Introduction
In the first lecture I offered a large-scale overview of the problem of
evil and suggested some markers that need to be put down as we try to
think soberly and Christianly about it. Evil, I argued, isn’t just a
philosophical problem, but a practical one; by trying to ignore or
belittle it, the Enlightenment tradition stands convicted of culpable
arrogance, while the critique of the Enlightenment offered in
postmodernity, important though it is, can’t offer any fresh solutions. I
concluded by suggesting that western democracy itself isn’t to be thought
of as an automatic solution to the problem of global evil, and that we
need to take seriously both the suprahuman powers of evil and the fact
that the line between good and evil runs not between ‘us’ and ‘them’ but
through every individual and every society.
I deliberately didn’t get
into any biblical exposition last time, principally because I wanted, as
it were, to take an initial walk around the problem as it presents itself
in today’s world, before asking what resources there are within the Jewish
and Christian traditions for approaching it. But tonight and next month I
shall make up for this by diving straight into the biblical material and
seeing what it has to offer. I am assuming that you either know the
material or can look it up later without difficulty; I am assuming, too,
that you will realise that one cannot say everything, or even do more than
scratch the surface, in a single lecture on the Old Testament and a single
one on the New.
The title of the present lecture reflects my perception
of one highly important feature of the Old Testament. What our western
philosophical tradition inclines us to expect, and indeed to ask for, is
an answer to the question, what can God say about evil? We want an
explanation. We want to know what evil really is, why it’s there in the
first place (or at least the second), why it’s been allowed to continue,
and how long this will go on for. Well, these questions are there in the
Bible, but frustratingly they don’t receive very full answers, and
certainly not the sort of answers that later philosophical traditions
would consider adequate. Taking the questions in reverse order: the Psalms
regularly ask how long this wretched state of affairs will go on for
(13.1; 79.5, etc.); there are dark hints about wickedness being allowed to
go on for a while so that when God judges that judgment will be seen to be
just (e.g. Gen. 15.16; Daniel 8.23); there are fleeting glimpses in
Genesis 3 and 6 of the place of evil as an intruder into God’s good
creation, though never satisfactorily set out; and the Old Testament
oscillates to and fro between evil as idolatry and consequent
dehumanisation, evil as what wicked people do, not least what they do to
the righteous, and evil as the work of the satan. None of these are
exactly explanations. The Bible simply doesn’t appear to want to say what
God can say about evil. That provides a powerful extra argument for the
point I made last time, that one Christian tradition has warned against
our trying to explain it at all.
What the Old Testament does is to
talk quite a lot, not about what God says about evil, but about what God
can do, is doing, and will do, about it. It may be possible that we can
work back from there to some account of what the Bible thinks evil is, and
why it’s there, but that’s seldom if ever the primary focus. Insofar as
the Old Testament offers a theodicy, it isn’t couched in the terms of
later philosophy, but in the narrative of God and the world and
particularly God and Israel.
In fact - and this is crucial, I think,
for understanding the Old Testament as a whole - what the Bible gives us
is both much less and much more than a set of dogmas and ethics, much less
and much more than a ‘progressive revelation’, as used to be said. The Old
Testament isn’t written in order simply to ‘tell us about God’ in the
abstract. It’s written - and this is true of most of the individual books
as well as the canonically shaped OT as we have it, both in the Hebrew
order of books and in the English one - it’s written to tell the story of
what God has done, is doing and will do about evil. This happens at
several different levels, and we shall explore them presently; but we must
grasp right from the outset that the underlying narrative logic of the
whole Old Testament works on the assumption that this is what it’s
about.
Let me just map the three levels for you so you can see where we
shall be going. First, the entire OT as we have it hangs like an enormous
door on a small hinge, the call of Abraham in Genesis 12, designed to
address the problem evident in Genesis 3 (the explusion from the garden),
Genesis 6 and 7 (the flood) and Genesis 11 (the tower of Babel). Then,
within that, we discover a second-order problem: Israel, the children of
Abraham, may be the carriers of the promise, but they turn out to be part
of the problem themselves. This unwinds through a massively long epic
narrative which ends with them going into exile. Then, within that again,
we discover a third level of the problem: not only as a nation, but also
as individuals, human beings in general and Israelites included within
that find themselves to be sinful, idolatrous, hard-hearted. Thus, though
‘the problem of evil’ often appears in the Old Testament in the familiar
form of wicked pagan nations oppressing God’s poor and defenceless people,
again and again the prophetic books (both the ones we think of as
‘historical’ and the ones we normally call ‘the prophets’) remind Israel
that the problem goes deeper than ‘us’ and ‘them’. The problem of the
individual, which in much western thought has been made central, is
presented in the Bible as a subset of the larger problem of Israel, of
humankind and of creation itself. If we learn to read the Old Testament in
this way, which I fear we often don’t when we work through it in our
lectionaries and private readings, we shall begin, I think, to glimpse the
whole forest as well as the particular, and sometimes puzzling, trees.
