Archive | October 2014
October 23, 2014  

Elihu, the Forgotten Prophet of Job

The Book of Job is one of the most important of the entire Bible, and is a prerequisite to all discussions of Christian theology, particularly theodicy.

Unfortunately, two erroneous interpretations of Job’s theses are by far the most popular.

Job the Hero: The Sunday School Interpretation

In Sunday School as a child, the Book of Job was presented to me as the story of:

  • Satan’s challenge to God,
  • Job’s suffering as a result,
  • Job courageously refusing to curse God through the suffering,
  • and God rewarding that fortitude with recompense and a happy ending.

This is the story of Job in the shallow end of the Christian pool. Take a gander, for example, at Christian heavy metal band Tourniquet’s take on the story:

Bad Friends: The “No Heroes” Interpretation

The other popular “take-away” from Job is that when someone is suffering, words only make things worse, and each person who talked to Job was wrong.

Job’s friends Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad are indeed rebuked, in the end, by God himself. And Job’s complaints against his friends would seem to serve such a thesis.

Ravi Zacharias wrote in his recent book, “Why Suffering? Finding Meaning and Comfort When Life Doesn’t Make Sense”:

“[A ‘negative reality’ emerged in] the colossal failure of [Job’s] friends. They were at their best when they took time out of their own lives just to be with him, saying nothing. The moment they began to give their own observations for why Job was suffering and offer their suggestions for remedying his situation, Job’s pain intensified. To be loved and feel cared about is what someone who is hurting needs from friends.”

Zacharias sees the problem of Job’s friends remedied only by God’s ultimate arrival:

“So the failure we see in the story of Job is the failure of friendship. Then comes the answer of God. God’s answer was not propositional, but relational. And that is what Job most needed. He simply needed to know that God was with him through his ordeal… that God had not abandoned him.”

The Problems With These Interpretations

The former interpretation accounts for Job chapters 1, chapter 2 verses 1 through 10, and chapter 42 verses 10 through 16. As such, it is missing about 40 chapters of content.

The latter interpretation has completely jettisoned the most overlooked prophet in the Old Testament: Elihu.

An Overview of Job

Job’s 42 chapters contain the following:

  • An introduction to Job’s predicament.
  • Job arguing with friends Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad about whether Job is righteous vs. whether God is just.
  • Elihu arguing against both Job and Job’s 3 friends.
  • The Storm of God arriving and boasting of His transcendent power, wisdom, and justice.
  • The conclusion: Job repents, God rebukes Job’s 3 friends (not Elihu), and Job is given recompense (as far as it can be called that).

jobview

Notice how much material Elihu provides, material never thereafter rebutted, left to be punctuated by God himself. Isn’t it odd that he is so often forgotten, bundled as “just another friend” alongside Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad?

Elihu as Prophet

Elihu is not a shy character. He’s a young upstart, and makes no apologies about the wisdom he brings to the table:

“I thought, ‘Age should speak; advanced years should teach wisdom.’ But it is the spirit in a person, the breath of the Almighty, that gives them understanding. It is not only the old who are wise, not only the aged who understand what is right. … My words come from an upright heart; my lips sincerely speak what I know. The Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life. … Be silent, [Job,] and I will teach you wisdom. … Hear my words, you wise men [Eliphaz, Zophar, Bildad]; listen to me, you men of learning. … So listen to me, you men of understanding. … If you have understanding, hear this; listen to what I say.”

All this, and God does not rebuke him like he rebukes everyone else.

Why?

Because Elihu really is providing us with truth and revelation.

He really is confronting Job, Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad and correcting their bad theology.

“Bear with me a little longer and I will show you that there is more to be said on God’s behalf. I get my knowledge from afar; I will ascribe justice to my Maker. Be assured that my words are not false; one who has perfect knowledge is with you.”

This isn’t some joke.

This is prophecy.

Elihu is on the scene to resolve the dispute, chastising both prior groups and offering the correct theological perspective.

Job’s Lamentation Theology

The calamity that befalls Job — and for which God is superordinately responsible (he deliberately gave permission to Satan here, after all) — prompts Job to regret the day he was born. He claims personal righteousness, and thus his misfortunes must be indicative (given that superordinate responsibility) of injustice in God, given that justice means, “He repays everyone for what they have done; he brings on them what their conduct deserves (Job 34).”

Job laments the fact that he cannot approach God personally with the case for his innocence; he yearns to do so! His friends aren’t “buying” that case, but Job surmises that a person lives that could vindicate him.

