Bach is self-referential. Hofstetter argues that much of nature
itself can only be understood by self-reference. For example, the
biological arms race between pathogens and people is a constant
self-referential test, with the body having to distinguish between
itself and an interloper, while the interloper keeps appropriating
characteristics of its host. The most famous modern plague, AIDS,
is a virus that targets the body's machinery for recognizing
viruses, revealing the deadly seriousness of
self-reference.
Albert Einstein, perhaps the most famous
scientist of the 20th century, wrote a paper at almost the same
time as Gödel entitled Can
quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered
complete? in
which he complains that the newest rage in physics, quantum
mechanics, was incomplete because it could not predict or even
answer questions such as the exact position and speed of an atom.
Worse, QM claimed that simple knowledge of the position destroyed
any possibility of finding the speed, and vice versa. Surely, fumed
Einstein, this limitation in human capabilities should not be
construed as a limitation in divine knowledge--"God doesn't
play dice." was his curt dismissal of quantum mechanics.
Einstein was wrong, for not only does God play dice, He plays with
us. Physicists have been able to show that merely observing a
system will indelibly change it, that we are inexorably a part of
the system we want to describe. For as we obtain knowledge,
knowledge obtains us.
Nor is the Bible an exception, for it absolutely revels in self-references. My favorite is Paul who quotes a philosopher from Crete who said "All Cretans are liars...", to which Paul adds the inspired commentary "what he says is true". Or the scripture verse where he says "all scripture is inspired by God", leading to the doctrine of the infallibility of the canon. "How do we know the Bible is infallible? Because it says so." Much earlier, Moses, trembling before the burning bush, asks God His name and is told, "I am who I am", or even "I am the I am". God can only be characterized by Himself, He cannot be described by what He has created. Self-reference is the answer to the limitless "Why?" (Because I said so!). It is the prerogative of the creator over its creation, it is the claim of divinity over mortality, it is the beginning and the end. Therefore it is all the more remarkable, that on the sixth day of creation, we are told "God created Man in His own image, in the image of God He created him." And we find that the very highest act of creation is self-referential, bestowing that crucial divine prerogative upon Man.
So when Job's comforters
argue for the validity of received wisdom, and Job against, the
apparent victory of Job implies the invalidity of the story of Job.
But if we argue that his comforters win, we own a book that
contradicts our conclusions. So we, the reader must piece together
some sort of compromise, trying to bring a resolution between Job
and his friends, between our heart and our mind, between God and
wisdom. Job forces us to decide.
Why is Solomon wise, but
Job only patient? Was Job's complaint a wise thing to say? Or is
wisdom only worthwhile if we are first "healthy, wealthy and
wise"? What is wisdom, something cultural or something
transcendent? Is wisdom about people or about God; is it by people or
by God? Does Job say anything that wasn't culture bound? How can we
tell? Is Job's wisdom even relevant for today?
We find
ourselves unable to answer these questions until we understand what
wisdom is, and what it is not. This is, of course, the purpose of
wisdom literature. And now we can see we have just purchased a ticket
for the oldest merry-go-round in the universe, for we cannot
understand the question until we have understood the answer. But
before you exit in haste, consider perhaps if it is not the world
that is travelling in circles, finding questions for answers that no
one believes, and this merry-go-round of wisdom is the one stationary
point on a planet spinning out of control.
In seventh grade my younger brother was exposed to higher culture and western literature. His English teacher decided that memorizing a poem would be a profitable way of teaching him about the civilizing aspects of modern culture, perhaps giving him some romantic appeal as he approached the liberating age of adolescence. She asked the class to memorize Wordsworth's poem "Daffodils". My brother, who was perhaps too far gone for such rescuing efforts, saw through the ploy immediately. "I'm not going to memorize a sissy poem!" he confided in me. We held a strategy session, and decided that if he found a longer poem more to his liking, she could have no objection on purely academic grounds. Sure enough, the strategy worked, and he set out at once to memorize "Gunga Din" by Rudyard Kipling. To this day I can rattle off the prologue to Gunga Din, doing my best to sound like a British soldier, "Oh you can talk of gin and beer, when you're quartered safe out here, and you go to penny fights in Aldershottit; but when it comes to slaughter you'll do your work on water, and you'll kiss the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it". I think its fair to say that he escaped the civilizing aspects of modern culture virtually unscathed.
What is the purpose of
poetry? Is it merely, as that English teacher thought, a civilized,
greeting card sort of endeavor? Something gentlemen in white suits
might engage in while sipping ice tea on a porch swing? Consider for
a moment that much of music industry is putting rhyming words on a
page with percussion accompaniment, and that adolescents (and
adults) by the millions are buying this poetry and listening to it
on their walkman for hours on end. If radio changed popular culture
by bringing music to "everyman", then the walkman has
enabled the message in that music to become the ever present
subliminal thought life of millions. Poetry has impact.
Poetry
is coupled often with music, perhaps because they speak the same
language, the language of the heart. David's Psalms, beautiful
examples of Hebrew poetry, were thought to be accompanied with music
at one time. Yet even without the music, the passion, the wide range
of emotions can rarely be equalled in any other part of the Bible.
Whenever more than intellectual interest is important, we find
poetry surfacing as a potent method of communicating emotional and
subjective truth. Examples can be found sprinkled through nearly
every book of the Bible: Miriam's song of victory in the Pentateuch,
Paul's paeans of praise interrupting his Epistles, Jeremiah's lament
of the rape of Jerusalem, the many prophetic pleas, Jesus'
beatitudes, John's song of the cherubim, and the list goes on.
Why
is poetry so ubiquitous in the Bible? Isn't it dangerous to allow
such a subjective literary style to convey the unalterable truths of
God's word? What if someone took literally the poetic imagery, or
took the literal truths poetically? Doesn't this sort of thing
introduce dangerous ambiguity into the presentation of the truth
(such as the length of the days in God's creation of the world)?
Surely no one has endeavored to write a systematic theology textbook
in rhyming verse, so why should the Bible?
If I might
rephrase this question to be: what is the relationship between
poetry and truth? I think the whole issue is a problem of modern
thought. Theology used to be queen of the sciences, but Immanuel
Kant separated the two by an impassable gulf. Science, the rational
mind, the factual truth on one side, and theology, the emotions, the
irrational heart on the other. We have come to believe that all
truth is somehow like history facts or Newton's laws; composed of
unalterable syllogisms of deductive logic and rational premises.
When someone asks us "what are your true feelings?", we
grope as if in the dark, cross-examining every emotion for traces of
genuine fact. We are confused by this divide that did not exist in
the ancient mind, that could believe with the whole heart, that
could weave emotions into the truth. When King David was confronted
by Nathan of his sin in killing Uriah, Nathan used a tear-jerker
story of a poor man and his lamb to make the point with the king.
Emotions were an invaluable aid or even necessary in comprehending
the truth. When Timothy McVeigh was on trial for premeditated
manslaughter, the prosecution used exactly the same technique. Why?
Because emotions can cloud the intellect? No, on the contrary,
emotions are an important part of the truth. If I say to my
children, "I love you" with gritted teeth and fearsome
demeanor, will they grow up with self-confidence? No, because "the
truth" removed from proper emotion no longer is "the
truth".
My own personal revelation came while meditating
on the words of Jesus, when he said "I am the way, the truth
and the life". I could not grasp how he could equate an
abstract, hard, empirical, rational fact with an emotional,
subjective persona. Suddenly it hit me, the truth was a person. And
people have emotions, feelings, personality, and character. The
truth might even be inexpressible without all of this emotional
"baggage", the truth might require a subjective response
in order to be objectively real, much as Quantum Mechanics requires
an observer for an object to be realized. The truth could no more be
owned or manipulated than a human being could be owned and
manipulated. The truth is a person.
In the light of this
revelation, the writer of Job is using poetry to convey all that is
important and crucial, all that is true, all that is essentially
lost in the history sections; the subjective response of the reader.
The Cliff Notes version of Job is no longer true, the Bible notes
summary is no longer true, because it misses the human, the
subjective, the emotion packed replies of Job. It is my view that
the poetry of Job was a necessity, not an embellishment; that the
subject material required a poetic treatment. Therefore if the
poetry of Job was necessary in communicating his message, let us
consider carefully the characteristics of Hebrew poetry.
Before we discuss Hebrew
Poetry, we should ask what are the distinguishing characteristics of
English Poetry. The most obvious characteristic is rhyme, as is
evident in the opening paragraph. However there have been famous
poets who disdained rhyming, John Milton, for example. In his case
he emphasized a second characteristic of poetry, rhythm. No doubt
you were exposed to pedantic phrases such as "iambic
pentameter" as an explanation for Milton's reputation when he
couldn't rhyme his way out of a paper bag. Yet both of these
defining characteristics, rhyme and rhythm, do not translate into
another language easily. Perhaps that is why we don't find books
such as "Great French Love Poetry" gracing our book
shelves, it just isn't the same in translation.
Fortunately
for us then, Hebrew poetry uses neither rhyme nor rhythm in its
construction, since it would be nearly impossible to translate. Why
then do we call it poetry, rather than elevated prose? Because it
has some peculiar characteristics not generally found in, say, the
historical books; characteristics such as concrete language,
allegory, metaphor, and perhaps alliteration. English poetry has
many of these same "secondary" characteristics that we may
overlook if we focus on the more obvious rhyming of words, simply
because it is attempting the same task: speaking to the heart.
Let
me address a few of these characteristics, which is by no means an
exhaustive list, but those that hopefully will give us some insight
into the style of the book of Job.
Forget rhyme. Forget
rhythm. If one learns to be concrete, one can write poetry with the
best of them. Take this example:
(1)"He was unutterably
sad, terribly confused, and weakened by grief". versus
(2)"He
stood silently, his forehead wrinkled, his eyes slowly filling with
tears, leaning against the doorjamb with his knees gradually
buckling under him."
In the first sentence, I have
analyzed the situation and told the reader how he should react. In
the second sentence, I have merely observed the situation without
analyzing it, letting the picture evoke its own emotional response.
The first sentence used abstract concepts, such as "unutterably"
or "weakened"; the second sentence used concrete
descriptions "wrinkled" or "buckling". The
secret to writing poetry is to write concretely, letting the reader
participate in the discovery of the poem. No one wants to be told
what to think, but everyone wants to share the excitement of a
discovery. Poetry is participatory, it focusses on the feelings, on
the co-discovery of truth. It is generally not analytic detached
generalizations, but emotional involved particulars. That does not
mean poetry can not talk about universal truths, rather it permits
the reader to discover the universal truth on his own.
In
order to be concrete, I usually have to use more words. The
particulars are important and take longer to say. I may have to be
repetitive, saying the same thing in slightly different ways to
make sure that my point is clear. Poetry may even appear
intentionally indirect, as it attempts to make a surprise ending a
real surprise for the reader. The key point is that concrete
language is used to force the reader to participate, to make the
story subjectively real, and not just objectively correct.
In my example above, I
tried to convey the emotions of this person by indicating his
facial and bodily responses. I picked an easy example, because we
are all accustomed to reading emotions in others actions. But
suppose I had wanted to convey a much more difficult concept, say,
God's love for humans. What kind of image could I use? Would it
even be appropriate to say, for example, "God's chest swelled
as he patted Adam on the head"? Somehow it seems demeaning to
anthropomorphize God, to make him have the gestures of a human
being. Yet conveying his love seems to be the never-ending task of
the prophets, the priests, and the Levites. How did they accomplish
this?
Moses' example is a good one because he tried just
about everything he could think of to teach the people about God's
love. He wrote laws. He wrote history. He wrote homeschooling
texts, commanding that parents teach this to their children. He
wrote litanies for the people to recite. And he wrote songs, Psalm
90 and 91. In Moses' own words he says (RSV):
He who dwells
in the shelter of the Most High, who abides in the shadow of the
Almighty, will say to the LORD, "My refuge and my fortress; my
God, in whom I trust." For he will deliver you from the snare
of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence; he will cover you
with his pinions, and under his wings you will find
refuge;...
God, feathers? What is Moses talking about? But
once you have seen a mother hen, at the first sign of danger,
collecting her yellow fuzz ball chicks under her wings, the image
becomes crystal clear: God is protecting us who are helpless from
the marauding hawks circling above. This is an analogy, or a
metaphor, that uses a well-known image to convey an abstract
concept. It is a miniature discovery, a small participation on the
part of the reader, but nonetheless useful in poetry. The danger,
of course, is that metaphors wear out quickly. What used to be a
clever picture can turn into dead technical language. Who
associates "ruthless" anymore with a Moabite woman? So
occasionally the difficulty in reading old poetry, such as Job, is
in pruning the dead metaphors to rediscover again the living sap of
emotion in the words.
Poetry, like music and
songs, was meant to be heard. History, like the Congressional
Record, was only meant to be read. If one actually read out loud
the first 9 chapters of Chronicles, it would have great soporific
effect. I can only get through them by either speed reading or
decorating it with a highlighter pen. Poetry, (excluding some
modern efforts such as e.e. cummings), should be read out loud. It
was part of the oral tradition, handed down like melodies from
generation to generation. And like music, poetry--the language of
the heart--is meant to be memorized. Why else would we say that
memorization is "learning by heart"?
Now anyone
who has had summer greek or a music/literature appreciation course,
will know all about mnemonic devices. My music teacher even taught
them to us (rather then letting us learn it on the street), telling
us that symphonies could be easily distinguished so that if the
bass line was rumbling "Beet-ho-ven Beet-ho-ven" it was
clearly the 5th, whereas if the strings were saying "Mozart's
in the closet, let him out, let him out, let him out" then it
was undoubtedly the 40th. So it is in poetry; I never lose my place
in the middle of the line, its remembering how that next line
begins that was so difficult. If the writer had every line
beginning with the same sound, or successive letters of the
alphabet, then I can jog my memory and spill out the next
line.
Unfortunately, that is an aspect of poetry that
doesn't translate well. I never could manage to keep more than a
few of the 176 verses of Psalm 119 in my brain, though I reportedly
had a relative who had memorized the whole thing in Hebrew.
Privately I think its all the mnemonic devices that helped him;
every 8 verses starting with a successive letter in the Hebrew
alphabet. But we should neither begrudge the poetry nor the people
for using these mnemonic devices, we can just be grateful that we
didn't have to memorize Job to study it.
The
most obvious trait of Hebrew poetry, and one that appears to our
western eyes as a distracting habit, is the tendency for the author
to repeat himself, to say everything twice. Once is okay, twice is
forgivable, but three times is downright annoying. In my youth I
decided to accomplish the Christian equivalent of a pilgrimmage to
Mecca, I would read the Bible cover to cover. Somewhere between Job
and Isaiah I can remember fading rapidly, reading every other verse
to relieve the monotony. Why, I wondered, does the Bible have to be
so boring? Can't they say what they mean the first time?
The
answer, I hope, is obvious; I wasn't reading it out loud. Hebrew
parallelism is designed to be concrete, to be mnemonic, to enhance
a metaphor, it was meant to be memorized. How many times have you
forgotten a line in a song but remembered the rhyme at the end?
"Roses are red, violets are blue, uh mm mm mm, and so are
you." I really have no idea what was in the third line of the
original, but we were awfully creative in grade school. In the same
way, Hebrew parallelism was as ubiquitous as English rhyme, and
came to be the defining characteristic of Hebrew poetry.
This
was providential, because several thousand years separate us from
the author, and many words have lost their meaning in the
intervening millennia. But due to Hebrew parallelism, we can often
reconstruct the flow, depending on that valuable repetition to lead
us over the river of ignorance. If you get out a KJV and compare it
with a recent translation of Job, you will find many examples of
KJV translators applying what my Latin teacher called, "creative
translation". Fortunately in the 4 centuries since the KJV, we
have uncovered many ancient documents that revealed the meaning of
some of these obscure words, so by all means obtain a modern
translation of Job before undertaking this study.
Thus poetry is written in a way to convey feelings, not by summarizing them for our quick perusal, but by forcing us to relive them, to participate in the rediscovery of the subjective, emotional truth. This form of discovery was meant to be heard, to be recited, to be memorized. So in addition to concrete language and metaphor, it used mnemonics, gimmicks to jog the memory and keep the story flowing. These tricks of parallelism and acrostics are really no different than our English rhyme, and in contrast to English poetry, manage to survive 3000 years of translation in language and time.
One risks being burned at the stake for even suggesting that God could be brought to trial, as if the created creatures had any right to judge their creator. Let me state clearly that we humans are neither the judge nor the prosecution in this heavenly trial, but the witnesses of an archetypal struggle. This is not our trial, this is God's, to which we play a not insignificant, but secondary role. We are presented with a heavenly scene which has a baffling encounter of a being named Satan with God. It is only as we examine the language and dialogue that we begin to realize that the spotlights on Satan and God are also faintly illuminating a huge chamber with myriads of angels and humans, all observing this primeval debate, this cosmic conflict. The very language of God's speeches late in the book, Rahab, Leviathon and Behemoth, are reminiscent of the ancient middle eastern myths of creation, of the heavenly struggle between the forces of good and evil. This is the cosmic backdrop to the very human story of Job and his friends, but a very important backdrop, because it supplies the context for the entire book. Therefore we need to examine carefully the strokes used to paint it.
The language used in 1:6ff
is reminiscent of a law court appropriate for the time of the
patriarchs. Unlike today's special buildings and titled offices, a
law court in ancient times existed de facto at the heart of
the business district of a walled city, namely, at the city gates.
Here the elders of the city would collect, and here, overlooking the
trade moving in and out of the city, decisions would be made that
affected the life of the city. One might think of it as a
combination stock market, city hall and the savings bank. The
important feature that determined whether court was in session was
the presence of the important people, the elders of the city. This
is exactly the situation we find in 1:6.
We are introduced to
a gathering of the angels (God's messengers) and the LORD. (Whenever
the word appears in capitals, the translators are indicating that it
is the special name of God, the tetragrammaton, YHWH. This is the
personal name of God revealed to Moses, and should not be taken to
be a generic "god".) This is a gathering of powerful
beings, since not only is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
present, but also his powerful agents who execute his decisions, the
angels. Adding to this list of powerful persons, is the being called
"Satan", the Adversary (or Accuser). This is almost a
legal term, sort of like saying in English, "the prosecution".
The title is correctly descriptive, because in short while, Satan
will be making an accusation.
The introduction 1:7-8 to the
accusation of 1:9 should not be viewed as banter, my impression is
that it may be the protocol used to introduce a legal complaint, and
in particular, a law suit by an outsider who has just arrived at the
city gate. There is perhaps also a sense that the court case has
been continuing for some time, and Satan has just returned from
gathering more evidence. Note that the court scenes in chapters 1
and 2 have no corresponding scene at the end of the book, no
conclusion. It doesn't appear that the court case is decided, or
even that the book of Job is about this law suit. Rather, this law
suit appears to be ongoing, even perhaps to the present time, and
this is just one televised episode it. This may then explain the
apparent "baiting" of the LORD, when He asks Satan if he
has noticed Job. Surely such a view of God doesn't fit in with the
rest of the book, it clashes with the apparent devotion that Job has
toward Him. Rather it appears to me that they are both presenting
their evidence to the court; Satan claiming worldwide support for
his position, God presenting His star counter-example. The original
complaint of Satan is not stated, but as the dialogue continues it
becomes clear what is the substance of Satan's lawsuit.
If it
be the case that we are seeing an episode from a long lawsuit, then
it is not so surprising that Satan plays no more role in the book
after chapter 2. This is not a story about "war in heaven",
this is not a story about the struggle of titans, this is a cameo of
one man's life used as evidence in an ongoing court case between
Satan and the LORD. It is an odd court case, because Satan speaks
not just for himself, but for a large majority of "Mesopotamians".
In a sense, God is on trial for abusing his privileges. Therefore
one should not view Satan as a coequal with God nor as a
personification of evil, rather he is merely the spokesman for
widely held beliefs about God. And it is these beliefs, this court
case, that provides the backdrop for the story of Job. These beliefs
might be summarized in modern parlance as "the problem of
Evil", or as a popular book title has it, "When Bad Things
Happen to Good People". Satan's function in this book is as the
premier spokesman for the contingent that claims "God isn't
fair".
Satan, both his person and function, has been seen with such widely conflicting views that his role in this book of Job needs some clarification. Let me caricature several views of Satan.
The
Prosecution:
Some take the book of Job entirely out of the
context of Biblical canon, and argue that all we know about Satan
is in these first 2 chapters. In that case, they say, we shouldn't
view him as being an "outsider" to God's court, rather he
is just an angelic being who is assigned the function of "the
Devil's advocate", the court jester, the foil for
demonstrating God's wisdom.
