Brian Hamilton-Vise

Out of the tempest

The climax of the book of Job is undoubtedly the very beginning of ch. 38, when the LORD finally speaks to Job “from out of the whirlwind.” The trouble is, God’s response has nothing obvious to do with anything that came before. What God says has nothing to do with Job’s suffering, nothing to do with the “doctrine of temporal retribution” which has been the subject of Job’s debate with his friends, nothing to do with whether the righteous and innocent will, in the end, be vindicated. Instead, God roars on about having been the one who founded the earth with all its gratuitous idiosyncrasies–the rain that “satisfies the waste” (38:27) or the ostrich who stupidly leaves its eggs in the middle of open ground “because God has made it forget wisdom” (39:17). As Walter Brueggemann puts it, YHWH here is “lordly, haughty, condescending, dismissive, reprimanding, refusing to entertain Job’s profound question, refusing to answer the probe of 21:7, and refusing to enter into any discussion about justice…. The whole statement is one of overwhelmingness, not engagement” (Theology of the Old Testament, 390).

Not that there haven’t been attempts to fish a real reply to Job out of God’s speeches. After all, Job does come out of the experience subdued, humbled, transformed. Job himself seems to think he’s received some kind of answer. In his penetrating book On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, Gustavo Gutiérrez tries to make the case that there really is an answer here: a reminder of God’s free and inexplicable delight in creation’s peculiarities, and even more of the immeasurable wisdom and might by which God established all things. And in God’s second, shorter speech (41:6–41:34), about Behemoth and Leviathan whom God alone can tame, Gutiérrez finds assurance of God’s just government of the world. Thus, though the LORD provides no direct explanation for Job’s suffering, he does give Job reason to trust that “you can do all things, and no purpose of yours can be thwarted” (42:2).

But this is the one part of Gutiérrez’s book which seems to me to have missed the mark. None of what he says is wrong, exactly; his reading gives concrete meaning to speeches that might otherwise appear merely impertinent. The trouble is that Gutiérrez’s conclusion is much too tidy. He actually does suggest an explanation for Job’s suffering, merely a more sophisticated version of the so-called free-will argument: “God’s power is limited by human freedom; for without freedom God’s justice would not be present within history” (p. 77). Whatever the other merits of this assertion, YHWH certainly makes no such concession here! In positing at least a semblance of a rationale for God’s permission of evil, and in reading the rest of the speeches in such a way as to relieve all doubts as to God’s goodness or power, Gutiérrez succumbs to the temptation–despite having valiantly and successfully resisted for the rest of the book–of reading Job as a theodicy.

To put it more simply, the problem is that on Gutiérrez’s reading these speeches dispel all the tension between God and Job. Although Job does relent, in the end, although he abandons his protest and is satisfied to have seen the LORD, there is no reason to think he does so (as Gutiérrez would have it) because all his questions have been laid to rest. In fact, on neither side have all the questions been answered: Job doesn’t know why the innocent suffer, and God doesn’t know for sure whether Job’s faith is entirely disinterested. But, as Brueggemann puts it, “they make do in their honesty, neither giving in excessively to the other” (Theology of the Old Testament, 393). Which more deeply reflects the conflicted reality of all attempts to face up to the suffering of the innocent this side of humanity’s final perfection, while God’s all-embracing goodness remains something impossible to grasp, impossible to clearly see, but something to be hoped for.

20 September 2008 | Comments (0)
Tags: Evil, Gustavo Gutierrez, Job, Walter Brueggemann