Job doesn’t relax God’s classical attributes. He fully endorses God’s omnipotence and superordinate responsibility (Job 12), as well as his cosmic wisdom (Job 28).

As such, Job’s theodicean solution — his “lamentation theology” — is to indict God’s benevolence.

“There is no justice,” Job says.

The Karmic Folk Theology of Eliphaz, Zophar, & Bildad

Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad have different emphases, but repeat some similar themes, and since are all rebuked, can be treated as a group.

Their argument is as follows: Since God is just (“He repays everyone for what they have done”) and superordinately responsible for what happens to a person, then if something bad happens to a person, it must be in response to something that person has done. Eliphaz articulates this “common sense” karmic folk theology:

“Who, being innocent, has ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed? As I have observed, those who plow evil and those who sow trouble reap it.”

Bildad, for example, jumps to the conclusion that Job’s sons must have been sinners, too:

“Does God pervert justice? Does the Almighty pervert what is right? When your children sinned against him, he gave them over to the penalty of their sin.”

Every time Job insists that he’s innocent, his friends go the opposite direction: Job must be super wicked, and trying to hide it. Zophar says:

“Though evil is sweet in [a wicked man’s] mouth, and he hides it under his tongue… [it] will turn sour in his stomach [and] become the venom of serpents within him.”

As Job proves adamant in his own defense, his friend Bildad retreats to that classic “catch-all” of total depravity: As a human, you are so beneath God that you are a worthless maggot and deserve whatever happens to you.

“How then can a mortal be righteous before God? How can one born of woman be pure? If even the moon is not bright and the stars are not pure in his eyes, how much less a mortal, who is but a maggot; a human being, who is only a worm!”

Eliphaz weaves a powerful figure: A wealthy man, portly and happy, brought down to shriveling, sickly misery.

Elihu’s Rejection of Job’s Lamentation Theology

First, Elihu sees it within human capacity to discern God’s justice in the abstract, even if we don’t know how it plays out day-by-day. He rejects the idea that God’s goodness and justice are completely inscrutable, as if something without human-appreciable meaning.

“For the ear tests words as the tongue tastes food. Let us discern for ourselves what is right; let us learn together what is good.”

Elihu further defines justice (“He repays everyone for what they have done”) and rejects the notion that God would pervert justice.

So, Elihu joins Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad against Job’s claim of innocence.

“His eyes are on the ways of mortals; he sees their every step. … Should God then reward you on your terms, when you refuse to repent? … [We all agree that] Job speaks without knowledge; his words lack insight. Oh, that Job might be tested to the utmost for answering like a wicked man! To his sin he adds rebellion; scornfully he claps his hands among us and multiplies his words against God.”

Elihu’s Rejection of Karmic Folk Theology

But here’s where it gets interesting.

Elihu agrees, Job has sinned, insofar as Job arrogantly indicted God for injustice, speaking “of things [he] did not understand”; Job’s plea, laden with such “empty talk,” was brazen, reckless, and cheap.

But he rejects the notion that man is a “maggot” who deserves whatever befalls him. The transcendence of God to man does not make man despised, but rather, makes man’s wickedness less impactful to God:

“Look up at the heavens and see; gaze at the clouds so high above you. If you sin, how does that affect him? If your sins are many, what does that do to him? … Your wickedness only affects humans like yourself.”

Instead of a “despised mankind” narrative, Elihu crafts a narrative in which God has an instrumental purpose for all he does:

“God is mighty, but despises no one; he is mighty, and firm in his purpose.”

In this way, God’s justice is comprehensible, but the intricacies of how that justice will be made manifest are mysterious. God is not a flayer; he’s a teacher:

“Who is a teacher like him? Who has prescribed his ways for him, or said to him, ‘You have done wrong’? … How great is God — beyond our understanding!”

It’s less about “vengeance,” but instead about correction, forebearing as long as that purpose has hope:

“He tells [the sinner] what they have done — that they have sinned arrogantly. He makes them listen to correction and commands them to repent of their evil.”

He recrafts Eliphaz’s tale of the sickened man into a narrative of redemption:

“Someone may be chastened on a bed of pain with constant distress in their bones, so that their body finds food repulsive and their soul loathes the choicest meal. Their flesh wastes away to nothing, and their bones, once hidden, now stick out. They draw near to the pit, and their life to the place of the dead.

Yet if there is an angel at their side, a messenger, one out of a thousand, sent to tell them how to be upright, and he is gracious to that person and says to God, ‘Spare them from going down to the pit; I have found a ransom for them — let their flesh be renewed like a child’s; let them be restored as in the days of their youth’  — then that person can pray to God and find favor with him, they will see God’s face and shout for joy; he will restore them to full well-being. … God does all these things to a person — twice, even three times — to turn them back from the pit, that the light of life may shine on them.”

