Job got a raw deal! In common parlance today he was ‘screwed’. Here was a guy living by the book, considered righteous and wise, who suddenly finds himself losing everything. He’s losing it all for apparently no known reason. The story is an old one. It’s one we hear about even today where an upright guy loses a child, or a business, or suffers a severe set back. It is a situation where bad things happen to good people. We had a terrible example here in Florida in this month of February. A 12-year-old girl abducted and murdered. The anguish cries of everyone was “Why?” This is the common reaction to this situation and the story from the Old Testament.
I got into this “Job” thing due to an ’eminent’ professor teaching us how this story relates to doctrine of creation. Now there’s a reach, if I ever heard one. What does a guy “who loses it all” got to do with creation, which is composed of everything of beauty and good that surrounds us? This professor is eminent, not because he has been named so by some academic institution. He is because he is able to get and hold the attention and interest, at a little after 6 A.M., on Thursday mornings of a group of 20 to 25 men of ages from 25 to 80, from all walks of life. He is eminent or distinguished or notable in another capacity, or was so, as a physician and surgeon. But for these attendees his eminence comes from keeping them interested enough to keep returning to see how a guy like Job has anything to do with creation. Except of course that Job, like creation, had it all, and then his went to nowhere.
Another unusual fact is that I, who always considered myself as a ‘rational animal’ or reasonable man and who pursued ‘knowledge’ where ever it could be found, is looking forward to sitting in on this discussion with enthusiasm and interest. My past did not include any pursuit of biblical studies. In fact my only connection was limited to studies where parts of it were required by the given curricula. Then later watching a witness in a courtroom as they placed their hands on the Book and swore “to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God” But that has changed. The literature of the bible has become a world of new learning for me.
I like the idea someone wrote of comparing it to the Sunday newspaper. That’s the edition with many sections starting with news, international, national, and local, business & money, food, review of books of all genre, music, art, etc. So too this book has its variety of literature from prose reports of past events to the music and poetry of the Psalms, to the business of the laws and dieting. But in the past is saw it strictly as a semi-doctrinal support for (Roman) Christian doctrine and teaching.
After writing the above it was with surprise and pleasure that I found in the present edition of the Atlantic Monthly (March ’04) a writer I admire using the same analogy re the Bible only on a broader scale. It is another example of the universality of the book and it depth of learning. The writer is Cullen Murphy and his style is one of satire and humor. He uses the example of the many varieties of literatures in the Bible to compose a “Next Testament” which will include writings of this past millennium. As he says”… everyone agrees on is that whatever its nature, the Bible is collection many bits of writing, representing many kinds of literature, and that its various pieces came into existence at different moments over more than a millennium.”
One of the reasons for my altered outlook to the Bible is the author Thomas Cahill. He became famous for his popular non-fiction book entitled “How the Irish Saved Civilization”. What a catchy title ! I had to read it just because of that since if it said “How the Irish Saved Murphy’s Saloon” I could understand it but “Civilization”? He made his case quite well in showing how the monasteries and abbeys started by St. Patrick led to the copying of the ancient Greek and Latin writings that became the classics of later ages. All of this was done in what is called the Dark Ages when literacy was unheard of and looking back at such literature by the men of that age was not done. So he convinced me he could keep his word and proved what his title proclaimed. I was thus easily led to his next search, which was a book entitled “The Gift of the Jews”. Some would look at that title like I looked at his Irish title and fancy that he was referring to their ‘doing well in business’. But it was not that. It was a new look at an old Book and the culture that created it. It concluded with lots of citations and evidence that a thing such as democracy would never have come into being with out the monotheism and individualism of the Jewish Culture. “We are the undeserving recipients of this history of the Jews, excessive, miraculous development of ethical monotheism without which our ideas of equality and personalism are unlikely to have come into being and surely would have matured in the way that they have.” The Bible he goes on…”can be read as a jumble of unrelated texts, given a false and superficial unity by redactors of the exilic period and later. But this is to ignore not only the powerful emotional and spiritual effect that much of the Bible has on readers, even on readers who would rather not be so moved, but also its cumulative impact on whole societies… Nor can we imagine the great liberation movements of modern history without reference to the Bible.” He points to the different movements that relied upon the language of the bible like the civil rights movements, democracy itself, etc. He made the bible to me a larger vista than I had heretofore beheld it. So as surely as he convinced me of the idea that the Irish saved in part the entire civilization so he convinced me that knowledge of man without reference to the Bible is illusory.
