A Sense of God
Good & Evil, & How the Book of Job Points the Finger at the Bible as Idolatry
“[Job] challenges God only because he considers it a moral duty to speak the truth before Him.” Yehezkel Kaufmann, “Job the Righteous Man and Job the Sage” (Dimensions of Job, p. 67).
Thesis question: What if fear of God means not speaking honestly to God? (Or about God.)
Commenters at the Children of Job column (well, okay, one commenter) seem to have been playing the role of Job’s friends: spouting scriptural dogma as if it was the living word of God, while casting judgment on the real-time human struggle to know God, directly, in the moment, as a lived inquiry rather than a tiresome, platitudinous ritual of catechisms and catch phrases.
These nominally faithful servants of scripture see Satan (or Gnosticism, or Jews) behind everything they disagree with; yet ironically, they are unwittingly committing their own form of idolatry, by worshipping the word (rather than the Word).
Their reliance on a book (one that, 99 times out of a 100, they have never read in its original languages), and on whichever interpretations they have taken to heart as dogma, is something surely no God nor prophet ever intended.
Yet somehow, printed words on a page are seen as more reliable, as having more assuredly come from God, than the words of all other human being ever since, including living ones in the room with them, right here and now. Why? Because the words in the Bible have been canonized, which really means, approved by institutions. This is a strange, Sisyphusian kind of doublethink at work.
I had a recent brief email exchange with fellow substacker, Guy Duperreault, some of which was included in his recent post “The War Between The Evil of Good and the Good of Evil, Introduction.” Guy emailed me to raise “the question of the objective nature of reality . . . is that bounded by limits, such as ‘evil’ cannot exist, has to exist? Or, as Teresa Corragio (a substack writer) quotes from the Course in Miracles, ‘There isn’t evil, only the absence of good.’
Guy included my reply in his post (truncated version below):
OR by definition exists independently of belief, being what makes it objective!
the question of whether it exists is absurd and the beginning of absurdity; it makes no sense; the question surely is, can it in any way be known or talked about? & if not, what is the purpose of naming it?
. . . I would [say] that evil is a relative term where good, perhaps, is not, or at least, has a transcendental/eternal aspect, where evil, surely does not (else how could it be evil?)
. . . if the source of evil is Satan and Satan is a fallen aspect of God (Lucifer), and only what is eternal is objectively real . . . since nothing changes in eternity, so no fall, [how can evil be objectively real?].
Guy didn’t include the subsequent exchange, in which he wrote that he thought my argument appied to “good” also. I replied:
[It] can’t really pertain to good surely, unless you perceive ultimate reality is blah; & certainly not if evil is absence of good...
dark is absence of light; light is not absence of dark
I didn’t receive a response (though Guy wrote in his post that he didnt agree with my “argument,” without specifying which part of it he disagreed with); but I found myself thinking about it this morning, while reading Chesterton on Job (hence the last-minute addition to this post).
The absence of good would certainly be a state of evil; but if a soul had no evil in it would it ipso facto be good? Or would it somehow be incomplete? According to the Book of Job (at least read from a certain angle, maybe a Jungian one but still valid), even God is incomplete without a bit of evil (Job, 2:10).
Does this add up? It is an ongoing exploration into an unfathombale mystery, and precisely why the book of Job became the basis for an open-ended column with no end in sight. In his post, Guy calls the problem of evil a “‘minor’ issue in the scheme of life.” I presume he means it with irony, since it is surely the only issue there is or can ever be, between ourselves and existence?
It does seems fair (to me) to say that all evil committed by men is due to an absence of good in their lives, that is, an inability to access good, whether it is in others or (especially) in themselves. Yet Goodness, if we equate it with God, if it is to have meaning at all, cannot ever be wholly absent, any more than light can be absent, though it can be outside the range of our awareness, or even our perception.
And therein, perhaps, lies the problem.
“there is always metaphysical evil to mark the fact that the universe is not God and God not the universe.” Paul Weiss, “God, Job, and Evil” (Dimensions of Job, p. 193)
I have long observed that being a devout Christian, insofar as it equates with loyality to (and consistency with) scriptural doctrine, entails being stuck in a schizoid state of mind. This is not only because the Old Testament is so obviously at odds with the New, either.
For starters, by what weird logic is the “faithful” (to scripture) Christian able to see the many institutions—those that have vouchsafed the Bible to us in its present form—as working for God? Does he not also believe (if he has read his Bible) that Satan is the Prince of this world and that (therefore) this world is opposed to God in its major structures of power?
Is it not axomatic to say that the only value the Bible has depends on the humans who penned it being faithful communicators of Objective Reality, or God’s will? And doesn’t this presuppose that such men (or women) might also be around, in more recent times—even in our present day?
If so, would we recognize them? Would their point of view—like that of Job to his friends—be very far from “orthodox”? Would it be seen, in fact, as heretical by anyone rigidly adhering to (trapped within) scriptural dogma?
The Bible might be helpful to facilitate revelation (by which I mean insight that comes from our souls, from God). It might thereby allow for a fuller embodiment of God’s will. But not if it becomes a substitute, a crutch. This would include making the Bible (scriptural dogma) in any way indispensable as a reference point—which is to say, using it to constantly check if we are on the right path, or not.
To Hell with the Bible! (And on to Blake’s Bible of Hell?)
How can God guide a soul who is forever checking his or her Bible to see if God’s guidance conforms with the holy scripture? Such a doctrinally obedient soul would risk being the very worst sort of servant, worse even than an openly defiant non-believer, I would say, since they would be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, where an honest non-believer is simply a wolf.
These sorts of “servants,” being neither hot nor cold but lukewarm in God’s mouth, are fit only for the spewing.
By what reckoning is a sheep superior to a wolf anyway? Aren’t they both God’s creatures?
“God is not in ultimate essence another being than yourself. He is the Absolute Being. You truly are one with God, part of His life. He is the very soul of your soul. And so, here is the first truth: When you suffer, your sufferings are God’s sufferings—not His external work, not his external penalty, not the fruit of His neglect, but identically His own personal woe. In you God Himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your concern in overcoming this grief. . . if God views as not only good but perfect a world in which we find so much evil, the divine point of view must be very foreign to ours, so that Job’s rebellious pessimism seems well in order, and Prometheus appears to defy the world rule in a genuinely human spirit.”
Josiah Royce, “The Oneness of God with the Sufferer” (Dimensions of Job, p. 166-8)
Continued over the wall, with “To Serve the Soul = to Challenge God?”