1. To Renew the Blessing
So, to begin at the beginning: in the first main section of this
lecture I shall expound the way in which Genesis 12, and the narrative
which flows from it, addresses the triple question of evil as it is
presented in Genesis 1-11. Then, in the second section, I shall engage
with the multiple problems that arise within this larger narrative when
the family of Abraham is itself discovered to be riddled with evil. The
third section will draw the focus more tightly into the period of the
exile, and look at three biblical passages, including the book of Job,
which wrestle with the question more deeply and poignantly than anywhere
else. This will lead to some conclusions about the way in which the Old
Testament leaves us facing the problem of evil, with powerful themes
expounded but not concluded.
We start with God’s decision to call
Abraham (or Abram as he still was, but for ease I shall use the longer
form throughout) and to promise that through him and his family all the
families of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 12.1-3). This promise is
repeated over and over, in various forms, both to Abraham and then to
Isaac and Jacob. It isn’t said specifically how God will bless the other
families of the earth through Abraham and his family, only that this is
what God intends to do. Like many of the smaller OT narratives, the entire
story has to be understood with this as its heading, so that even where we
go for many chapters, and indeed whole books, without any sense of a
blessing coming upon the world through Israel, we should still understand
that this is at least in the back of the mind, though perhaps in the front
of God’s mind.
Genesis 12 thus sends us back to Genesis 1-11 to ask: if
this is the solution, what’s the problem? As I indicated, Genesis 3-11
offers a triple problem to which God’s call to Abraham seems to be offered
as the answer. Working back from chapter 12, the first one we meet is the
story of the tower of Babel. Human arrogance reaches a height, quite
literally, with the building of a tower to make a name and create
security. God comes down to look at the puny little tower (the passage is
full of ironic humour), and confuses human languages so that the human
race won’t be able to carry out its arrogant ambitions. What is God doing
about evil? On the one hand he is confronting it, judging it, and doing
something to stop it having the effect it wanted. On the other hand he is
doing something new, beginning a new project through which the underlying
problem, of the curse and the disunity of the human family, will be
replaced by blessing. How Abraham’s family will reverse the curse of Babel
is not clear; and, some would say looking at the Middle East today, it
still isn’t clear, as Abraham’s family is now so firmly divided into two,
a division which goes back to Genesis 16 and 21 with the birth first of
Ishmael and then of Isaac, leading all the way to where we are today, with
one branch of the family looking to Jerusalem and the other, at least in
some modes, to Baghdad, i.e. ancient Babylon. When the promise of Genesis
12 comes through into the New Testament we discover its effect, of course,
not least on the day of Pentecost; though, again, how that is then to be
applied to the problem posed in Genesis 11 is still a matter of urgent
debate.
We notice two features in particular. First, there is a link
between the humans and the land. The arrogant people of Babel build a city
and a tower; God calls Abraham to be a nomad - no fixed abode for a while
yet - but promises him, eventually, a homeland. Second, we note that the
‘solution’, or the answer, offered in Genesis 12 is strictly
eschatological, that is, it points forward, with the ongoing story
continuing to hold together deep ambiguities. To put it bluntly, Abraham’s
family will have its own local version of Babel. And of course,
ultimately, Abraham’s family will go into exile, and the place of their
exile is Babylon. The people of the solution will have to return to
experience the problem.
Working back, we come to the story of the
Flood, which framed the first lecture last month. This contains one of the
saddest lines in the whole of the Bible, when God declares that the
wickedness of the human race has grieved him to his heart, so much so that
he is sorry he ever made the world in the first place (Genesis 6.6). The
flood offers once more the same pattern of God’s reaction to evil. On the
one hand, a literally torrential judgment, blotting out both land and
animals. On the other hand, an act of grace to rescue one family from the
debacle, indicating both that God’s purpose for creation will continue and
that God is now committed to working out that purpose with sorrow and
grief in his heart. Nothing in the story indicates that God imagines that
rescuing Noah and his family will somehow make them different, in their
imagination and intentions, from the people of whom Genesis 6.5 declares
that their wickedness was great, and that every inclination of the
thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. Noah’s family of
course then include the people who build the tower of Babel, as well as
the family into which Abraham is born. The flood stands as a reminder that
God hates evil and what it does to his creation; that he can and sometimes
will take steps to stop it in its tracks; but that, precisely because he
is the sovereign creator, he will find a way of working through and out
the other side to fulfil the purpose which he still intends for creation.
As with Babel, there is of course a close link between humans and the
earth: the earth itself is flooded as part of God’s judgment on the human
race, and then the sign of human rescue is the green olive shoot that
comes up from the newly irrigated ground, brought to Noah, significantly,
by part of the non-human animal creation. The story ends in a vineyard,
with the deeply mixed message both that a new fruitfulness has awoken and
that new possibilities for evil will stalk the earth.
