The Book of Job

[Machadaynu]

I mentioned my thoughts on The Book of Job in the 'Back to Church' thread, and it was suggested that I start a new thread about it. So here it is.

The story of the book of Job is (to quote myself from the other thread):

God is chatting to Satan and mentions how Job is his best follower and would never lose faith. Satan essentially has a bet with God that Job would turn on God if his life wasn't so great. God, for some reason, accepts this deal with the proviso that Satan doesn't kill Job. It's not explained why God is chewing the fat with Satan rather than, say, destroying him completely, what with God being omnipotent and Satan being pure evil.

Anyway, Satan sends all sorts of illness to Job, kills all his animals, destroys his farm and kills his entire family. God, being omniscient, knew this would happen when he took on the bet - he knew Job would suffer, and he knew Job would remain true to him. Quite why he needed to prove this to Satan (pure evil, remember) is something of a mystery.

In the end God gives Job twice as many animals as before, and 10 new children, including 3 daughters that were prettier than the ones God allowed Satan to kill.

Christians see this as a story of how faith is rewarded (even if you're only suffering because God is trying to prove a point to Satan) I see it as a story of how God will use us as he sees fit, is insecure and vain and is apparently either unable, or unwilling, to resist being influenced by Satan.

I contrast God's treatment of Job, his wife and children - all "God's children" used as pawns in a game, and suffering terribly for it - and wonder what we'd make of a human father treating his children in such a way. I expect the MN opinion would be rather damning to say the least. Yet when God does it, it becomes an inspiring story, and God is love, apparently.

Christians, I am told, see the book as a lesson in why the righteous suffer. The answer, it seems, is that their all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing, benevolent holy father is sometimes prone to abandoning people to the worst excesses of Satan to try and prove some kind of point to God knows who.

Seems odd to me. God does not show love in that story. God shows himself to be deeply unpleasant. Or not God.

What are your views on Job?

No ones going to answer my question(s) then? Anyone?
which one(s)? Lost track...

You don't sound particularly angry to me. (I don't remember being angry with god when I was questioning... more like let down when I prayed for faith and there was absolutely no 'reply'. Nothing there - no one to be angry with.)

Why Jesus spent his short time on earth rehashing the tenets of earlier belief systems

Why Jesus didn't share anything of practical use to mankind i.e. the existence of bacteria

Grimma, if it was only Mark 10:17 talking about selling up and giving to the poor then I'd agree with you that it was just something for that particular person. But it's not. It's a frequently repeated and apparently quite central part of Jesus' message. It's certainly something that Jesus seems to have talked about a lot more than, for instance, marriage only being acceptable between a man and a woman.

Eg, Luke 12:33 Sell your possessions, and give to the needy, or John 3:17 But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him?, or Acts 4:34 There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold 35 and laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

I could go on.

1) If God wanted to do it,God wanted to do it.
Never underestimate Gods power.

I'm not questioning God's power, I'm questioning His morals.

On the one hand you've got the citizens of Sodom & Gomorrah with their repeated and complete utter depravity. They were trying to rape angels; who knows how bad their other crimes were?

On the other, you've got Lot's wife whose biggest crime appears to be glancing back at what must've been a cataclysmic event. A simple bit of human curiosity that harmed no-one else.

And both those depraved Sodomites and Lot's wife got killed for their transgressions even though the crimes were by no means comparable.

How is that ethical or just?

hih in answer to your question, my Muslim friends tell me that the concept of 'relationship' is not how they would describe their worship of Allah. Allah is seen as holy, far off, separate, and all powerful, as well as loving. But relationship, I've been told, would be an inappropriate word to use, would be playing down the holiness of Allah. Christians experience of relationship with God is quite different, they experience God as intimately involved in their daily lives, as walking alongside them. However, many Christians would also do well to remember the holiness and otherness of God, as Muslims do, and not to become overly lazy about grace and self satisfied.

As for Lot, well, I reckon it's metaphorical, that one

I also question how depraved they were to have been capable of rearing children to adulthood. They were obviously reproducing and managing to nurture their babies. If they were all depraved wouldn't their offspring have little chance of being adequately provided for?

Okay Mad, there will be differences in how the describe their deity but they clearly feel just as strongly about their god as you do yours. They're not going around eyeing up Yahweh, enviously thinking: 'Shucks, if only Allah was as warm and approachable as him.' They are as strongly convicted of the reality of Allah as you are about Yahweh. Whose wrong? How do you know?

When my friend who was a strong Muslim was converted quite dramatically to Christianity, he said that he found that Jesus was who he had been searching for in his sincere worship of God all this time, that his life of worship and sacrifice made sense in the light of Jesus and his sacrifice, and that he felt fulfilment in his Christian faith that he had been striving for.

Now I am reporting his words, because it would be arrogant for me to say such words. I cannot 'know' and would be arrogant to say so. I can only go on experience and on what I have discovered and researched myself, and on the experience of millions. I don't think it's that clear cut either.