Christ as Victor

We’ve talked before about how the existential dilemma of Ecclesiastes — ultimate meaninglessness — received a practical solution in Christ as conqueror of death.

In Job, we see the dilemma of justice, where the wicked may enjoy the peace of death without their due repayment, and where the playing-out of God’s justice may involve the unrewarded — in life — suffering of the faithful.

Christ, as conqueror of death, is also the final judge. The final judgment is not for God’s edification — Elihu correctly explains that God doesn’t need to hold a tribunal — but for ours. And through that process, all “loose ends” can be wrapped-up entirely:

“For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.”

Elihu as Bridge

From the Jewish Encyclopedia:

“[Elihu’s] meaning is ‘He is my God’ [in the sense of] ‘He remains my God and does not change.’ … [His] argument is as follows: God is the educator of mankind, who punishes only until the sinner has atoned for his sin and recognizes his wrong-doing. Then God has attained His object, to ‘bring back his soul from the pit, to be enlightened with the light of the living.’

Elihu, therefore, holds a middle ground, maintaining that God neither ‘takes away judgment,’ nor sends suffering merely as a punishment, but acts as the educator and teacher of mankind.”

Elihu is our “bridge” to Christ. His is a theological response that unites justice and mercy — not by conflating them, but by employing them as part of a single grand plan.

His is a rejection of pure retribution and an embrace of prospective instrumentality, an exaltation of a God who is mighty, despises no one, and is firm in his purpose.

Elihu, who heralds the Lord Himself:

“Out of the north he comes in golden splendor;

God comes in awesome majesty.

The Almighty is beyond our reach and exalted in power;

in his justice and great righteousness, he does not oppress.”

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October 14, 2014  

Does Determinism Make Us Robots?

As we’ve talked about before, we humans have the funny tendency to be “too rocked” by world-rocking revelations.

In other words, proposals that dramatically shift our way of thinking can prompt us to — accidentally — go too far and conclude things that are vaguely related, and seemingly entailed by the new revelation, but not actually entailed by the new revelation.

We called this Kochab’s Error, and Kochab’s story helps us beware his Error.

Determinism

Determinism is the idea that everything that happens is the definite result of a set of causes. Given a single set of causes, a single effect must emerge — unless and only unless sheer randomness intervenes.

This is a rather benign position. Imagine watching the universe from the outside, and Maurice chooses apple pie over chocolate pie. Then, imagine rewinding the universe, including everything within Maurice, to seconds before that decision.

He’ll make the apple pie decision again, of course.

“Of course” proceeds from the rhetorical question, “Why wouldn’t he?,” entailing the fact that if nothing about Maurice were altered on the second go, then he likewise wouldn’t decide differently.

Our decisions are products of our constitutions — “who we are” — at the moment of decision. So unless randomness intervenes, Maurice will always choose apple pie on each “repeat.”

And thank goodness! The prospect of Maurice choosing differently from one go to the next would be horrifying — it would mean that our decisions were not dependable products of our constitutional “factories.”

(The prevalent interpretation of quantum mechanics has there being intervening randomness at very tiny scales. Behavioral determinism under this interpretation is sometimes called “adequate determinism,” since it isn’t perfect determinism.)

A Common Response to Determinism

The very common response to hearing about determinism, however, is that of revulsion. That’s because we have several “default” perceptions:

  • Others surprise us, and we even surprise ourselves, and we have a hard time predicting any individual’s behavior with accuracy. Thus, decisionmaking seems very “spontaneous.”
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  • We lack a sensation of the emergence of our thoughts from that of which they’re caused (if indeed they’re caused, and not random).
    –
  • The way in which most of us contemplate our available avenues — by imagining multiple prospective “worlds” sitting just ahead in time — gives us the sense that there really are multiple prospective “worlds” floating out there, like an array of multiple roads from a single junction.

Determinism exchanges that feeling of spontaneity for the recognition of a “hidden” non-spontaneity, and seems to bulldoze all but one of those “multiple roads.”

And thus, we see the following very common reductio ad absurdum: “If determinism were true, we’d all be robots!”

Being a Robot

Being a robot entails all sorts of unsavory things:

  • The lack of consciousness.
  • The inability to have emotions.
  • The inability to love.
  • The inability to express interests and values.
  • The inability to find meaning in things.
  • The inability to creatively express one’s self.
  • The inability to come up with novel inventions and innovations.
  • The conformity to simple rules.
  • The inability to vividly imagine multiple prospects and choose between them according to feelings, intuition, and reason developed from a lifetime of experience.