Working back
again, we come of course to the story of the humans, the snake and the
forbidden fruit. A great deal has been written on this, of course, and I
have no major new insights to offer into what is by any account one of the
most profound, but also puzzling, stories in all literature. We all want
to know what the story refuses to tell us, why there was a snake in God’s
beautiful creation in the first place, and why it wanted to use its
cunning in that way. Instead of giving us an explanation for evil, the
story gives us a brief analysis of it - not least the way in which
deception, of oneself and of others, plays a strong role, and the way in
which excuses come easily to the heart and tongue but can’t put off the
question of responsibility - and then tells us, once more, what God does
about it. God judges the evil, with his judgment taking the form of
expulsion from the garden and the imposition of a multiple curse. Humans
must not be allowed to take from the Tree of Life while they are in their
rebellious condition; the ground itself is cursed, and will bear thorns
and thistles. God’s project for creation must now proceed by a long and
tortuous route, through thorns and thistles and dust and death. But even
in exile there are signs of blessing, though now not unmixed with almost
equal signs of the curse. The original command, that the humans should be
fruitful and multiply, was not rescinded, even though it now carries a
horrible ambiguity. Eve conceives a man with the help of the Lord, but he
turns out to be a murderer. The sign of God-given life carries within it
the now equally God-given curse of death: the refrain through Genesis 5,
‘and he died . . . and he died’ remind us over and over of what has
happened in Genesis 3, even as new life in each generation brings new hope
until finally we reach Abraham and the fresh promise both of blessing and
of the land.
The great story which frames the Old Testament, then,
begins with this triple statement of the problem and the single statement
of God’s answer. Evil must be judged, and judged severely. God has made a
beautiful world; evil, insofar as we can define it at this stage, is a
defacing of that world, a way of getting the world upside down and inside
out. Humans, instead of worshipping God, the source of their life, give
allegiance to the non-human creation. The earth, instead of being ruled
wisely by God-fearing, image-bearing stewards, shares the curse for the
sake of idolatrous humankind. Death, which we may be right to see as a
natural and harmless feature of the original landscape, now assumes the
unwelcome guise of the executioner, coming grimly to prevent the poison
spreading too far. ‘Lest they put forth their hands, and take of the Tree
of Life . . .’ leads to ‘Lest they understand one another’s speech, and
nothing will be impossible to them.’ Judgment in the present time is a
matter of stopping evil in its tracks before it gets too far. Death takes
various forms: exile for Adam and Eve, the flood for Noah’s generation,
confusion and dispersal for Babel. But then, in Abraham, God declares, as
an act of sovereign grace following the word and act of judgment, that a
new way has opened up, a way by which the original purpose, of blessing
for humankind and creation, can be taken forward. From within the story we
already know that this is going to be enormously costly for God himself.
The loneliness of God looking for his partners, Adam and Eve, in the
garden; the grief of God before the flood; the head-shaking exasperation
of God at Babel - all these, God knows, God will have to continue to put
up with. There will be numerous further acts of judgment as well as mercy
as the story unfolds. But unfold it will. The overarching picture is of
the sovereign creator God who will continue to work within his world until
blessing replaces curse, homecoming replaces exile, olive branches appear
after the flood, and a new family is created in which the scattered
languages can be reunited. That is the narrative which forms the outer
frame for the canonical Old Testament.
2. People of the Solution, People of the Problem
The body of the Old Testament, from this point onwards, carries - and
the writers know it carries - the deeply ambiguous story of how Abraham’s
family, the people through whom God’s solution was being taken forwards,
was composed of people who were themselves part of the problem. The
narrator of Genesis leaves us in no doubt that Abraham himself was far
from being a plaster-cast saint. Twice he nearly throws the promises away
by placing Sarah in jeopardy with a white, but dangerous, lie about her
being his sister. He and Sarah try to do things their own way rather than
God’s way, and the result is the tragedy of Ishmael, which leads directly
to the nightmarish story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac. Deeply complex
though this story is, I am convinced that it is closely related to what
Abraham and Sarah had done to Hagar and Ishmael. The promises will
continue forwards, but the promise-bearing people, from Abraham onwards,
will know that it does so at a huge cost.
The story from Abraham to
the exile and beyond continues this theme, replete with its multiple
ambiguities. Jacob cheats and lies his way into inheriting from Isaac and
then is himself cheated top to bottom by his father-in-law Laban. He
returns to the promised land limping after his struggle with God, the God
who will keep his promises but who will remind his people of their own
unworthiness, and of the surprising nature of grace. Joseph’s brothers
sell him into slavery where he learns, it seems, not only the humility he
had lacked before but also a strong sense of God’s strange providence, the
providence which is one of the Bible’s central answers to ‘what does God
do about evil?’. When his brothers come to see him in fear and trembling
after Jacob’s death, Joseph declares that ‘You meant evil against me, but
God meant it for good’ (Genesis 50.20). Somehow, strangely, and to us
sometimes even annoyingly, the creator God will not simply abolish evil
from his world. That, of course, is the question that swirls around these
discussions: why not? We are not given an answer. We are, instead,
informed in no uncertain terms that God will contain evil, that he will
restrain it, that he will prevent it from doing its worst, and will even,
on occasion - though we are not yet told that this is a regular practice
on God’s part - use the malice of human beings as a way of furthering his
own strange purposes.
The most deeply formative narrative in all
Judaism, of course, is the story of the Exodus, and this is pre-eminently
one of the Biblical answers to the question of what God does with evil.