The difficulty I have with this
position, besides the weight of other Biblical evidence, is the
emotional way Satan talks to God. This is not an intellectual
exercise for Satan, this is not the tone of a willing servant of
YHWH, there is a clear attitude of rebellion, of insurrection in
the dialogue. Nor does God address Satan as an insider, but clearly
as an interloper to the court; their dialogue is confrontational
and legal. Compare this to the dialogue between Abraham and God
over the destruction of Sodom; in that story Abraham was pleading
his case but with a very different attitude. If nothing else, this
attitude of Satan indicates that although he must be very powerful
to be able to confront God in this manner, he is not a member of
the court.
The "Dark Side
of the Force":
In many eastern religions,
Zoroastrianism for example, the forces of good and evil are nearly
coequal, struggling for supremacy. The Bible has never presented
this view of God nor of Satan. Yes, Satan is powerful enough to
stand with the angels, but he is asking permission from God. And
God withholds from Satan the absolute power over Job, saying to him
in essence "you can go this far but no further." Nor does
Job attribute to Satan any of his difficulties, but he says
immediately, "God has done it." Satan plays merely the
part of a spokesman in a labor dispute, not a king from an evil
empire. Thus it would be incorrect to exonerate God by saying,
"Job's suffering is Satan's fault, God had nothing to do with
it." This gives Satan too much credit, credit that Job himself
did not give to Satan. Nor is it logically possible to separate the
responsibility from the power. If it is God who has the ultimate
power over Satan and over Job, then we cannot make Satan
responsible for what happens to Job. Nor can we blame the 3 friends
for Job's torment, nor assign it to the Mesopotamian culture. Most
emphatically, we cannot we make Job responsible for the events in
this book. The beauty and the terror of worshipping a single,
all-powerful God, is that God alone is responsible for His
creation. All other views devolve into pantheism.
The
Fallen Angel:
The historical and, I believe. correct way to
view Satan is as a powerful being who is in rebellion against God's
rule, a fallen angel. This is elaborated by many others in many
places, John Milton's Paradise
Lost and C.S.
Lewis' The
Screwtape Letters
come to mind, so that I really don't need to expound on it to any
great extent. Much of what we know about Satan is sketchy, a
Genesis story, an encounter with Jesus, an apocalyptic ending, with
some random warnings sprinkled through the Epistles. But then, we
have always been told more about heaven than about hell, for we
already know too much about hell, it is heaven that holds our hope.
The verse for me that captures the essence of Satan are Jesus'
words, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven."
Briefly
then, Satan's abilities are equal to that of God's other executive
agents, the angels. But his power over God's creatures hangs by a
very slender legal thread, it lies in Satan's right to accuse.
Because God has created Man in his own image, Satan cannot claim
authority over mankind unless he can prove God has mismanaged his
creation. In the same way that theologians argue the necessity for
Man's "free will", there is a necessity for God's "true
justice" that provides Satan an avenue for attack. The key
point to be made here is that Satan always accuses, he must accuse,
it is his only hope for existence, it is his life. Therefore his
function in the book of Job meshes perfectly with his personality,
painting a backdrop of the archetypal conflict of divine justice,
the cosmic law suit in which Job is just a single exhibit.
What is the nature of this
complaint, of Satan's accusation? When God says, "where have
you been?", Satan replies, "Oh, just covering the globe."
This sounds like pretty meaningless banter since obviously God would
know more about Satan's visits than the famed East German secret
police: every city, every village, every hamlet his shadow had
passed through would be old news to God. Likewise Satan's flippant
answer is without surprise unless this dialogue is the continuation
of some preceding, but unrecorded, debate. One can imagine that the
debate had gone something like this, Satan saying "You're
completely unfair God!" And God replying, "Prove it."
And Satan storming out, calling over his shoulder, "I'll do
just that." So in this episode, Satan has returned after
collecting global statistics, arriving back in the court with his
file folders under his arm. God knows what's in those file folders;
He doesn't need to hear again about how Uncle Bill lost his faith
when his two-year-old drowned in the pond. So He pre-empts Satan,
and pulls out his prime counter-example, Job.
Now how can
Job, a righteous man but still only one after all, counter the
thousands of statistics in Satan's folders? He can't, of course,
unless Satan's accusation is universal, unless Satan's complaint is
that no one likes God, that everyone is merely
tolerating His rule. And it appears that Satan is forced to make a
universal argument, for God's defense would be that Satan has
deluded a majority of mankind ever since the Garden. To which
Satan's rebuttal might be that "the truth hurts", and the
truth just might be that God's expectations are universally
impossible to attain. Hence God is telling Satan, "Look here,
Job loves me. If he can be righteous then my expectations are not
too high, and you really are deceiving the other 99% of
mankind."
Satan fairly explodes. This is like the highly
visible model commune that supposedly justifies why communism is
superior to capitalism, while behind the scenes is an artificial
economy in which this commune consumes more resources than it
produces. "This is patently unfair," Satan replies, "you
expend incredible blessings on this guy just to keep him loyal to
you. If you take away his material wealth, why, he would react like
everyone else, he would spit in your face." And with that,
Satan throws down the gauntlet. And a smart move it was. For if God
refused, Satan could always say he was right, and God was chicken.
And if God accepted, a righteous man would suffer, which, if it
didn't break Job's faith, might still break the faith of many
others.
Did God need to pick it up? He knew Job's heart, did
he really have to torture Job to win the contest with Satan? Why did
God allow Satan to touch a hair of Job's head, after He had said
"Job was a blameless man."? Just as we said above, a God
that gets into petty disputes with Satan doesn't appear to be a God
worth worshipping, much less dying for. Surely there must be
something else happening in this court that required a continuation
of the contest. And we are reminded of many other "tests"
of righteous men, tests that God already knew the answer from. As a
preacher once told me, "God doesn't test us to learn our score,
he tests for us to learn it." For although God might know the
outcome, Satan did not, nor did the jury of the court.
Perhaps it is inappropriate
to talk about a jury in an ancient Mesopotamian law court, since
there was no sense of the modern "jury by one's peers",
rather the elders of the town were the court and the jury. (Perhaps
that is the problem in American jurisprudence, that the jury has
become a tool of the attorneys.) One gets a sense of this from the
story of Ruth, where the elders were witnesses of a legal
transaction, and presumably, so were a large number of passers-by.
Yet in another sense a jury which reaches a verdict (or witnesses a
verdict) must pay the consequences of its verdict, just as a
cosigner to a loan must pay if the loan is defaulted. When Gideon
was chasing the Midianites and asked for help at the city gates, the
refusal of the elders to help Gideon sealed their punishment on
Gideon's victorious return. To be a witness is to be responsible for
the verdict.
Thus it is more than a literary style that we
are placed as a passers-by in the court of heaven. We become the
witnesses of the legal case between Satan and the LORD. We become
participants of this cosmic court. We become responsible for the
verdict. We are the jury.
Once when I was driving to a
meeting, animatedly waving my hands while discussing passionately
some fine point of theory, and totally oblivious to the sudden
braking of heavy traffic for no apparent reason, I found myself
caught in a speed trap at the bottom of a hill. The bill arrived in
the mail a few weeks later, and came to about $150, 3 months of my
disposable income. Closer scrutiny showed that I was being accused of
a misdemeanor for driving far in excess of the speed limit, which was
patently untrue. (One can always make fine distinctions about speed
limits.) I resolved to appeal the ticket and appear in court with my
wife and children. After waking the family up at 3 am and driving for
6 hours through a tropical rainstorm, I arrived in court only to be
mistaken for a lawyer by all the adolescent miscreants who actually
were driving far in excess of the speed limit. The district
attorney called us in one by one to determine how we would be
pleading our case. She warned us sternly that this judge was known as
a hanging judge, so we should not think that our mere presence in
court would grant us leniency. I knew enough lawyers to know that if
my particular policeman were not present to vouch for the radar
report, I would be off scott-free. Furthermore I was incensed that my
infraction had been inflated to the level of a misdemeanor to benefit
the coffers of the state. I was determined to plead "not
guilty." My wife, however, felt this was immoral because, in
point of fact, I had been exceeding the maximum 55 miles per hour
allowed in this state. I was in a quandary. Should I plead not guilty
to my false accusation or plead guilty to a separate charge? Do I
face the wrath of man or the wrath of God?
This was the
situation Job found himself in. He was on trial, not particularly
because he deserved it, but because he was caught in a speed trap of
Satan's making. Job found himself caught in a struggle between
superpowers: between Satan, the premier Behaviorist, who claims that
Men are predictable machines optimizing their probability of
survival; and God, who seems to believe that his creation is capable
of loving its creator. Both superpowers have played their hand, and
now hold their breath awaiting Job's choice. The trial that began in
heaven continued on earth; and it was on earth that it would be
resolved. His friends play the part of the District Attorney,
advising him how to plead his case. Did Job fear God or fear Man? For
in some sense, Job represents more than himself, he represents all
mankind. The story of Job is the story of Man on trial.
Satan's contention, as he so
emphatically tells God, is that Men are calculating sorts who are
forever optimizing their chances for success, their probability of
survival, the propagation of their genes. If, as B. F. Skinner once
did with pigeons, we put Men in a box and feed them at random
intervals, they will develop all sorts of superstitious behavior on
the belief that their actions cause the gods of chance to bring them
food. Even worse, if we reward certain behaviors by feeding them,
their actions become very predictable, they become conditioned. If
there exist any "religious sentiment" in Man, Satan
argues, it is the recognition of the "laws of nature",
that whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap. Men understand
retribution, they understand divine justice, they understand that
one must be polite and respectful with persons of power. But are
they capable of devotion? Can they love this distant god that they
worship? "Ridiculous", snorts Satan, "its all a
matter of mind control and manipulation! Take away the payoff, and
the behavior will be rapidly extinguished." So Job was placed
in the glass box, the observers gathered around, and all external
stimulation was terminated. The experiment had begun.
Whatever
else we might say about Job, we must say that he didn't crack. When
a computer no longer responds to external inputs, we say it is
"hung" or "frozen", or in electronics we say
that "latchup" has occurred, with a cure known to all PC
owners, rebooting. Job's faith appears to have become independent of
external inputs, it had been "internalized". Satan was not
about to let God win this argument over what was obviously a sick
puppy. This man had clearly lived so long in God's unreal operating
environment that he was retreating into imagination, into dreamland,
protecting himself from harsh reality by this cocoon of "integrity".
"Skin for skin!", Satan says, "just let me reboot
this fellow. Let me cut through this cocoon and give him some
external stimulation that he can't ignore. I'll jolt his circuits,
and you'll see that a man will sacrifice anything for his life."
So Job was afflicted with painful boils, preventing him even from
sleeping.
The trial of Job then, was the ultimate experiment
in Skinnerian psychology. The outcome will take 30 more chapters to
describe. For the outcome of this experiment is intimately tied to
faith, to hope, to love, to religion; the outcome tells us about
Man, his weaknesses, his foibles, his fears; the outcome tells us
also about God, both in His image revealed faintly in Man, and the
response of his creatures toward Him. For the philosophy espoused by
Satan is more than an academic experiment, more than a mental Turing
machine, it is a direct assault on the nature of truth and the
character of God with immense moral and legal implications.
Why do I say that the test of Job's response to external stimuli is a moral issue? Surely modern psychology does the same sort of thing all the time, determining if consumers prefer orange crispy crackers to green soggy ones, for example. Why should Job's response have anything to do with morality? Satan would argue that it doesn't because Job's response is determined, it is trained. Therefore morality itself doesn't really exist because there's no real choice. God would say that Job is a man made in the image of God, and therefore has the ability to create new possibilities, to chose freely without compulsion. If Job merely reacts, then Satan is showing that either Man has lost God's image, or never had it. If Man never had it, then God has failed in his creation, and if Man has lost it, then God's creation has been ruined. Job's choice then will determine whether he is man or machine.
Well if everybody is
waiting for a response, maybe Job should just refuse to play along.
Surely he is smart enough to realize that he is a pawn in some
divine chess game, and that the lack of information must be part of
the strategy. Perhaps he should take it all stoically, saying in
effect, "God has his reasons, which become clearer in time.
I'll just wait for His next move." There have been many people
throughout history who have suggested that it is far greater piety
to bear one's sufferings silently than to express emotion. Some
have even suggested that Job's sin, for which he repents in the
last chapter, was one of complaining, of whining about his
God-given circumstances. Should Job have remained silent,
eliminating the need for chapters 3-40?
Job did remain
silent, he did wait for God. For all of seven days and seven nights
he waited. Under the circumstances, I would consider that a heroic
achievement. But to remain silent forever confuses severe
depression with uncommon restraint. It is no more pious to say
nothing to God than it is virtuous to stop speaking to a neighbor
who has been insulting. Unlike the ascetic, God does not separate
mind from emotions, the will from the heart; rather He commands
through Moses that we should "love the Lord your God with all
your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength."
God made the body, He made the feelings, He invented the emotions,
they were all declared good. When a very young child encounters
impossible evil and pain, he may develop "multiple
personalities" in an attempt to bottle up the suffering. Like
that child, a Stoic attempts to bottle up the pain by severing all
ties to the emotions, and with similar results. Such an approach
may be the foundation of other religions, but not of biblical
wisdom.
Well, if silence is
unhealthy, should Job then proceed through the "five stages of
grief" as espoused by modern counselors? As I recollect them,
they are Denial, Anger, Fear, Depression, and Acceptance. If we
identify stoicism with denial, is Job any better off by expressing
anger, anger against God for denying him justice and causing him
grief? Is it healthy to "let off steam" and tell God how
it feels? Or does a proper "creator-creature" distinction
preclude such insubordinate expressions of rage?
Not all
expressions of anger are beneficial. We are warned by St. Paul, "be
angry but do not sin". Or, as our marriage counselor taught
us, it is the difference between saying "you make me angry
when you do X" and "when you do X, I get angry". Our
anger is ours and ours alone, we are neither victims nor
executioners of our emotions. If Job feels angry, as he reports so
eloquently, it is neither sin nor weakness. How he handles it,
however, is of great moral consequence. For if emotions are not
sin, neither are they license. We cannot excuse our actions on the
basis of overwhelming emotion. And we could make the same argument
for Fear and Depression; that as feelings they are value-neutral,
but one's handling of them is not.
Job then finds himself in a storm of emotions through which he must steer a straight and narrow course following the faint light of the image of God, the hope of the eternal. For Job, whether he wants to or not, must respond to his feelings, must choose his words carefully. The trial is about his choice. His fate hangs on his decision.
Job's wife gets no respect.
But look at it from her perspective: those were her children too,
that was her household, her servants, her husband and yes, her
future grandchildren who had been accursed. A man may have his
career, his reputation, his integrity, but what does a woman of her
time have beyond her home, her children and her husband? For Job,
pain is its own analgesic, it distracts one from the indignities of
disease. But no such balm was hers, rather she had to stare day and
night at this blackened body, those oozing sores, this withered husk
that had been her husband. Make no mistake, observing the suffering
of a loved one can be harder than enduring it oneself. Out of this
pain, out of this intolerable situation can one fault her for
wishing that it were over? "Curse God, and die!" she
pleads with Job, "just make the suffering stop. There's nothing
worse that can happen to you. Please, just end it."
There
are three ways that I can understand her plea. It can mean, "curse
God, and He will kill you", or "curse God and commit
suicide", or "commit suicide, which is a curse to God".
The first two elaborations don't make much sense to me. Here is the
wife of a righteous man, who has lived 20 or 30 years with her
husband, the wife who raised his ten children, who shared his
sorrows and his joys. How then could she so vindictively urge him to
curse God, especially when she knows how he will answer? No, I think
this conversation, like Satan's conversation, reveals an ongoing
dialogue. She appears to be urging him to end his sufferings, to
commit suicide, perhaps she is even suggesting a mutual suicide
pact. His response to her must have been that this was not allowed,
that suicide would be the equivalent of cursing God, since like
homicide, it erases the image of God. This would have kept her quiet
for a short time but the suffering continued and when she could
contain it no longer she finally burst out, "Curse God then,
but die!"
This was Job's first test. A quick, painless
ending to intolerable suffering. A solution to the embarrassment of
disease. A balm for his beloved wife's anguish. But a curse thrown
in God's face.
It is curious that Satan told God "a man
will do anything to save his life", yet his first test of Job
was a temptation to take his life. How like Satan it is to lie, to
destroy, to distort, to make the grave a friend. Job is confronted
with Death speaking through the lips of his wife. How should he
respond?
And we see again the exquisite control that Job has
over his feelings. After Job has overcome the temptation and seen
through the disguise, he could well have redirected his anger at God
toward his wife. We would expect him to explode and tell his wife
she was Satan herself. But he doesn't. Instead he reproves her
gently, leading her to the quiet waters of acceptance. "You
speak like a pagan woman," he tells her, "not as one who
has known God. Should we receive good from God and not suffering? It
is still God's good hand that leads us." And though we should
not draw great conclusions from silence, it appears that Job's words
have ended the debate, have somehow comforted his wife. And my heart
aches for this man who could comfort his wife from the pain of his
own suffering.
If the first test of Job was
a battle for his emotions, the second test was a war for his mind.
Like the "brainwashing" tactics employed in the Korean
War, Job's friends counsel him to admit to something he didn't do.
But why, what difference would it make? Would such hollow admissions
remove an iota of the pain he felt? Perhaps analyzing their response
from the perspective of the Korean conflict will be helpful.
At
first I thought that such extorted "confessions" were a
trifle eccentric, since the televised "criminal trials"
had little if any impact on the outcome of the war. But on
reflection, it seemed apparent that brainwashing was not done for
the sake of the Americans, but for the sake of the North Koreans.
Eyewitness accounts of the prisoner exchanges at the end of the war
contrasted the malnourished, bony, and ragged yet unbroken spirits
of the American POWs jubilantly singing with the well-fed,
well-dressed defiant faces of the returning North Korean POWs. The
contrast was striking, revealing that the conflict may have ended in
stalemate, but the spiritual superiority of Christianity over
Communism was inescapable. Against this evidence, the Communist
government expended great resources to discredit the West in the
eyes of their countrymen. The future of a Korean Communist state was
at stake, and so the warfare for the hearts of the people extended
into the psychological and spiritual realm, inventing the bizarre
weapon of invisible torture, "brainwashing".
Going
back to my traffic court experience, the district attorney applied
psychological pressure to obtain a guilty plea, not for my benefit,
but in order to reduce the workload of the district court,
regardless of the veracity of the police report. In a similar way,
the three friends were not interested in the truthfulness of Job's
report, or in comforting their hurting friend, rather they wanted to
protect the status quo, to uphold their fragile cosmopolitan
compromise religion in the face of overwhelming opposing evidence.
They needed a guilty plea from Job to maintain their positions of
power and privilege. So from a legal perspective, most of what is
said in the next 30 chapters was an attempt to extort a guilty plea
from an innocent man. Those 30 chapters will provide much ammunition
for this point of view, which we defer to the verse-by-verse
commentary, but it suffices to say that if Job capitulated, not only
would he be discrediting God before Satan, since it was God who said
Job was blameless, but he would also be defaming the Truth, and
demonstrating the fickleness, the inherent weakness of God's flawed
image in His creation, Man. In short, Satan would win.
When the Supreme Court
convenes to hear a case, often unsolicited amicus cure,
"friend of the court", briefs are filed by interested
parties. They often present a philosophy or a viewpoint of a group
or organization that would like to influence the decision of the
justices. Sometimes it is irrelevant to the particulars of the case,
but addresses the generalizations or precedents that this case might
set. For example, if the Supreme Court should care to rule on the
accessibility of pornography on the Internet, an amicus brief
might present the view that this case should be decided by the
physical location of the defendants rather than the principles of
the First Amendment. Of course the court has no need to respond to
or even acknowledge such unsolicited advice.
In the same way
as an amicus brief, the appearance of Elihu in chapter 32 is
sudden, and his disappearance in chapter 37 is equally so. It is as
if he were invisible or ignored by all the participants in this
trial, despite his familiarity and self-declared presence throughout
the opening arguments. Therefore some scholars view Elihu's speech
as a later insertion, however, in a legal context this appears to be
an amicus brief. Certainly Elihu presents himself as a friend
and defender of God. If we view Elihu from this perspective, perhaps
we can find in his arguments a different objective or perspective
than that of the three friends.
Elihu is introduced by some
prose that says his speech is a result of anger; he is angry with
Job for belittling God but twice as angry at the three for not
refuting Job. His introductory comments demonstrate this emphasis
because they are directed not at Job, but at the three friends.