Notice that each of the above are not things that could describe us, even under determinism.

As such, “We’d all be robots” is a Kochab’s Error. Calling us “robots” under determinism is absurd, trampling on all sorts of real, true things about ourselves that we enjoy and express.

To put it simply, if we ask “Could a robot make poetry/artwork/symphonies/etc.?” and the answer is “No,” then we’re not robots under determinism.

balloons

A Common Christian Response to Divine Determinism

When God’s involved, determinism has an extra complication: Everything ultimately traces back, through the domino-chain of causes and effects, to things God set up.

Thus, rather than calling us “robots,” a common response is, “If divine determinism were true, we’d all be puppets!”

Clear Non-Puppets Under Determinism

Most who say that humans have “libertarian free will” — a kind of “true spontaneity of decision” that precludes prior causes somehow (the “somehow” is never positively articulated) — do not apply the same quality to lesser animals.

And yet, our experience with lesser animals is not that they’re “God’s puppets.” Particularly when we think of our mammalian pets, we observe creatures with unique dispositions, desires, decisionmaking faculties, methods of contemplation and projection, feelings, and surprising (almost spontaneous!) behaviors.

Those aren’t the actions of puppets.

The story of Christian the lion is of genuine love, not an illusory veneer atop puppetry:

Further, even if someone says libertarian free will extends to lesser animals, would they apply the same to water against rock?

Imagine a cliff face being eroded by crashing waves over thousands of years. With each beat of the ocean, the face is slightly altered.

cliff

Does the deterministic procession of those water molecules against the molecules in the rock mean that each alteration — every nook and cranny throughout its history — is the hand of God in studious, meticulous action?

Such would be an extra conclusion beyond mere determinism.

Though under determinism God instantiated the universe — and each emergent item in the universe owes itself ultimately to that instantiation (and any subsequent intervention) — this doesn’t mean that God is consciously micromanaging absolutely everything.

Just as we don’t consider every cliff face at every moment God’s deliberate and micromanaged puppetry under determinism, nor the behavior of every Fido and Mittens in households around the world God’s deliberate and micromanaged puppetry under determinism, we aren’t burdened to consider the behavior of humans God’s deliberate and micromanaged puppetry under determinism.

The Gardener

The Gardener set the borders and rules and seeds of his garden from the get-go.

He also knew precisely how it would turn out in the end.

As the garden grew, there were blossoms and fruit, but also some thorns and weeds. But the Gardener was pleased to allow some such things to emerge.

Why?

Because although he didn’t have a taste for thorns and weeds, he did have a taste for letting his garden bloom chaotically — orderly, but messily and naturally — without constant intervention.

Did he intervene on occasion? Of course. Sometimes the thorns and weeds would be too much, and sometimes he wanted certain plants to know his personal care.

The degree to which he “let grow,” and the degree to which he intervened, proceeded from his total interest set expressing itself in action and inaction through time. And the deterministic chaos emergent from “letting grow” means that even under determinism, God is not a micromanager.

But if he knew precisely how it would turn out in the end, why do it at all?

meadow

Because it was in the Gardener’s taste to actualize his garden, not merely imagine it.

He really did want plants to grow.

He really did want shapes, forms, and stories to emerge.

He wanted to create a garden, and so he did so.

Conclusion

Christians who are libertarian free will incompatibilists — those who think there’s no sense of free will under determinism — have a typical answer when we ask them about whether God specifically micromanages the needles of each pine tree (a deterministic procession) or the thoughts and behaviors of my dog, Kirby (a deterministic procession): “No, he doesn’t.”

They’re ready to answer this for non-humans; they generally find it cogent, sensible, and satisfying.

This should likewise satisfy for human thoughts and behaviors under Christian determinism.

  • Because we each have a “natural will” — a will wrought, knitted, and cobbled from an incalculably large and unique causal recipe — and
  • because we can talk about the degree to which that will is free from gross intrusions, oppressions, and manipulations, and
  • because that will yields obedience and rebellion, horror and symphony,

we are in no meaningful sense robots.

For more about how Biblical compatibilism solves the age-old puzzle of freedom vs. sovereignty, see “Freedom & Sovereignty: The Heterophroneo.”

For more about the authorship of evil under divine determinism, see “Is God the Author of Evil? Semantics of ‘Want/Will.'”

For more about how determinism does nothing to preclude “genuine love,” see “‘Genuineness’ by Association.”

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