Israel is in slavery in Egypt. The Egyptians are harsh and bullying
taskmasters. God hears the cry of his people, and comes to deliver them -
not at once, and not by a single flash of lightning, but, in what by now
ought to be emerging as a characteristic pattern, through the call of an
individual, and then another individual to work alongside the first -
individiuals who are themselves, as the story highlights, flawed and
sometimes muddled human beings, themselves needing to be rebuked and even
punished, but bearing God’s promise and his fresh, saving word of freedom.
The main judgment, though, falls on Egypt, in the form of the plagues,
resulting in Pharaoh’s final dismissal of Israel, the crossing of the Red
Sea, and the time in the wilderness. For ever afterwards, to this day, one
of the primary Jewish answers to the question, What does God do with evil,
is: God judges the wicked pagans who are oppressing Israel, and he rescues
his people from their grasp. That answer resonates through the whole Old
Testament, not least in several of the Psalms, where the righteous
sufferer pleads with God to defend his cause, his person, his life against
the wicked, the oppressor, the ungodly. It comes through into the New
Testament period in Jewish writings such as the Wisdom of Solomon.
And
of course the Old Testament itself makes it clear that this is only one
side of the story, though it is the more encouraging one (unless you
happen to be Pharaoh). The other side is that the Israel who is rescued is
still a grumbling, rebellious, malcontent people. Instead of being
grateful, obedient and trusting, as a naive reading of the Exodus story
might have led us to imagine, Israel spends forty years in the wilderness
wanting to go back to Egypt, fearful of entering the promised land because
there are giants there, and generally displaying all the signs of the
fallen humanity to whose plight they were supposed to be the answer. The
call to them on Sinai spoke of them being God’s royal priesthood, God’s
holy nation, his special people, a treasured possession out of all peoples
(Exodus 19.5-6). Anything less like that it would be hard to imagine. The
worst of it comes when, after the long description of the tabernacle which
is to be built for God’s worship, and of how Aaron and his sons are to be
consecrated as priests to serve in it, we come down the mountain again and
there is Aaron leading the people in worshipping the golden calf. Two
thousand years later the rabbis would look back in sorrow and speak of
that moment as the equivalent, in the story of Israel, of what Adam and
Eve did in the garden. Israel was called to be God’s promise-bearing
people, the light to the nations, but Israel showed every sign of being
itself in darkness. What God did with evil then was of course, once more,
to judge, to judge so severely that it looked as if he would have to start
again from scratch with Moses, as he had done with Noah. But God had made
promises to Abraham, and as God was faithful to his purposes for the whole
creation, so he remained faithful to the promises to Abraham’s family even
when they were faithless to him.
Perhaps nowhere is the ambiguity of
that position more poignant - with resonances that continue to this day -
than in the conquest of Canaan. The story is told, like the Abraham
stories are told, without any attempt to whitewash the failure and folly
of Israel, even as they succeed in conquering most of the land. We have
been prepared by the writer of Genesis for this moment, and for part at
least of the moral problem it poses, as far back as Genesis 15, when God
tells Abraham that his descendents will come back to the promised land in
the fourth generation, ‘because,’ he says, ‘the iniquity of the Amorite is
not yet full’ (15.16). The implication is that, running alongside or
underneath the larger story of how Abraham’s family is God’s means of
dealing with evil in the world, there are sub-plots in which God is
keeping an eye on the various nations of the world, not in order to punish
them immediately if they are going to the bad, but in order to prevent
them going beyond a certain limit. In Abraham’s day, God knows that the
Amorites are wicked but not that wicked; but it’s clear they are going to
become more so. Sooner or later, at the appointed time, the non-Jewish
peoples who occupy the land will be ripe for judgment, and then God will
use his people, and their entry to the land, as the means of that
judgment. This corresponds to the remarkable picture of God’s moral
providence we find in Isaiah 10, when God first uses the pagan arrogance
of Assyria as a way of punishing rebellious Israel and then, when this
work is complete, punishes Assyria in turn precisely for its pagan
arrogance. This is presumably what the Psalmist means by God turning human
wrath to his praise.
All this, however, is a terrible responsibility
for Israel, and Israel will not live up to it. Hence the tragi-comic
sequence of stories in the book of Judges, when, after the conquest under
Joshua, Israel get it wrong over and over again and God has to rescue them
from scrape after scrape. The rescuers themselves, characteristically, are
hardly pillars of virtue; think of the flawed hero Samson. We look back
from our historical vantage point, and post-Enlightenment thought has
looked back from its supposed position of moral superiority, and we shake
our heads over the whole sorry business of conquest and settlement. Ethnic
cleansing, we call it, and however much the Israelites had suffered in
Egypt we find it hard to believe that they were justified in doing what
they did to the Canaanites, or that the God who was involved in this
operation was the same God we know in Jesus Christ. And yet. Ever since
the garden, ever since God’s grief over Noah, ever since Babel and
Abraham, the story has been about the messy way in which God had to work
to bring the world out of the mess. Somehow, in a way we find positively
offensive, God has to get his boots muddy, and, it seems, get his hands
bloody, to put the world back to rights. If we declare, as many have done,
that we would rather it were not so, we face the counter-question as to
which bit of dry, clean ground we are standing on that we should look down
from that height and pronounce on the matter with such certainty. Dietrich
Bonhoeffer declared that the primal sin of humanity consisted in putting
the knowledge of good and evil before the knowledge of God. That is one of
the further dark mysteries of Genesis 3 - there must be some substantial
continuity between what we mean by good and evil and what God means,
otherwise we are in moral darkness indeed - but it serves as a warning not
to pontificate too securely about what God should and shouldn’t have done.