My time being more available to do as I wish, I thus began the undertaking and so it is that I arrived at this juncture of attempting to discover how the book of Job is related to ‘doctrine of creation’. Cahill does note that the book of Job epitomized the idea of individual versus God, which was new. Prior to that the idea was that a person was a part of a group, a tribe, or a clan or he was nothing. He put it this way. “As with the spiritualization of the journey (Exodus) and of religious obligation, the idea of the individual – the single spirit – begins to take hold, and the idea that makes its way with great difficulty into the world of groups, tribes, and nations, in which all identity and validation comes from solidarity with a larger entity.” Cullen Murphy in his essay refers to the Book as “a category unto itself: a huge swath of contemporary literature implicitly evokes Job-be it the Job who accepted his fate as the Lord cast woe upon him or, more strikingly, the Job who angrily challenged the Lord and His justice.”
Cahill in his book muses, “Why must the just man suffer? For if sin and retribution are upon the individual, what is the meaning of unmerited suffering?” Which questions bring us to the example of Job. Here is a good man who suffers without sin. That poses a question, a question, which has no answer. “They have reached that mysterious core of human life where one heart in pain speaks to another – and the other can respond in sympathy but without an answer. If there is a reason, it is a reason beyond reason.” In the story as told in Book of Job his friends are convinced that he is suffering because he has sinned and should therefore repent. Their reason, only a just man receives the gifts of worldly success and now Job having attained them must have sinned in order to lose them. It is enough that the story creates these unanswerable questions but to then to contend that some how the story relates to doctrine of creation is even more a challenge.
In the closing chapters of the book God speaks to Job. He offers no explanation as to his individual crisis. Job has not cursed God, as his wife suggested. He has wished he wasn’t born and that all this had not happen. He struggles with trying to answer that unanswerable question and his struggle is like wrestling. It brings a closer relation to the other party in just “wrestle” with his image of God. Now where does creation come in?
Another class was held with our eminent professor and it resulted in his pointing out how creation ‘comes into the picture’. God takes Job on a journey of how things got to where they are now as you look around you. He acts like a parent teaching a child why He is not like you. In fact some parts are a bit humorous when he ask questions like ‘Can you make the waters stop from overflowing, the stars from shining, etc.?’ Leading him and us to see our image of God, our image of justice, and all are images based on finite and material sources. The Lord in Job uses creation to encourage humility, the limits of our understanding. It is not however saying that reason in science and theology is unimportant. In fact it is reason alone which can tell us that the question is incomprehensible. It takes Faith and humility to accept that. So the doctrine of creation plays its part in the story by showing us why the answers we look for are incomprehensible. The power of the Creator is incomprehensible so too then, some of the things He seemingly allows.
When not in class as noted herein we keep busy in many ways. The weather has not been conducive to our daily walks since what seems like summer when you look north still is cold for us. We continue in our reading and such. We even continue our piano playing now down to four times a month. Our visitor’s log is filling up and March looks like a busy month at the McSorley’s Inn, at least for meals. We have the pleasure most of the time of having big Mike sleeping with us as he awaits his house to be built. I continue to add more names to my little black book and they continue to have ‘M.D’. after their names. Most recently the care has been required at both ends, a foot beat up by a lawn mower and an eyelid that is now said to have dandruff! Until next time, Pax tecum!