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I am glad to continue today, and I appreciated lots of conversations in sidebars yesterday. So excited to continue. And I think by the end of this talk, we're going to see a really interesting kind of convergence of all three of the lecturers, which could not have been expected, but spirit is at work, right? So I'll begin by thinking about lessons from the book of Job on the ethics of religious community.

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This is a rather underdeveloped aspect of Job's scholarship, the role and implications for community, for church, we might say. Most readers are so dazzled by the theological argument between Job and his friends and Job and God that they overlook what is happening at the level of human community. And I think we need to do better than that.

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I think this is a book that has many things to say about community. So, the dilemmas and demands of consolation. I'll start there. Samir Yadav writes, the book of Job

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is not so much about how to properly speak or withhold speech about God in the midst of innocent suffering. It is instead a theological exploration of the dilemmas and demands of consolation imposed upon us as readers, given the inexplicable enormities of innocent human suffering. So remember that phrase, the dilemmas and demands of consolation.

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I think that Yadav is at least half right here. He says the issue is how we console others during their times of innocent suffering. When someone we know, a friend perhaps, undergoes terrible and unjust suffering, how do we console them? What do we say?

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But at least for religious believers, a big part of what we say, the consolation that we offer, usually is some form of God talk. We say some things about God. We do wrestle with whether and how to speak about God to those who are suffering around us. What do we say, really, about where God is right now when somebody has lost a child?

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or a five-year-old has been diagnosed with leukemia. What do we say about what God is doing in this situation? What this suffering might mean for the sufferer in their relationship with their God? Most would agree that Job's friends are at their best when they say nothing.

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Sometimes we are at our best when we say nothing and we just show up. So for a week, Job's friends sat silently with him. But then Job offered a terrible anguished soliloquy. By the way, Job 3 is some of the most anguished words in all of the Bible.

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Job says, I wish I had never been born. I wish the day didn't exist on the calendar. And he goes backwards from there. I wish the night nine months before had never happened.

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I wish that, I mean, it's incredible. So Job offers this terrible anguish soliloquy, which I'm convinced is not directed to his friends. It's not directed to God, it's just spoken. The friends at this point have a choice as to how to respond.

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They could remain silent. They could weep. They could wait for Job to engage them with a direct address. They could express sympathy and support.

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They could offer practical help. Unfortunately, they do none of these things. Eliphaz feels threatened by the theological dimension of Job's anguished soliloquy, and he responds with theological backtalk in Job chapter 4. And off we go into a sustained argument between Job and his friends about how to think and talk about God in relation to Job's suffering.

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And off it goes, and it gets worse chapter by chapter. Samir Yadav is especially acute in how he describes the nature of the Friends' defensive theological speech. He says, and I think he's especially, I think Samir Yadav teaches at Baylor, at least when this was written. So in that context, I think it helps to hear these words.

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When confronted with the grand narrative that purports to make theological sense out of the goodness of creation, we can begin to succumb to a temptation toward optimism. Our capacity to listen to the suffering voices in Scripture can become dulled. Our capacities to hear and attend to the sufferings of others can suffer from cultivated failures of compassion.

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Even a correct notion of God's redemptive work can serve for us as a delusional attempt to avoid the realities of suffering that threaten us and afflict others around us. Christian theologies of flourishing can likewise become elaborate attempts at spiritual bypassing and toxic positivity that hide A thinly veiled form of terror management. just so many self-protective religious games.

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Yikes, Samir Yadav was bringing it that day. Yadav is talking about the entire biblical narrative, and if we know the biblical narrative, we know that there's a lot of positive things to say. The goodness of creation, the love of God, God's intent to redeem, God's desire for human and planetary flourishing. He says, that's all great, but those

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That narrative, that arc, can lead us astray during times where our task is to offer consolation to suffering friends. If we default to the happy narrative of redemption, we're not going to be very helpful, probably. The relentless tendency toward optimism so often found in Christian communities can make it difficult to offer anything but happy platitudes.

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Has your suffering ever been met with, well, you know, God must have needed another angel, or God has a plan, or God is in control, or everything happens for a reason? That's perhaps one of my least favorites. We return to Yadab's pungent language, spiritual bypassing, toxic positivity, and terror management. put those on bumper stickers, okay?

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Spiritual bypassing is when people use spiritual or theological concepts or practices to evade their unresolved emotional issues or challenging situations. This is a religiously laden defense mechanism that functions to bypass hard human problems with God talk. Spiritual bypassing often takes the form of toxic forms of positive religious language, happy talk. is ubiquitous in many Christian communities.