The stories of conquest conclude with Israel, the people of promise,
finally in the land, embattled and rebellious but installed, a broken
signpost still shakily pointing forwards to the creator’s purpose to
rescue his human creatures and complete the work of creation.
The
period of the Judges gives way, with a sigh of relief on the part of the
book of that name, to the period of the monarchy. But right from the start
- I hope you are beginning to sense how this pattern works throughout the
Old Testament - the institution of the monarchy was itself flawed. Samuel
knew the people asked for a king for the wrong reasons, and the first one
he gave them went to the bad. David, the man after God’s own heart, was
too interested by half in other people’s wives, and his own consequent
experience of humiliating exile, and almost equally humbling and costly
restoration, form an advance pattern for the experience of the whole
people five hundred years later. There is no question, particularly in the
Psalms, that David and his dynasty are to be seen as God’s answer to the
problem of evil. They will bring judgment and justice to the world. Their
dominion will be from one sea to the other, from the River to the ends of
the earth. And yet. The greatest royal psalm, Psalm 89, which I still hope
to hear sung in full by our choir one evensong before I leave this blessed
spot, juxtaposes 37 verses of celebration of the wonderful things God will
do through the Davidic king with fourteen verses asking plaintively why
it’s all gone wrong. The Psalm then ends with a single verse blessing YHWH
for ever; and that’s the classic Old Testament picture. Split the Psalm
up, either way, and you fail to catch the flavour of the entire corpus of
biblical writing. God’s solution to the problem of evil, the establishment
of the Davidic monarchy through which Israel will at last be the light to
the nations, the bringer of justice to the world, comes already complete
with a sense of puzzlement and failure, a sense that the plan isn’t
working in the way it should, that the only thing to do is to hold the
spectacular promises in one hand and the messy reality in the other and
praise YHWH anyway. The Psalms, indeed, are a rich treasurehouse of
reflection on evil and what God does with it, as indeed of so much else.
The Psalter opens with a classic statement of one part of Jewish belief:
people who walk in the way of YHWH are blessed, while the wicked will be
like the chaff which the wind blows away. This conventional wisdom is
repeated frequently in other Psalms, and of course in Proverbs too. One
Psalm even chances its arm and declares (37.25) that, though the writer
has been young and now is old, he has never seen the righteous forsaken,
or their seed begging for bread. We don’t need to look at the book of Job
to find out that things aren’t always that straightforward: several other
Psalms come quickly, almost angrily, to point out that the righteous
suffer injustice and God doesn’t seem to do anything about it. Psalm 73
forms one of the towering statements of this, wrestling with the problem
and pointing at last towards a long-term solution: God will act in the
end, perhaps beyond death itself, to judge the wicked and vindicate the
righteous. Psalm 94 goes in a similar direction: the present sufferings of
the righteous are to be seen as divine chastisement, leading to eventual
rescue and salvation, while the wicked will reserve their sufferings for
later, for ultimate punishment. Several Psalms ask ‘How long, O Lord?’,
and by no means receive an unambiguous answer. And, sandwiched between the
lovely little poem we know as ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken’ and the
great royal psalm I spoke of a moment ago, we have Psalm 88, the darkest
and most hopeless of any prayer in scripture:
Wretched and close to death from my youth up, I
suffer your terrors; I am desperate. Your wrath has swept over
me; your dread assaults destroy me. They surround me like a flood
all day long; from all sides they close in on me. You have caused
friend and neighbour to shun me; and darkness is my only companion.
The only note of hope here, if indeed it is that, is the second person
singular. The Psalmist will not suggest that what is happening to him is
other than the strange and terrifying work of YHWH himself. He can’t
understand it; he knows it isn’t what ought to be happening; but he holds
on, almost one might think to the point of blasphemy, to the belief that
YHWH remains sovereign.
This, of course, is what happens with the
prophets of the exile, and indeed Psalm 88 might be read as a corporate
statement corresponding to Jeremiah’s Lamentations. Though the pagan
nations might celebrate their triumph not only over Israel but over
Israel’s God, the prophets of the time insist that it was YHWH himself who
had done to Israel what he had done to Adam and Eve so long before,
expelling them from the land, the promised garden, because of their
rebellion. The story of exile and restoration, so central to the Bible,
becomes the great and mysterious answer to the question, what does YHWH do
about evil. The question of God’s justice, raised implicitly all over the
Bible, is here faced head on. This is where, in our third and last main
section, we come to the three books which invite us to come higher up the
mountain, even if it means going into the mist, and to listen for fresh
words of wisdom on our topic.
3. My Servant Israel, My Servant
Job
‘Have you considered,’ asks God to Satan, ‘Have you considered my
servant Job?’ Well, Satan had and he hadn’t, and part of the puzzle of Job
is why God put the question like that to Satan in the first place. But
before we consider Job for ourselves I want to look at the other great
Servant of YHWH in the Old Testament, if indeed he is that different from
Job, and then at another book in which a similar pattern is worked out.
