Scripture & Theology

Wilhelm Vischer’s mini-commentary of the Book of Job is a final-form reading that attempts to buck the traditional approach that asks why God allows an innocent person to suffer. Vischer instead reads the whole book as if it attempts to answer the Satan’s question, “Does Job fear God for nought?” The Satan wonders if piety can ever exist outside of self interest and doubts God’s confidence in Job.

Piety, according to Vischer, means “to fear, love and trust God above all things,”¹ which Job does display after losing both his belongings and his health. In the first instance, when Job loses all that he has, he only says, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the Name of the Lord.” In the second instance, Job responds to his wife’s complaints about his integrity saying, “Shall we accept the good from God, but the evil shall we not accept?” In both of these responses, Vischer notes that Job keeps his focus on God rather than the goods that God grants. He writes with respect to Job’s second saying, „Er will nicht Güter, nicht das Gute, er lebt von Gottes Güte, die jenseits von gut und böse ist.“² A dynamic equivalent in English might read, Job “does not desire possessions or The Good; he exists by God’s loving-kindness, which lies beyond good and evil.” The rest of the book, Vischer contends, should be read to uncover the meaning of this.

What is the nature of “God’s loving-kindness, which lies beyond good and evil?” The poet of the dialogues has perhaps taken it as a challenge to elaborate on this notion that the narrator sets up in the prologue. Vischer does not use the word midrash, but the picture he draws indicates that something akin to midrash is what the poet undertakes. He writes, “But now someone takes up the challenge which is thrown down (Is it the same or another ‘Poet’?), treads upon the bow as it were and stretches upon it the bowstring of the speeches with a power and tenseness such that at any moment the bow threatens to snap.”³ Thus, the dialogues of Job explore what it means to exist by God’s loving-kindness, even if that loving-kindness does not manifest itself in what we generally recognize as “goods” or “good.” The friends speak words and phrases with presupposed definitions of God’s loving-kindness. On the other hand, Job, who has had every possession stripped away, must work out a new definition of God’s loving-kindness spurred by his presuppositions being stripped away along with his possessions.

1. Wilhelm Vischer, “The Witness of Job to Jesus Christ,” EQ xlviii, no. 1 (Jan 1934): 41. [↩]
2. Vischer, “Hiob, Ein Zeuge Jesu Christi,” Bekenende Kirche 8 (1934): 6. [↩]
3. Vischer, “Witness of Job I,” 42. [↩]