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Job's friends are also clearly trying to manage their own terror that something similar might happen to them. In fact, in the exegesis, I look at how a lot of what they're doing is saying, the reason this is happening to you is because of X. We didn't do X, that's why it's not going to happen to us. This terror management strategy is a ubiquitous human problem.

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The reason that person got cancer is because of X. The reason I didn't get cancer is because I didn't do X. The reason that person got in a car accident is because of Y. The reason I don't get in car accidents is because I don't do Y.

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This is a terror management strategy to deal with the suffering and the evils and the horrible things that happen to people. So The idea that Job's friends are offering terror management as a form of self-protection and that Job's friends are not able to attend to his pain because they're too busy dealing with their own need for terror management is what Yadav is arguing. So clearly, one implication of the Book of Job is that intentionality related to what we say to people during times of consolation is essential.

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The Book of Job can be a great tool for accessing resources that are something other than spiritual bypassing, toxic positivity, and terror management. There's almost nothing that Job's friends say to him in the course of the book that is any help whatsoever. One of the striking themes of the Book of Job is the way that religious communities can close ranks to defend their traditions, even at the cost of scapegoating dissidents. In fact, I didn't mention, but Rene Girard has a book on Job.

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And Girard sees the scapegoating mechanism happening in the Book of Job. Job was, at first, simply trying to articulate his own grief and his own questions, and very rapidly found himself in a spitting match with friends I often, by the end of the book, I call them ex-friends, because that's what they are, with friends who hear his grief as an attack on sacred religious tradition, and then they double down on the authority of the tradition. This raises broader issues related to the tendency toward authoritarianism in some religious communities.

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One of the best commentaries on Job that none of you would have ever heard of is by the political commentator named William Sapphire. Does anybody remember the name William? Sapphire from back in the day. Sapphire wrote a whole book on Job.

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It's amazing. He wrote it in the 90s. And he is struck by how Job is a charter document for the opposition to authoritarianism, religious or political. And he says this, the book's message is not that we should accept the dictates of fate, capital F, but rather that we should object to authority's injustice or unconcern,

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and assert our morality as best we can. Challenging religion on moral grounds was shocking to established authority because it dared assert that tradition may not be rightly expressing God's design. In the same way, challenging authoritarian political leadership today, not that we know anything about that, challenging authoritarian political leadership today on human rights grounds, is troubling to some powers that be because the challenge itself strikes at the basis of the regime's legitimacy.

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He was talking about other countries in the 1990s when he wrote this. But we won't linger here for very long. But notice that Safire is arguing. that it is that Job teaches that it is right to protest injustice, even God's injustice, or unconcern, as an assertion of our own moral agency.

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But Sapphire is also recognizing that when dissenters or sufferers within traditions do this, they often run into fierce resistance from the custodians of the religious tradition. Their response is often to attempt to crush dissent and exile dissenters. For Sapphire, a great political commentator in his day, this connected with political authoritarianism's tendency to crush dissent and exile dissenters. So Job can actually help us speak to the authoritarianism of our moment.

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Catherine Lopez writes, Job subverts theologically simplistic and harmful views of God. He holds up a mirror as if to say, look at yourselves and look at the God your words create. I say during the exegesis of Job 19 that while our theories about what an invisible God is doing to us as we suffer are theological speculations only, what our religious community does to us while we suffer is daily reality. Part of what they do to us might well be to inflict really bad theology on us, like the reason you lost your child is because you sinned, which is what Job's friends told him over and over again.

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Lopez is correct in saying that religious traditions create a version of God through their teachings. This version of God may be better or worse, life-giving or destructive, Religious communities mediate and authorize visions and versions of God every day. The Book of Job is about what happens when one such version crashed into the suffering reality of a human being who refused to accept it.

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And it is about the strenuous efforts that custodians of the tradition will take to suppress challenges to the tradition. Norman Gottwald wrote, probably the author of Job would have been satisfied if his whistleblowing on moralism and dogmatism managed to alert the custodians of wisdom to the price of cheapening and betraying its critical process of observation and reflection. This is an important point. The unreflective defense of tradition can become a betrayal of the tradition in the name of defending it.

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I'm going to preaching and meddling today, as they say in the Baptist tradition. Amen. Am I right, Sean? Okay.

