Job and the Problem of Theodicy
Every human ordering must be reaffirmed over against forces of
chaos and evil that threaten to undo it. Attempts to reaffirm the order
of existence take the intellectual form of theodicies. Such explanations
attempt to integrate the threatening chaos, whether moral evil or natural
destruction, into the overarching religious order and thus preserve
meaning. There is an “implicit theodicy” in all social order.77 In fact,
the wisdom books of Job, Ecclesiastes, the Wisdom of Solomon, and
Sirach all address the problem of theodicy.78
This study of Job regards the problem of theodicy as a major theme
in the book.79 Job’s suffering is clearly extreme, tragic, and unjust, and
like every case of apparently pointless suffering raises the question of
divine justice and the meaning and purpose of life. “To such disturbing
questions,” Marvin Pope rightly perceives, “there is probably no better
introduction than the Book of Job.”80 Job is not a theodicy per se, as I
have indicated, at least in the classical definition of that term; nor is it
an attempt to resolve the problem of theodicy. It does not finally justify
God in the face of human suffering, which is what a theodicy invariably
aims to do. If it is considered a theodicy in this sense, it is a “conspicuous
failure,” as Rowley reminds.81 Often in the book, Job defends himself—
not God—in the face of the friends’ charge that he suffers justly because
he has it coming to him. Yahweh finally vindicates Job’s innocence,
however, and condemns the friends for claiming that Job deserves
his horrific fate. In this regard, then, book may be described, “not as
theodicy but anthropodicy.” Theodicy is the justification of God’s love,
justice, and power in the face of evil; anthropodicy, the justification of
human beings against those who blame the human victim.82
While this distinction is important, the problem of theodicy, in one
variation or another, is much in evidence throughout the book. It is a
theme that is found on almost every page, so much so that Lusseau
claims, “the problem of the suffering of the just confronted with the
prosperity of the impious constitutes the work’s central object.”83 At
the risk of overemphasizing the significance of theodicy in Job, I will
place special emphasis on how the book deals with this conundrum.
Disappointingly, the book fails finally to resolve the issue. It does not
give us a neat, logical solution to the problem. At best, Job ponders the
problem of theodicy in human suffering within the context of ancient
Hebrew wisdom and the order of God in the world. In the dialogue, Job’s
friends speculate that “suffering comes about sometimes as punishment
for sins, sometimes as a warning against committing sin in the future,
and sometimes, as in Job’s case, for no earthly reason at all, but for
some inscrutable divine reason. In the end . . . readers cannot discover
from the book any one clear view about what the reason for their own
particular suffering may be, nor any statement about the reason for
human suffering in general; for the book is entirely about the suffering
of one particular and unique individual.”84
When we look at the problem of theodicy in the light of modern
theology and philosophy, however, we discover a remarkable fact. The
book of Job advances in rudimentary form several of the approaches
to theodicy that have been proposed and developed philosophically by
later thinkers—then rejects them. Job doesn’t propose formal theodicies
of the type that will eventually be worked out philosophically and
theologically. There do occur in Job, nevertheless, approaches to the
problem of theodicy comparable with the formulations that will later
be made in Western religious thought. What is remarkable is that the
essential elements of these theodicies is already found within the book
of Job. Is there really nothing new under the sun? These approaches are
comparable to those of later development. We could even draw a line of
development through the history of thought connecting the approaches
in Job to modern theodicies.85 The ancients obviously contemplated
this problem. Through the centuries following Job, particularly in
the Western tradition, these approaches were more fully developed
intellectually until they emerged in complete form in the West as the
major theodicies we recognize today.