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By Root 1525 0

has spoken rightly, God isn’t saying, “Eliphaz et al. have given false information about me, but Job has given true information.” Maybe God is saying, “It is not right for fallible, limited creatures to speak of me the way Elihu et al. have. But Job—in his questioning and wrestling with me, in his refusal to give up faith, on the one hand, or to shut up and listen, on the other, in his active engagement in the conversation, in his refusal to acquiesce to unsatisfying answers—has spoken rightly of me, as a true and honest human being should. That’s what I’m looking for. That’s what it’s about.”5

Reading the Bible this way is far inferior to the way many of us learned—inferior, that is, if we’re expecting the Bible to be a constitution. But if we’re expecting it to be a community library, the record of a vibrant conversation, and a stimulus to ongoing conversation, it is beautiful, I’d say.6

We’ve mentioned the many human voices in the text of Job. One more question needs to be asked. What about God’s voice, which we encounter in the introduction, striking rather strange bargains with the Satan, and at the end, flinging questions as a machine gun spits out shells?7 Can we trust God’s voice to be God’s voice? Or is even “God” a character in the story too, not the actual God necessarily, but the imagined God, the author’s best sense of God, the fictional character playing God for the sake of this dramatic work of art? This is a powerful and perhaps terrifying question.

We might answer, “If the Bible says God said it, then God said it and that settles it.” But wouldn’t that answer imply, “Shut up and listen”? Wouldn’t that shut down any conversation? Why include these other voices, if only one voice counts?

We might say, “It’s all just talk. ‘God’ is just a fictional character, a poorly camouflaged projection of human anxiety, aggression, and desire. The only voices are imaginary voices. There is no God, there is no Word, there is no revealing, just human words upon words upon words.” But wouldn’t that answer also neutralize the conversation? What good is it? Why does it matter?

But we might say, “God is indeed a character in the text, a representation, not the real God. But the same is true of Job, the Satan, Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and Elihu.” The real Job (if there was one—my sense is that the Job story is a kind of archetypal theological opera and has no intention of portraying what we would call a historical event) is represented in the text by a word, a name—that’s not the real Job. The whole text, in this sense, is a representation or construction, but not just a construction, any more than a wedding vow or a court summons or a love poem is just words. To say the text is inspired is to say that people can encounter God—the real God—in a story full of characters named Job, Eliphaz, Bildad, the Satan, and even God. Through stories like this, gathered in a library like this—not articles and amendments enumerated in a constitution—God can self-reveal, so that the Word of God, the speaking and self-revealing of God, can burn like fire in the branches, twigs, and leaves of the text.8

All this takes on an even more amazing feel if we take seriously our belief in God’s Spirit. The Holy Spirit, whom we see hovering over the primal creation in Genesis, evoking glorious possibilities of order and life from the swirling chaos and darkness, is the same Spirit running like a current through the characters Job, Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, Elihu, and God. And, we might add, this is the same Spirit evoking the text from the chaos of human writers in a vigorous culture. And this is the same Spirit hovering over us now, running like a current through us today, at this moment, evoking understanding as we seek to understand, to know, to learn, drawing us like an orchestral conductor into the holy conversation and symphony of the sacred Scriptures. And this is the same Spirit by whom Jesus is conceived, filled, and empowered, as we will consider in more detail in an upcoming question.

In this light, then, the Bible truly is enough—meaning