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All right. That's right. Religious traditions develop over centuries. At their best, that development involves fine minds wrestling critically with crucial issues and doing so repeatedly as new challenges arise.

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The reflexive, unthinking, defensive tradition represents its ossification, its calcification. can be a step on the way to the demise of a tradition rather than its survival. Many of us post-evangelicals see the signs of decay in the religious tradition we have left behind and in the brittle defenses of tradition that are offered by its custodians. Ellen Davis, a great biblical scholar, says, the book of Job may have little to say directly about God's character and the nature of divine justice.

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However, it says much about human character. as it is revealed and sometimes transformed under the pressure of the most extreme suffering, and in relationship, even tortured relationship with God, and then that line I said yesterday, Job is the only person who learns and thus changes in the course of the book. Think about it, Job is indeed the only person who learns anything in the course of the book. Job's friends just dig in and defend the tradition.

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Whether God does so as well, we'll talk about a little bit later. It is hard to learn anything while building a defensive wall around yourself. You're too busy with your trowel and your mortar and your bricks. Then the third point in this section, when God is hiding, we must reveal love.

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The idea that Job wants to put God on trial is one of the most shocking and audacious aspects of the book of Job. Two responses from the Jewish community have struck me with great force. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote this in relation to Job. The Hebrew Bible records God's mighty acts in history.

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This is Heschel. What is overlooked is that on every page of the Bible, we come upon God's longing and waiting for humans to do their mighty acts. This is the meaning of human existence. The world is unredeemed and deficient, and God is in need of us.

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to be partners in completing, in aiding, in redeeming. The urgent issue is not personal salvation, but the prevention of humanity's surrender to the demonic. The sanctuary has no walls. The opportunity to praise or to aid has no limits.

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When God is silent, humans must speak in God's place. When God is hiding God's compassion, humans must reveal God's love. There was a rabbi named Joshua Spurka who wrote a commentary about Job. He seemed conservative, maybe Orthodox, or even ultra-Orthodox.

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In his commentary, he expresses deep anger at the very idea that Job is putting God on trial. He considers it an impertinence. He writes in his dedication, this book is dedicated to the memory and martyrdom of the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazi barbarians. Sperka reads God's answer in the whirlwind as this, what are you human beings doing to avoid evil in the world?

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He concludes, it is the human task to become a partner in creating a better world and ultimately hastening the Messianic era. So both Heschel and Spurka are reading God through the lens of the Jewish tradition. I see the idea of tikkun olam, the healing of the world here, and the distinctive and original Jewish Messianism in which human beings cooperate with God to repair the world and hasten the coming of the Messiah. In Job, the defenders of tradition mainly defend tradition.

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There is no talk about how to assist Job in his need, or how to care for the poor and destitute, or how to prevent further violent crimes such as what has befallen Job, or how to make the world more just. Heschel says, when God is silent, humans must speak in God's place. When God is hiding God's compassion, we must reveal God's love. Whatever we may want to say about why God is silent and why God seems to be hiding,

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We are always called to speak the words and do the deeds of justice, and to offer the love to which we are always called. In this sense, Rabbi Spurka is right in saying that the Book of Job can be read to point to human beings being on trial, not God being on trial. Whatever it is that God is doing, we are responsible for loving our neighbor and repairing the world as best we can. What we should not be doing is spending our time speculating about who sinned and why they're being punished by God.

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What the friends offer Job is speculative theology about what Job did wrong. What Job needs is their solidarity, their practical help, which is never once offered. A bunch of guys sitting around debating theology when Job has been bereft and Job's wife is also bereft. I got an interesting question about Job's wife yesterday.

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ask me more about it later. There's a development on the idea of what Job's wife is about and why she says what she says in the tradition. It's fascinating, in the Jewish tradition. What he needs is their solidarity, their practical help, and their partnership in making a better world.

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We should head in this direction, solidarity and acts of justice, not speculative theology. So now I turn to the final section of this paper. on the ethics of God in the Book of Job. This is the fun part.

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Are you ready? Okay. This is the most sensitive discussion. What are we to make of God, the character God, as depicted in the Book of Job?

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And I think that's how we should think about it. Think of God as a character in a play called the Book of Job. This creates a little distance between that character's literary depiction here and the actual God of the universe, perhaps. But the fact that this depiction of God has made it into the canon certainly makes it relevant for any overall picture of God that we might develop.

