A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [44]
All of their speeches are highly poetic and, to contemporary ears, long-winded and pious. Whether it’s Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, or Elihu speaking, they say exactly the kinds of pious things we’d expect—what we might call conventional religious wisdom or predictable platitudes. Job sounds like the doubter and heretic; they sound like they’ve gotten good grades in seminary and studied Deuteronomy and Proverbs in great detail.
Then comes the surprising conclusion to the book, in which God finally intervenes and makes a long speech that consists of a dazzling blizzard of questions—not propositions, not theses, not answers or explanations, but questions. And then what does God say—“Bildad, Eliphaz, Elihu, and Zophar were right, Job. You should have listened to them”? No, God says the opposite: “Job has spoken what is right about me, and Eliphaz and company have been a pack of pious blowhards speaking nonsense.” And then God says, “You guys better ask Job to pray for you, so I won’t treat you as a bunch of fools deserve to be treated.”
Now, note what God doesn’t do—he doesn’t go back and explain the deal struck with the Satan in the first chapter. If that explanation is supposed to help us, the readers of the story, why wasn’t it offered to the poor protagonist of the story? Perhaps for the author(s) of Job, that whole explanation for Job’s suffering is thus dismissed right along with the pious platitudes of Job’s so-called friends. Perhaps?
Now, all this raises a fascinating question. God has just told us that a large proportion of what is uttered in the book of Job is false and foolish. Yet we are taught that the book of Job, being part of the Bible, is the Word of God and is inspired by God. Does that mean that God inspired the introduction and conclusion, but not the middle, where the pious blowhards speak? Or does it mean that God inspired the pious blowhards’ false statements? Or that God was pretending to inspire that part, but was crossing the divine fingers behind the divine back, so as to come out later on to say, “I was only kidding in that part”?
Obviously, there isn’t an easy way out of this problem in the constitutional approach to the Bible, in which God’s message is supposed to be found in the plain words of the biblical text. We need a way, a passage, out of this whole method of reading the Bible, and I think the book of Job gives it to us here.
If we ask, “Where does revelation occur?” we can’t answer, “Independently in every verse of the book of Job.” If we say that, God is revealing nonsense half the time and later contradicts what had been revealed earlier. No, revelation occurs not in the words and statements of individuals, but in the conversation among individuals and God, we might say. It doesn’t simply occur in the black symbols on white paper; it also occurs in the white space between letters and words and sentences—in the unspoken interactions, tensions, and resolutions between the voices in the text. Revelation doesn’t simply reside in this or that particular verse of Job like cereal in a box, waiting to be opened and poured out into a bowl. Instead, it emerges through the whole story of Job, through the conversation that unfolds between these many voices, like meaning in a novel or perhaps even the punch line in a joke. It creeps up on you, sneaks its way into your thought process, and then when least expected, it surprises you; in the words of Emily Dickinson, it comes in “slant,” not direct, and “dazzles gradually.”3
In this way, even the falsity of Job’s friends’ statements plays a part in the true revelation that comes through the book, as does the story of God’s deal with the devil in the beginning and its conspicuous omission at the end. The meaning of the revelation that we carry away after reading the text takes shape in relation to the long-winded and false arguments that we find in its long middle section. Revelation thus happens through the course of the conversation, in the tension of the argument, through the interplay of statement