Like our imaginary Supreme Court case above, Elihu is concerned
that the three friends have missed a crucial point in Job's attack,
they have implicitly allowed Job to claim a dangerous precedent. By
not countering Job's bold assertions of God's responsibility, Elihu
feels that the three friends have strained at a gnat and swallowed
a camel; the gnat being Job's personal guilt and the camel being
God's divine (in)justice.
This critique of the three is
significant for several reasons: first, it lumps the three
together, as Job did, giving us some confidence in stating that the
three friends have a unified front; second, it gives us an
alternative critique of the three friends producing in effect a
"trialogue" with four points of view expressed; and
third, it opens up a whole range of interpersonal dynamics, with
young, old, and older points of view. One might even make the case
that we are observing a "socialization" or "maturation"
of religious sentiment in these three groups. Regardless of the
psychology, Elihu's criticism of the friends is three-fold: though
elder, they lack wisdom; their arguments with Job deteriorated into
personal attacks; and finally, they chose silence rather than
refutation. Thus, Elihu argues, he must carry on the debate even
though he is young, but not by making personal attacks, rather by
refuting Job's faulty theology.
If we can accuse the three
friends of attempting to "brainwash" Job, getting him to
admit to something he didn't do, then we might characterize Elihu
as attempting to "deprogram" Job. The phrase "deprogram"
arises out of efforts of parents to "regain" their
college age children from cults such as the "Moonies".
The modus operandi was to "kidnap" the child from
school, separate the child from the influence of these groups, and
if possible, break the faith of the child in the authority figures
represented by the leaders of the cult. I realize I am being
extreme in calling Elihu's efforts "deprogramming", but
the goal is the same, halting Job's heresy by destroying Job's
faith in an immanent God, a God who is there.
Now to destroy
faith is arguably as difficult a task as to build faith. In the
case of the parents above, the effort is focussed on undermining
the authority figures, on attacking the internalized (memorized)
presuppositional "truths" of the cult, on shattering the
emotional security that a cult leader provides. In the same way,
Elihu attacks all expressions of God's immanence, all experiences
of God's kindness are dissected mercilessly. As in the case of the
child, no attempt is made to redress the deficits that made the
cult attractive in the first place: the lack of appropriate
authority, the emotional distance, the omission of moral absolutes.
In the same way Elihu never addresses the ultimate responsibility
of God, the issue of Job's pain, the problem of evil. Instead he
focusses almost entirely on the image of a transcendent,
incomprehensible, and unknowable God.
Elihu
calls his speech a defense of God's good name. But it could also be
viewed as propaganda for Elihu's private view of God. Look
carefully how Elihu defends God against Job's complaint that God
isn't telling him anything. In chapter 33, Elihu argues that one
can learn what God is saying by 3 methods: dreams, physical
discomfort, and messengers (angels). Note what is missing from his
list: direct communication. God spoke directly to Adam, to Cain,
and to many others including Abraham. We have no reason to believe
that Elihu was ignorant of these stories. So if Elihu downplays
Job's complaint that God no longer reveals himself directly, Elihu
is perhaps merely showing that he has never had that kind of a
relationship with God. Yet if for the sake of argument we agree
with Elihu, does this then answer Job's pain? The simple answer is
that it doesn't, nor does Elihu think he has to find an answer,
only that he prove Job incorrect.
Furthermore when Job calls
out of his unbearable pain that "it profits a man nothing that
he should delight in God.", Elihu argues that this sentence is
obviously false because this statement has also been made by wicked
men to defend the uselessness of morality. Which is to say, context
counts for nothing, Job's pain is unimportant, experience is not to
be trusted, for truth is a ephemeral abstraction uncontaminated by
sensory perception. I may be reading more into this than I should,
but Elihu's very last words are: "He does not regard any who
are wise of heart." (NASB) Since the heart for a Mesopotamian
was the seat of emotions, it suggests that Elihu mistrusts anyone
who might value emotions, or even worse, relate to God in an
emotional way. Elihu would say it is better to sacrifice one's
unfounded expectations on the altar of theology than to end one's
life hoping for a merciful word from a distant Deity. If then Elihu
finishes his speech with lofty words of God's transcendence, which
almost inspire me to echo the "Amen", they are still
words that say, "The Almighty--we cannot find him." For
these words that Elihu speaks with praise are the same ones that
Job cries out in agony.
We aren't sure if Elihu
expected an answer from Job, which raises the question, for whom is
Elihu defending God? Surely not the court of heaven, for to defend
God to God appears pointless. But if he intends to defend God to the
court of men, where then is the judge, and where the jury? Clearly
he views both Job and his friends as defendants and witnesses in
this trial, and not as the jury. Perhaps there was an audience,
though Job seems to say that only scoffers bother stopping by. As we
look around for a jury it begins to dawn on us that we, the readers,
are the judge and the jury. And then, looking harder, we perceive
the beady eyes of Satan watching us, mocking us, accusing us, and we
realize that our choice, our decision is as weighty as Job's. Who is
God? Where is He? Why doesn't He answer them? Why doesn't He answer
us?
Returning to my appearance
in traffic court, I went in trembling to see this hanging judge, not
really believing that any judge could be as unreasonable as the
district attorney seemed to imply. I was mistaken. I met an obese
balding man who appeared to be reclining in some sort of hospital
bed, which gave the appearance of legs too small for his body. The
folds of his massive neck gave his head a distinct bullet shape. An
extinguished cigarette dangled from his lips. As the DA ushered me
in to a room full of stale smoke and closed the door behind me, his
small black eyes latched on to me. I remember a low bass rumble,
asking me how I would plead. My only thought under that piercing
gaze was, "Oh no, it's Jabba the Hut!"
In
hindsight, I'm sure that the appearance was well planned, but at the
time I remember losing all courage to argue, all hope for
reasonableness. I had wanted to be frank, to challenge the obvious
mercenary intent of the speed trap and the self-serving error of the
ticket. I expected to have the judge on the defensive, and would
then demand for my accuser to step forth, knowing full well that the
patrolman would not be loitering around the courtroom that day. It
was a grand dream, well rehearsed, and futile. Under that gaze I
wasn't even sure that I was innocent of manslaughter. I clung to the
only truth I was certain of and blurted out "I plead guilty to
68 miles per hour, your honor."
In the same way that
this judge used his appearance to his advantage, so God's
appearance, in chapters 38-41 is crucial to understanding His
message, for in some ways, His appearance is the message. And
just as this judge recognized that the adolescents who filled his
court would respond to a familiar image, so we must also identify
the recipients of God's message and gauge their response. Only after
these two steps, I believe, can we make sense of what God said in
these chapters.
Traditionally, Job is taken
to be the object of God's lecture, partly because the introductory
sentence says that "the LORD answered Job out of the storm",
and partly because God uses the second person singular. Note
however, that God does not use Job's name, leaving the object of
his rebuke somewhat ambiguous. Occasionally a commentator will
argue that God is talking to Elihu, since Elihu was the last person
to speak. There are other indications that perhaps Job was not the
sole object of God's questioning, though it would be difficult to
argue that Job wasn't at least included in the list.
The
first difficulty lies in the introductory sentences of 38:1 and
40:1 which state clearly that the LORD was speaking to Job. How can
we take this speech to address anyone else? This form of speech,
however, has other precedents in the Bible. At Mt. Sinai, the
people told Moses that they could not listen to God, it would kill
them, and would Moses please take the message for them. So from
that point on, God's messages to Israel came through Moses.
Likewise, when Samuel was a small boy, God gave him a message for
the high priest, Eli, which Samuel was to deliver. So we see that
it was typical for God to speak through an intermediary, a prophet,
though perhaps it was not typical for the final recipient to be
present with the prophet. This identification of Job with the
office of prophet is confirmed in the last chapter where God
commands Job to pray for his friends. Thus God's speech to Job
could be construed as a prophecy to be passed to his friends.
Even
if we take these chapters as prophecy, the next sticking point is
that God uses the second person singular. Why would God not use the
third person or the plural if He had more than one in mind? Perhaps
because, unlike prophecy, a trial requires the presence of the
defendants, and each of the friends was present for God's rebuke.
And since each person in the debate had used the singular first
person in their arguments, that is, no one claimed to be
representing a group, God replies to each one individually. One
might even say that it is a question of responsibility, that no one
can hide behind the screen of committee decisions, of mob rule,
rather God deals with each one of us directly.
Yet a third
difficulty arises with this interpretation, and that is Job's
response in chapter 40 and 42, where he seems to take God's rebuke
personally. Yet focus on his longer response in 42, where he says
"My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you."
Job apparently does not credit the words in God's rebuke,
but the appearance of God himself. Thus I interpret this as
evidence that the words were directed toward the others, but the
vision was the message for Job. This may not be unambiguous
evidence for deflecting God's rebuke from Job, but it should give
us reason for broadening the scope of His message.
The most shocking aspect of
God's speech in the book of Job is the raw sarcasm. There are no
two ways about it, God is asking questions either for which there
is no answer, or for which Job could not know the answer. If
someone is asking impossible questions, we would rightly assume
that they do not really have a question, they are making a
statement. God's statement appears to be that human beings don't
know diddly about the universe, much less the world that they
inhabit. But was this such great news, didn't everyone agree to
this in the last 36 chapters? Why must God hammer on it for so
long? When someone overdoes a humorous put-down it ceases to be
funny and approaches the limit of bad taste. My reaction to these
chapters is to feel embarrassed for Job. What keeps God going for 4
chapters?
A similar event occurs in the Gospel of John, when
Jesus asks Peter repeatedly, "Do you love me?" until
Peter was mortified. The reason was clear, Peter had earlier three
times denied that he even knew Christ. Christ was then
simultaneously reminding Peter of his disloyalty, allowing him to
repent of his sin and cleanse his guilty conscience, and drilling
into him the necessity of future faithfulness. The repetition made
this point better than any twenty minute sermon on the subject.
Likewise I believe the four chapter drubbing was intended to
provoke embarrassment, but in the 4 friends, not Job. It was the 4
friends who had given Job such treatment themselves. It was the 4
friends who felt that they could speak for God. It was the 4
friends who had judged Job and found him wanting. It had been their
implicit argument that God can be controlled very nicely by
admissions of false guilt, or kept an arm's length away from the
heart. All of these conclusions were shattered by the presence and
immanence of a terrifying God. God's appearance was the
message because it so powerfully smashed their endless arguments.
And only Job could speak a reply to God's questioning because only
Job believed that God could be spoken to. It is, to a large extent,
our approach to God that makes God approachable.
When
I stood before His Honor, Jabba the Hut, the only thought in my
mind was that he wanted to embarrass me, he wanted to condemn me,
he wanted to squeeze the last dollar out of my pocket. Appeals to
mercy were futile. And it was because I viewed him that way that I
abandoned all attempts to protest my innocence, my only defense was
the truth. After blurting out my one sentence plea, unable to make
any further elaboration on my well-rehearsed speech, I stood in
what I hoped was brave silence awaiting his reply.
His mouth
twitched slightly, as if he were amused, and he nodded his head at
the secretary who took down my plea. I was escorted out of the room
wondering whether I had won or lost. The secretary told me to fill
out some forms and write a check out for the amount of $35, the
appropriate fine for "travelling 1-14 miles per hour in excess
of the speed limit". I was elated. I had stood up to the
corruption of the traffic court and had been victorious! There
would be no "black points" on my driving record. I had
faced the hanging judge and won. That is, until I discovered at the
cashier window that I had to pay an additional $100 for court
costs. By the time I had added in the gas and tolls for the trip,
it came to almost identically the original fine. Suddenly I felt
deflated, cheated. "At least our insurance rates won't
increase", I told my wife as we got in the car. "I hope
you learned your lesson" was her curt reply.
Years
later as I look back on this incident, I think that I could have
stood up to that judge, I could have escaped without even a fine.
It all hinged on how I went in to that crucial interview. It was,
in effect, my own view of the judge that had judged me. This is how
I understand God's message coming out of the whirlwind. Our
response to God's ambiguous questioning becomes the judgment that
we expected God to deliver. Self-judgment is a theme that
resurfaces in many places in the Bible, perhaps the clearest is the
story that Jesus told--the parable of the talents. In this parable,
a rich man goes on a long journey and calls three trusted servants
into a private conference. "Here are three sums of money"
he tells them, "one of you will get 10 talents (say $1
Million), one will get 5 and one will get 1. Use it wisely until I
return." Then the man leaves for a year. On his return he
calls in the three servants to see what they have done with their
capital investment. The fellow with 10 talents had doubled his
investment, as had the fellow with 5. The master was pleased. But
the servant with 1 talent reported, "I know you are a harsh
master, so I was afraid, and I hid the 1 talent in the ground. Here
it is, just exactly as you gave it to me." To which the master
replied, "Yes I am a harsh master. You were a fool not to put
it in the bank and collect interest. Take the talent from him and
give it to the man with 10, but take this servant and throw him out
into the darkness."
I have struggled with that
conclusion since I heard it. Slowly it has dawned on me that the
man with one talent condemned himself, not so much for collecting
no interest, but for viewing the master as harsh and cruel. If he
had seen his master as kind and compassionate, he would have taken
risks, he would have known that he would not be accused for doing
his best. As it is he lost not a cent, but his job and perhaps his
life. Why? Because he damned himself, accusing his master of
libelous motives. As Job and the four friends stood before that
whirlwind in the desert, hearing the questions that have no
answers, it was their own words that brought them into judgment.
For Eliphaz had said "what is man that he could be pure, one
born of woman, that he could be righteous?" and now he stood
in God's presence bearing that judgment. Bildad too had said "if
the stars are not pure in his eyes how much less man who is but a
maggot", and now Bildad finds himself square in His gaze.
Their own words condemn them, when the Almighty appeared. Elihu too
had said, "we cannot draw up our case because of our darkness.
Should He be told that I want to speak? Would any man ask to be
swallowed up?" And now speechless, Elihu is swallowed up in
terror. Only Job could answer God in his awful appearing, because
only Job had not damned himself.
And so it is that we
find a second reason for the strange use of the second person
singular in God's reply. For we find ourselves engaging in a mental
dialogue defending God to Job, and Job to God. We want Job to know
that he is above reproach, as God himself says in the first chapter,
and we desire to reinterpret God's harsh words as words of comfort,
as words of praise. Then in the midst of this self-imposed
arbitration, we suddenly realize that Job has fallen silent, and
that God has fixed his gaze on us. As we splutter into silence, we
begin to understand that Job's response is not the cowering squeal
of a whipped puppy, but the brave response of a man who has received
his request, and we realize that God's questions are now directed to
us. How can we answer Him?
The World Wide Web has lived up to its inventor's dream of providing a brand new form of communication that complements the more traditional forms of print and conversation. But even before hypertext was the quiet revolution of e-mail. This unassuming stepchild of the Web has already created whole new genres of literature including "group humor". You know the antecedent, the xeroxed cartoon that circulated via copying machines and was invariably pasted above the coffee pot or the fax. In the same way group humor circulated via e-mail, accreting modifications and additions in the process. One of this genre passed through my e-mailbox recently, which I repeat briefly:
Capitalism - He who dies with the most toys, wins.
Communism - Everyone gets the same number of toys, and you go straight to hell if we catch you selling yours.
Catholicism - He who denies himself the most toys, wins.
Hari Krishna - He who plays with the most toys, wins.
Branch Davidians - He who dies playing with the biggest toy, wins.
Mormonism - Every boy can have as many toys as he wants.
Jehovah's Witnesses - He who sells the most toys door-to-door, wins.
Pentecostalism - He whose toys can talk, wins.
Anglican - They were our toys first.
Greek Orthodox - No, they were OURS first.
Non-denominationalism - We don't care where the toys came from, let's just play with them.
Atheism - There is no toy maker.
Polytheism - There are many toy makers.
Evolutionism - The toys made themselves.
Church of Christ, Scientist - We are the toys.
Existentialism - Toys are a figment of your imagination.
Agnosticism - It is not possible to know whether toys make a bit of difference.
Confucianism - Once a toy is dipped in the water, it is no longer dry.
Taoism - The doll is as important as the dumptruck.
Voodoo - Let me borrow that doll for a second.
Hinduism - He who plays with bags of plastic farm animals, loses.
7th Day Adventist - He who plays with his toys on Saturday, loses.
Church of Christ - He whose toys make music, loses.
Amish - Toys with batteries are surely a sin.
B'Hai - All toys are just fine with us.
Hedonism - To heck with the rule book!? Let's play!
Baptist - Once played, always played.
If one takes happiness as the opposite of suffering, one could replace "toy" in the above humor with "happiness", and most of the sentences would still make sense. Although I do not endorse any of the views expressed above, it strikes a resonant chord that we should associate denial (and suffering) with Catholicism. Pope John Paul II's Salvici Dolores, listed in the appendices, records all the benefits that suffering brings. In contrast, the appendix on theodicy lists all the arguments defending God from the crime of causing unjust suffering. Is suffering and denial a good thing or a bad thing? Was God doing Job a favor or an insult to afflict him so heavily? How can I even ask such an obvious question? In our modern Western culture we have perhaps lost any sense of the value of righteous suffering, a concept that was well understood by the ascetics and martyrs of past centuries. Perhaps it would be beneficial to examine this story from such a perspective.
Since human suffering (not to mention animal suffering!) has often been equated with unmitigated evil, it would make the remainder of this chapter an oxymoron unless we can carefully distinguish between the two. Clearly evil is a moral judgment, for though we might call a murderer evil, it would not seem correct to call a man-eating tiger evil. In contrast, suffering, for the most part, is amoral, for we might again say that a long drought causes animals to suffer without saying that the drought is evil. Evil seems to require that a sentient being freely chose to cause suffering in some manner. We will come back to this choice, but for the moment, let us look objectively at types of suffering.
Dr. Brandt, in his book
with Phillip Yancey, Where
is God when it Hurts?
discusses his medical work at a leprosarium. Because of the social
stigma associated with the disease of leprosy, which goes back at
least as far as the Mosaic Law, lepers were often forced to live in
a quarantined community, a leprosarium, despite the relative
difficulty in actually contracting the sickness. Dr. Brandt
discusses the nature of the disease and its consequences, a
bacterial infection of the nerve endings that causes a cessation of
feeling, particularly of pain. The disfigurement that is associated
with leprosy is almost entirely a secondary result of lacking the
sensation of pain. He tells the story of a rusted padlock that
would not yield to his efforts to unlock it. A young patient ran
over and said, "Here, Dr. Brandt, let me help you." The
fellow gave a quick turn of the key and the lock opened. The amazed
Dr. Brandt seized the boy's wrist and said "Let me look at
your hand." The lock had been so rusty that the key cut the
boy's fingers right down to the bone, to which he was completely
oblivious. Pain, Dr. Brandt argues, is essential for living, it is
a necessity for survival.
Pain, in and of itself, appears to
be distinct from suffering, however it is often associated with
suffering, and in fact is the most common explanation for
suffering. Since we don't want to say "suffering is essential
for living", we must somehow again distinguish between them.
One might try to say that great pain, or chronic pain produces
suffering, but it seems too easy to find counter-examples. My
children, for example, are quite capable of turning a mosquito bite
into impossible suffering, particularly when they should be asleep
in bed. Thus it appears that suffering has to do more with the
attitude taken toward pain than the pain itself. In his book, 1984,
George Orwell presents a "hero" whose resolve collapses
under torture, the torture being the fear of pain, rather than the
pain itself. In contrast, one might distill from the stories of
great heroes of the past the definition that true heroism is the
ability to overcome fear in the face of pain. So we see that
suffering is an added dimension to pain, it requires a certain type
of emotional response, which, though triggered by pain, is
independent of the amount or duration of the pain itself.
Even without physical pain it is easy to find examples of suffering, particularly in those, such as Job's wife, who are forced to observe the pain of someone they love. In fact, as others have remarked, it is this group of sufferers who write most of the literature on "the problem of evil", since those enduring the hardship of pain most often lack the energy or the drive to philosophize. It is really not even fair to label this "vicarious" suffering, because the observer experiences it so vividly himself. Into this group one could put all other forms of "painless" suffering: broken relationships, discrimination, rejection, betrayal etc. What they all have in common is an emotional viewpoint toward the circumstances that makes one a victim or object of suffering. Only when this viewpoint changes can the suffering be remedied. The most moving account of this process that I have encountered was C.S. Lewis' pseudonymous book, A Grief Observed, in which he describes the death of his wife. How one reaches this resolution is probably unique to each person, and forms the subject of a vast body of literature in the field of counselling. Nevertheless, it is probably true to say that when emotional distress is combined with physical pain it produces the most stubborn form of suffering known to modern psychology. Job fits in this category, and is therefore an archetype of the most pernicious type of human suffering.