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As we think about how God is depicted in... Job, remember that we have relatively little reliable information. We have lots of talk about God. But we only encounter God in the much disputed prologue and epilogue, and in the speech from the whirlwind in Job 38 through 41. Besides that, we have lots of God talk by Job and his friends and Elihu, without any definitive declaration as to whether the reader is supposed to believe some, any, or all of what any of these characters say. So we don't have a reliable narrator. We just have a lot of people talking about God. And we get to decide what we think, which is really interesting. I suggest that we allow Job's interpretation of God's treatment of him to carry a bit more weight, certainly more weight than the words of the friends. I think we can do this in view of the vindication of Job in 42, 7-8, when God punishes the friends because, quote, you have not spoken the truth about me as did my servant Job. This is not at all unambiguous, but it does make it at least reasonable for us to attend closely to the words Job says about God in the book. We then must ask which of the things Job says qualify as true. And of course, we must attend closely to the divine speech in Job 38 through 41. So just, I'm going to touch down on some places to fill out the picture a little bit. I know the time is not endless here, but.

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Let's not downplay the horrifying nature of the prologue in Job 1 and 2. It's easy to dismiss it both in terms of its theology and its editorial history, but any final form reading of the book of Job must attend to what happens there. In the prologue, I think we have to say that it offers a terrifying and terrible depiction of God. If read on its face, we are to believe that God twice allowed the Satan to attack an innocent and pious man as a kind of bet to see if he would curse God in response. The 2 unhappy interpretive options available are to dismiss the story as a fanciful setup, or to grant that God tests innocent human beings this way sometimes, just to see how virtuous they really are. In general, it is a terrible picture of a capricious God. In the restorative epilogue, we definitely have a cleaning up of the story and a happy ending. The God of the epilogue shows kindness to Job at last and offers clear vindication. God offers material restoration to Job and blesses him and his wife with new children. God's actions enable Job to be restored to his family and his community. And Job is given many more years and then dies old and happy. So they live happily ever after, right? So that's cool. No problem. But as we review the speeches of Job between the prologue and the epilogue, we run into the most incredible and damning claims by Job about God. In Job 6.4, the arrows of the Almighty are in me, my spirit absorbs their poison.

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Job 9.17, he wounds me much for no cause. In the rest of that chapter, Job accuses God not just of crushing him, but of destroying the blameless and mocking innocent people as they are ruined and handing over the earth to injustice. In Job 12, Job says, robbers live untroubled in their tents and those who provoke God are secure. In Job 16, says, now God has truly worn me out. You have destroyed my whole community. I think that's an important line. Job also says that God has shriveled him, torn and persecuted him, gnashed his teeth at him, handed him over to evil men, broken him into pieces, taken him by the neck and shattered him, set him up as a target for archers, pierced his kidney with arrows, spilled his bile on the ground, breached him again and again and rushed at him like a warrior and has done so for no injustice on his part. That's A detailed indictment. In three places, Job dreams of a heavenly arbiter. Famous lines, you know, my vindicator, my arbiter. He hopes for someone in the heavens who will show compassion to him. In the book of Job, God neither serves in that role nor provides anyone else to do so. In Job 19, 17, it says, I cry violence, but I'm not answered. I shout, but can get no justice. In Job 21, Job says, why do the wicked live on, prosper, and grow wealthy? In that chapter, Job attacks God on the justice of God in the world, and picturesquely describes how easily the wicked prosper. In Job 24, he says, why are times for judgment not reserved by Shaddai?

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He also offers an intense, detailed description of specific injustices against vulnerable people that leave them hungry, naked, cold, thirsty, and dying, basically raising the question, if I can notice this, where are you? In Job 30, he says, because God has disarmed and humbled me, they have thrown off restraint in my presence. Job accuses God of bringing him so low that the lowest of the low now deride him, that his dignity is destroyed, that he's been reduced to dust and ashes, that God refuses to hear his cries for mercy and justice. Job is a ruined man and God has ruined him. That's what Job accuses God of. So Job offers not an occasional lament or a peep of protest, but a comprehensive indictment of God for injustice against Him and for superintending A deeply unjust world. Is this what God is commending Job for in Job 42.7? You have spoken true words about me? Yikes. What might that mean for our understanding of the character of God as depicted in the book? Maybe the whirlwind speech will help us sort it out. My general conclusion about the whirlwind speech, Job 38 through 41, which gets amazing rivers of ink in all commentaries, is that the voice of God in the whirlwind does offer meaningful reframing of Job's thinking

