RE: [asa] (Job) Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense_Except_in_the_Light_of_Evolution

"Nevertheless I am sympathetic to a liberal commentator I once read..."

Oh oh, sounds like you've been listening to Satan, like I've been... ;-)

...Bernie

-----Original Message-----
From: mrb22667@kansas.net [mailto:mrb22667@kansas.net]
Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2009 5:17 PM
To: Dehler, Bernie
Cc: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: RE: [asa] (Job) Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense_Except_in_the_Light_of_Evolution

Quoting "Dehler, Bernie" <bernie.dehler@intel.com>:

>
> That's like a child asking his parent 'why' and they say 'because I said so.'
> We know from experience as a child that we hate than answer, and from
> experience as an adult that we sometimes say it when we don't have a good
> reason or don't want to consider the question because we are too tired... and
> sometimes the real reason isn't good.
>

..or another possibility is that the child isn't yet old enough to understand
why he can't do something and meanwhile he just has to trust his parents about
it. The difference being that we never "mature" to a point of independence from
God.

Bernie writes:
> In Job's case, God never told him the real reason, but the reader was told:
> it was to test the faith of Job even if he is tortured. And he was tortured
> to the max- up to the point of almost losing life. How would Job have
> responded if God told him the real reason behind the torture? I wonder if
> that would have made him lose his allegiance to God.

That is another profound issue raised in Job: how much (or little?) does it
take in life to make you curse God? Not as much for Job's wife, apparently (who
'merely' lost her family). Job holds out, though, and clings to trust.

The cheesy ending tacked on where Job gets everything back x 2 seems to me to
end the profundity of the story where the author finally caves in and caters to
the popular prosperity gospel notion that faithful people ultimately get their
reward here and now. We know from the rest of Scripture and from life itself
that this just isn't true in any kind of universal sense. But in special cases,
God will do what God will do. Nevertheless I am sympathetic to a liberal
commentator I once read who suggested that last part of Job was tacked onto the
book by later redactors; a suggestion I found too tantalizing to completely
disregard.

--Merv

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Thu Aug 20 20:35:49 2009