Scriptural Remarks

On Job

How can we best synthesize what The Book of Job is? In this existential work we are confronted with ethics, suffering, and meaning. After all, we look for meaning in the face of suffering. The questions of the meaning of life are brough to bear when suffering is at its most extreme. And The Book of Job is a classic text that falls to the subject matter that philosophers call existentialism. While that subject has traditionally brooded over our physical sensations, this book transcends that reductive phenomenology and seeks serious questions with the intent of receiving serious answers. And for Job that is done within the framework of Jewish monotheism. Here there are actual stakes because Job is starting his conversation with a soul and souls possess a telos or direction.

In our youth, to those who enjoy a natural adolescence, we get along quite well. In this state we are in what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called a “disinterested attitude”; we are not reeling with existential questions, we are in alignment with the world as its personal experiencer. But when pain is total, in whatever fashion it may be, our expectations are inversed and we shrink. Suffering may be, at least in the short term, greater for the faithful in the depths of sorrow, but has the potential to provide longer term strength and resolve while faith does its work.

Here is the situation that sets the stage for this existential work: Job is “an upright man”, he is a righteous jew who obeys the commandments of God, i.e., in His favor when terrible misfortune strikes. Then we are introduced to a dialogue between Job and his friends that chiefly seek to answer why Job is suffering…

On The Psalms

In Psalm 49, David warns about putting our trust in wealth, he confirms that in wealth there is no salvation. But beyond this initial thought he goes even further:

“Be not thou afraid when one is made rich, when the glory of his house is increased. For when he dieth he shall carry nothing away: his glory shall not descend after him” (Psalm 49).

Now this moral principle is taken to its eternal or immortal end which I think we are in greater need of today given our hyper-controvercies. Namely, that being rich is not inherently bad or sinful, and is therefore, not a measure of a man's ultimate fortune—salvation and uprightness before the Lord. Therefore, says David here, if a man becomes rich fret not. His material wealth rises and falls with him. So we can forgo busying ourselves with who does and does not receive and possess wealth justly. 

This kind of ethics is transcendent. Any form of transcendental ethics frees the heart from mortality’s broken forms of justice. 

Now the end, verse 20 is curious. I've read several translations and the foregoing verses and I sense I'm not quite qualifying its total effect. But if I were to try I would say that there's a kind of…