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including by decentering the role of humanity in creation, and by emphasizing the value of wild creatures and the most untamable creatures like Leviathan and Behemoth. But there is next to nothing in these chapters that addresses whether God is at all involved in the world in making justice. Carol Newsome, who I respect deeply, does not agree. In the whirlwind speech, she sees God establishing for Job, quote, the fundamental reliability of the structures of creation, unquote. She says that God reminds Job that he lives in a world full of valued creatures, most of which humans know nothing about. God also gives humans the capacity to freely, quote, choose to perceive and embody an order of rightness and respect in community. Newsom sees God in the book of Job reaffirming that God has given human beings the building blocks for the work of justice in the world. She writes, a moral order is something that has to be created or more properly co-created. It comes into being and continues to exist through the actions of individual moral agents. So we're asking, and here in a sense all three of our lecturers are asking, how does justice get done in this world? Newsome is saying that God gives humans the building blocks to do justice, but then she uses the language of co-created, co-created with God. Newsome goes on to say that God teaches Job to recognize, quote, the presence of the chaotic as part of the design of creation. Think of the lecture from Katherine Keller yesterday about creation, Genesis 1.

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and to be satisfied with no real explanation for the chaotic and its continued power. Despite its dangers to creatures, including humans, Newsome also reads the grand tour of the wild creation as, quote, suggestive of the formation of a moral order by God, characterized by, quote, place, purpose, and limit. This is a language of balance, she says, not a fully developed ethic, but a kind of framing for an ethic. She reads Job 38, 12-15, related to the dawn, quote, setting a limit to the wicked as God's way of describing the temporary restraining of antisocial impulses rather than the violent crushing of God's enemies. In other words, Newsome is suggesting that even the whirlwind speech has God doing something to restrain evil and to make the world just. But I am not persuaded. If one is accused of something in court and refuses to answer, but shouts about something else, it is usually taken to mean that the accused is unable or unwilling to answer the charges. Is this how we should read God's non-response to Job's many specific charges about injustice, both what he has suffered and in the world more broadly? The whirlwind speech was a moment where the character of God could have offered a direct explanation of what has happened to Job, and for that matter, what happens to so many other sufferers. This was a moment where God could offer an account of a providential superintending of justice in the world that God has made.

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God could have said explicitly that the unexplained, chaotic dimension of creation just claims casualties from time to time. God could have said that God made a bet with the accuser and now regrets it very much. Sorry, Job. It would have been helpful if God in Job 38 through 41 had clarified what role God plays in bringing justice on the earth. There are so many biblical texts in and beyond Job that suggest that God's role in bringing justice in the world is profound and active. We say it all the time in the social justice side of the Christian community, right? God is a liberator.

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God is a doer of justice. God's defenders have said that over and over again in the chapters in Job. Job has believed in it as well and wants to hold God accountable for the justice that God has declared to be central and has not delivered to Job.

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God could have said that the design of creation turns out to be that there will be no justice on earth unless it is co-created by humans. Co-created would mean at least that humans do it together. God's role at a weak claim level could be that God has equipped us to do justice. Or God's role making a stronger claim would be some kind of mysterious co-participation, that it is God, or Spirit, motivating and empowering and aiding and capping off human efforts to do the work of justice and righteousness till it flows down like rivers.

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But no such account is offered in the speech, so sure it would be nice to have something like that. One very plausible reading of the message of the Book of Job is that there is, in fact, no humanly discernible and no humanly accessible moral order to the universe. We live in a tragic world, and in terms of what happens here, we are responsible. We, humans.

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I suggest that Job comes to accept that, and that is what his submission speech means at the end, in Job 42, 6. That he is able to make peace and rebuild his life without any longer having the belief that God makes justice in the world. And that from now on he will do the best he can to be the best human being that he can be and how he relates to his community and his family, his wife, his children, all those around him. Some theologians are comforted by the idea that God deigns to speak to Job at all.

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They say, hey, isn't it wonderful that, you know, God talks to Job. David Burrell, a theologian, wrote that it's this encounter between God and Job that is the consolation. God didn't have to answer, God does answer. He writes, Job is commended in the end because he dared to address the Creator God.

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His interlocutors are castigated for purporting to speak knowingly about that one. Speaking about something veers toward explaining while speaking to someone can engage both in a relationship of exchange, open to yet other forms of understanding. So this is Borel's defense of God. You read a lot of defenses of God in the literature about Job.

