by Peter Kreeft
1. The Problem of God
The problem of God in Job is not whether God exists. Only the fool says in his heart that there is no God, and he says it not because reason and evidence tell him but because his deceptive, wish-fulfillment desires tell him to pretend there is no God so that he can sin without punishment. (That is the psychoanalysis of both the psalmist [Ps 14] and the apostle [Rom 1:18-2:1]).
Nor is the problem of God who or what God is in himself. That is the problem of the theologian or the philosopher. Job’s problem is: What (or rather who) is God to me? What is the relationship?
There are two problems of God in Job: the first concerns Job and the search; the second concerns God and the finding. The first problem is why Job is in a right God-relationship in his searching. The second is why God, once found, proves totally adequate to answer all of Job’s questions and agonies even without answering any of Job’s questions and even before he gives Job back all the worldly goods he took away. There are two puzzling sections in Job that pinpoint these two problems. The first is Job 42:7, where God approves Job’s heretical and blasphemous words and disapproves the orthodox and pious words of the three friends. The second is Job 42:1-6, where Job, the most demanding and impatient and hard-to-satisfy man in the Bible, is totally satisfied.
The first puzzling phrase reads as follows: “When Yahweh had said all this to Job, he turned to Eliphaz of Teman. ‘I burn with anger against you and your two friends’, he said ‘for not speaking truthfully about me as my servant Job has done.’ ” (Job 42:7). But Job, by his own admission, uttered “wild words” (Job 6:2-3). H thought God was his enemy, thought God was inventing grievances against him without cause, and even thought God would lose a fair court case against him! How awful that would be: to win in court against God. What hope would there be then? Our only hope, as Kierkegaard so arrestingly puts it in a sermon title, is “On the Edification Implied in the Thought That Over Against God We Are Always in the Wrong”. If the source of all right is himself wrong, then there is no right reality for us to be reconciled with, to hope in, to find our way back home to. Job’s words are foolish, wild, even blasphemous. How can God say he spoke truthfully?
And how can God say the three friends did not speak the truth? Every single thing they say can be found in dozens of passages elsewhere in the Bible. They defend God; they are pious; they are orthodox. Their viewpoint is simply “let God be true and every man a liar” (Rom 3:4). Their desire is simply “arise, O God, let not man prevail” (Ps 9:19). How can this be false and Job true?
One “solution” taken by radical interpreters is that Job was written by a heretic and contradicts the rest of the Bible. (Everyone who says that really seems to mean that the rest of the Bible is heretical because it contradicts Job.) The theory is that Job is really right and God really wrong, Job the hero and God the villain. This is the same folly, of course, that job dallies with in imagining his winning his suit against God in court. There has to be a better way.
There is. Notice carefully what God says in Job 42:7—not that Job spoke truth but that he spoke truthfully, and not that the three friends did not speak truth but that they did not speak truthfully, as Job did. What is the difference between speaking truth and speaking truthfully?
It is the difference between a noun and an adverb, between truth in the content of what is spoken and truth in the act of speaking itself. Whether or not you speak the truth is an objective question, whereas whether or not you speak truthfully is a subjective question, a personal question. Job did not always speak the truth, but he always spoke truthfully. His words were not always in the truth, but he was. He had the quality of truth, emeth, fidelity, in his being and his acting. He had what Kierkegaard called (somewhat misleadingly) “truth as subjectivity” (in Concluding Unscientific Postscript).
What does this mean specifically? Job sticks to God, retains intimacy, passion, and care, while the three friends are satisfied with correctness of words, “dead orthodoxy”. Job’s words do not accurately reflect God, as the three friends’ words do, but Job himself is in a true relationship to God, as the three friends are not: a relationship of heart and soul, life-or-death passion. No one can be truly related to God without life-or-death passion. To be related to God in a way that is only finite, partial, held back, or calculating is not truly to be related to God. God is everything or nothing. Job thinks God has let him down, so that in a sense God has become nothing to him. That is a mistake, but Job at least knows it must be all or nothing. God is infinite love, and the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Job’s love for God is infected with hate, but the three friends’ love for God is infected with indifference. Job stays married to God and throws dishes at him; the three friends have a polite nonmarriage, with separate bedrooms and separate vacations. The family that fights together stays together.
There is a second reason why Job spoke truthfully about God. The most obvious and important difference between the speeches of Job and the speeches of the three friends is one that escapes our notice for the sa him. Thason the capital letters naming the continents escape our notice on maps, and Poe’s “purloined letter” (in the famous short story by that name), exposed to plain view, escaped the notice of the police who were carefully searching every nook and cranny for it: it is too big, too close up, too obvious, like the nose on your face (mine, anyway). It took Martin Buber to point it out to me, and this one discovery suddenly lit up the whole book of Job as no other could: the difference is simply that the three friends speak about God while Job speaks to God.
This is speaking “truthfully” because it is speaking to God as God is, that is, as always present Person, not as absent object. Speaking to God in the second person is one person closer to the first person singular that I Am is in his own essential being than speaking about him in the third person. Buber says, “God is the Thou who can never become an It.” He also says, “God can only be addressed, not expressed”, for the same reason.
