Job Overview

JOB

• Suffering is universal (All know suffering)
• In naturalistic medical-technological culture, suffering must be surgically removed or managed with drugs. Suffering is meaningless and intolerable, and if it cannot be eliminated, many advocate suicide!
    * That is a low tolerance for suffering.
• In Buddhist influenced cultures, suffering acknowledged; goal of enlightenment is escaping the cycle of suffering through mystical experience. Suffering is not something to justify but to escape.

JOB

• Biblical faith; God is just, loving, and powerful to reward good and punish evil. This raises and ethical puzzle: if God is good and powerful, why do relatively righteous people suffer?
• Two perspectives on this.
    * The first: A sort of “soul building” argument, says that God uses suffering to form mature character in us.
    * The second: The “free will” argument, points out that for God to give people sufficient free will to truly love God, there is the risk of genuine freedom resulting in real evil, so that the possibility of genuine love for God entails the possibility of evil.

JOB

• These two arguments are not in contradiction, and versions of each are in Job.
• But neither alternative is the conclusion reached by the book of Job itself!
• Job itself gives two answers, one within the core dialogs and one as an implication of framework narrative. We will explore both.
• But it is valuable to keep in mind these classic solutions to the “problem of evil” in order to recognize the very different answer the Bible gives.