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He says, the Creator God does answer Job's extended complaints. What is most startling of all, that God responded to him. So we're supposed to be satisfied with that. Burrell says it's the very fact that God responds to Job that shows that God cares about having a relationship with Job, that God is continually creator and is in covenant with creatures, including Job, and including all of us.

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But I am not quite so sanguine. Have you actually read the whirlwind speech recently? The manner of God speaking to Job is far more imperious than it is tender. Job is not invited into a discussion of the nature of his covenant with his Creator.

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A straightforward reading, I think, is that Job attempted to speak to God for many chapters and God remained silent. Then when God finally spoke to Job, God did not address the content of Job's complaints at all. It would be like if you had an issue with your child, your child really needed to talk to you and you just shouted really loudly. God forcefully directed Job's attention to the wild frontiers of creation, indicating their great interest and value, and challenged Job's ignorance and powerlessness relative to God.

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This was not an answer, and it showed nothing like covenant love. So to conclude, Job is not the only book in the Bible, but it is somehow, amazingly, in the Bible. Overall, I continue to believe that this majestic book is quite destabilizing of a major theme of the Bible, that God is a God of active justice-making who superintends the world.

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It remains stunning to me that Job made it into the Bible. But as I end this study, I feel a deep sense of gratitude that this ingenious book did indeed find its place in the Hebrew Bible and then the Christian canon. Written to address a crisis for the Jewish people 2,500 or more years ago, the book seems very much up-to-the-minute. I think this was a book written from crisis and speaks to crisis, such as the crisis we are in now.

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We live in an era in which we can daily find out exactly how wicked people behave, and how unjust the world is through our social media feeds. We watch people getting murdered on our screens every day. We are recording evil all around the world every day.

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We can look through our GPS satellites at the battered landscape of war-ravaged lands all over the world and in our own country. We can watch people get killed on TikTok. We can buy pornography where children and women are abused. We can study books that describe the mass killings that have taken place just in the last century.

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Where shall we start? The idea that God actively superintends this world and brings justice in this world is less plausible than it has ever been, in my view. Weaker accounts of God's role as a kind of inspirer or co-creator or present spirit strike me as having a kind of abstract wispiness.

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But I may be wrong. No one really knows what it might mean to co-create a just world with God. We do know what it means to get up on Monday and join the group marching for human rights. I think Rabbi Heschel was right.

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Where God is hidden, we must show up. Where hatred rules, we must bring love. The moral order of the world is ours to build. Thank you all very much.

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As always, if you can do us a kindness, make sure you take a look at those QR codes for Slido, and we will do a little bit of time for Q&A. So to get us started, Henry Nauman speaks of a ministry of presence. Not in saying something or doing something, but simply by being present can make a world of difference. Job's friends and many Christians, especially men, struggle with the concept of being present, not critiquing or problem solving, but offering a ministry of presence.

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What are two things that we can learn from Job's friends as a model of what not to do? I like that talk in the tiny talk yesterday. Here's the, here's how to work with young adults, here's what not to do with young adults, you know, the backside. That was brilliant.

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Not to respond to anguished questions with defensiveness. Not to blame the victim for their own suffering. That's a pretty good start. Yeah, no, that's a lot of therapy.

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That's right. That's excellent. Following up with that as well, too. What about the reconciliation of Job's friends?

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In the end, they do not accept God's condemnation of their speech and go to Job to receive forgiveness. In the end, in the epilogue, God instructs Job to sacrifice for his friends so that they might be forgiven for the wrong things that they have said. And he does that. And so his role as kind of like priestly mediator, which is we see him in the beginning doing that for his children.

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He does it here for his friends, but we never hear their voices again. And there's no evidence in the epilogue, though it's a very brief epilogue, that they're somehow sitting around the table of fellowship with the family celebrating the restoration of Job. I envision Job's friends as having burned their relationship with Job through all the things that they accused him of. I mean, not only did they accuse Job of being the author of the sins that caused his family to be destroyed, at some points they accused his children of having brought it on themselves.

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There's a line in Job where it says, if your son sinned against him, he dispatched them for their sins. This kind of wild accusation against Job and his family, I don't know, maybe there was reconciliation, but we don't see any picture of it. He does do what God asks. He sacrifices for the friends so that they are not held guilty before God just at the very end, but we never see them again after that.