Suppose I am in your presence, and you start talking to a third party about me, ignoring me. Not only is this highly insulting; it is also metaphysically inaccurate. It treats the real as the unreal; it treats presence as if it were absence. And that is what the three friends always do. They never pray, only preach. Job is always praying, like Augustine in the Confessions: every word is uttered either to God or in his presence. That is why there is such blinding light even amid the confusion: Job insists on standing in the presence of God, who is light. The three friends try to generate their own light by reasoning about God as a proper concept. God is right there all the time, between Job and the friends, so to speak, as the fifth party around the dung heap. Job believes this fundamental truth and therefore speaks truthfully (that is, to the God who really is present), while the three friends act as if God were absent. For the second person (“you”) means presence, while the third person (“he”) means absence.
The most practical lesson we can learn from Job—the most practical lesson we can ever learn from anything—is “the practice of the presence of God”, the simplest and most fundamental exercise in realism and in sanctity. The two are identical, for both mean simply living in reality, not illusion, acting as if what is real is real. And the most fundamental reality is the God who is present.
The other puzzling passage is Job’s reply to God’s speech:
This was the answer Job gave to Yahweh:
I know that you are all-powerful:
What you conceive, you can perform.
I am the man who obscured your designs
with my empty-headed words.
I have been holding forth on matters I cannot understand,
on marvels beyond me and my knowledge. . . .
I knew you then only by hearsay,
But now, having seen you with my own eyes,
I retract all I have said, and in dust and ashes I repent (Job 42:1-6).
Job is the most demanding man in the Bible, the “doubting Thomas” of the Old Testam
ent. Why is this Jewish Socrates suddenly satisfied? God did not answer any of his questions. Instead, all he seemed to say was “What do you know, anyway?hat right do you have to think you can know the answer, anyway? Who do you think you are, anyway?” Even an ordinary man would be disappointed at such an answer; how much more disappointed should this arch-questioner be?
Let us conduct a little thought experiment to find out why Job was satisfied. Suppose that God had given Job what job expected instead of what Job got. Suppose that God answered every one of Job’s questions with total clarity and total adequacy. (God could certainly do that if he wanted.) Suppose God wrote the world’s definitive theology book for Job. Now, what do you think would have been the result?
I think I know, because I think I know Job. Job would have been satisfied for about five seconds after he finished the book, or perhaps even five minutes. But then more questions would have arisen, like the Hydra’s heads: questions about questions, questions about answers, questions about interpretations of God’s answers. Every answer produces ten more questions to a mind like Job’s, that is, the mind of a first-rate, honest, and passionate philosopher. Then the intellectual warfare would have started again. The hundreds of little soldiers coming out of Job’s head would have to be met by a hundred big warriors coming out of God. And, of course, they would be met. But then there would be another hundred, or a thousand. The human mind has an infinite capacity to wonder. Nothing can stop it, not even answers, for each answer elicits ten more questions. Eventually we would have an intellectual battlefield strewn to capacity with the corpses of slain ideas, refuted misunderstandings, a mile high. They would accumulate exponentially, and they would stand between Job and God, as they stood between Job’s three friends and God. The danger of truth is that it gets obscured by truths. There is only one way to overcome that danger, and God took that way with Job. The way consists of two parts. The first part is negative: not to tell the whole truth in words, not to give answers, even true and adequate answers, not to cut off one of the Hydra’s heads lest it sprout two new ones. Thus, God does not answer Job’s question; God answers Job instead, and that is the second part, the heart part. Just as Jesus constantly answers the questioner instead of the question, since he sees that the real question is the questioner, not the question, the heart and not the words, so here God answers Job’s deepest heart quest: to see God face to face; to see Truth, not truths; to meet Truth, not just to know it. Job is satisfied with the only answer that could possibly have satisfied him, in time or in eternity, the only answer that can satisfy us in time or in eternity, the only answer that can overcome boredom and eventual “vanity of vanities”, the definitive answer to Ecclesiastes, as to the three friends: the Answerer, not the answer.
“I had heard of you with the hearing of the ear; but now my eye sees you.” This is the climax to Job. This is the most important verse in the book. This explains everything that happened, why God brought Job through the whole dung heap: to this end. This is the end of life, the meaning of life, the purpose of life. This is the solution to the problem of evil, and the solution to the problem of the conflict between faith and experience, and the solution to the problem of the meaning of life, and the solution to the problem of my identity, and the solution to the problem of God, of who God is for me. This is the answer to everything. No one, not even Job, can ever be dissatisfied with this answer. No one will have any more questions once he sees this answer. No one will ever feel let down, cheated, or disappointed with this answer, no matter how demanding and dissatisfied he is with everything else. This is the answer that fills the infinite, God-shaped vacuum that is the human heart. This is God.
