God of Sense and Traditions of Non-Sense

Tonstad

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498233149
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

One hundred taxis lined up on Church Street in Oslo on November 26, 1942, deployed in order to round up the city's Jews and send them to Auschwitz. This reality anchors God of Sense and Traditions of Non-Sense: it is theology from a Holocaust perspective. The brash Elihu excoriating Job for his insistence that he is owed an explanation for the calamities that have befallen him. This is the book's opening salvo. Job speaking of a God of sense, Elihu and Job's three friends inaugurating a tradition of non-sense: this is the existential and theological predicament. The problem of finite suffering in this life addressed in the theological tradition with the prospect of infinite, endless suffering, in this book described as a key element in Traditions of Non-Sense. Back to the millions of Jews, among them 188 women and 42 children from Oslo, deported, gassed, and cremated--in God of Sense this is not seen as a problem that defeats belief, but as the reality that demands a religious and theological account of human existence.

Part I

God and Sense

Chapter One

God of Sense and Traditions of Non-Sense

“Teach us what to say to God; our minds are blank; we have nothing to say. I won’t ask to speak to God; why should I give him a chance to destroy me?” the young Elihu says to Job in one of the most startling books in literature (Job 37:19–20, GNB). The warning concludes Elihu’s unscheduled speech, his punch line just before God gets the last word in the increasingly-heated exchange. Elihu’s intrusion into the conversation, says the narrator, was triggered by the fact that Job’s three friends “had found no answer [to Job], though they had declared Job to be in the wrong” (Job 32:3).1

After listening to the friends’ futile attempt to silence Job, Elihu sets out to do better. While he expresses anger at Job’s friends for their ineptitude, he is even angrier at Job. In his eyes Job has his priorities wrong, being more concerned about his own reputation than God’s standing (32:2). Elihu’s admonition is the final attempt to dissuade the ailing man from his insistence that God owes him an explanation for the calamities that have befallen him.

And Elihu does not mince words. In his closing missive, he cuts off at the feet the merits of Job’s complaint, citing human incapacity even when it comes to knowing what to say (37:19). He rebukes Job for insisting on a meeting with God, denying legitimacy to a case that would be irreverent if not for the fact that Elihu has already deemed it incoherent (37:20a; cf. 23:3–6). Incoherence, indeed, could in Elihu’s view well be the hallmark of human attempts to address God. “Our minds are blank; we have nothing to say” is a key tenet in the script Elihu places before Job to sign (Job 37:19). He is convinced that Job is so out of bounds that his insolence invites real danger. “Why should I give [God] a chance to destroy me?” he warns, hinting rather unsubtly that if God were to destroy Job it would be self-invited and well deserved (37:20b, GNB). To Elihu, divine transcendence, inscrutability, and sovereignty are the verities against which Job is banging his head. “The Almighty—we cannot find him; he is great in power and justice, and abundant righteousness he will not violate,” he counsels (37:23). Job should cease and desist from his demand. “Those who are truly wise,” according to Elihu, “know their limitations, and do not expect to be able to argue with God,” says David Clines.2

Should Job leave it at that? Will he?

Elihu’s outburst strikes a posture of newness, but the novelty comes chiefly in the form of bluster and rudeness. By way of content, there is little new in his speech over and above what Job’s three friends have argued unsuccessfully throughout three cycles of poetic speeches. Elihu’s concluding admonition serves as a summary of the arguments all four have brought to bear on Job, a consensus statement of the view they hold in contrast to Job’s minority opinion. What that view is can be stated quite succinctly: Job should concede that his quest for understanding is futile and that he is, even at his best, only capable of speaking nonsense. Given that suffering is the problem for which Job seeks an explanation, this is the specific question concerning which he should retreat into respectful silence. To wring this admission from Job, Elihu and Job’s friends are prepared to pay a high price. As we shall see in greater detail (Chap. 14), they are willing to commit to a theology of non-sense, urging Job to do the same (37:19–23).3 The “nonsense” in question, lest we misunderstand, relates in this context to divine action that does not make sense, or the sense of which lies beyond human comprehension.

Looking at this conversation from the vantage point of history, there can be no doubt that Elihu’s admonition has found resonance in the Christian theological tradition. Three examples must suffice for proof, examples that are nevertheless quite decisive because they represent the most influential voices in the history of Christian theology: Augustine, Martin Luther, and Karl Barth.

Augustine (354–430), my first example, echoes Elihu and not Job on the point that takes the basic measure of the divine-human relationship. In a letter to his friend and fellow bishop Simplician written in 397, Augustine says that God “decides who are to be offered mercy by a standard of equity which is most secret and far removed from human powers of understanding.”4 Wherein is the “nonsense” in this statement? Augustine is not claiming that the divine action has no logic but the logic cannot be understood by humans, and there is reason to think that it will never be understood. God’s modus operandi defies human reason. Human incapacity, in turn, plays out in the context of divine inscrutability. Questioning must necessarily be futile if the questioner is incompetent and the one to whom the question is directed unfathomable! Roughly from that time onwards, Augustine defaults to the position expressed in Elihu’s rebuke to Job. “God owes explanations to no one,” Paula Fredriksen notes concerning Augustine’s mature view on the subject.5

Martin Luther (1483–1546) held convictions very similar to Augustine with respect to human capacity and divine inscrutability. Job, we recall, faults God for allowing a good man to suffer without giving an explanation. Luther ups the ante, arguing that God arbitrarily consigns humans to damnation and eternal suffering. Like Elihu and Augustine before him, Luther insists that no one should expect an explanation.

This is the highest degree of faith, to believe him [God] merciful when he saves so few and damns so many, and to believe him righteous when by his own will he makes us necessarily damnable, so that he seems, according to Erasmus, to delight in the torments of the wretched and to be worthy of hatred rather than of love. If, then, I could by any means comprehend how this God can be merciful and just who displays so much wrath and iniquity, there would be no need of faith.6

This clip from Luther’s debate with Erasmus promises even less by way of explanation for a belief that needs it more. Job looked to death...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Permissions
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Prologue
• Part One: God and Sense
• Part Two: Bursts of Sense
• Part Three: The Sense of the Ending
• Bibliography