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.
KIRKEGAARD, CHAMBERS AND BARTH
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.
• THE WAR
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?”
• THE NEGATION
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!”
• THE DESPAIR
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.”
• THE IRRATIONAL
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.”
• THE 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.
A POSTSCRIPT
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.
A SUMMARY
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.
ELIPHAZ, BILDAD, AND ZOPHAR
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.
THE ARGUMENT
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.
THE DEFENSE
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.
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.)
TRINITIES
Perhaps these arguments can be crystallized by analogy to the trinity of communication in which three steps are needed: intention, execution, and comprehension.
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
1. The first defense argues that man’s comprehension is limited.
2. The second defense argues that God’s execution is arbitrary.
3. 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
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
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
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 GOD WHO IS THERE
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.
• THE GOD WHO SPEAKS
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.
• THE GOD WHO EXAMINES
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):
• 29.. QUESTIONS ABOUT MAN’S ABILITY (CAN YOU..., HAVE YOU...?).
• 11.. QUESTIONS ABOUT MAN’S KNOWLEGE (DO YOU KNOW...?).
• 6... QUESTIONS ABOUT GOD’S ABILITY/KNOWLEGE (WHO CAN...?)
• 4... MISCELLANEOUS QUESTIONS.
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 meta-question, 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.
SUMMARY
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.
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1. Oswald Chambers, MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST (Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc., New York., 1935)
2. Oswald Chambers, BAFFLED TO FIGHT BETTER (Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566 Grand Rapids MI 49501, 1931)
3. 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.
4. God Questions Man's Knowlege
Job 38:4,6,17,18,19,24,28,29,33. Job 39:1,2.
5. God States His Ability and Knowledge
Job 38:5,8,25,36,41. Job 39:5.
6. Miscellaneous Questions
Job 38:2. Job 40:2,8. Job 41:11.
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Copyright © 1997 Rob Sheldon