There are lengthy debates
as to whether the Old Testament supports a two-part separation of
man into Body-Soul, or whether a three-part separation is
justified, Body-Soul-Spirit. Without intending to take sides in
this debate, let me venture into neo-Platonic territory with St.
Augustine and propose that evil has no objective reality, rather it
is the absence of reality, in the same way that a shadow is the
absence of light. We can define suffering in a similar way, so that
emotional distress is not so much an objective condition as it is
the absence of emotional well-being.
Physical pain is not so
easily defined away. Physical pain, as a neurologist might say, is
caused by the firing of certain pathways in the brain, generally
stimulated by messages from the nerves. But since it is interpreted
in the brain, a "short-circuit" in the brain is possible
that produces pain without external stimulation, so that, for
example, a man with an amputated leg might still feel pain in his
now absent appendage. In such cases, electrical stimulation of the
nerve endings of the stump or in the spinal cord can prevent the
short-circuit from generating pain. In fact, meditation and
biofeedback techniques have proven very effective in treating cases
of "phantom" pain. So despite its very real existence on
electro-encephalograms, one could still view physical pain as a
disruption of the normal alpha-wave pattern of a healthy
brain.
What have we gained from such neo-Platonic word play?
The ability to define spiritual suffering, i.e., if physical pain
is a disruption of a "normal mode" brain wave, and
emotional distress is a disruption of "emotional well-being",
then spiritual suffering is a disruption of "normal mode
spiritual well-being". And what, pray tell, would that be?
Well if Genesis 1 and Job 1 could be said to define the normal
state of heaven and its footstool, Earth, then the Fall in Genesis
and the Suffering of Job constitute an anomaly, a disruption in the
Heavenly order. Such a lack of "rightness" in the
spiritual realms constitutes "spiritual suffering".
Without impugning God, one might say that Satan's presence in the
court of heaven caused God spiritual suffering.
Now the
origin of this spiritual suffering is beyond our understanding,
consisting as it does, in the origin of Satan's rebellion. That
angelic rebellion spread to Man in the Fall, and from thence to
Job, as described in Job 1. Job's plight then takes on a third
dimension, beyond the physical and emotional torment, to a realm of
spiritual suffering in the heavenlies. The "why?" of
Job's pleas are thus far more than expressions of his agony in the
particulars of his own situation, but the cry of all the innocents
who have died at the hands of merciless men, "from Abel to
Zechariah". If we can say that the most stubborn form of human
suffering lies at the interface between body and soul, we see that
the most profound form of human suffering lies at the interface
between soul-body and spirit, between heaven and earth. It is the
resolution of this spiritual suffering that is, in some sense, the
important answer that the book of Job holds for those who ask the
question.
It is, in general, a very dangerous thing to give reasons for suffering, which will be construed wrongly no matter how carefully put. But in practice, most of the supposed "causes" for human suffering are inferred from the actual consequences, so that many of the purported explanations become merely tautologies that make better expressions of faith than of logic. Attempting to avoid this trap, we focus instead on the consequences of suffering, not from a secret desire to defend suffering, but rather in the hope that one's view of suffering will broaden and become enriched, permitting a shift in viewpoint from victim to participant, from sufferer to worshipper, from prophet to priest.
Suffering, whether emotional, physical or spiritual, is the shadow of negation, of emptiness, it is the onslaught of Hell. Its natural consequence is depression, decay, of erosion of all that is bright and good and joyful. Such natural responses easily become self-fulfilling, self-sustaining, so that the end result of suffering is naturally death. If there be anything good resulting from suffering, it must be exceptional, it must be unnatural. As Simone Weil, a mystic and sister of a more famous mathematician, put it, "The spiritual laws are as fixed and certain as the physical law of gravity. Only grace violates all laws." If this chapter is to continue, then we must consider this most irrational of all results of suffering, the consequence of grace.
There is a tendency today
to despise the retributive justice system of our childhood
innocence and claim that "an eye for an eye" is barbaric
and uncivilized; that the only justification of a retribution is
the prevention of further crimes, which is obviously ineffective.
But what is overlooked in these debates about justice is the
presence of evil, the existence of spiritual suffering. When a
surgeon operates on a suspected cancerous tumor, he will often
remove a great deal of "normal" tissue on the chance that
the tumor has metastasized and spread invisibly into to the
surrounding region. When a forest fire is spreading toward
inhabited areas, firefighters may start secondary "controlled"
fires to burn off the available fuel before the fierce heat of the
uncontrolled wildfire approaches. In the same way, suffering can be
a firebreak for evil.
Consider the detailed instructions
given by Moses concerning the discovery of a dead body out in the
fields (Deut 21). After ascertaining that no one will admit to the
crime, extensive ceremonies are carried out involving the elders of
the nearest village, blood sacrifices, and petitions that God will
not hold this guilt against them. For, as Moses warns about the
death of the innocent, "So you shall not pollute the land in
which you are; for blood pollutes the land and no expiation can be
made for the land for the blood that is shed on it, except by the
blood of him who shed it." (Num 35:33 NASB). A concrete, yet
disturbing example of this principle is given in 2 Samuel 21, where
the land of Israel is suffering a three-year drought. Probably
children are dying, so King David beseeches God for an explanation
for this suffering. He is told that his predecessor, Saul, broke a
treaty with the Gibeonites and shed innocent blood. So David
arrests seven surviving relatives of Saul who are handed over to
the Gibeonites to be killed and so expiate the blood guilt. The
principle is clear, suffering of the innocent may sometimes act as
a firebreak against the spread of evil and even greater suffering.
Without a doubt suffering catches our attention and forces us to rethink our course of action, just as surely as a state trooper with his lights flashing causes us to check our speedometer. The book of Judges has example after example of God given suffering that caused the people of Israel to repent and return to Him. This is not to be confused with discipline. If my daughter wants to play with the pretty flame on the stove top, the pain of disobedience is not discipline, it is a wake-up call that something is seriously wrong. Suffering grabs our attention, it can be a call to repentance.
Suffering also forces us to change our decision process. When I caught my 3 year old jumping on the couch, in flagrant violation of house rules, I told her she was due for a spanking. She objected on the grounds that she had forgotten this particular house rule. In a moment of inspiration I replied that this was exactly why I was spanking, to help her remember. In the following years I have repeated this answer countless times as I get out the spanking spoon. "Do you know why I am spanking you?", I ask. "To help us remember?" they reply. By use of corporeal punishment I am trying to change their behavior, to encourage self-controlled, disciplined actions, to get them to internalize their decision process so that when they get too big to spank, they will have formed the good habits that will last a lifetime. In short, suffering builds enduring character.
There is a sense in which
all of the above consequences of suffering are small redemptions:
the uncle who died in France while opposing the Nazi war machine;
the woman saved from suicide by a flat tire; the student who
resisted peer pressure to begin a revival. Yet there is a more
acute sense in which suffering is a purification, a sanctification,
even a salvation for a stained soul. Having said that, I must be
quick to clarify what I didn't say. For we must be careful, when
talking about any of these consequences, that we do not turn them
inside out and say "we must suffer in order to have these good
effects". Flannery O'Connor in her book, Wise
Blood, explores
the consequences of searching for salvation in self-inflicted
suffering. Somehow, just as it is impossible to tickle oneself, it
is also impossible to benefit from self-imposed suffering.
Nevertheless, suffering that is out of our control, suffering that
only God can stop, can be suffering that saves our
souls.
Continuing the analogy with cancer, a tumor that has
metastasized sends virulent cells, nascent tumors throughout the
body. These cells are indistinguishable from healthy cells in most
respects so that the defenses of the body's formidable immune
system are rendered powerless. Yet these cells have become, well,
evil; excreting enzymes that allow them to tunnel through capillary
walls, they burrow into every organ of the body where they throw
off every constraint, multiplying furiously while demanding new
blood supplies and killing neighboring tissue. The medical
establishment has very few remedies, their most effective being
poison which attacks growing cells. Even then the cancerous tumors
develop resistance to these chemicals, so that multitoxin cocktails
have become the norm in chemotherapy. The dosage is found by trial
and error, increasing the levels of poison until the entire body is
on the verge of death: weak, nauseous, bald, and anemic. It is no
wonder that my aunt chose rather to forego treatment than to have a
cure worse than the disease. The hope this suffering holds is that
the cancer will fare worse than the patient and the body will be
cleansed. Suffering then can be salvation.
As
an Old Testament study, we are on hermeneutical thin ice if we
argue that Job believed God could suffer, much less that our
suffering made us any more like God. If anything, Job seemed to say
quite the opposite, that a transcendent God could never understand
our very human suffering, arising as it does from our powerlessness
and finitude. Yet in another sense, Job did understand God's
suffering in a way that Elihu never could. Job knew that the death
of the innocent and the fat of the wicked were abhorrent in God's
sight, that it caused God pain. The three friends said,
"Impossible!". Elihu said, "God doesn't even
notice." Job said "Speak for yourself, my God cares."
Otherwise, why would Job have wasted his breath directing his
speech toward God? Somehow Job knew God to be compassionate, and
therefore a God who concerned himself with Job's pain.
Many
years ago I spent a summer internship in Haiti, in the
impoverished, voodoo infested highlands near the capital of
Port-au-Prince. One's first impressions of a person or a place are
usually the most profound, and I had an impression of deep beauty
and deep pain. The very trees that lined the road flamed with red
blossoms, six-foot hedges of poinsettia bloomed all year round. Yet
the deforested valleys were scarred with white, where tropical
storms had created such runoff that the undercut limestone walls
were crumbling into the valley floor, making these streams into
rubble strewn wastelands as alien as the cratered moon. The
slash-and-burn agriculture had created bedrock deserts out of lush
rain-forest. Among the mobs of children were those with mottled red
hair, characteristic of protein starvation, due not so much to
want, as to neglect. The pain of a culture cobbled together out of
a thousand African tribes under the slash of the slavemaster's
whip, finding in fear a religion that unified their many tongues. I
stood one night, under a tropical moon so bright that I could tell
red from blue, mourning the death of my host's son, hearing the
voodoo drums in the valley, feeling the pain of existence, crying
out to God like a woman in labor, wordless tears washing my
face--"God, don't you know?" And though I never heard an
answer, my pain was lessened, not because the world had become any
better, but because God had heard, because my pain was shared. So
it was with Job, when God appeared and he finally knew that God had
heard his voice. Suffering, spiritual suffering, is solidarity with
God.
I have listed above some of the consequences of suffering, but have not yet applied them to the characters of this story. In one sense I really can't apply it, because I would be putting words into their mouth. Imagine, for a moment, that you have a teary-eyed 3 year old who has just burned her fingers on the stove. After giving her a cup of ice water to hold her fingers in, you begin to tell her the benefits of her suffering. Chances are that she will respond poorly, not believing that you are truly sympathetic. In the same way, I can identify potential benefits, but whether the sufferer actually benefits remains a highly subjective response. Suffering, the same identical suffering, can either bless or destroy depending on the participant's response.
It may seem strange to say that Job's suffering benefitted these men. They were such bitter enemies of Job's religion, so intent on tearing down his defenses, so desirous of extracting a false confession, how can we say that his suffering was in any way beneficial to them? As Job tells them himself, "You see something dreadful, and you are afraid". But it is exactly in showing them their fear, their duplicity, their disloyalty that Job's suffering provided them a warning, a call to repentance. When Job, at God's instruction, prayed for his friends, we can see that perhaps this suffering even provided for their salvation. Certainly someone wrote down the story of Job or at least composed and recited it. Surely that someone was present throughout the debates recorded in the book. Could it be that this book is testimony to the transforming power of Job's suffering in the lives of his friends?
I am not the first to find
some benefit for Job, nor will I be the last to be blasted for
trying. Surely the restoration of Job's fortunes and the birth of
10 more children--even if they were the most beautiful daughters in
the land--surely these blessings were not the result of Job's
suffering. Indeed, he might have been even wealthier if he had had
the capital to invest. Nor would one expect debilitating disease to
make one more virile than before. No, it appears that these
blessings were not a result of but in spite of his suffering. If
one is to find a silver lining in Job's trials, then it must lie
somewhere between his final complaint and his restoration,
somewhere between chapters 31 and 42. I cannot find much
encouragement in Elihu's speech, nor even in God's. So I am
astonished by Job's reticence to speak in chapter 40.
However
chapter 42 perhaps holds an answer that shows Job has finally
obtained what he sought. If there is one thing this suffering has
done, it has brought Job closer to God. Job answers God's question
"who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge?"
by replying that he has said things he didn't understand because
they were too wonderful for him. Now this is quite different from
his previous complaint. God's ways had been just as obscure to him
then as well, but then they had been dark, heavy, and oppressive;
now they are full of wonder. How did this transformation take
place? Job's next phrase indicates that God had asked this very
question. "It happened," Job replied, "when instead
of just hearing you, or hearing about you, I saw you. That's when
my whole outlook changed." Job's suffering has not only
brought him solidarity with God, it brought him into God's very
presence.
If I was skating on thin
ice before, now I am surely over my head! How can suffering benefit
God? If God is transcendent, dwelling in unsearchable light in whom
there is no shadow due to changing, who am I to claim that
suffering can modify His already perfect condition? Let me tiptoe
lightly around these lethal theological landmines, and say that we
are talking not of God's essence, which is transcendent, but of His
interaction with Man, of His communication with Man, which is His
concrete revelation. For whatever reason, God has chosen to
interact in a causal way when He speaks to us. The court of heaven
in Job 1 has convened to hear Satan's accusations. These
accusations and God's response would not make a lot of sense if the
order were inverted or scrambled. Therefore God takes the
limitations of human existence into account when He deals with us.
Suffering cannot benefit God's essence, but it will impact on His
revelation. Is that impact beneficial?
Let us go back to the
"firebreak for evil" section, and ask, "Why does
blood guilt pollute the land?" If we believed that God is
totally free to enact any legislation He wants governing the
spiritual realm, why does His law say that the innocent must suffer
to stop another creature's evil? I can not answer that, other than
to say that God's being is primary, and therefore God's interaction
with Man, His revelation, is limited by His essence. Thus the Bible
says, "God cannot lie." Somehow this question of
suffering is tied into God's essence and where that leads I cannot
follow. Recognizing our inability to ask the limitless "Why?",
we nonetheless can still learn something about suffering and God
from examining His revelation to us.
In our Augustinian
section we argued for the existence of spiritual suffering, of
disorder in the heavenly realm. In the section on pain we pointed
out that suffering can be a firebreak for evil. Arguing from
analogy, what is it that can stop the creeping spiritual darkness,
the spreading negation of evil? Is it not a lamp or a light? Well
if suffering is a firebreak for evil, could it not also be a
spiritual light as well? Slow down, didn't I just say that
suffering is negation of all that is good, how then can it be
something good in itself? This is the mystery of grace; that God
can make something good out of suffering. But then is it correct to
define suffering neo-Platonically as an absence of good? No, it is
not entirely correct, and we must look to see what is the nature of
this thing that God can use for both good and evil.
The Knowledge of Good and Evil was the title of a famous tree. Like that tree, created by God and declared "good", suffering can be used for infinite gain or infinite loss. Suffering is the currency of heaven, redeeming sinners (Isaiah 53) and damning them (Isaiah 51). Suffering has been part of the human condition since the Garden, where God planted the tree of pain. And since the Fall, suffering has been the only way back into the Garden, where Adam once conversed with God. The story of Job is an inside-out Garden, a story of a man forced to eat of the tree and gaining knowledge "too wonderful for me" that led him back into God's presence. The story of Job is a reversal of the Fall, a story in which God beats Satan at his own game. It becomes the archetypal story of victory over suffering and the defeat of death.
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.
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.
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?"
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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'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'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'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 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.
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.
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.
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.
One of my favorite movies of all time is "The Gods Must Be Crazy", a 1980's film from South Africa, where the nerdy scientist hero saves the girl. Maybe it had something to do with my bachelor days in graduate school, but the movie made a deep impression on me. Looking back over 15 years, I realize now that the movie was also documenting the post-modern, post-scientific age that we live in, an age in which science itself is as clumsy as the hero in wooing the fickle public. Without understanding how our present age views natural science, it would be hopeless to comprehend Job's, so as an introduction let us examine this movie. I can't do justice to the marvelous screenplay, but here is a summary of the plot.
We begin in a highly modern
city, Capetown probably, where the skyline is dominated by office
towers and the frenetic pace of modern life. One scene shows our
heroine commuter on a weekend, hopping in her car, driving down the
30 foot driveway to the mailbox, emptying it, and driving back into
the garage. We cut quickly to the empty Kalahari desert, where we
are shown the life of the Junt-wasi bushmen. Although they live in
a harsh environment where foraging for life sustaining food and
water consume most of their time, yet they are presented as
dwelling in a peaceful paradise, content and at harmony with nature
and themselves. The point seems clear, that although science and
technology have made great progress in satisfying our physical
needs, yet our emotional and spiritual needs remain unsatisfied.
So the heroine decides to teach school in a remote village
north of the Kalahari, during which the airline pilot, flying over
the desert, discards an empty Coca-Cola bottle out of the cockpit
window. The bottle is observed by the Junt-wasi who regard it as a
gift of the gods. Immediately it is put to use as a rolling pin, a
musical instrument, a digging tool, a superior pestle... Until,
unheard of in this idealized culture, fighting breaks out over
possession of this miracle tool. After much discussion the elders
decide that they are incapable of owning such a contentious gift,
that the "gods must be crazy" to have given it to them.
Thus they appoint one man to return it to the gods by walking to
the edge of the world and throwing it off.
The remaining 90%
of the movie follow the path of this man, his arrest for hunting a
goat, his rescue by a micro-biologist, the capture of the
schoolteacher by rebels, her rescue by the bushman, and finally his
arrival at the edge of the world, where he disposes of his white
man's burden. (Two more critiques: humorist
and Taoist)
The
message I heard those many years ago was a nostalgia for the
simpler life. But today I sense a different message: a nausea for
all things technological and scientific. The coke bottle represents
more than mere commercialization of science, but an emblem of all
that is wrong with today's world, a symbol of the spiritual
emptiness in the glass and steel of Capetown. And the only
salvation held up for us is a complete rejection of technology and
science, with the unstated but concurrent embrace of a religious
panacea, yet significantly one without a Judaeo-Christian heritage.
Am
I reading too much into this movie? Perhaps, but in the decade and
a half following this movie I have heard this conclusion repeated
with greater and greater frequency. Only today I read in the
"forum" section of a renowned science journal a pro/con
discussion of the Kyoto world summit on Global Warming. In the
"con" article, a scientist argues with ample
justification that "global warming" is a theory with
insufficient scientific proof, that the computer models that
predict it fail to describe the present observed climate as well.
Which is not to say that the theory is wrong, only that it is
unsubstantiated by current scientific knowledge. The "pro"
article begins by arguing that the debate is no longer about the
validity of the science, but about the ethics and politics of
global warming.
I was stunned. I gather from this that
scientific truth is no longer an important part of the debate, or
perhaps that scientific truth must be modified by political and
ethical truth. And this argument was made by a scientist! Let me
try an analogy. Suppose that in the fourth century when the bishops
held a global council to hammer out the doctrine of Trinity in the
face of the rising Arian heresy, that the emperor showed up. He was
worried about the political impact of declaring so many churches
heretical, so he told them that this was no longer a merely
theological issue, but a political and ethical one, and if they
couldn't make a compromise amenable to both parties, he would have
them all beheaded. Now I ask you, what would be your judgment on
those bishops had they acceded to the demands of the emperor, and
what would have been the future of the Christian church?
This is the age in which we find ourselves, an age when all truth, even scientific truth, is considered relative and of equal significance (or insignificance) as religious or political truth. It is also a post-Judaism, post-Christian era, when all alternative religions are considered equally valid, but no intolerant absolutist religion is to be tolerated. It is a post-ethical age where no ethic that claims universal application is to be obeyed. It is a fragmented, chaotic, post-modern ending to a century marked by change. Rather than guessing at the murky future, let us turn around and ask, how did we get here?
The whole concept of "natural science", the study of nature, as a process separate from "philosophy", the love of knowledge, or "theology", the wisdom of God, is a rather modern distinction. This separation has occurred only since the Renaissance, for it is not just the wise men arriving in Bethlehem 2000 years ago who were experts in all three, but from the time of the Sumerian astrologers to Galileo the wise of three millennia were expected to be conversant in all areas of human wisdom.