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Thank you. Here's another question. What about Job's wife? She has been vilified and demonized throughout history and finds no community or comfort in this story.

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She too has lost everything. Yes. I discovered something amazing. The only lines we have, I don't have the whole book manuscript here, unfortunately, but the only lines we have from Job's wife are, you still holding on to your integrity?

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Why don't you curse God and die? That's in Job 2, 9, I think. But in the Septuagint, the Greek writing, the rabbis or the scribes who translated the Hebrew Bible into the Greek expanded her lines there. If you look at the Septuagint, it says something like this.

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She says, here I am, cleaning, working in people's houses to sustain life for us, while you sit here on the ash heap and complain. And she says that I lost the children who I labored over, I carried and labored over and brought into the world. And so I interpret Job's wife as a head of him in

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in being unable and unwilling to submit even for a moment to what has happened. Remember, initially Job says, the Lord gave and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord, she's unwilling to do this even once. So it may be that she demonstrates, she doesn't have the intermediary step of submission, she goes right to protest. And she goes right to protest in part because her embodied experience, every single one of the children she brought into the world is now dead.

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And she's not able to pretend that that's okay. There's actually a kind of a book that doesn't make it either into the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, but there's lots of documents. There's a book called The Testament of Job that was produced by the Jewish community, and Job's wife's role is even larger in that. in that first or 2nd century manuscript.

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We learn a lot more about her. Ian Archibald MacLeish's play, J.B., Job's wife, is a major character, the major character, really. So, and I say clearly in the book, I condemn the abuse of the character of Job's wife in Christian tradition to build up the misogynistic tradition. She gets in the long list of temptress women.

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Augustine adds to his sins, that particular sin, of blaming her for being a temptress of Job. So yes, I think here, studying what happens beyond the canon and as the tradition develops in relating to a character is really, really important. Outstanding. I'm going to take one more question and then we will pause for a coffee break.

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And we were probably going to go over on time on this one because I am going to throw a grenade. As A post-evangelical, And thank you so much for speaking at Bit Winners. What's one, this is an amalgamation of a question here.

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What's one thing that you can say that you believe post-evangelicals can learn from the Presbyterian world? And what's one thing that the Presbyterian world can learn from post-evangelicals? Wow, okay. Come on back, you don't have to run.

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Well, One of the things that's happening is that the 100-year-old argument between fundamentalists and modernists, which had everybody living in separate worlds or uneasily in one denomination trying to coexist, the fundamentalists were rebranded as evangelicals. So you're evangelicals on the one side and you're more progressives on the other side, trying to live in a denomination together is sometimes hard.

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You all have experienced that. The post-evangelicals are showing promise of overcoming 100-year-old division between left and right in Protestantism. And what's happening in a number of communities is that Growing post-evangelical churches that usually came out of non-denominational environments or sometimes out of evangelical, like a common pattern is a vineyard church that became inclusive on LGBTQ and got kicked out of their denomination and then renamed themselves or remissioned themselves and are now trying to go on without any denominational support.

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Such a church has no investment in a 100-year-old fight between the fundamentalists and the modernists. And what's happening sometimes is in some communities, these, like a PCUSA congregation or broader structure that is maybe looking for new life, are looking for ways to invest in missions, in mission encounters, a post-evangelical church that says, let's work together. So partnerships are being built. Here in Austin,

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you should pay attention to the merger of Restore Austin, led by Zach Lambert, with Memorial United Methodist Church, which had like 30 members and a big campus that they couldn't keep anymore, and now they've merged. And so Restore Austin, probably the largest post-evangelical church in the country, is now a United Methodist congregation. There are conversations at various levels, to make that happen in other places.

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I know there's some conversations happening in Dallas, for example. So I would just say to you, be open to where the Spirit may be blowing among post-evangelicals. They believe in Jesus, they want to do church, they need buildings, they need some structures, they need support. But they bring a lot of energy and a lot of dynamism.

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I see a lot of future with the post-evangelicals, which is why I'm investing in them so heavily. You might look up post-evangelicalcollective.org and see how it strikes you. And you look at a map of all these post-evangelical churches, they're spreading. It's A renewal movement in American Christianity that I'm really excited about.

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Thank you so much. Post-evangelicalcollective.org. Yep. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr.

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David Gush, give him a hand, please. We are going to take a coffee break. We will reconvene for our final lecture, as well as closing remarks from our president at 11:10 A.m. So you're on break until 11:10.

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Thank you so much, everyone.