The book of the Old Testament which, on its surface, has most to do with
the justice or righteousness of God is the book sometimes called Second
Isaiah, that is, chapters 40-55, or perhaps 40-66, of the larger book we
call Isaiah.
Isaiah 40-55, commonly supposed to date from the time of
the exile (though nothing for my purpose hinges on this), wrestles with
the question of how YHWH can be righteous, granted that Israel is
condemned to exile. This, it quickly emerges, is the focal point, at the
smaller, close-up, level, of the problem of God’s moral governance of the
world as a whole. Israel in exile, as I said a moment ago, is like Adam
and Eve expelled from the garden. But God had created the human race as
his image-bearing stewards, to rule wisely on his behalf over creation;
and that covenant is not forgotten. That is the biblical shape of the
problem of evil: that the long memory of the human task, under God, is
currently in tension with the fact that humans have rebelled and the
ground bears thorns and thistles.
Similarly, Israel has been exiled
for gross misconduct - idolatry, immorality, persistent refusal to hear
YHWH calling her back to obedience. But God has called Israel to be the
people through whom he will redeem the world, humanity, creation itself,
and that covenant is not forgotten. The larger biblical shape of the
problem of evil is reflected in the more sharply focused shape of the
problem of Israel in exile; and Isaiah 40-55 proclaims that YHWH is still
the sovereign creator, that he is still in covenant with Israel, that he
is, above all, righteous, tzaddik, and that because of this righteousness,
this faithfulness both to covenant and to creation, Israel will be rescued
and creation itself will be restored. Isaiah 55, the magnificent climax of
the whole section, glories in the fact that the thorn will be replaced by
the cypress, and the brier with the myrtle. The curse of Genesis 3 itself
will be undone when Israel is redeemed and the covenant re-established. If
you want to understand God’s justice in an unjust world, says Isaiah, this
is where you must look. God’s justice is not simply a blind disposing of
rewards for the virtuous and punishments for the wicked, though plenty of
those are to be found on the way. God’s justice is a saving, healing,
restorative justice, because the God to whom justice belongs is the
creator God who has yet to complete his original plan for creation, and
whose justice is not simply designed to restore a balance to a world out
of kilter but to bring to glorious completion and fruition the creation,
teeming with life and possibility, that he made in the first place. And he
remains implacably determined to complete this project through his
image-bearing human creatures, and, more specifically, through the family
of Abraham.
But how? Woven closely into the fabric of Isaiah 40-55
stands the figure of the Servant: YHWH’s Servant, the one through whom
YHWH’s purpose of justice and salvation will be carried out. The Servant
comes before us in chapter 42 as a royal figure, clearly linked to the
royal figure in chapters 9 and 11, and the similar one in chapter 61; and
yet he is in many ways very unlike a king. He is clearly Israel, or
perhaps we should say Israel-in-person, sharing the vocation of Israel and
now sharing the fate of Israel, exiled, crushed, and killed; and yet he
also stands over against Israel, so that Israel itself looks on in horror
at his fate, and even the remnant within Israel is described as ‘those who
hear the Servant’s voice’. Somehow Isaiah has so redefined the broader
problem of evil, of the injustice of the world and the justice of the one
creator God, that we now see it, not as a philosopher’s puzzle requiring
explanation, but as the tragedy of all creation requiring a fresh act from
the sovereign creator God, focussed on the tragedy of Israel requiring a
fresh act from the sovereign covenant God. And, to our amazement and (if
we know what we are about) horror, we discover that this fresh act comes
into sharp focus in the suffering and death of the Servant. Sharing the
fate of Israel in exile, the exile which we know from Genesis 3 onwards is
closely aligned with death itself, he bears the sin of the many. He
embodies the covenant faithfulness, the restorative justice, of the
sovereign God, and with his stripes ‘we’ - presumably, the ‘we’ of the
remnant, looking on in wonder and fear - ‘we’ are healed.
Central to
the Old Testament picture of God’s justice in an unjust world, then, is
the picture of God’s faithfulness to unfaithful Israel; and central to
that picture is the picture of YHWH’s servant, an individual who stands
over against Israel, and takes Israel’s fate upon himself so that Israel
may be rescued from exile and the human race proceed at last towards the
new creation in which thorns and thistles will be replaced by cypress and
myrtle, dust and death by new life. The greatest prophet of the Old
Testament points forwards, without further explanation, to a fresh act of
the one true God in which this will be accomplished. The Servant is both
Israel and God’s fresh emissary to Israel; he is both the king and the one
who does what no king could ever do. As far as the Old Testament is
concerned, it remains a puzzle, the positive side of the puzzle of evil
itself.