But today can anyone
really expect to be conversant in even the subsubdisciplines of a
subdiscipline, such as organic chemistry, or neurosurgery? Of
course not, for knowledge has been growing at least exponentially,
if only because the human population has been growing
exponentially. Even if there were no books, or all books were
outdated, still the information contained in living brains would
outweigh all the knowledge now lying in moldering tombs. There are
simply more people alive and breathing this instant than have ever
been buried since the beginning of time. And that will continue to
be true for the foreseeable future barring world-wide plague or
disaster, for that is the nature of exponential growth.
Has
this always been true? No, this is entirely the product of modern
science and health. Unless parents can produce at least two
children who grow to adulthood, then the population will
inevitably decline. In the past, entire populations teetered on
the brink of extinction; weather, disease, war, famine all these
were enough to push a nation over the edge, never to be heard from
again. In those harsher times, knowledge and wisdom were weapons
in the battle against annihilation, a bastion against the wild
beasts of ignorance. A wise king by definition ruled a nation
whose people prospered. This last century has seen exponential
growth simply because the wisdom of the West has been inordinately
successful in conquering disease and mortality.
Which is
not to say that the West will continue to be successful, for in
this decade alone AIDS, a disease that has resisted the most
expensive campaign in history, has reduced the average life
expectancy in some areas of Africa from 65 years to a scant 31
years. Nor is this the last of the modern plagues, wars or famines
that will test the West, for as assuredly as death and taxes
marches the mutation of pathogenic organisms, the wild swings of
climate, and the political aspirations of men. I do not say this
because I am a doomsayer, I say it because of history, history
recorded on clay tablets with a reed, on sheepskin with a quill,
or in the layers of snow falling quietly in the eternal winter of
Antarctica. World summits notwithstanding, the West is as
vulnerable to climate swings as the Anasazi, the vanished nation
of cliff dwellers of the American Southwest. In this world of
historical uncertainty and change, in this world of exponential
growth, how can knowledge be kept a stronghold in the 21st
century?
In exactly the same manner
as the ancients, by keeping knowledge focussed on an overarching
goal, a unifying theme, a philosophy of knowledge. This is not
merely epistemology (the study of knowledge) or even metaphysics
(the bases of being), but also ethics and psychology. For example,
it is not enough to know how to build an atom bomb, or the nature
of the nuclear force that holds the atom together, but one must
also understand the ethics of using an atom bomb, and the effects
of living in a world with atom bombs. This is not to say that one
must have a working knowledge of all aspects of bomb design and
theory to be a wise man, rather one must have an approach to such
knowledge that unifies the subatomic quark with the community of
nations.
But what is this unifying theme, what is the
character of this wisdom that will protect the West from the
onslaughts of the 21st century? Alas, the philosophers themselves
disagree. Clearly the philosophy of the Prussian Immanuel Kant,
the ethics of the "universal good" was applied
differently to the Aryan race than to the Semitic. Likewise, there
is little profit to be made in the West by making malaria vaccines
for the poor third world. Some would even argue that enforced
sterilization of the third world is for their greater good.
Machiavelli saw in the inherent selfishness of men the seeds of
strife planted in the fertile fields of Western success. As the
specters of disease and famine fade, new demons of war and
disaster rise to take their place. As the world population grows
exponentially, we move from tactical to strategic warfare for
survival, from hand-to-hand combat with death to organized
battalions, from individual to community ethos. The community will
decide how food is distributed, how medical care is made
available, how war is conducted. This is the inevitable
consequence of Western science, the explosion of humanity on a
shrinking planet. Now if we call an individual's worldview his
philosophy, then can we not call this community enforced worldview
a religion?
But all religions are not created equal. Certainly the paranoia of a Jim Jones or Branch Davidians is not a religion that survives, much less a religion that advances science. The choice of a religion affects profoundly both one's philosophical outlook and the scientific method. We must be prepared to analyze religions, to understand absolutes, to uncover the knowledge of the God who made this awesome creation we call our world.
Thus in our long march of progress we have come full circle on this shrinking globe, the natural sciences are not relevant without the direction of wisdom, and wisdom not complete without the knowledge of God. Once again we must wed the sciences with philosophy and religion if we are to find enduring answers to the threats of war, famine and plague. If I am permitted to generalize, the spectacular success of the West in this century is a result of the trinity of Judaeo-Christian values, Lockeian liberalism and the scientific method. Is this trinity robust enough to survive its own success? Will it endure the rigors of the 21st century? Or are the cracks observed today indicative of a rotten core?
Strangely enough, the book of Job speaks to this very modern dilemma, it describes the relationship between the natural sciences, wisdom literature, and the knowledge of God. Job's private suffering and impending death are generalized to the condition of all humanity that inhabit this world, so that the two weapons of men's wisdom and the knowledge of God which Job wields are directly applicable to our globe today. The science in the book of Job, which at first appears to be so at odds with our expectations of a philosophy treatise, when examined in depth, is found to be extremely relevant to our post-20th century civilization. The questions are pertinent, the answer is critical, for nothing less than our survival depends on it.
In one sense this section really belongs in the next chapter, where we approach the book of Job as a Philosophy text. However we don't have the luxury of hearing from God His own views, instead we are given cryptic questions that sound more like biology exam questions than a well thought out philosophy. Thus we must empirically determine and inductively ascertain some generalizations from these peculiar particulars. That is, we must treat God's discourse as a natural science, testing hypotheses for those that make the most sense to us, which is the exact opposite of Systematic Theology, where we deduce applications from accepted universal truths. As I see it, it is the only approach that can make sense of chapters 38-41, while giving a probable explanation for such an obtuse discourse.
I have spoken extensively
about epistemology in the chapter on Existentialism. Summarizing
the discussion, I argued that the knowledge of truth required 3
steps in its transmission from God to man: intention, execution,
and comprehension. I then discussed the error of rational
determinism made by the friends, and the three solutions available
by negating one of these 3 steps. Then I tried to show how God
rebuilt the chain of truth while simultaneously replacing it. I
ended the Existentialism chapter at the point where God supercedes
determinism by declaring truth personal. It is because truth is
personal that we can be humanly rational, that we can seek a human
understanding of truth without usurping God's divinity. We do not
demand that God obey our truth, but rather that God be consistent
with Himself. One way to grasp this epistemology is to see the
truth as a friend, not as object to be owned. We cannot possess a
friend, we cannot control a friend or even define a friend in a few
pithy sentences. Rather we must be loyal to our friends, keep in
touch with them, and maintain a relationship with them. So it is
with truth, our attitude towards the truth is as important as our
knowledge of the truth.
Thus I am greatly concerned for the
future of the West, not so much that it has thrown away its
knowledge of the truth, but that it is treating the truth with such
contempt. When the relationship with truth is destroyed, when the
people no longer worship at the temple of Wisdom, what idols will
take its place? Spiritism, materialism, power, and greed are all
crowding at the step, ready to lead astray the blind, the orphans,
the widows of the West when once the door is opened. In the face of
disaster and plague, riots and unrest, will the truth prevail over
bread and circuses?
Can we confirm this
personal view of truth by our experiences? Or conversely, is there
any evidence that an abstract, deterministic view contradicts
experience? I believe both answers are "Yes!"
As
we discussed in our introduction, there is growing dissatisfaction
among even the movie-going public with a rational, deterministic
view of life. An accelerating trend of the 1990's is
"spiritualism" in all its manifestations. Could one have
forecast even 10 years ago that a new age book, "The
Celestine Prophecy" would remain on the best seller list for
over a year, or that the prime time TV show with the highest
Nielson rating would be about angels? One perhaps cannot turn
anecdotes into incontrovertible proof, but it should give one
pause that a mere 20 years after that zenith of scientific and
rational achievement--Neil Armstrong taking "one small step"
on the Moon--that scientific discoveries are being routinely
ignored for stories involving, say, extraterrestrial aliens in
Rothwell, New Mexico.
Such views, however, are nothing new
to mankind, indeed, one might as well argue that the atheistic
rationalism of this century is an aberration in the history of
human thought. As we argued early in this study, the most
important section of Job is the poetry of chapters 3-41, and
poetry is the language of the heart. Job's complaint to his
friends was that they were "miserable comforters", and
that their deterministic philosophy were "defenses of clay".
The abstract truth they championed, the propositional statements
they made provided no comfort, no answer to adverse experiences.
It is one thing to philosophize about a brother's difficulties,
but quite another to find a solace for one's own. In direct
contrast, Job's views on truth supplied him with enough comfort
that he could say, "Oh that my words were written...with
an iron tool in lead, or engraven in the rock forever. For I know
that my Redeemer lives..." These are not the words of a
man hypothesizing about truth, nor the words of a man straining
for the unobtainable, but a declaration of faith in the reality of
personal truth.
The greatest puzzle or
surprise in the entire Book of Job, is the apparent contradiction
of "normative ethics". The Biblical norm might be summed
up in the phrase, Whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also
reap. If one sows wild oats, one reaps them. Now Job has
ostensibly sown pedigreed, high quality, pure wheat seed, why then
does he reap sorrow and anguish? To make the dilemma unavoidable,
Job is given antagonists who state in unambiguous terms this
normative ethic standard, even recounting that Job has espoused
such ethics in the past.
Can the writer weasel out of this
apparent dilemma by making fine distinctions? For example, one
might say that normative ethics applies to run-of-the-mill sinners
but Job is a special case. Or my personal favorite weasel, one
might say that Job sinned between the time that God declared him
blameless and his restoration, so that his afflictions were given
for future sin. Such tactics might give the appearance of
resolving this dilemma, but fail to generalize to all of human
experience; they solve Job's problem by making it irrelevant for
the rest of us. I consider this trivialization of Scripture to be
a far greater sin than Job's purported one.
What then are we to do? In the natural sciences, when an experiment invalidates a theory, we attempt to a) repeat the experiment b) explore how far off we are c) construct a new theory. Now we know Job is not a special case because we can find other examples of blameless men in Scripture who suffer (Psalm 22, Isaiah 53). Furthermore, Job makes the point that not only do the righteous suffer, but the wicked prosper, demonstrating that normative ethics, whatever else we might say about it, is inconsistent with experience. Thus we are confronted by a real discrepancy for which we need a new theory that must explain seemingly opposite facts: normally we get what we deserve, but sometimes we don't. If we cannot distinguish the first from the second category, then not only have we removed the ethical imperative, but we are in danger of pragmatic atheism, which is an accusation Job's friends level against him.
Job solves the problem of atheism and the problem of confused categories by going for the jugular. He tells his accusers that their definition of normative ethics is bankrupt when divorced from the interaction with a personal God. When ethics are used as a proxy for God, then naturally a breakdown in the ethical imperative produces atheism. But ethics are NOT what God follows, they are what God DOES. Therefore when our calculations are off, when the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper, we must immediately turn to God to find out why. This personal view elevates ethics from both a deterministic decimation as well as an atheistic relativism. But take notice that it is this brutal honesty on Job's part that enables him to advance far beyond the simplistic aphorisms of his friends. It tells us that philosophy, like science, must not content itself with mere "self-consistency", but must strive for "life-consistency", it must work not only for sinners, but for the righteous as well, it must function not just in principle, but in practice.
We can follow similar
lines of reasoning concerning metaphysics. Here Job's friends
present a view of God that is transcendent, distant, unknowable,
and incommunicable. Such a view of God generally includes
determinism, a sense in which God must respond in a fixed way
consistent with metaphysical absolutes (see the previous chapter).
Since God is so powerful but so distant, one must have a proxy, a
law that operates in his absence. The best we can say for such a
view is that it is consistent with their "normative ethics".
The worst that we can say about such a view is that it is
self-inflicted self-damnation.
Job, in contrast, believes
that God is immanent, present, knowable and communicable. This is
not to say that Job is a pantheist or animist, on the contrary,
Job acknowledges the power and perfection of God, the sole
sovereignty of God over his creation. He even agonizes over the
difficulty of human-divine discourse without the gracious approval
by God. It is a high view of God demanding an even higher standard
from man. Still it is no less and no more consistent a view than
the friends, we cannot a priori tell if Job or his friends
are correct in their portrayal of God.
By all expectations, Job's
view of God is much harder to defend than his friends, just as
Elijah's stand on Mt. Carmel was far riskier than the political
pragmatism then in vogue. Like Elijah, Job pits his metaphysics
directly against the friends in order that there can be no
mistaking the outcome. God is either personal or impersonal,
immanent or transcendent, compassionate or judgmental. For the
metaphysics of Job's friends was independent of any manifestation
of deity, it barely required God's actual existence. It was
pragmatic, hypothetical, and philosophical, it could hardly be
proven either true or false. Job's metaphysics, in contrast,
required the active involvement of a terrifying God, it required
fire and smoke, awe and devastation, it could easily be shown
false and only with difficulty proven true.
So it is that
chapters 38-41 stand above the dialogue like Mt. Carmel or Mt.
Sinai: massive, brooding, dark with storm. For God's appearance
bursts like lightning, and His speech like thunder upon a
wasteland of unbelief.
Despite living in a cosmopolitan environment, possibly even an urban one, Job like other rich landowners, lived off the land. This meant that Job was very aware of weather and climate, it foretold the difference between feast and famine. We find many weather-related metaphors in the speech of Job and his friends. Living in a semi-arid environment, wind was used to describe things that were without benefit, dangerous, desiccating and empty (6:26; 8:2; 15:2 37:17). Wind was also judgment, sweeping away chaff, trash, and empty notions (21:18; 27:21; 30:15; 30:22 37:9). Clouds brought hope (26:8; 36:28; 37:11; 38:37), though often proved ephemeral (7:9; 30:15; 37:13). It was rain, however, that brought relief, comfort and blessing (5:10; 29:23). Just as storm clouds brought lightning and judgment (3:5; 26:9; 36:32; 37:3), so also rain could be judgment (12:15; 24:8).
In this weather conscious culture, it was important to know who or what controlled the rain and wind. A modernist might suppose that the primitive cultures of the middle east, which found themselves dependent on fickle weather patterns, would fall back on superstition as a way of explaining the weather. One doesn't invoke deities to explain the law of gravity--it is taken for granted just because it is so dependable--rather it is the random or semi-random events that provoke guessing, second-guessing and superstition. It is not surprising then that the worship of local deities (the Baals) focussed on their ability to bring rain or withhold it. So it is highly significant that wind destroyed the house that killed Job's children. It is just such inexplicable random acts of nature that force the question "Who is in charge of weather?"
There are at least three
possible answers to this sort of question: no one; some ones; God.
The modernist would say "no one", for given enough
measurements, weather can be predicted. The animist/polytheist
would say "many spirit beings" have the ability to
influence weather. The theist would say "God" is
ultimately in charge of weather. Implicit in an animist view is a
sort of pantheism, that we can manipulate the spirit beings to do
our will, thereby becoming equal with them. Clearly the polytheist
view and the worship of Baals is rejected by Job and his friends.
The decision then appears to be between the extreme options. If no
one is in charge, then the death of Job's children is a meaningless
loss, but if God is in charge, then these deaths are an
incomprehensible judgment. Which is to be feared the most?
As
we examine Job's response, we see that this modern dilemma is a
false dichotomy, much like asking "Do you walk to school or
carry your lunch?" Since Kant, we have thought that science
and faith were poles apart, but this is not the view expressed
here. Both Job and his friends are in agreement that God controls
the weather, (5:10;
9:7;
28:20-28;
28:25),
yet their knowledge of causative agents and the hydrologic cycle is
very modern (36:32-37:6,15-18;
36:27).
They see no conflict in combining the wisdom of science with the
knowledge of God. It is God, however, who forces the question.
Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail, which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle? What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no man lives, a desert with no one in it, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass? Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew? From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens when the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen? (38:22-30 NIV)
Why should God ask
meteorology questions, didn't the speakers just finish saying that
weather was His domain? Perhaps then his questions were meant for
us, who know so much more on the subject. Yet here we are, at the
end of the 20th century and unable to agree if the globe is warming
or cooling. Vigorous debates go on about the origins of atmospheric
electricity, in fact, a new class of lightning was discovered only
a few years ago (blue jets and red sprites) that flashes upward
from the thundercloud. The inter-relation between atmospheric
electricity and rain droplet formation is still being debated. The
paths of thunderstorms, or meso-storm scales is an additional area
of intense research. And I just drove through 14 inches of a Boston
snowstorm that was predicted to be "1-2 inches of snow ending
in rain"--evidently a novel cold front inversion that didn't
exist in any of the weather models. In summary, we might be a lot
more sophisticated in our reply, but we certainly cannot answer
God's questions any more completely than Job.
A further
limitation of meteorology models is their incredible sensitivity to
initial conditions such that a butterfly's flapping wings might set
off computer tornadoes. For it was in meteorology that the new
scientific field of "chaotic systems" was born, systems
so sensitive that we can never predict them. These models prove the
old adage true that "prediction is difficult, especially of
the future". So it is that meteorology with all its gigabytes
is inherently unable to explain variability because it fails in
principle, not just in practice. This hasn't stopped the old school
of atheistic positivists, for the same people that sold us a
philosophy of determinism are now attempting to sell us a
water-cooled Volkswagen, a philosophy of indeterminism. Do we have
any other options?
It is time to proclaim loudly that the
Emperor has no clothes. If science falls back on irreducible
complexity to explain its failures, can we not find in that
complexity the fingerprint of God, the personality of Truth? If
Truth is a person, it must necessarily be complex and to some
extent unknowable. One cannot possess the Truth, one becomes
familiar with it. In just such a way, the ancients blended science
and wisdom with a deep respect for the causative agent behind both.
Would it be unfair to refer to the study of unpredictably complex
systems as theology?
But we must equally reject the view of
the friends that this calamity was the work of a judgmental God.
This is the exact same error of determinism now applied to God. The
book of Job is here to tell us that even in theological matters
there are mysteries we are inherently unable to comprehend. Nor
should we exchange judgmentalism for the irrational indeterminism
of the existentialist. Rather we must see in the intrinsic failure
of both abstract theology and science to explain Job's suffering
the crying need for a personal God.
So when lightning
killled his flocks (1:16)
and a wind from the desert destroyed Job's family (1:19),
it was not a meaningless act of random meteorological variables,
nor was it a totally incomprehensible act of a distant deity,
rather it was the misunderstood action of a close personal friend
of Job's, from whom Job rightly demands an explanation.
If the vagaries of meteorology have always been the hobby of the gods, surely astronomy has been the hobby of the wise in every millenia: the constant circling of the stars around Polaris, the incessant march of the seasons, solstice and equinox, full moon and new. Surely here it should be possible to separate the Parthenon from the Atheneum, the domain of the gods from the range of science. It should prove very interesting to contrast the clockwork regularity of the heavens with the chaos of the earth. How are astronomical observations handled in the book of Job?
The astronomical word that
appears most often in the book of Job is "heavens", a
word defined in Strong's Concordance as,
shamayim: 1)
to be lofty; 2) the sky (as aloft; the dual [plural] perhaps
alluding to the visible arch in which the clouds move, as well as
to the higher ether where the celestial bodies revolve): 2a) air;
2b) heaven.
One should be careful, of course, in drawing
great conclusions from the usage of a word in translation, however,
I think we are safe to remark on the use of this word as three
types of place. The usage "birds of the air" (12:7;
28:21;
35:11)
forms the volume closest to the earth. The usage "skies"
(1:16;
26:13;
35:5;
37:3,
18,
21;
38:29,
37)
encloses a volume that incorporates the clouds and the rain. The
remaining usage appears to extend from above the clouds to beyond
the stars. After removing the verses that emphasize "loftiness",
and so are ambiguous between sky and space, (9:8;
11:8;
20:6;
26:11)
we are left with a collection of verses which appear to tell us
about astronomy. The heavens are nearly eternal (14:12)
in contrast to man. They are less pure than God (15:15)
but far more than man (20:27).
They are a place of God's dwelling that is both high and vast
(16:19;
22:12,
14)
in contrast to small and finite Earth (28:24;
41:11).
They have strict laws under God's dominion (25:2)
which is constrasted with Earth (38:33).
In
these verses we see a fundamental difference between Western
science today and the science of Mesopatamia circa 1000 BC. Rather
than viewing order and predictability of the heavens as a
characteristic of natural laws empirically ascertained by science,
the ancients viewed the order of the heavens as a perfection
unattainable on earth, and therefore the domain of God. This
Platonic view of the purity of the heavenly spheres and corruption
of the earthly sphere appears to predate Plato and perhaps even the
Greeks. Again we see in the subject of astronomy the combination of
science and theology. Yes the planets and the stars are much more
predictable than weather, even more so because they obey God's
commands more perfectly. From Job's response (31:26-28)
it is clear that celestial bodies obey God, and are not gods
themselves. Even more amazing in comparison to contemporary
religions or science, is Job's understanding that the corrupt
sphere of the earth does not depend on other created beings for
support, it cannot blame its position on anyone else, but "He
spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the
earth over nothing."(26:7). This appears to presage Newton
and Copernicus by 2000 years!
