“Even with all of that, it doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but its presence acknowledges that it’s a problem that any person of faith has to wrestle with.”
I grew up as a reformed Presbyterian and didn’t leave the faith until after my junior year at a Christian college. The part I’m quoting above is the official narrative that any Christian will use, and is a clue to what is actually occurring: Job isn’t an attempt by Christians (or Jews) to deal with the difficult questions, but rather a rhetorical “move” or polemic used to lend intellectual legitimacy to ideas that have no intellectual legitimacy. The problem of evil, and the contradictions presented in Job, are logically irreconcilable. If one is invested in truly grappling with difficult ideas, one has to be willing to change his mind about his conclusions in the face of logical contradictions. What is happening in Job is the opposite. Humans frequently employ a rhetorical tactic to legitimize an irrational belief. You can see it used every day: tell someone you’ve struggled deeply with apparent contradiction, maybe even engage a lengthy discussion about it; then, when you’re finished, reassert your irrational conclusions. This will make it appear, to both your conscience and to others, as though your irrational conclusions have gained in legitimacy by virtue of still existing even after you “struggled” and “grappled” with “the difficult questions. Job isn’t a serious grappling with the issue because serious intellectual grappling involves having the courage to accept logical rebuttals of irrational claims and then face the reality that emerges. The book of Job isn’t meant to help believers grapple with difficult truths. Rather it’s a subtle rhetorical polemic designed to make one feel he has grappled with truth despite maintaining an irrational belief. In other words, it’s about having your cake and eating it, too.
Christians don’t read Job to be challenged by reason and the logical contradictions of their beliefs. Nobody reads Job prior to a break with the faith. They read it for the same reason they get flu shots. Christians don’t lose their faith reading Job, but become innoculated against reason, training themselves to consider the irrationality of their ideas, and then pat themselves on the back for their continued belief and perceived intellectual street cred.
To assume Job is about grappling with difficult truths is to accept precisely the narrative it’s feeding you…which is its power. But it is, and remains, a book whose authorship was fundamentally invested and dependent upon worshiping the irrationality it claims to grapple with. Job is pseudo-intellectual musing meant to create a barrier between rational thought and its consequences. It was written by zealots to justify unreason.