A similar puzzle is found in the second of my three books, one
of the first books to wrestle with Isaiah 40-55 and apply it to subsequent
situations. The book of Daniel is all about the problem of evil: of how
pagan empires do their worst, and the one true God acts in judgment upon
them and in vindication of his true people. At various points in the book,
but particularly in chapters 11 and 12, the servant-figure seems to be
applied to the righteous within Israel, those who stay loyal to YHWH even
in exile and suffer for it, those who are martyred at the hands of pagan
empire, who are (in the book’s central image, which we glanced at last
time) mauled by the monsters who come up from the sea. The kingdoms of the
world rage against the kingdom of God; the problem of evil grows teeth and
claws, comes out from the philosophers’ debating chambers and on to the
stage of the real world, turning gardens into deserts and human lives to
dust and ashes. As I argued last time, one of the reasons our contemporary
world hasn’t been able to come to terms with the reality of evil, or when
it does it does so in immature and inappropriate ways, is because it has
thought of evil either as a philosopher’s puzzle or as an old-fashioned
problem which modernity has at last solved. Those who study Daniel on the
one hand, and those who study the real world of 2003 on the other, ought
to know better. Evil is alive and powerful, not least where mighty empires
vaunt themselves and imagine they can do as they please, even if it means
turning gardens into deserts and deserts into graveyards.
At the centre
of the book of Daniel, corresponding in some ways to the figure of the
Servant in Isaiah, and fulfilling a similar role in terms of both
receiving and embodying the saving justice of God, is the figure of ‘one
like a Son of Man’. The original meaning, and subsequent understandings,
of this phrase, are of course hugely controversial, and I have written at
some length about them elsewhere. But the drama of Daniel 7 is not to be
collapsed into mere linguistic debates. The monsters that come up from the
sea - remember the sea from last time - make war against the human figure;
but God exalts the human one over the beasts, just like Adam in the garden
being set in authority over the animals. Only this time, after the long
history of evil, of creation out of joint, the animals are threatening,
and the newly re-established human rule over them is one of punitive
judgment. Daniel 7 is basically a lawcourt scene: God takes his seat, and
judgment is given for the Human One against the beasts. This is what God’s
justice over the unjust world will look like: God’s restoration of
creation must take place by the forces of evil being rightly overthrown,
and his faithful people vindicated. The question we are left with at the
end of Daniel is: but who are God’s faithful people? And how will it all
work out? WHo is this Son of Man?
The third and final book to be
considered (far too briefly, inevitably) is of course the noble and deeply
puzzling Book of Job. Out of the many things that could and probably
should be said I choose the following six.
First, the pattern of the
book of Job, like that of some of the Psalms, and of the exilic literature
as a whole, is one of questioning the moral providence of God in the light
of rampant evil - in this case, of course, evil directed against Job
himself. The question of God’s justice is raised by the book of Job in a
manner parallel to the way it is raised in the literature of the exile;
and the answer, if it is an answer, consists of a fresh display of the
power of God as creator, which is the theological basis also of the
answers, if they are answers, offered by Isaiah and Daniel.
Second,
however, the whole point of the book of Job is that, whereas Israel was
emphatically guilty, and the prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and
Daniel insist loudly on this point, Job was of course innocent. The normal
analysis of the exile was that Israel thoroughly deserved it; the whole
point of Job is that Job didn’t. His comforters, relying no doubt on a
simplistic reading of Deuteronomy, Psalm 1, and so on, insist that good
people have good things happen to them and bad people have bad things,
therefore if you have bad things happen to you . . . etc. etc. The book of
Job enters a massive protest against this as a blanket analysis of how
things are in the present world, like Psalm 73 but with far more long
drawn out stridency and without the same resolution.
Third, the book is
of course framed by the opening two chapters in which we learn both that
the satan is the source of Job’s problem and that God has given him
permission - indeed, we might almost say, encouragement, to do what he’s
done. This is one of the rare occasions when the satan puts in an
appearance in the Old Testament - the main other one being the
Chronicler’s account of David’s census - and it’s quite clear that the
word ‘satan’ is a title, an office: he is the accuser, the director of
public prosecutions. He doesn’t exactly tempt Job to sin, though perhaps
part of the point is that he’s tempting him to curse God, and Job refuses.
(He curses everything else, including the day he was born, but he simply
complains to God and asks what’s happened to the celebrated, legendary,
divine justice.) We are invited, in other words, to look in on Job’s
torment and his questions with the privileged knowledge that this is not,
in fact, a contest between Job and God, as Job thinks it is (which is why,
knowing himself to be innocent, he thinks that God has made a terrible
mistake) and as his would-be comforters also think it is (which is why,
knowing cheerfully that God doesn’t make mistakes, they assume that Job
must in fact be guilty in some way). Nor is it, or not straightforwardly,
a contest between God and Satan, as the dualist would imagine. It is a
contest between Satan and Job: Satan trying to get Job in his power, Job
insisting both that God ought to be just and that he himself is in the
right.
Fourth, the majestic display of creation which forms the
denouement of the book both is and isn’t an answer to the problem. Indeed,
in one sense it restates it; if God really is the sovereign creator,
ruling Behemoth and Leviathan and calling the north wind out of its shed,
then he ought to make a better job of running the moral side of the
cosmos. Nor is it simply a way of saying ‘I’m God and I’m very powerful so
you just shut up.’ Nor do I think it’s likely, despite a recent advocate
of this position, that Behemoth and Leviathan are intended as evil
creatures over whom God is displaying his sovereignty. But within the
larger canonical context it ought to be clear that re-emphasizing the
doctrine of creation is indeed the foundation of all biblical answers to
questions about who God is and what he’s doing. This is so, as we’ve seen,
both for Isaiah and for Daniel, and it remains so in the New
Testament.