What is left then of the view
that religion arises as a way for man to make order out of chaos,
when it seems clear that Job sees man as making chaos out of God's
order? Can modern science bring order to the heavens, can
astrophysics and cosmology circumscribe the spheres? This is the
same question God asks.
We find ourselves in the awkward situation of claiming this territory for science and therefore directly in the line of fire of God's questions. Perhaps this oral exam will fare better than the last.
Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand.
Earth's foundation? (Yes! I know this one cold.) The formation of the Earth, right? Well, sir, that occurred during the coalescence of planetesimals during the planet building stage of the solar nebula, approximately 1.1 billion...Excuse me? You want to know where I was? Well, sir, I don't know why that is relevant. Yes, I do understand the foundation of the Earth, but of course I wasn't born yet, the human race hadn't appeared yet either. No, it would take a billion years of evolution before intellect developed. Yes, I guess you might call it a potential existence. No, sir, I can't be any more specific than that. (What is he driving at, I thought I had this one in the bag?)
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it?
Dimensions, sir? Yes, life was potentially possible only with G-type solitary stars in on small rocky planets with sufficient gravity to contain an atmosphere and in the orbital range between 80-100 million miles. Oh, and with a massive Jupiter type planet to terminate the planet building stage...Excuse me? Who planned these dimensions? I don't know sir, they're requirements for life to develop, otherwise we wouldn't be here... I'm sorry, I was speaking for myself, and a lot of my colleagues, I might add. (What's the matter with him, can't he accept the anthropic principle?)
On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone--while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?
Footings, cornerstone? Poetic license no doubt, I'm sure every field of science would put itself as a cornerstone. If you will allow me my bias, I would say the molten iron core is a cornerstone of the Earth, since it gives rise to the magnetic field that repels the solar wind and maintains the atmosphere, while simultaneously protecting the surface from life-threatening ionizing particles. How? Well one might argue that iron naturally would accrete in planetesimals closer to the sun...No, sir, I don't really know how it happened at the Earth and not at Mars or Venus. Yes, I suppose it had to occur early. No sir, I have no theories about angels, I had just assumed...Pardon me? Well of course, everyone has to make assumptions, that is, if they don't have direct evidence. (I hope he won't start asking those interminable Philosophy questions!)
Can you bind the beautiful Pleiades?
Astrophysics? I would be happy to. The Pleiades are a grouping of 500+ stars bound together by gravity, much like globular clusters. No sir, they aren't exactly a globular cluster since their kinetic energy is greater than the gravitational potential energy, they are an open cluster. What keeps them together? Well, nothing, though they are generally believed to have been born together. No, sir, I don't know the probability of multiple star births. I suppose if it were very low, then it suggests an underlying mechanism, generally taken to be a burst of star formation in a nebula. Well no, if the cluster isn't gravitationally bound, then I suppose the nebula isn't gravitationally bound either. No sir, I can't explain the recent origin of a non-gravitationally bound nebula. (Whew, that was a close one!)
Can you loose the cords of Orion?
Cords of Orion? Can you be more specific sir, are you referring to the Orion nebulae or the constellation as a whole or some aspect of stellar structure illustrated by Rigel, Betelgeuse or Sirius? No sir, there is nothing holding these stars together, they are an accidental constellation only visible from Earth's perspective. No, I would prefer not to speculate on the accident. (I still don't know what he's driving at.)
Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons or lead out the Bear with its cubs?
Constellations, zodiac? Of course, sir, that's elementary. You see the Earth revolves around the sun, so that the sun appears to move against the fixed sphere of the stars. Yes, I know it isn't really fixed, it moves with the precession of the poles, the spin axis of the Earth, which is why astrology charts from 1000 years ago don't line up. Yes, that's right, the constellations wouldn't line up with their historical seasons. No, I can't possibly change the spin axis of the Earth, why not just adjust the seasons to agree with the constellations? Fudging? Absolutely not! That's when one doesn't know the reason, this is scientific, this is fitting. Well, no, I don't know all the reasons the poles precess, it has to do with angular momentum and ice sheets and continental drift and all, rather complicated you know. (This exam is on astronomy, after all!)
Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set up God's dominion over the earth?
Yes sir. I hope I have convinced you that the heavens obey simple and deterministic laws which we scientists have ascertained through observation and deep analysis. No sir, we don't make the rules, we merely observe them. No sir, these are invariable rules, it wouldn't make sense to say a rule was variable. Thank you, sir, it was a pleasure to explain the triumphs of astronomy to such a perceptive audience.
Symptoms: Rich man suffers.
Diagnosis: Moral decay caused by wealth. An open-and-shut case,
opine Job's friends. Is the story of Job about a man who was morally
deficient because of his great wealth, as his friends implied? What
is the relationship between God and money, between religion and
economics?
It may seem strange to argue that there is a
religious dimension to economics, for religion rarely enters into
the debates about taxation, social security, deficit spending, to
name a few. However a closer examination of those who propound these
views finds persistent patterns of religious belief. Indeed,
economic theories and theological views have been historically very
much intertwined: Feudalism and Catholicism/ Confucianism; the
middle class Bourgoisie and Protestantism; Marxism and Atheism.
Without too much difficulty one could associate an economic theory
with Puritans, Amish, Jim Jones or Moslem fundamentalists. Or
conversely, one might easily stereotype the religious beliefs of
Capitalists, Socialists, Fascists or Communists. So it should not be
too surprising for us to find that wealth and piety are important
issues for Job and his friends.
Is Wealth bad? As I argued
earlier, the success of the West in conquering disease and
mortality lay not only in its scientific accomplishments, but also
in the growth of personal and national wealth that could afford the
investment in science. Generally speaking, wealth is a good thing.
Well then, is it the uneven distribution of wealth that is bad? Are
wealthier men by definition immoral?
It is difficult to
answer this question without bringing in some stereotypes. Very few
people identify with the wealthy, perhaps because one can never be
wealthy enough. One can, however, make the discussion quantitative
by statistics
that reveal the average separation between the rich and the poor.
Then we can ask questions such as "does the attainment of
personal wealth lead to a better or worse standard of living for
everyone when compared with the equal distribution of corporate
benefits?" That is, should humans act as individuals
maximizing the chances of their own survival or as an altruistic
group that sacrifices individual gains for collective success?
Without doing the analysis suggested above, we might still draw
some conclusions from the macro-economics of nations that have
implemented one or the other view.
It is entirely natural
that a high view of human behavior might emphasize the benefits of
a collective, altruistic approach, whereas a low view of human
behavior might emphasize an individualistic approach. Communism
would value altruism, whereas capitalism would be deeply
suspicious; communism would favor large corporations, whereas
capitalism would enact anti-trust legislation. A priori
either/neither view is justifiable. One can just as well argue the
superiority of the N. Vietnamese government over the corrupt S.
Vietnamese as the economic superiority of semi-capitalist Taiwan
over communist mainland China. There appear to be extenuating
factors in every comparison that make blanket statements suspect.
What one really would like is a historical perspective that
averages over the inherent variability of leaders and famines. In
this way Job gives a truly far-reaching perspective, since the book
sums up 1000-2000 years of Mesopotamian cultural history, without
the baggage, so to speak, of the Mosaic Law. How does Job view
human behavior and wealth?
The crudest analysis is
guilt by association--how many times are nasty people associated
with words like "wealth", "riches", "gold",
versus nice people? The numbers look in impressive: 17 bad
associations, 4 neutral, and only 3 good. However one of those
three is 22:25
which compares gold and silver to God. In another, Job compares his
purity to gold (23:10),
and in the third, (28:15)
wisdom is compared to riches. If wealth were an unmitigated evil,
these verses would require a very peculiar interpretation.
Closer
examination of the nasty associations show that no one is wishing
wealth on wicked people, rather they are wishing the removal of
wealth from the wicked. (5:5,
15:29,
20:10,
20:15,
22:20,
22:24,
27:16-17)
Indeed, only a very few verses suggest that wealth can subvert the
righteous, (31:24,
36:18-19)
And even in these, it appears that wealth is not an inherent evil,
but a distraction or diversion; that morality lies in the attitude
toward wealth. This would suggest that wealth, though often
associated with the wicked, would otherwise be a blessing. That is,
the wicked are not morally bankrupt because they have wealth, but
in spite of it. This is a key point so let me repeat it, wickedness
is associated with people independent of their wealth.
If then wealth is morally
neutral, perhaps we should ask, "Is Poverty bad or likewise
neutral? What if, like the stock market, it is a "necessary
correction"? Should insurance, or governments or individuals
provide safety nets? Is the investment in a safety net
counter-productive for a stable society? For example, suppose a
single-peaked wealth distribution is "better" than a
two-peaked wealth distribution. Would not "fiscal disasters"
act to tranform a 2-peak into a 1-peak distribution, would
depending on acts of God produce a more level playing field? And if
we allow insurance, doesn't it protect the wealthy more than the
poor? Or if we set an artificial poverty line below which the
government will subsidize the poor, do we not paradoxically produce
a 2-peaked distribution?
These issues are likewise addressed
in the book of Job. Poverty is somehow deeply related to theology.
To quote Abraham Lincoln, "God must love poor people, because
he made so many of them!" So Job's life is analyzed by the
four friends, to detect any sign of immoral use of wealth that
might explain his poverty as a "necessary correction".
What is Job's theology of poverty?
The poor are often equated
with the powerless ( 29:12),
which is not to say that they are valueless as a Social Darwinist
might say, rather human value, like a silver certificate, arises
from its representation of the genuine article. God makes it clear
that power and wealth have absolutely no effect on value (34:19).
Thus the powerless require a Defender to prevent a devaluation of
the currency, a defender who is ultimately God, though often
working through human agents. The poor then, are caught in the
middle of a struggle between the evil and the good, between Satan
and God. They are a weathervane of the righteous, a Rosetta stone
of the crafty. By observing how someone treats the poor and the
powerless, one can discern the operational value system (which
might be quite different from the self-stated value system).
Simultaneously, by observing how God delivers the powerless, one
can discern God's protection and active participation in His
creation.
So we have examples of discerning the wicked by
their treatment of the poor: (20:19,
24:4,
24:9,
24:14).
And likewise discerning the righteous by their defence of the poor,
(29:12
30:25
31:16
34:28).
Therefore the poor have hope, and God's oversight is praised (
5:15-16).
Thus we see that both wealth and poverty are value neutral in
themselves but prove to be extremely powerful amplifiers of the
hidden value systems of the rich and powerful. We cannot,
therefore, associate evil or piety with the amount or lack of
wealth, however we can discern righteousness from the actions and
attitudes taken toward wealth and poverty. Job appears to have
maintained a healthy attitude toward both the rich and the poor and
toward both his "undeserved" wealth and his "undeserved"
poverty. In this way Job's roller coaster ride from riches to rags
and back again reveal his inner strength and consistent holiness.
In the end, Job is justified by God, and his friends show their
true loyalty by providing Job's insurance policy 42:11.
Their critical evaluation is confirmed in the resulting increase in
Job's second career.
Something happened at the end of this story, and only its familiarity protects us from shocked incredulity. We have the story of a rich man who loses his wealth in a series of disasters that we could only wish on our worst enemies. Job's friends put two and two together, and having connected wealth with blessing, poverty with cursing, attempt to discover the source of his curse. In the dialogue we are presented with all the inherent dangers of great wealth, many innuendoes and finally outright accusations of a previously wealthy man. And why not, powerless wealthy men are fair game in all seasons. But suddenly a great transformation occurs, the hat is passed and everyone chips in to get him on his feet again. Not only is he able to recover his great wealth from this modest welfare, but he is even wealthier than before! It's hard to decide which is the more incredible: the change in his friends or the change in his fortunes. What happened?
42:11 (NIV) All his brothers and sisters and everyone who had known him before came and ate with him in his house. They comforted and consoled him over all the trouble the LORD had brought upon him, and each one gave him a piece of silver and a gold ring.
Let us first dismiss from our minds that this is in any sense the ordinary outcome of conscience-stricken well-meaning persons. If one could become wealthy by collecting coppers at a street corner then beggars would ride. Nor does the observation of great poverty inspire many people to acts of kindness, quite the reverse. Job's lament records the rejection he receives from everyone, kind or otherwise. No, what we see in this last chapter is vindication, pure and simple vindication. It is as if we have lived this argument of economics in two dimensions and suddenly we find the solution in a third. For the seemingly endless debate about wealth and poverty, selfishness and altruism is terminated, as it always is, by divine vindication.
Within this century we have seen the almost complete triumph of Darwin over Biology. Since the victor rewrites the history books, we have been led to believe that the modern age of biological science began with this victory. Forgetting of course, not only the millenia of domestication and breeding that preceded our eyeblink era, but the life work of an Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel, whose patient work with peas produced the revolution appropriated by secular science. Yet it is not the ill-defined theory of evolution that marks this age, rather it is the meta-theory of evolution, the secularization of nature, the Kantian filter of atheist phenomena which so characterizes the modern Biologist. It is precisely on this point that the book of Job has so much to contribute, for in this book not only do mortals interpret biological observations but God himself. Recall that in answer to Job and his friends, God gives a long lecture on natural science and especially biology, interspersed with unanswerable questions. Why should God reply to a philosophical debate with natural science? Could it be that the meta-theory of biology is really a philosophy of life? Could it be that God relies on empirical observations to refute inconsistent philosophies? If so, then we should make every effort to understand the biological meta-theories argued here.
As Darwin and his followers would state, the observation of wanton destruction in the animal kingdom would indicate that "Nature" (Darwinspeak for God) is completely indifferent to the residents of its ecosystem, rather, ecosystems reach their own "equilibria" of birth and death. Man, of course, changes this equilibrium tremendously, which leads to an ethical paradox for a Darwinist. For unlike the other creatures, Man is self-aware, Man observes and controls his environment, not merely reacting to it. This ability to pro-act carries with it the choice of a future, and that choice implies an ethical "should". So out of ethical non-existence arises ex nihilo the demands of the Green police. To be self-consistent we must either remove the ethical mandate or remove the indifferent god. Does an ethical mandate exist? Does God care about His creation? How do Job and his contempories view nature?
The first and most obvious
lesson that Job and his friends find in nature, is that life is
brief (9:26),
as ephemeral as a moth (4:19-20)
or a flower (14:2);
susceptible to every danger found in nature (10:16,
20:16).
And unlike a tree, which can send up shoots from a stump, there is
no second chance for us fragile animals who must breathe every
minute of every day in order to live (14:7-9).
Nor does a man's death leave any everlasting imprint behind him
(8:16-19),
houses and pharaohs notwithstanding (27:18).
It is not even certain that his biological posterity will survive
(15:32-33).
So at first blush it appears that nature is not just indifferent to
man, but potentially hostile.
Yet there is a second theme
interwoven in our observation of nature, a theme of equilibrium, of
limits. Despite being at the top of the food chain, the roaring
lion finds itself powerless, and its progeny unprotected, destroyed
"at the breath of God" (4:9-11).
Even the dreaded deep sea monster has God-given limits it cannot
pass (7:12).
Power does not inevitably flow to the powerful, nor do the
powerless become prey. Rather the life of every living thing
(animals, birds and fish) lies cupped in the palm of God's hand
(12:7-10).
Job himself makes this observation in the exasperated tone of an
expert being lectured in the basics. Not only does Job refute
Darwin, but he uses a tone of complete condescension. For the
evidence is obvious, Job states, God does care for His creation.
There is a second meta-theory implicit in the Darwinian worldview: Man holds no special position or property within creation; he is no more and no less than animal, a naked ape. Thus, for example, larger brain size usually has evolutionary advantages, but it is smaller now than in the extinct Cro-Magnon man. And those things unique to Man--language, arts, religion--are all viewed as merely exaggerations of successful traits evolved from rudimentary forms observed in nature. There is nothing in the human being or culture that sets apart man as Man, there is nothing that could not arise anew in apes given time and evolutionary pressure. Study carefully this meta-theory, for it observes a singular event, Man, and categorically states "This is not unique." Such a claim must be presupposition, for it is unfalsifiable.
Certainly Job acknowledges
that Man and animals alike hold life as a breath. Their behavior is
in many respects equally predictable (6:5).
But the similarities end there. The laws of genetics are used to
support the view that Man is a category distinct from animals
(11:12).
There are human actions that show no parallel with the animal
kingdom, mining, for example (28:1-11).
And when men are forced to behave like animals, it is to their own
degradation (15:23,
24:5,
30:1).
However the Darwinist might reply that these "proofs"
are all circumstantial evidence. One could, for example, make the
same arguments as to why 19th century Europeans were superior to
Eskimos. The Darwinist might argue that Evolution was a new
paradigm, a new discovery that reinterprets all these hoary
cliches. Job knows this as well, and so reserves his strongest
argument for last. The best proof that Man is unique is not to look
into Man to discover some unusual physiology, but to look outside.
Job asked the question, "where does Wisdom come from?"
(28:12-28).
It cannot be bought (e.g., independent existence), it is not found
in any living thing (e.g., evolved), it is not found by negation
(e.g., abstraction by denial of the opposite), where is it from?
(Lewis)
Job
does not leave us in suspense, he answers the question by calling
on something outside Man himself. 28:28 (NIV) And [God] said to
Man, 'The fear of the Lord--that is wisdom, and to shun evil is
understanding.' Note the interplay of ethics, metaphysics and
religion in his answer, which he supports not with Man's own wisdom
(which would clearly be inconsistent) but with direct revelation!
The beauty of his solution lies in its razor-sharp simplicity and
self-consistency. Elihu adds the comment later on that because of
their arrogance, wicked men do not recognize that God gives wisdom
to Man rather than animals (35:9-12).
So
we find a gauntlet laid at the end of this meta-theory road:
Indifferent versus compassionate Death, arrogant versus fearful
Life, modern versus archaic worldviews, Darwin's versus Job's word.
These are not easy choices, and Job never meant them to be. How do
we choose?
The problem we face when
arbitrating this debate, is that neither the claims of the ancients
nor the claims of the moderns are falsifiable. They both have this
disturbing sense of justifying one's own position in complete
denial of the observations. There are many fine psychological
reasons for this selective blindness, not the least is man's desire
to find solutions. "To the man with a hammer, everything looks
like a nail." Observations that don't fit into the final
solution are routinely ignored. This selective blindness produces
extremely convoluted arguments as both sides explain to the other
what they did not see. The frustration both sides feel about this
debate explains, perhaps, the demagoguery practiced by both, as
they collapse into fiat declarations when defending a
point.
Yet this same reliance on inductive proof, on
empirical evidence, provides a ray of hope that can penetrate this
darkness. For our dependence on something outside ourselves allows
something truly new, something truly unexpected to illuminate our
dungeon with brave new light. Thus Job's God avoids easy dismissal
by directing our attention toward observation of the natural
kingdom, observations that may not fit comfortably within our
worldview. Our task then, lies in identifying the implicit
assumption, the unconscious blindness over which God's question
dangles like a magnesium flare.
Job 38:39-41 (Food: providence) Do you hunt the prey for the lioness and satisfy the hunger of the lions when they crouch in their dens or lie in wait in a thicket? Who provides food for the raven when its young cry out to God and wander about for lack of food?
The two questions focus on Man's inability versus God's ability to provide. This observation shows that nature is not man-centered, nor particularly vegetarian. Perhaps directed against those who would deify nature, and indirectly, man.
Job 39:1-4 (Fertility) Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Do you watch when the doe bears her fawn? Do you count the months till they bear? Do you know the time they give birth? They crouch down and bring forth their young; their labor pains are ended. Their young thrive and grow strong in the wilds; they leave and do not return.
An observation of fertility in the wild but not the attribution of fertility to any being. All the questions focus on Man's lack of knowledge. Fertility cults which attribute fertility to the gods have long been popular in the middle east, assigning deities for birth and spring rains. This observation of Man's ignorance invalidates both ancient fertility cults and their modern death cult equivalents.
Job 39:5-8 (Freedom: wilding) Who let the wild donkey go free? Who untied his ropes? I gave him the wasteland as his home, the salt flats as his habitat. He laughs at the commotion in the town; he does not hear a driver's shout. He ranges the hills for his pasture and searches for any green thing.
The donkey had been domesticated from very early times. Yet despite intense breeding, the donkey can never be "owned" by Man; despite the longest eugenics program on record, Man's control over biology is tenuous at best, and is easily undone by God himself.
Job 39:9-12 (Control: domestication) Will the wild ox consent to serve you? Will he stay by your manger at night? Can you hold him to the furrow with a harness? Will he till the valleys behind you? Will you rely on him for his great strength? Will you leave your heavy work to him? Can you trust him to bring in your grain and gather it to your threshing floor?
