Attack With Love

“The drama of the book of Job is a vigorous, artistic invitation in Israel to rethink in radical ways the theodicy explanations that over time were undoubtedly reduced to moralistic clichés. Over times Israel had become too familiar with God, too much able to predict and control, so that ethics was programmed into a series of prepackaged consequences. The massive artistic, intellectual effect of Job is to undermine such certitudes and to reopen life with God to slippage and wonder and risk. In the end the truth of God is amazingly large, mysterious, stubborn, and elusive and cannot be reduced to a safe set of moralisms that are calculating and controlling. The student thus is invited to reflect upon theodicy settlements in Proverbs and theodicy crisis in Job as a format from which to consider the moral certitudes (religious and secular) in our own time and place, and the ways in which lived reality continually erodes the authority of such absolutisms.” B. Birch, W. Brueggemann, T. Fretheim, and D. Petersen, A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament (2005), 403.