The Bible and Me Part V - Job

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

[The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question]
[The Bible and Me Part II - Creation]
[The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy]
[The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition]

After concluding that the creation stories at the beginning of the Bible probably weren't meant to be taken entirely literally (see Part I and Part II of this series), the next bit of the Bible I started to wonder about (although not until some time later) was the book of Job (pronounced Joeb).

Job is the story of a man who has everything, but then loses it all - his possessions, his family and his health - almost overnight. He ends up sitting on an ash heap, covered in sores and scraping himself with bits of broken pottery. Job is portrayed as a good man: he is kind and generous and has always looked out for those who are less fortunate than himself. The book mostly consists of the dialog between Job and his friends as they try to make sense of what has happened to him - or more specifically, as his "friends" try to blame him for it and work out what he's done wrong to deserve it, while Job defends himself, protests his innocence and blames God for his condition. It's a wonderful book, which tries to address the perplexing question of why - if God is just - bad things still seem to happen, often arbitrarily, to good people.

From a historical point of view though, there were 2 things in particular that puzzled me about this book:

First of all, the first part of the story contains a couple of discussions which take place in heaven between God and Satan. I'd often wondered how these discussions had come to be recorded! Obviously there were no people in heaven to hear what had taken place, so the only alternative - if it was historically true - was that God must have directly revealed this conversation to somebody afterwards.

The second thing that puzzled me about this book was ... most of the rest of the book! Specifically - as I mentioned just now - the book consists almost entirely of the dialog between Job and his friends. It is poetic, philosophical, rich, deep, ... and very long! Somebody had to have had a very good memory to have written it all down perfectly afterwards! Not impossible of course - within reason anyway - but it did make me wonder...

Once I became curious enough about this to do a bit more research, I discovered something else about the book that I hadn't noticed before - notably that it contains no indication of when these events are meant to have taken place. It simply starts with "In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job". Now, Uz was a real place, so you could argue that it has some historical context, but apart from that it is starting to sound rather a lot like, "Once upon a time"! When you also consider the structure and content of the rest of the book - which as I've said is nearly all poetic dialog between Job and his friends - it actually starts to look (to my mind anyway) a lot more like the script for a play, then like a proper historical account.

Other than my own uneducated observations, I have no particular reason to believe that Job is meant to be a play - if people even wrote scripts for plays back then - but no particular reason to believe that its contents are entirely historical either, and the evidence I've just discussed seems to suggest the contrary (and a great many Biblical scholars seem to agree). Job belongs firmly within the "wisdom" tradition of the Old Testament, along with Psalms, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. It has obviously been very carefully constructed and has been written primarily for philosophical, rather than historical purposes. Whether or not Job was a real person, and to what extent the story reflects the actual events of his life, we will probably never know, but this is very much secondary to the main purpose of this book, which is to wrestle with the deep questions of life and meaning in what sometimes appears to be a very chaotic and uncaring world.

[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]
[The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural]
[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]

Don't Let Your Understanding Get in the Way of Your Understanding

Christianity is for stupid people!

By that of course I mean that Christianity is for everyone, regardless of intellectual capacity.

As a moderately intellectual person myself though, I like to ask lots of questions and try very hard to reason things through. I have a high degree of confidence in my own reasoning skills which can cause me significant difficulties when I'm confronted by something I can't understand. This can make being a Christian quite difficult - because when it comes down to it I don't really understand my own faith! I like to pretend that I do and I can usually talk fairly intelligently about it in a way that sounds quite convincing to other people (or at least to some other people anyway!), but I always have a lot of questions in my own mind - sometimes nearer the surface than others - which I am not able to answer.

I have often noticed that happiness and/or goodness do not seem to correlate - at least not positively - with intellectual capacity. In fact, if a correlation was discovered, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that it runs the other way! The cleverest people I meet and the wisest people I meet are completely different groups. Just occasionally there is some overlap between the two!

I think there are (at least) two different kinds of "understanding". There is a logical/analytical kind of understanding which can be extremely useful, but can also come to some very wrong conclusions, particularly if it strays outside of the narrow range of problems to which it is particularly suited. Then there is wisdom. Wisdom comes from experience, from making good decisions (and sometimes bad ones), and from an instinctive or intuitive grasp of what is good, right and meaningful - from a deep inner sense of what really matters in life.

But how do you get wisdom? The book of Job (in the Old Testament part of the Bible) has this to say:

There is a mine for silver
and a place where gold is refined.
Iron is taken from the earth,
and copper is smelted from ore.
...
But where can wisdom be found?
Where does understanding dwell?
No mortal comprehends its worth;
it cannot be found in the land of the living.
The deep says, “It is not in me”;
the sea says, “It is not with me”.
...
                        - Job chapter 28

And what is wisdom anyway? The book of Proverbs says this:

The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom¹!

                        - Proverbs chapter 4 verse 5

A recursive definition if ever there was one!

Proverbs also says this though:

Does not wisdom call out?
Does not understanding raise her voice?
At the highest point along the way,
where the paths meet, she takes her stand;
beside the gate leading into the city,
at the entrance, she cries aloud:
...
                        - Proverbs chapter 8

So wisdom is both elusive and hard to find (according to Job) and shouting out in public to anyone who will listen (according to Proverbs). Both of these things are true - wisdom is sometimes best expressed through paradox! The logical mind doesn't like paradox and tries to resolve it. The wise heart knows how and when to accept it and hold both parts in tension.

I can't tell you where to find wisdom, but I can tell you that it is accessed primarily, not through the logical/analytical mind, but through the heart. Pascal spoke well when he said:

The heart has its reasons, that reason knows nothing of

Pascal also said:

It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason.

And the quote from Job earlier goes on to say:

The fear² of the Lord — that is wisdom,
and to shun evil is understanding.

Understanding in the sense of "reason" is a good thing and should be encouraged, developed, listened to and taken seriously, but reason will only get you so far. Understanding in the sense of "wisdom" will take you to a deeper level - a level that will show you what reason is for and teach you what to do with it.

Wisdom should be informed by, but not clouded by reason - don't let your "understanding" get in the way of your "understanding"!