Here we have an animal that did not trace its lineage to domesticated livestock. The behavior of this animal is contrasted with the more docile version. His unreliability shows that Man's control over nature is limited, at best, to a few domesticated species and fails to extend even to related species. The questions focus on Man's lack of control even over a "dumb" beast.
Job 39:13-18 (Foolishness: instinct) The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully, but they cannot compare with the pinions and feathers of the stork. She lays her eggs on the ground and lets them warm in the sand, unmindful that a foot may crush them, that some wild animal may trample them. She treats her young harshly, as if they were not hers; she cares not that her labor was in vain, for God did not endow her with wisdom or give her a share of good sense. Yet when she spreads her feathers to run, she laughs at horse and rider.
This section has no questions, and hence greater ambiguity. However it interprets the behavior of ostriches as due to a lack of inherent brains but plenty of inherent brawn. Taken at face value, the anthropomorphic treatment of Darwin creates conflicting "stories" of how parental behavior evolves, whereas this book attributes such paradoxical behavior to God. The key message appears to be that God alone grants wisdom or lack thereof.
Job 39:19-25 (Fearlessness: breeding) Do you give the horse his strength or clothe his neck with a flowing mane? Do you make him leap like a locust, striking terror with his proud snorting? He paws fiercely, rejoicing in his strength, and charges into the fray. He laughs at fear, afraid of nothing; he does not shy away from the sword. The quiver rattles against his side, along with the flashing spear and lance. In frenzied excitement he eats up the ground; he cannot stand still when the trumpet sounds. At the blast of the trumpet he snorts, 'Aha!' He catches the scent of battle from afar, the shout of commanders and the battle cry.
After making the point that ostrich brains are attributable to God, we turn to the pride of the defense research programme, the war-horse. The questions refer to equine strength and beauty, clearly the object of most breeding programs. Why then would God draw attention to the one success of human genetic manipulation? I can take it both ways: either the question expects a "No" answer, implying that Man may never take ultimate credit for any breeding programme; or the question expects a "Yes" answer, and then goes on to sarcastically show that a horse can be bred to have finer qualities than the average trained infantryman. Either way, we are awed by the interplay of mind and muscle, brains and brawn, over which Man's "improvements" are purely cosmetic.
Job 39:26-30 (Flight: wisdom) Does the hawk take flight by your wisdom and spread his wings toward the south? Does the eagle soar at your command and build his nest on high? He dwells on a cliff and stays there at night; a rocky crag is his stronghold. From there he seeks out his food; his eyes detect it from afar. His young ones feast on blood, and where the slain are, there is he.
Finally, after showing Man's inability to control nature, deify nature, anthropomorphize nature, or even understand nature, the message focusses on that most divine of natural characteristics, wisdom itself. We are asked if we even understand winged flight at all, much less control, imitate or explain it. For if Man's observations lead inexorably to his humiliation before natural wisdom, how much more so that wisdom which is from God.
Darwin would replace God with Man, simultaneously demoting the creator and deifying the creation. This "ansatz" is defended through genetics and anthropomorphized "just-so stories" not noted for their compelling logic. In this passage, God shows the limitations of both to explain nature. Even more profoundly, Darwinism founders on the same rock as solipsism or behaviorism: if Darwinism is true, then it declares itself irrelevant. Using the animals as object lessons, God shows that wisdom derives from something outside ourselves, from God himself, thereby imbuing biology with a holy relevance.
In this most scientific of all Biblical books, we have followed in the footsteps of Job through epistemology, ethics and metaphysics, through meteorology, astronomy, economics and biology. The medium changed, but the message remained constant: in Man's humiliation lies his essential holiness, for Man's inadequacy demands the wholly other, and Man's folly requires divine wisdom. Intention, execution, comprehension: we cannot escape the Trinity.
Meteorology Notes
Wind: Whose?
1:19 when suddenly a mighty wind swept in from the desert and struck the four corners of the house. It collapsed on them and they are dead, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!"
28:25 When he established the force of the wind and measured out the waters,
Wind: Empty
6:26 Do you mean to correct what I say, and treat the words of a despairing man as wind?
8:2 "How long will you say such things? Your words are a blustering wind.
15:2 "Would a wise man answer with empty notions or fill his belly with the hot east wind?
37:17 You who swelter in your clothes when the land lies hushed under the south wind,
Wind: Judgment
21:18 How often are they like straw before the wind, like chaff swept away by a gale?
27:21 The east wind carries him off, and he is gone; it sweeps him out of his place.
30:15 Terrors overwhelm me; my dignity is driven away as by the wind, my safety vanishes like a cloud.
30:22 You snatch me up and drive me before the wind; you toss me about in the storm.
37:9 The tempest comes out from its chamber, the cold from the driving winds.
Clouds: Hope
26:8 He wraps up the waters in his clouds, yet the clouds do not burst under their weight.
36:28 the clouds pour down their moisture and abundant showers fall on mankind.
37:11 He loads the clouds with moisture; he scatters his lightning through them.
38:37 Who has the wisdom to count the clouds? Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens
Clouds: Ephemeral
7:9 As a cloud vanishes and is gone, so he who goes down to the grave does not return.
30:15 Terrors overwhelm me; my dignity is driven away as by the wind, my safety vanishes
37:13 He brings the clouds to punish men, or to water his earth and show his love.
Clouds & Storm & Lightning
1:16 While he was still speaking, another messenger came and said, "The fire of God fell from the sky and burned up the sheep and the servants, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!"
3:5 May darkness and deep shadow claim it once more; may a cloud settle over it; may blackness overwhelm its light.
26:9 He covers the face of the full moon, spreading his clouds over it.
36:28 the clouds pour down their moisture and abundant showers fall on mankind. 29 Who can understand how he spreads out the clouds, how he thunders from his pavilion? 30 See how he scatters his lightning about him, bathing the depths of the sea.
36:32He fills his hands with lightning and commands it to strike its mark.
37:3 He unleashes his lightning beneath the whole heaven and sends it to the ends of the earth.
37:15 Do you know how God controls the clouds and makes his lightning flash? 16 Do you know how the clouds hang poised, those wonders of him who is perfect in knowledge?
Where then does wisdom come from? Where does understanding dwell? It is hidden from the eyes of every living thing, concealed even from the birds of the air. Destruction and Death say, 'Only a rumor of it has reached our ears.' God understands the way to it and he alone knows where it dwells, for he views the ends of the earth and sees everything under the heavens. When he established the force of the wind and measured out the waters, when he made a decree for the rain and a path for the thunderstorm, then he looked at wisdom and appraised it; he confirmed it and tested it. And he said to man, 'The fear of the Lord--that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding.' (28:20-28 NIV)
How great is God--beyond our understanding! The number of his years is past finding out.He draws up the drops of water, which distill as rain to the streams; the clouds pour down their moisture and abundant showers fall on mankind. Who can understand how he spreads out the clouds, how he thunders from his pavilion? See how he scatters his lightning about him, bathing the depths of the sea. This is the way he governs the nations and provides food in abundance. He fills his hands with lightning and commands it to strike its mark. His thunder announces the coming storm; even the cattle make known its approach. At this my heart pounds and leaps from its place. Listen! Listen to the roar of his voice, to the rumbling that comes from his mouth. He unleashes his lightning beneath the whole heaven and sends it to the ends of the earth. After that comes the sound of his roar; he thunders with his majestic voice. When his voice resounds, he holds nothing back. God's voice thunders in marvelous ways; he does great things beyond our understanding. He says to the snow, 'Fall on the earth,' and to the rain shower, 'Be a mighty downpour.' So that all men he has made may know his work, he stops every man from his labor...Do you know how God controls the clouds and makes his lightning flash? Do you know how the clouds hang poised, those wonders of him who is perfect in knowledge? You who swelter in your clothes when the land lies hushed under the south wind, can you join him in spreading out the skies, hard as a mirror of cast bronze? (36:26-37:6,15-18 NIV)
Heat & Drought
6:16 when darkened by thawing ice and swollen with melting snow,
6:17 but that cease to flow in the dry season, and in the heat vanish from their channels.
24:19 As heat and drought snatch away the melted snow, so the grave snatches away those who have sinned.
Rain: Comfort
5:10 He bestows rain on the earth; he sends water upon the countryside.
29:23 They waited for me as for showers and drank in my words as the spring rain.
Rain: Judgment
12:15 If he holds back the waters, there is drought; if he lets them loose, they devastate the land.
24:8 They are drenched by mountain rains and hug the rocks for lack of shelter.
Rain: Order
28:26 when he made a decree for the rain and a path for the thunderstorm,
36:27 "He draws up the drops of water, which distill as rain to the streams ;
37:6 He says to the snow, 'Fall on the earth,' and to the rain shower, 'Be a mighty downpour.'
Astronomy Notes
Heavens: Contrast
Eternal 14:12 so man lies down and does not rise; till the heavens are no more, men will not awake or be roused from their sleep.
Pure 15:15 If God places no trust in his holy ones, if even the heavens are not pure in his eyes,
Pure20:27 The heavens will expose his guilt; the earth will rise up against him.
Observer 28:24 for he views the ends of the earth and sees everything under the heavens.
Order 38:33 Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set up God's dominion over the earth?
Owner 41:11 Who has a claim against me that I must pay? Everything under heaven belongs to me.
Heavens: Dwelling
High 16:19 Even now my witness is in heaven; my advocate is on high.
High 22:12 "Is not God in the heights of heaven? And see how lofty are the highest stars!
High 22:14 Thick clouds veil him, so he does not see us as he goes about in the vaulted heavens.'
Order 25:2 "Dominion and awe belong to God; he establishes order in the heights of heaven.
Heavens: Lofty
9:8 He alone stretches out the heavens and treads on the waves of the sea.
11:8 They are higher than the heavens--what can you do? They are deeper than the depths of the grave --what can you know?
20:6 Though his pride reaches to the heavens and his head touches the clouds,
26:11 The pillars of the heavens quake, aghast at his rebuke.
Heavens: Air
12:7 "But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
28:21 It is hidden from the eyes of every living thing, concealed even from the birds of the air.
35:11 who teaches more to us than to the beasts of the earth and makes us wiser than the birds of the air?'
Heavens: Sky
1:16 While he was still speaking, another messenger came and said, "The fire of God fell from the sky and burned up the sheep and the servants, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!"
26:13 By his breath the skies became fair; his hand pierced the gliding serpent.
35:5 Look up at the heavens and see; gaze at the clouds so high above you.
37:3 He unleashes his lightning beneath the whole heaven and sends it to the ends of the earth.
37:18 can you join him in spreading out the skies, hard as a mirror of cast bronze?
38:37 Who has the wisdom to count the clouds? Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens
38:29 From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens
Stars
3:9 May its morning stars become dark; may it wait for daylight in vain and not see the first rays of dawn,
9:7 He speaks to the sun and it does not shine; he seals off the light of the stars.
25:5 If even the moon is not bright and the stars are not pure in his eyes,
22:12 "Is not God in the heights of heaven? And see how lofty are the highest stars!
38:7 while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?
38:31 "Can you bind the beautiful Pleiades? Can you loose the cords of Orion?
38:32 Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons or lead out the Bear with its cubs?
Moon & Sun
26:9 He covers the face of the full moon, spreading his clouds over it.
31:26 if I have regarded the sun in its radiance or the moon moving in splendor,
37:21 Now no one can look at the sun, bright as it is in the skies after the wind has swept them clean.
Economics Notes
Stats Speaking as a physicist and not an economist, one can treat wealth by counting how many people fall into "net-worth" bins (normalizing for cost-of-living etc.). Then one can fit the distribution with a single-peaked Gaussian and determine "skewness" and "kurtosis" of the distribution. This assumes, for example, that the distribution of wealth is monotonically decreasing from the average. A more robust statistic is to look at the median and the mean and calculate the deviation. If the distribution appears to be double-peaked, one can calculate whether a twin-peak function gives a better fit than a single peak. This last result alone may indicate how "stable" a society is. My uninformed guess is that societies have two stable positions, either a "gaussian" single-peak or a "skewed" two-peak distribution. Bourgois and stone-age societies may be in the first category, whereas feudal or fascist societies might fall into the second category.
Bad Wealth
3:15 with rulers who had gold, who filled their houses with silver.
5:5 The hungry consume his harvest, taking it even from among thorns, and the thirsty pant after his wealth.
6:22 Have I ever said, 'Give something on my behalf, pay a ransom for me from your wealth,
15:29 He will no longer be rich and his wealth will not endure, nor will his possessions spread over the land.
20:10 His children must make amends to the poor; his own hands must give back his wealth.
20:15 He will spit out the riches he swallowed; God will make his stomach vomit them up.
20:19 For he has oppressed the poor and left them destitute; he has seized houses he did not build.
22:20 'Surely our foes are destroyed, and fire devours their wealth.'
22:24 and assign your nuggets to the dust, your gold of Ophir to the rocks in the ravines,
27:16 Though he heaps up silver like dust and clothes like piles of clay,
27:17 what he lays up the righteous will wear, and the innocent will divide his silver.
31:24 "If I have put my trust in gold or said to pure gold, 'You are my security,' if I have rejoiced over my great wealth, the fortune my hands had gained,
34:19 who shows no partiality to princes and does not favor the rich over the poor, for they are all the work of his hands?
36:18 Be careful that no one entices you by riches; do not let a large bribe turn you aside.
36:19 Would your wealth or even all your mighty efforts sustain you so you would not be in distress?
Good Wealth
22:25 then the Almighty will be your gold, the choicest silver for you.
23:10 But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.
28:15 It cannot be bought with the finest gold, nor can its price be weighed in silver. It cannot be bought with the gold of Ophir, with precious onyx or sapphires. Neither gold nor crystal can compare with it, nor can it be had for jewels of gold. The topaz of Cush cannot compare with it; it cannot be bought with pure gold.
28:1 "There is a mine for silver and a place where gold is refined.
28:6 sapphires come from its rocks, and its dust contains nuggets of gold.
Bad Treatment of the Poor
24:4-5 They thrust the needy from the path and force all the poor of the land into hiding. Like wild donkeys in the desert, the poor go about their labor of foraging food; the wasteland provides food for their children.
24:9 The fatherless child is snatched from the breast; the infant of the poor is seized for a debt.
24:14 When daylight is gone, the murderer rises up and kills the poor and needy; in the night he steals forth like a thief.
Good Treatment of the Poor
5:15-16 He saves the needy from the sword in their mouth; he saves them from the clutches of the powerful. So the poor have hope, and injustice shuts its mouth.
29:12 because I rescued the poor who cried for help, and the fatherless who had none to assist him.
30:25 Have I not wept for those in trouble? Has not my soul grieved for the poor?
31:16 "If I have denied the desires of the poor or let the eyes of the widow grow weary,
34:28 They caused the cry of the poor to come before him, so that he heard the cry of the needy.
42:11 All his brothers and sisters and everyone who had known him before came and ate with him in his house. They comforted and consoled him over all the trouble the LORD had brought upon him, and each one gave him a piece of silver and a gold ring.
Biology Notes
Life is ephemeral
4:19-20 how much more those who live in houses of clay, whose foundations are in the dust, who are crushed more readily than a moth! Between dawn and dusk they are broken to pieces; unnoticed, they perish forever.
8:16-19 He is like a well-watered plant in the sunshine, spreading its shoots over the garden; it entwines its roots around a pile of rocks and looks for a place among the stones. But when it is torn from its spot, that place disowns it and says, 'I never saw you.' Surely its life withers away, and from the soil other plants grow.
9:26 They skim past like boats of papyrus, like eagles swooping down on their prey.
10:16 If I hold my head high, you stalk me like a lion and again display your awesome power against me.
14:2 He springs up like a flower and withers away; like a fleeting shadow, he does not endure. 14:7-9 At least there is hope for a tree: If it is cut down, it will sprout again, and its new shoots will not fail. Its roots may grow old in the ground and its stump die in the soil, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth shoots like a plant.
15:32-33 Before his time he will be paid in full, and his branches will not flourish. He will be like a vine stripped of its unripe grapes, like an olive tree shedding its blossoms.
20:16 He will suck the poison of serpents; the fangs of an adder will kill him.
27:18The house he builds is like a moth's cocoon, like a hut made by a watchman.
Life is regulated
4:9-11 At the breath of God they are destroyed; at the blast of his anger they perish. The lions may roar and growl, yet the teeth of the great lions are broken. The lion perishes for lack of prey, and the cubs of the lioness are scattered.
7:12 Am I the sea, or the monster of the deep, that you put me under guard?
12:7-10 But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds of the air, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish of the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this? In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.
The Nature of Man
6:5 Does a wild donkey bray when it has grass, or an ox bellow when it has fodder?
11:12 But a witless man can no more become wise than a wild donkey's colt can be born a man.
15:23 He wanders about--food for vultures ; he knows the day of darkness is at hand.
24:5 Like wild donkeys in the desert, the poor go about their labor of foraging food; the wasteland provides food for their children.
30:1 But now they mock me, men younger than I, whose fathers I would have disdained to put with my sheep dogs.
28:1-10 There is a mine for silver and a place where gold is refined. Iron is taken from the earth, and copper is smelted from ore. Man puts an end to the darkness; he searches the farthest recesses for ore in the blackest darkness. Far from where people dwell he cuts a shaft, in places forgotten by the foot of man; far from men he dangles and sways. The earth, from which food comes, is transformed below as by fire; sapphires come from its rocks, and its dust contains nuggets of gold. No bird of prey knows that hidden path, no falcon's eye has seen it. Proud beasts do not set foot on it, and no lion prowls there. Man's hand assaults the flinty rock and lays bare the roots of the mountains. He tunnels through the rock; his eyes see all its treasures. He searches the sources of the rivers and brings hidden things to light.
Rationality
C.S. Lewis makes a very similar argument on the origin of "Rationality" in his proof of God's existence. The argument contends that "rational" behavior cannot arise from irrational causes. Thus for Man to be rational, there must be something from which he inherits rationality, i.e., God.
28:12-28 But where can wisdom be found? Where does understanding dwell? Man does not comprehend its worth; it cannot be found in the land of the living. The deep says, 'It is not in me'; the sea says, 'It is not with me. It cannot be bought with the finest gold, nor can its price be weighed in silver. It cannot be bought with the gold of Ophir, with precious onyx or sapphires. Neither gold nor crystal can compare with it, nor can it be had for jewels of gold. Coral and jasper are not worthy of mention; the price of wisdom is beyond rubies. The topaz of Cush cannot compare with it; it cannot be bought with pure gold.
"Where then does wisdom come from? Where does understanding dwell? It is hidden from the eyes of every living thing, concealed even from the birds of the air. Destruction and Death say, 'Only a rumor of it has reached our ears.' God understands the way to it and he alone knows where it dwells, for he views the ends of the earth and sees everything under the heavens. When he established the force of the wind and measured out the waters, when he made a decree for the rain and a path for the thunderstorm, then he looked at wisdom and appraised it; he confirmed it and tested it. And he said to man, 'The fear of the Lord--that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding.'"
35:9-12 Men cry out under a load of oppression; they plead for relief from the arm of the powerful. But no one says, 'Where is God my Maker, who gives songs in the night, who teaches more to us than to the beasts of the earth and makes us wiser than the birds of the air?' He does not answer when men cry out because of the arrogance of the wicked.
What is the Problem of Evil?
Its hard to say, for there are as many definitions of "The
Problem of Evil" as there are polemics on the subject, each of
which comes with its own implied audience, a long history of debate,
and a peculiar jargon. For example, the word "theodicy"
comes from the greek for "God" + "justice",
implying that the existence of evil is somehow related to the justice
of God. Some would argue that the existence of evil is incompatible
with the existence of God, or at least, the existence of a good and
just God. Some would argue that evil has nothing to do with God, but
is entirely due to human corruption, while some have argued that evil
has no more existence than a shadow or a vacuum.
These
debates, then, are like syllogisms, where the cleverly debated proof
is all contained in the suppositions, in the definitions of the
words, in the jargon. The right jargon with the wrong audience,
however, is as doomed to failure as Paul on Mars hill. So it is as
important to recognize the different audiences as it is to identify
the different presuppositions. Forrest
Baird identifies four
groups that are traditionally the audience for a theodicy: the
sufferer, the observer, the moral atheist, and the traditional
atheist. Taking liberties with his titles, we will call them "the
sufferer", "the observer", "the theologian",
and "the philosopher".