Fifth, and perhaps most important, the conclusion to the
book, which many have felt to be quite a let-down almost to the point of
bathos, is important for what it insists on. It might have been easy, if
the author had been of a different theological position, for him to say
that after Job’s death the angels carried him to a paradise where
everything was so wonderful that he forgot the terrible time he’d had on
earth. But that is emphatically not the point. The question is about God’s
moral government of this world, not about the way in which we should leave
this world behind and find consolation in a different one. That is the
high road to Buddhism, not to biblical theology. We may find the last
chapter of the book a bit trivial, and it does seem to leave the writer
still open to Dostoevsky’s question. But it insists that if God is the
creator, and that after all is the premise of the whole book, then it
matters that if things are to be put right they are put right within
creation itself, not somewhere else. Sixth, and pointing ahead to next
time, the parallel between Job and YHWH’s Servant in Isaiah remains
striking. The Servant, after all, is innocent as Job is. He doesn’t
complain, as Job does; yet he, too, suffers indignity as well as pain and
despair. Within, once more, the larger canonical context, there may be
something to be said for seeing the entire book of Job as an anticipation
of the harrowing scene in Gethsemane, where the comforters again fail and
even creation goes dark as the monsters close in around the innocent
figure asking what it’s all about. But more of that anon. Job remains, in
its own terms, as a monument not only to astonishing literary skill but to
the theological pursuit of answers that refuse to be put off, the
theological insistence that to solve the problem of evil is to belittle
it, the theological celebration, in the teeth of the apparent evidence, of
Israel’s God as the creator and lord of the world.
Conclusion
There are literally dozens of things that could be said to conclude
this whirlwind tour of the Old Testament’s way of coming at the problem of
evil, but I confine myself to four, the last of which opens up just a
little further.
First, the personified force of evil, the Satan, is
important but not that important. The origin of evil itself remains a
mystery; and the Satan, when he or it appears, is kept strictly within
bounds. We are still some way from the dragon of Revelation, or even from
the whisperer of the Mount of Temptation.
Second, human responsibility
for evil is clear throughout. And, though no theory of this is offered,
all humans appear to share in the problem - or virtually all; Ezekiel
lists Noah, Daniel and Job as the three most righteous men who ever lived,
and we remind ourselves of Noah’s drunkenness, Daniel’s prayer of
confession, and Job’s hand across his mouth with nothing more to say in
his own defence. Abraham got it wrong; so did Moses, sometimes; David, a
great saint, was also a great sinner; and so on. God chooses to bring the
world back to rights through a family who are themselves composed of
deeply flawed human beings, and who thereby generate second- and
third-order problems of evil which in their turn have to be addressed and
solved. Only the strange, silent figure of Isaiah 53 stands before us as
one of whom it is said that he remains innocent and righteous.
Third,
the evil that humans do is integrated with the enslavement of creation.
This is seldom a matter of one-on-one cause and effect, but there is a
nexus, a web of rippling events that spreads out from human rebellion
against the creator to the out-of-jointness of creation itself. In the
same way, when humans are put back to rights the world will be put back to
rights. No theory is offered about earthquakes or other so-called ‘natural
disasters’, though no doubt the prophets would have been happy to identify
them as divine warning signs.
Fourth, the Old Testament never tries to
give us the sort of picture the philosophers want, of a static world order
with everything explained tidily. Instead, we are given a narrative of
God’s project of justice within a world of injustice. This project is a
matter of setting the existing creation to rights rather than scrapping it
and doing something else instead; and for that reason God decides to work
through human beings, even though their hearts think only of evil; and
through Israel, even though from Abraham onwards they make as many
mistakes as they do acts of obedience. Both in the grand narrative itself,
and in many smaller moments within it, we observe a pattern of divine
action, to judge and punish evil and to set bounds to it, without
destroying the responsibility and agency of human beings themselves; and,
also, both to promise and to bring about new moments of grace, events
which constitute new creation, however much they are themselves necessarily shot through with ambiguity. This is not, I think, exactly the
same as the ‘free will defence’ beloved of some theodicists; it is more a
‘commitment to action’ on God’s part, to act within the world he has
created, to affirm that world in its created otherness even as he is
putting it to rights.
Within this fourth point, of course, we find, in
pattern and outline at least, the signposts that will lead us, however
obliquely and ambiguously, to that narrative which offers itself as the
climax of the Old Testament. The moment when the sinfulness of humankind
grieved God to his heart, the moment when the Servant was despised and
rejected, the moment when Job asked God why it had to be that way, came
together when the Son of Man knelt, lonely and afraid, before going to
face the might of the beasts that had at last come up out of the sea. The
story of Gethsemane and of the cross itself present themselves in the New
Testament as the strange, dark conclusion to the story of what God does
about evil, of what happens to God’s justice when it takes human flesh,
when it gets its feet muddy in the garden and its hands bloody on the
cross. The multiple ambiguities of God’s actions in the world come
together in the story of Jesus, the story that will be the subject of the
next lecture.
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