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The
Theodicy of the Book of Job
The Book of Job is surely one
of the greatest achievements of all literature. Whoever wrote it was beyond
doubt not just a mystic but also a writer of unbelievable imagination,
tenderness, observation and skill (to appreciate which these texts, and
indeed the whole book, should be read out loud). Job, sitting on a dung
hill, suffering the loss of wife, sons and daughters, family, wealth and
health, asks God to justify letting such evils happen to him. God will not
be put into the dock by anyone. Instead, he says to Job:
“I will
ask questions and you will answer.
Where
were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Who set its corner stone in place
When the morning stars sang together
And all the sons of God shouted aloud?
Who watched over the birth of the sea
When it burst in flood from the womb
When I wrapped it in a blanket of cloud
And cradled it in fog?
Have you descended to the springs of the sea
Or walked in the unfathomable deep?
Have the gates of death been revealed to you?
Have you ever seen the door-keepers of the place of darkness?
Have you comprehended the vast expanse of the world?
“Has the rain a father?
Who sired the drops of dew?
Whose womb gave birth to the ice?
And who was the mother of the frost from heaven
Which lays a stony cover over the waters
And freezes the expanse of the oceans?
Can you bind the cluster of the Pleiades
Or loose Orion’s belt?
Do you know when the mountain goats are born?
Do you attend the wild doe when she is in labour?
Do you count the months when they carry their young,
When they crouch down to open their wombs
And bring their offspring to the birth?
Did you give the horse his strength?
Did you clothe his neck with a mane?
Did you make him quiver like a locust’s wings?
Is it for a man who disputes with the Almighty to be stubborn?
Should he that argues with God answer back?
Then Job answered the Lord:
I know that thou canst do all things
And that no purpose is beyond thee.
But I have spoken of great things which I have not understood.
Therefore I melt away
I repent in dust and ashes”.
The writer of Job is Old
Testament through and through. For him (or her –the imagery of the book is
very female throughout) God is the doer of all things, both good and evil.
Like for the prophets who unhesitatingly say that God himself directly
creates evil to punish Israel whenever she like a faithless wife abandons
his ways; like for the authors of
the books of Numbers, Deuteronomy and Judges who with no theological qualms
or misgivings whatsoever say God brings the most terrible evils upon the
men, women and children of Israel’s enemies, takes their land off them and
reduces whichever survivors there might be to drawers of water and hewers
of wood. The writer of Job describes God as himself responding to the jibes
of Satan by killing Job’s sons and daughters with a whirlwind, having the
Sabeans swooping down on his herdsmen and putting them to the sword and
sending sheet lightning to burn up his shepherds and his sheep, and letting
Satan smite Job himself with running sores from head to foot. We are
intellectually powerless before God says the writer.
“Indeed I know this for the
truth, that no man can win his case with
God.
He destroys the blameless and the wicked alike...
God himself has put me in the wrong
and he has drawn his net around me...
The hand of God has touched me “[1]
There then we have one
answer. What God does, God does, and that’s all there is to it.
“Then the Lord answered Job
out of the tempest.
I will ask questions and you shall answer.
Dare you deny that I am just?
Or put me in the wrong that you may be right?
Have you an arm like God’s arm,
Can you thunder with a voice like his?”
In a way it is the response a
super-power makes when challenged by lesser beings. Like Stalin sneering at
the news he’d been challenged by the Pope: “Where are his battalions?” Like a contemporary US president: “Do
you think I’m going to let American soldiers answer to charges in some poxy
international court of justice?” For all the insights, for all the sheer
incredible imagery and beauty of language, the writer of Job is an Old
Testament writer. That is why the Book of Job as a theodicy is a
disappointment.[2]
The Job writer is limited by his
understanding of his god. Power is what matters -like ‘Ulster will fight
and Ulster will be right’. Might is right. It is not yet the fullness of
time. The ‘promised inheritance...God’s better plan’ (Hebrews 11.39f) has
not yet arrived -the moment when God made himself nothing (eanton ekenwsev), taking the nature of a
slave.[3]
So that escape hatch is closed to us. We cannot as Catholics throw up our
hands as a gesture of our helplessness to understand and make do with that.
Our Catholic faith tells us there are no contradictions. That God is good
and can do no evil is both our faith and our philosophy.
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