For example, the highly
popular theodicy, "When
Bad Things Happen to Good People",
was written by Harold Kushner, the father of a terminally ill child
and a Reformed rabbi. His theodicy, while containing some philosophy
and theology, has had little discernable impact on either discipline.
But when I mentioned the title in a nursing home, I had the immediate
attention of the entire nursing staff. His theodicy had spoken most
strongly to those who observe suffering constantly, to nurses and
pastors and rabbis. These are the people who understood his jargon,
who are his audience. If one argues that an author's circumstances
dictate his approach, then it may not be so surprising to find
caregivers as his primary audience.
In the sequence of
audiences given above, we move from the concrete to the abstract,
from the sufferer to the philosopher three times removed. The details
of abstract metaphysical philosophy are as unlikely to provide solace
for the concrete pains of the sufferer as pain-killers to provide
satisfaction for the philosopher. So it may be helpful to describe
the problem of evil for each audience, identifying the general
concerns and presuppositions.
If physical pain is the only
problem for the sufferer, then morphine is theodicy. Indeed, for
small children suffering from terminal illnesses, simple faith and
pain-killers go a long way toward resolving the problem of
suffering; the pain for which they are often far more accepting and
philosophical than their parents and caregivers.
If a child
is emotionally damaged or scarred through suffering at the hands of
others, say, survivors of Kosovo, Botswana, or Sudanese slavery, it
would be more accurate to say that this child was a victim of human
depravity, a casualty of sin. Such suffering has a distinct cause
and cure, and while injust, is only relevant to the the other
audiences. Which is to say, if a child is being abused by adults, we
have laws in our land to halt the evil, and places for cure. The
character of that evil is as old as the Garden, but not the issue we
address here, though it will be the subject of another book, for the
issue here is suffering without cause, without reason, without
cure.
It is perhaps the teenager and adult who fully
experience the emotional and spiritual aspects of incurable
suffering. For only one who is able to see the potential of the
future, the promises of life, recognizes the denial of death. So the
poignant tragedy of Jephthah's teenage daughter (Judges 11) is
almost mythic in the purity of its emotion. How do we speak to the
cognizant sufferer out of our own weakness and ignorance? Is there
anything we can say to a cancer patient that will comfort? Is there
any answer for the grave?
If there is an answer, it must lie
in our total weakness, in our gross inability even to hinder Death,
much less cure it. It is out of that weakness that we cling to each
other, be it sitting silently as Job's friends, or wailing loudly as
the maidens of Jephthah. Why should there be comfort in company? Why
should mourners bring consolation? Why is human companionship
morphine for the soul?
As I ponder this riddle, I am
astonished by its opposites. Death, so final, so absolute, yet so
infinitesmally brief. Life, so lengthy and full, yet as fragile as a
breath. Memories, as immaterial as love, carved by life, yet
triumphant over death. To die unmourned and unremembered, as Job
himself implies in 27:15, is a life not lived. The memory of our
friends is an everlasting promise engraved in lead. If our friends
bring us solace, it is because they hold us alive in their hearts.
Immortality, while not ours to hold, is ours to give. Our Death can
be accepted, once we are certain of our Life.
I am reminded
of our lonely friend, dying of cancer, over whom we wept when she
could not, soaking her hospital sheets. When she finally made her
peace with Heaven, and her tears had washed away fifteen years of
bitterness, her dying words relayed over the Atlantic to us were
"Don't let the Sheldons mourn for me." She knew we would.
We did. And because she knew, her comfort was complete. And in that
comfort, she comforted us.
The mystery deepens. For hope in
the memory of our friends is fading hope indeed--far better to have
a building named for you than to depend on friends. Yet engraved
granite has no arms to hold, no tears to wash away the fear. Memory
that is frail and free is all the more dear. I have read of oriental
despots who had hundreds slaughtered at their death to ensure that
tears were shed at their funeral. This story is powerful for what it
doesn't say, that despots had no faith in friends, that angry tears
are better than none at all, that genuine mourning is better than
professional wailing. Comfort seems to come through the intangibles
of genuine relationships, of Personal Truth.
Job's
mysterious comfort in the face of certain death comes when the same
God who caused his pain makes a personal appearance (42:3-6). An
appearance without apologies or explanation, yet this
personalization of truth satisfies Job's heart. How can such
subjective experiences provide eternal comfort? Somehow Death turns
all things inside out, so hope that looks inward sees the farther.
For hope that is seen is not hope, who hopes for what he sees? But
if we hope for what we do not see, we shall see it when our flesh is
gone(19:27).
Although many books purport
to comfort the sufferer, most appear written to soothe the observer.
Doug Muder writes a lengthy critique
of Kushner, arguing
that the book is a defense of Anger, replacing belief in God with a
belief in the goodness of man. Kuschner must be addressing a
different audience than the sufferer, or how else can we explain his
emasculation of God masquerading as hope? As we analyze the many
books written for the observer, we find that Kushner stands in a
long tradition of authors who defend the observer's soul. Forrest
Baird points out
that the particulars of the observer's defense depend on his
presuppositions, whether he be a believer, a moral atheist or a
traditional atheist. Yet there is something universal about all
these books, they all engage in triage amid the carnage of some
great battle nearly lost.
We could fill this book with
anecdotes and personal reminiscences of death and its radioactive
fallout, not to mention the manifold pages already published on the
subject. We could even compare and criticize the many approaches we
have found, though the end result of such analyses would likely be
the mundane labelling of their all-too-familiar worldviews. Perhaps
such analyses can provide comfort to the reader, though I suspect it
serves only to reinforce his already firmly held beliefs. A more
fruitful approach, I hope, can be found in analyzing Job's story.
Here there is more than another anecdote, more than another nuclear
devastation, but a transformation of both the sufferer and his
observers. It is a fierce battle of worldviews and dissonance with
no survivors, yet where all are saved. If there can ever be hope for
the observer who finds himself in free fall into the black hole of
meaningless suffering, it is somewhere in this book.
Although
Job is the sufferer at the center of this book, he begins by being
an observer of suffering; first the death and destruction of his
servants and his wealth, then the death of all his children. His
response, despite Satan's boast, was not anger. Death did not
frighten Job. It was not a "fight or flight" reaction on
Job's part. It was acceptance, yet not fatalism. "Dust to dust"
might have been fatalism, but for Job it was a return to something
familiar, something with meaning. "Naked I came in the world,
naked I return. Blessed be the name of the Lord". Somewhere in
these words is a familiarity, a relationship, a personal truth. It
will take 30 more chapters to flesh it out, but the significance of
these words was not lost on God, or Satan.
Perhaps it was
this desire to move Job from an observer to a participant that
prompted Satan's next request, and God's acceptance. Job was
afflicted with painful boils, sleepless nights, a depressed wife and
abandoned by friends. He begins falling, falling, falling with no
support but the breath in his lungs. He has become the sufferer, his
three friends, the observers.
It is the genius of Job that we
are given the dynamic of the faultless observer who critiques his
own observers, for only Job who has already lost everything has a
moral right to correct his comforters. We have spoken earlier of the
worldview held by the three friends: their normative ethics, their
expectations of God's justice, their complacency about earning a
righteous man's reward. Job's situation, while not yet terminal, was
nonetheless a tremendous rent in the seamless fabric of their world.
These friends engage in every practice denounced by Kushner or
Muder. They minimize, they look for happy endings, they accuse, they
lecture. Beneath all these defenses, Job finds their real
weakness--they see something dreadful and are afraid (6:21).
At
first blush, fear seems so inappropriate. Here it is Job who is
afflicted and in great need yet it is his friends who are afraid?
Without being too Jungian, let me rework a threadbare analogy.
Suppose you belong to a tribe of Stone Age hunters gathered around a
smoky campfire in a wild jungle full of unknown dangers. Suddenly
your chief falls backward out of the circle of firelight with a loud
cry and you see a large animal, magnified by the flickering shadows,
crouching over him. Wouldn't fear be the appropriate response to his
plight? Should we rescue or retreat, fight or fly? In the same way
we, who live in the civilized world, organize our lives by unwritten
rules that define and protect us. What mother would not feel a pang
of fear seeing a small child chasing a ball out into a busy street?
In a no less abstract way, what businessman would not cringe seeing
a colleague invest his life savings on an unseen gold mine in
Indonesia? Nor should it be surprising if a Hindu or Buddhist might
fear for a Westerner who begins a business venture without proper
sacrifice.
When these three friends see clear evidence of
heavenly retribution on a trusted and respected colleague, every
fiber of their soul cries "DANGER!" Can what Job has be
catching? Is there a secret sin that might swallow them up if they
come too close? What is this shadowy form crouching over Job? So we
spoke earlier about their fear of similar retribution, their need to
brainwash Job to protect themselves and so validate their knowledge
of God's justice. This fear was not merely academic or theological,
but a gut-wrenching panic, inciting them to attack their friend in
his weakened state with more than the barbed platitudes Muder and
Kuschner condemn, but with the outright hatred reserved for venomous
snakes. It is a general truth that when we observe unexpected
suffering close at hand we are afraid and experience an adrenaline
fueled "fight or flight" response, striving to defend
ourselves against an unseen danger.
Before we get too caught
up in the defenseworks, perhaps we can step back and observe the
battleground. For the sufferer, the destruction is too vast, Death
too immanent for defense, and his world is turned inside out.
Looking inward, he finds solace in the most ephemeral aspect of
life, genuine relationships, personal truth. It is a transformation
few observers can understand and none can follow. Instead the
observer is left with a black hole into which the sufferer has gone,
a discontinuity of space-time, a unravelling of a life's meaning, a
cognitive dissonance in his worldview. Depending on how many threads
of memory disappear into that cancerous tangle, the observer may
find himself dragged into this suffering, spiralling into the Abyss
of Meaninglessness. Is it no wonder then, that survivors of this
battle feel the urge to write about their narrow escape, to describe
the elements of their salvation, to warn against false foundations?
These works are in no way intended to help the sufferer, rather they
are a defense of the soul against the onslaught of Death.
If
theodicy for the sufferer is compassion, then theodicy for the
observer is protection. We want to find safe haven, security from
the Scylla of suffering and the Charybdis of chaos which threaten to
pull us down into the abyss, by filling our quivers with stout
arrows and building our walls high and wide. This is why Job tells
his friends, "your maxims are proverbs of ashes, your defenses
are defenses of clay" 13:12. The paradox of Job is that after
demolishing their strongholds, he provides no replacement armor,
nothing to protect them from the howling wilderness, a tactic which
turns out to be their best defense. Vulnerability becomes
protection.
We see this all the time. Every Boy Scout knows
that when trapped in quicksand he should never struggle, but he
should lay down gently in the sand and float. Likewise, every
beginning pilot is taught that should he become disoriented and let
one wing dip into a graveyard spiral, he should resist the impulse
to pull back on the stick, which will only cause a tighter spiral,
but he should do the very thing he fears and push the stick down
into a dive and so escape. Drunks survive car accidents better than
their victims because their bodies are so relaxed. Somehow, no
defense is the best defense.
"Ahh", I hear you
thinking, "but this is self-contradictory, for how can one
defensively imperil oneself?" Muder
calls it quiet acceptance. Kuschner
asks for noble suffering. C.S.
Lewis seeks a
revelation. Job provokes divine justice. In contrast, the three
friends and Elihu rationalize, minimize and theologize. What is the
difference? The difference is one of attitude. Muder says it most
gently, for acceptance implies a giver, and Muder insists we remain
the object of an unspoken verb. Kuschner draws his power from a
similar clouded insight, that we are co-sufferers with God. Lewis
persistantly asks for the clear insight, and Job boldly demands it.
The antagonists of Job, however, need no such help, but are content
to be the subject of every verb. Under the guise of defending God,
they become gods, reshaping reality into their own private creation.
Even Elihu, with his defense of a transcendent God, leaves no place
for God to disagree. The difference is that between transitive and
intransitive verbs, between personal and impersonal truth, between
wisdom and knowledge, between hearing about God and seeing Him.
As
we stare into the Abyss, we realize we are staring into ourselves.
Only by abandonning our rationalizing defenses and embracing the
chaos, only by turning our back on our cozy worldview and reaching
into the sucking darkness can we find the hand of God reaching for
us. It is never trivial, never easy, never simultaneous, for we must
fall if we want His arms to catch us. Falling into a black hole
lasts for eternity to those who watch outside, yet is but a
measurable instant for those who take the plunge. Is this
Kirkegaard's irrational leap in the dark? No, though we must abandon
our rationality when we let go, it is more precisely an arational
leap. It is more like falling in love, if one can compare love and
death, for it is the willing abandonment of self for the sake of
another. It is the memory of the fingers of his hands, of the smell
of his garment, of the warmth of his breath that takes us across the
chasm. It is the remembered God we see in shapeless void, making all
our life but preparation for this last step. That true memory of Him
is faith, the falling is hope, His arms are love.
Lest I be accused of
cynicism, calling every moral atheist a theologian, let me quickly
say that the converse is not true, not every theologian is a moral
atheist. Because theology is the process of converting abstractions
about God into instances and applications for today, it seems
appropriate to say that the moral atheist is doing theology.
"Shouldn't I say anti-theology?" you ask. No, it is
precisely theology, for the opposite of theology is not atheism, but
idolatry, the substitution of human aspirations for divine justice.
Idolatry replaces God with something patently false, simply to make
God more malleable, more manageable, more liveable. It is idolatry
that incites the outrage present in the theodicy of the moral
atheist. "How dare they redefine justice and mercy to make God
into the reflection of the status quo! God's justice is not
redefinable." Look at Frisen's
attack on RBC,
for an example. Calling these works "angry", doesn't do
justice to the sense of injustice, the personal grief, the real
outrage felt by these authors. Which is exactly how Job responds to
the arguments of his friends. To deny or condemn this anger as
inappropriate would be to deny or condemn Job. Rather we ask where
does this outrage come from, and where did God depart to?
Our
family had to take a long trip recently, without the use of our BMW,
"Big Mormon Wagon", and the built-in VCR. With commendable
foresight, my wife checked out a dozen "books on tape"
from the library, and during the 2000 mile trip we listened to
Grimm's Fairy Tales, James Herriot's life, and a biography of Mother
Teresa. Mother Teresa felt this same outrage, seeing the poorest of
the poor who had been denied every opportunity in life, now denied
even a respectable death, lying like so much roadkill on the side of
the city streets, encrusted by flies. So she started ministering to
them. Carrying them to a bed. Washing them. Holding their hands
while they died. It was only a drop in the ocean, what can one
short, frail woman do for the hundreds dying on the streets of
Calcutta every night? Not much.
Hanging on the wall of at
least one of the many chapter houses of the Missionaries of Charity,
the order she began, is a plaque entitled, Do
It Anyway. It
consists of a series of angry sentences, answered by the same terse
reply. An example is, "The good you do will be forgotten
tomorrow... do good anyway." Her persistance, her
nineteen hour workday, her recruitment skills, her ability to turn
outrage into compassion, enabled her to achieve worldwide
recognition as a modern saint. Despite her truly superhuman
accomplishments, which gained her a listing in Time magazine as one
of the 100 most influential people of this century, the tribute Time
printed was appalling, preferring to find fault with her faith than
praising her manifold accomplishments. The Klu Klux Klan could have
written a better obituary. I can almost hear her quiet laughing
answer, Do it anyway.
How could she not feel outrage?
How could she avoid it? Yet not only she, but the hundreds of
sisters and brothers in the Missionaries of Charity have achieved
this same elevated state, now continuing in the absence of their
founder. And remember, she began recruiting in this most un-western
of nations, among the most unpromising of candidates, in the slums
and streets of Calcutta. If she found an answer, it must answer the
polytheistic Hindu, the pantheistic Buddhist, and the rigidly
monotheistic Muslim. It must cut across all religions, all
lifestyles. It must appeal to East and to West. It must answer both
the idealistic young and cynical aged.
"Is God just?",
you might ask her, as she busied herself washing a weak and wizened
woman who had just been brought to the converted Leprosarium. "I
don't know", she might have replied, "just what you mean
by just? Here hold her up while I get a sari." Suddenly you are
confronted with an instance of the injustice that brought such
outrage. And you must help. And hold. And comfort. Railing against
injustice is not what this woman needs, she needs a clean sari. And
a clean bed. As you lay her in the bed, you notice the woman's eyes,
she hasn't said a word to you, but her eyes... "Wait", you
call out, as Mother Teresa quickly moves toward her next task, "it's
doing the right thing. That's what I mean by just." "Are
you?" she asks, handing you a sheet, expecting you to tuck it
under the plastic-covered mattress. "No, I mean God. God doing
the right thing." She pauses, looking over the half-lifted
mattress, "And how will you know what is doing the right thing,
unless you do it?"
Make no mistake, we do not achieve
equality with God by our actions, rather we achieve rapport with
Him. The many volunteers who contributed their testimonials to the
tape all talked about the life-changing effect of ministering to the
poorest of the poor. Intellectually they were doing what every
parent does, washing bodies, doing laundry, cooking food, yet
emotionally and spiritually something dramatic happened. For the
outrage against idolatry rises out of impotence--if only we were
God, we would show the world what justice is! Mother Teresa's
insight is that we are God inasmuch as we are His hands that
wash the beggar, His feet who carry the dying to a bed, His mouth
that pronounces the burial rites. In these seemingly insignificant
actions we are omnipotent in the wilderness, we conquer the chaos
the way a candle defeats the darkness. As Mother Teresa emphasizes
over and over, our poverty becomes unassailable wealth, our weakness
becomes omnipotence, our anger becomes compassion. Why? Because
truth became personal, justice gained a face, love found a name.
Perhaps you've heard the
schoolboy conundrum on why God can't be omnipotent. Can God make
a rock bigger than He can lift? Either way, it appears that
there is something God cannot do. Once you get the hang of it, you
can construct an infinite variety of these statements, proving
either that God is a lot less intelligent than we are, or that we
are spouting nonsense. Many people have pointed out that
grammatically correct statements can still be meaningless. "Twas
brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.",
was Charles Dodgson's contribution to the debate over 100 years ago.
So too the classic theodicy argument--God's omnipotence,
omniscience, and benevolence are incompatible with the existence of
evil--teeters on the brink of being as meaningless as
Jabberwocky.
I
say "teeters" because of the ambiguity within the
argument. Take for example, "omnipotence". As our
schoolboy prattle demonstrates, there are lots of things God cannot
do, such as lying. This does not interfere in the slightest with his
omnipotence, because His power is not our power. And when we try to
understand omnipotence, we naturally magnify our potency, or worse,
negate our impotence and think we've described His power, but what
we have really described was only our ambition. The same argument
goes for omniscience, thinking that God's knowlege of evil stops
with what we can see, when He can follow the black thread of that
disease through the tangles of spacetime to its bitter root.
Yugoslavia is a recent example of treating the present symptom
without respecting the historical antecedents. Finally God's
benevolence might be quite different from the negation of a parental
malevolence, the grandfatherly negligence that passes for kindness
in our estranged culture today. No wonder Isaiah writes about God's
benevolence (51:8), "For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD. "As the
heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your
ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."
Therefore
since these words are not clearly defined, our conclusion clearly
cannot be definitive. Indeed, these definitions are explored in
great detail in the various replies described in the appendices.
Alvin Plantinga argues that omnipotence is limited by free will,
producing the Free
Will Defense. RBC
argues that God knows what we need, not what we want, so it is his
omniscience that forsees the good that comes from evil, and his
benevolence that gives us the good disguised as evil. These
discussions serve to make us think about God, but the danger of
course, is that they substitute for the real thing. When we are too
persuaded by our consummate logic, we have created an idol, a God
made in our image. This is precisely what Elihu and the three
friends do to Job, and rightly received their punishment. This
exercise often provokes the anger we saw in the previous section. It
is therefore a nearly futile exercise, which in my outrageous
moments, would say is even sinful.
The fact of the matter is,
a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent is
incompatible with the existence of evil. Which should show us that
we are totally incapable of making a God in our image. Every God we
manufacture according to accepted specifications, will be utterly,
totally inadequate to account for suffering. Is this so incredible?
Do you think that an imaginary friend will ever be as satisfying as
a real one? Can an imaginary friend save us? Can an imaginary friend
explain why he has abandonned us? The only God that can answer the
problem of pain is the God who created pain, and He answers only to
us. Were we to write His answer down and pass it to another, we
would have filtered Him through our human understanding and
inadvertantly constructed an idol. No, the only answer is the
personal answer. The only truth is personal truth. As Job said,
(42:5,6) My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.
Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes."
Yes, the book of Job does have an answer for evil, for pain, for suffering. The answer is as complex as the book itself, for the answer is not a formula, a pill, or a prescription, no, the answer is a person, the answer is Him.
Copyright © 1997 Rob Sheldon