Book of Job – godblog

Stories about God

Stories about God

Jack Miles has written a couple of books about the life of God. They are not new books. New, or rather recently renewed, is my appreciation of them.

What’s different about Miles’ books is that he assumes that the Bible, Hebrew Testament and New Testament, can be treated as literary works, biographies that tell us about the development of the protagonist. No historical criticism, no redaction criticism, no textual criticism (who wrote what when). He treats the Bible as you would a biography you pulled from your bookshelf. What type of person (that’s really the term for how he treats him) is God, what does God learn along the way, how does God develop and change in the course of his encounters with man, particularly but not exclusively the Jews? Miles’ God is a Trinitarian God, particularly in the sense that whatever we learn about Christ we learn about God, for they are one. “Jesus is Lord.” While God: A Biography stands alone, it is only complete with his second volume, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God.

A harsh God

Though the God of the Hebrew Testament can be loving toward his people (1 Kings 10:9), he is fundamentally a warrior God, which is what his people wanted.

In rage you stride across the land, you trample the nations in anger as you advance to save your people, to rescue your anointed one. You stave in the sinner’s roof beams, you raze his house to the ground. You split his skull with your bludgeon. (Habakkuk 3, quoted in God: A Biography, p 98)

God is praiseworthy because he smashes the heads of Israel’s enemies. Pity the poor Amalekites.

The Lord swore to Moses: “Record this in writing, and recite it in Joshua’s hearing, that I will utterly wipe out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.” (Exodus 17:14)

Now, go and crush Amalek. Put him under a curse of total destruction, him and all that he possesses. Do not spare him, but slay man and woman, child and babe, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” (1 Samuel 15: 2–3)

Miles comments, “what the Lord swore and Moses solemnly witnessed was, in more modern language, an oath of genocide.” (p 101)

What changed with the New Testament?

What changed is that God was confronted with his own weakness. His strong right arm could no longer protect the Israelites against Babylon, and then Rome. But rather than admitting defeat, God changed the terms of the covenant.

God does have, however, one alternative to simply bringing his storied career to an ignominious close. Instead of baldly declaring that he is unable to defeat his enemies, God may declare that he has no enemies, that he now refuses to recognize any distinction between friend and foe. (Christ, p 108)

To make this argument, to exemplify and die for it, is the job of Jesus.

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Thomas Merton is wrong: Christian mysticism is a bad idea

Thomas Merton is wrong: Christian mysticism is a bad idea.

Thomas Merton was a great proponent of ecumenism. For Merton, all religion, East and West, sought the same thing: unity with God. He was also a beautiful writer. Nevertheless, it seems to me that he got something fundamental wrong.

The goal of Christian mysticism is to find unity with God. Solitude, contemplation, self-denial and often silence all aim at the emptying of the self in order that we might be filled with God. But what if the goal of unity is the wrong goal? The proper Christian goal is faith in God and following the teachings of Jesus Christ. Chief among Christ’s teachings is loving and caring for other people.

Whatever unity with God that is necessary in order to feel fulfilled is achieved through the eucharist (communion). We partake of the blood and body of Christ, and so incorporate his body into ours, and our body into the membership in the church. What else is needed? What else is there? *

Contemplation is about the self, not God

If this is so, what purpose does the contemplative search for mystical unity with God serve? I think it serves solely the need of the individual, and little to do with a greater unity with God. What if instead of the word “unity,” I substituted “a feeling of belonging to God’s world because I am one of his creatures.” Putting it this way is more long winded, but it says all that need be said. The search for wholeness is a search for self, not God.

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Emmanuel Levinas says we can’t talk to God, only each other

Emmanuel Levinas says we can’t talk to God, only each other. When we care for others in words and deeds, we come as close as we can to God.

Emmanuel Levinas is popular among philosophers because “he introduces God into the scene without making so much ontological noise,” as Ryan Urbano puts it (p 75). In other words, Levinas lets us talk about God without talking about God. It’s true, but it’s not because he is shy about using the G—word.

For Levinas, God is experienced in the ethical encounter with the other. Religion is Levinas’ term for this ethical relationship. For Levinas, there is no direct relationship with the Divine.

The Divine can only be accessed through the human other to whom the self is infinitely responsible. (Urbano, p 51)

We know God when we act ethically toward another person. We do not keep God alive by trying to prove his existence, a waste of time. Everything I can ever know about God is experienced in caring for others.

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What if Job was right and God is wrong?

The Book of Job is one of the most puzzling books of the Hebrew Bible. If we take Yahweh’s speeches from the whirlwind seriously, then there is no humanly comprehensible reason for the suffering of innocents and the righteous. The good suffer, the bad flourish, and we must accept this without question. Does this mean that Job was right and God is wrong?

One way out of this puzzle, generally called the problem of theodicy (if God is all good, all powerful, and all knowing, then why do the innocent suffer?), is to read the Book of Job from the perspective of the New Testament. This is what G. K. Chesterton does, seeing the suffering of the most innocent and righteous of men as a preface to Christ.

Though God rewards Job at the Book’s conclusion with seven new sons and three new daughters even more beautiful than before, as well as doubling his flocks and oxen, most scholars agree that the section, 42:10-17 was an addition by later redactors to encourage the faithful. The Book really ends with Job despising himself for his arrogance in questioning God (42.6). Or at least that is one translation.

The patience of Job?

To read the Book of Job from the perspective of the New Testament is to miss what is so challenging about it. Job’s harsh criticism of God is not answered by God, at least not in any way the pious reader might expect. Says Job

The good and the guilty He destroys alike. If some scourge brings sudden death, He mocks the guiltless for their melting hearts; some land falls under a tyrant’s sway—He veils its judges’ faces, if not He, then who? (9:22-24)

Job goes on like this chapter after chapter. Whoever wrote about the patience of Job was crazy. Job wants to take God to court and find him guilty (9:32-10:5).

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