ABSTRACT
The Book of Job is the Bible’s classic response to the constellation of issues that have been traditionally labeled “theodicy.” Theodicy is the struggle to legitimate talk of God’s love and justice in situations of theological dissonance, most particularly when natural and moral evil is evident and severe. Theodicy can be defined narrowly as the attempt to justify the ways of God in the face of evil, or more broadly as any response to the experience of disorientation when a society’s given religious nomos is challenged. In his writings on Job, Kierkegaard was critical of the enterprise of theodicy when it was construed as a conceptual exercise, as if the alleged “problem of evil” were amenable to a resolution through the development of more satisfying conceptual networks or more plausible hypotheses about God and the universe. For Kierkegaard, the problem of human tragedy should be addressed doxologically, not theoretically. Doxology is preferable to theodicy in the way that blessing the name of God is preferable to cursing it. This is true not only of our speaking of God but also of our reading of Scripture. For the purpose of edification, reading the Bible doxologically makes better sense than reading the Bible in order to distill a metaphysics or to reconstruct the cultural dynamics of an ancient society.