Snorbs, I agree that the giving up of wealth is a part of Christianity. It's difficult, yes, but it is there - it's one of the things I can't weasel out of. It's way too easy at this point to accuse all Christians of gross hypocrisy, but until you've gone through their bank statements, you'll never know how much (or little) people give. Best not to cast too many stones, IMO. :)

Re. Lot's wife...Firstly, this story goes way back to an undateable past. It's a fool's errand to try and prove whether this event really happened in the way it's narrated in Genesis. Unless some pretty definite archaeological evidence is found, we just don't know. So what we have is a story, which I see as akin to the kind of family stories that get passed down through generations to create and sustain identity and belonging. Given that, I find it a bit odd to read this story simply through the lens of the ethical. I find it a bit strange when people talk about the ethics of fairy tales, too (not that I think the story of Sodom is a fairy tale as such)...I can't help wondering if we've missed the point a bit, which to me, is something along the lines of 'run for your life when destruction comes or you might risk being destroyed too' - which seems to be how Jesus interprets it in Luke 17 ('remember Lot's wife.') To widen it out, when you read the story of David and Goliath, do you judge that by ethical standards? Or the Exodus? I'm just not sure that 'ethical' is always the best category by which to judge these very ancient stories. It raises too many problems for me, one being how we can justify assessing a very ancient near eastern text by modern liberal western ideas of the ethical.

That's all a bit waffly, but ultimately I believe in 'progressive revelation', that what is said of God in the very old bits of the OT sometimes are superseded by newer developments in belief. That's pretty clear to me, and Jesus makes no bones about it (you gave heard it said....but i say to you....)I also think we make a huge mistake if we fail to recognise the great literary diversity within the Bible. It's odd, really - most of us know how to read different genres in our general reading, but we do find it much harder when those genres are found in the Bible. So if we judge (eg) poetry by the literary standards of a court transcript, of course the poetry 'fails'. Dyswim?

So you don't think anyone has ever converted to Islam from Christianity Mad? Even if we pretend that no one ever had, would that be evidence that Yahweh exists. It's akin to asserting that because more people like chocolate ice cream than raspberry ripple, that chocolate ice cream must have a supernatural element.

head - mad said she had a friend who converted M->C

Yes, very waffley holo. It seems like you're arguing against yourself by asserting the man made qualities of the bible. I think you're suggest that god reveals the deeper meanings of the text as we develop as humans without explaining the myriad of opposing interpretations amongst believers themselves.

If I said 'Holo, I've got this book here that god made me write for everyone to read' how would you go about testing my claims?

Yes Grimma. I was using the opposite scenario of C-> M to make a point.

That's a strange question, and I don't quite understand how it relates to the Bible. God didn't make anyone write anything.

If you're interested in understanding what I was saying, here's a Wiki link for you (oh how we love them on MN religion threads!) viola

Okay let's just say I said 'god inspired me to write it'. I think the question relates entirely to the issue as you have a book you claim is inspired by god no? What skills do you use to check the claim?

sorry head, didn't read properly.

To me, HiH, as a Christian, the answer is obvious: I'd assess your claims against the Christian tradition, and maybe aprticularly as an Anglican, that'd be a mixture of Scripture, tradition (i.e. church history) and reason. What's the issue you're driving at here? I'm not quite getting your point.

'Progressive revelation' is another of those inevitabilities - among anyone who tries to approach religion at all rationally. So is the similar phenomenon of 'progressive interpretation' - whereby (liberal) christians play catch-up with evolving non-religious ethical standards.

I'm glad they do it but too many (not Holo) still try to have it both ways and claim more for the Bible than it deserves.

As I mentioned previously, I have no problem accepting the idea that the story of Lot didn't play out the way it is related or, more likely, never happened at all.

Your suggestion that it's a tale passed down through the generations as a means of promoting belonging etc (and, I'm sure, to have something to say to pass away the long evenings with no Great British Bake-Off on TV to watch ) certainly makes a lot of sense to me. It's like the tales of Finn McCool. Folklore, in other words.

How the story of Lot could be folklore while also being any kind of divine "revelation" though, progressive or not, makes my head hurt. It's like saying that the story of Finn McCool creating the Giant's Causeway isn't just an entertaining piece of folklore created to explain a peculiar piece of geology, it's also divine revelation about the nature of supernaturally huge people who don't like getting their feet wet. The two aspects seem rather at odds.

I was trying to show you how a non Christian approaches the bible. You claim the book to be divinely inspired no? As people of other faiths claim their book to be. How do I go about working out which book was published by a supernatural entity and which one is a fake?

I'd probably say that prog rock revelation is an inevitability if you want to make sense of the Bible in the same way that evolution is if you want to make sense of the variety of natural life.

And as a non believer I have no other divinely inspired book to check it against. It's just me and my brain and these two books in front of me. Where do I go from there?

Well, HiH, if I were really interested in your hypothetical book, I'd a) judge it against my own background (see post above) and b) if I wanted to understand your book on its own terms, I'd steep myself in it, its backgrounds, its history, languages etc etc etc.

Snorbs - what 'revelation' is there in the story of Lot? Good question. Maybe something about God's judgement. Maybe. I'm off out now - have a good day everyone!

holo you claimed that the progression of interpretations in the bible originates from god. Are you suggesting the theory of evolution was supernaturally inspired? Again can I ask why the progressive revelations aren't given to all believers via the Holy Spirit? How come there are so many different ones?

HiH if you're a human being (which I take it you are!) it's not just you and your brain! (unless you're a hermit - and even then....) You are part of a complex combination of communities, affcted by politics, philosophy, history, religion (yes you are, even if you don't like to thin k of uyourself as being so) etc etc etc. You are not an island, as John Donne says.

It's an utter myth to think of ourselves as isolated individuals. You have just as much hermeneutical baggage as the next person, whether or not she/he is religious.