div>
The greatest question ever asked and the greatest answer ever given, in my opinion, are in an incident near the end of the life of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Thomas was alone in the chapel, he thought (but his friend Reginald was watching and swore under oath that he saw and heard these events), and praying before the altar. A voice came from the mouth of Christ on the crucifix: “You have written well of me, Thomas. What will you have as a reward?” It was the same question with which Jesus began his public ministry, in John’s Gospel, the great question: “What do you want?” (Jn 1:38). And the equally great answer Thomas gave to God, the answer that puts a lump in my throat and a bird in my heart every time I say it, was, “Only yourself, Lord”. The theologian who found thousands of answers—more answers, and more adequate answers, than any other theologian in history—wants only one thing, “the one thing needful” that Mary wanted and Jesus wanted Martha to want (Lk 10:42): himself. That is why even Job was satisfied. He did not get what he thought he wanted, but he got what he really wanted. He did not get what his head and his consciousness thought they wanted, but he got what his heart and his deep unconscious knew they wanted, the thing we all want. We cannot help it: God made us that way. Only one key fits that lock; only one Romeo satisfies that Juliet. “Deep calls unto deep”—only infinity can marry infinity. Just as no animal was adequate for Adam (Gen 2:18-24), no creature is adequate for the human heart, and a fortiori no concept. Concepts are pictures, and men cannot marry pictures (though many of us try and relate more to the picture we have in our mind of what we dream our spouse or friend should be than to the real other who bursts the bounds of all pictures). Job is satisfied because all life is courtship, and now he finally gets married. The Beatific Vision that awaits all believers in Heaven is granted to Job for a moment on earth.
It is the difference between secondhand knowledge and firsthand knowledge, between “the hearing of the ear” and “the seeing of the eye”. Job had heard about God, but now he sees God. It is as if you had never met your father because he was away in the French Foreign Legion, and he sent letters to you that were transmitted and interpreted to you by your mother (Mother Church), and then one day he stepped through the door and said, “Here I am”. Suppose the letters were perfectly accurate and adequate and interpreted perfectly by your mother. The difference would still be infinite between “the hearing of the ear” and “the seeing of the eye”. One moment of his presence would be worth infinitely more than all the letters in the world.
Saint Augustine, in his sermon “On the Pure Love of God”, imagines God coming to you with a question similar to the one he asked Saint Thomas. The point is a kind of self-test to find out whether you have “the pure love of God”, that is, whether you arc obeying the first and greatest commandment, to love God with your whole heart and soul, in that deep, obscure center of your being where your “fundamental option” decides your eternal destiny. Augustine supposes that God proposed to you a deal and said, “I will give you anything you want. You can possess the whole world. Nothing will be impossible for you. You will have infinite power. Nothing will be a sin, nothing forbidden. You will never die, never have pain, never have anything you do not want and always have anything you do want—except for just one thing: you will never see my face.” Would you take that deal? If not, you have the pure love of God. For look what you just did: you gave up the world, and more—all possible worlds, all imagined worlds, all desired worlds—just for God. Augustine asks, “Did a chill arise in your heart when you heard the words ‘you will never see my face’?” That chll is the most precious thing in you; that is the pure love of God.
Job felt that chill throughout his sufferings. The thing he keeps talking about is not his sores or his lost possessions or even his lost family but rather his lost God. Apparently he was Godforsaken; apparently he would never see God’s face. That is the tiling he longed for most, even if it meant death. He said in effect what Augustine said in the Confessions: “Let me die, only let me see Thy face, lest I die with longing to see it.” (Or, in another translation, “Let me die, lest I die; only let me see Thy face.”)
Only one thing in life is guaranteed: not happiness, not the pursuit of happiness, not liberty, not even life. The only thing we are absolutely guaranteed is the only thing we absolutely need: God. And wi
sdom consists essentially in absolutely wanting that which we absolutely need, in conforming our wants to reality. Job is incomparably wiser than Ecclesiastes because of that. We must identify with Job, not Ecclesiastes, for Ecclesiastes’ vanity is the philosophy of Hell, while Job’s search is the philosophy of Purgatory, and everyone graduates from the University of Purgatory with honors into Heaven.
SONG OF SONGS:
Life as Love
Before I write anything about Song of Songs, I must confess and confront a problem: I am way over my head, out of my depth, playing Little League baseball in a major league park. This book has been the favorite of the greatest saints and mystics, such as Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint John of the Cross, and Saint Thomas Aquinas, who was writing a commentary on it when he died. (How fitting—God cut short the wedding photographer’s work when the honeymoon suite was ready.) How can I play in their park?
I cannot, of course. I simply have no solution to the problem. So let us rush in anyway where angels fear to tread. Let us be fools together. We may not be able to play in their league, but we can play the same game. Song of Songs is about love, of course, and love is for everyone.
Another problem at the beginning: this is the only book in the Bible (except for the shorter version of Esther) that never once mentions God.1 How can this book be the saints’ favorite?
That question is much easier to answer: because God is everywhere in this book, symbolically. The bridegroom, Solomon, the Solar King, is a symbol for God, and his chosen bride a symbol for the soul, or the chosen people, Israel, or the Church, the new Israel. Symbolically interpreted, this book is the most intimate book in the Bible. It describes the ultimate purpose of life, which we found at the end of Job: the meeting and marriage between ourselves and God. This is the highest and holiest and happiest hope of the human heart, the thing we were all born hungering for, hunting for, longing for. This is the last chapter of life’s story, the point and purpose of it all.