SBL Annual Meeting Papers — November 2007

WORKING DRAFT: Please do not cite without permission of the author

Angella Son
Drew University

Inadequate Innocence, Audacious Inadequacy

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Job, who had been a very prominent and wealthy man, was struck by the loss of his wealth and his family.  Moreover, Job himself was covered with sores all over his body.  Job’s suffering has an implication in all aspects of his life ranging in physical, emotional, social, and even spiritual aspects.  Job’s situation, though extreme and comprehensive, depicts a paradigmatic predicament of any person facing pain and suffering.  Job’s struggle with God in the midst of his excruciating and body-wrenching pain and agony represents, though different expressions of such struggle may be employed by different people, a universal experience of human beings regardless their belief in the existence of God.  In pain and suffering, people ask the most basic questions such as “why me?” or “why this?”  One starts becoming both acutely aware and diffusedly unaware of one’s existence and its meaning.  Even self-doubt slips into their minds regardless of they are the very cause of their own suffering or it is clear that no such possibility should be entertained.

What is striking about Job, however, was his unwavering sense of innocence.  It is recounted in the beginning of the book.  Robbed of practically everything in his life, Job did not slide down into an unclimbable ladder of despair nor did he resort to the quick and easy answers that his friends provide.  Even when his wife spoke to him in anger and desperation, saying, “Do you still persist in your integrity?  Barak God and die”(2:9)1, Job replies by saying, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?”(2:10)  Job’s understanding of the world was not limited to a moral order in which the righteous receives good and the wicked receives bad.  Job’s understanding of God and the world is far more complex and comprehensive than that of retributive moral order.  Job understood that the righteous would receive bad as well as good things in life from God.

This particular juxtaposition of Job’s unwavering sense of his own innocence and concurrent experience of inconceivable suffering has received much attention from both theologians and non-theologians because his innocent suffering and God’s apparent indifference to his suffering strike the basic chords in many of us, theologians or not, eliciting multi-various and intense reactions ranging from a mild curiosity to a violent whirl-wind like anger.  These reactions are  complicated by the question of “why?” in those who are already confused and perplexed and trying to cling to some kind of reasonable pattern explaining the cinemascopic display of human suffering in Job’s life.  Namely, it is the question of theodicy, i.e.,  Why does the benevolent God allow suffering in life?  How do we understand evil within the context of benevolent God?  Is God indeed benevolent?  Is God indeed omnipotent?  Or is God impotent for that matter?  Why do human beings suffer at all?  If Job’s main struggle was not that of innocence, then why did he struggle and wrestle with God?

It is the purpose of this work to touch on these questions by engaging in a hermeneutical task concerning Job’s experience, consulting the resources provided by the biblical theologians, but also employing a particular school of psychoanalytic psychology called self psychology created by Heinz Kohut.  The thesis of the project is:  Utilizing Heinz Kohut’s self psychology as an interpretive tool in identifying God as the Selfobject of Job allows us to re-vision the concepts of God’s omnipotence and theology of atonement.

Re-envisioning the understanding of God’s omnipotence, we may add the dimension of  “audacious inadequacy,” which I define as an ability to audaciously embrace the undesirable “not-self” or “self-contradiction” as a part of the self for the benefit of others.  Specifically, God embraces even violence as a part of Godself in spite of its opposing or negating force to God’s nature as love.  This re-envisioned understanding of the theology of atonement includes the experience of guilt and shame in restoring the human relationship to God.  Job’s main struggle was not about reasons for his suffering, i.e., innocence or guilt, but rather about his sense of inadequacy stemmed from his perceived experience of abandonment from God.  Innocence alone thus is inadequate in addressing one’s connectedness to God and inadequacy or sense of shame has as much, if not deeper, bearing on the restoration of one’s relationship to God.

Heinz Kohut, who had been a devoted Freudian conflict psychoanalyst and focused on interpretations of resistances and defences due to one’s internal conflict among drives—id, ego, and supergo, created the self psychology after noting the failure of Freudian conflict psychology to provide an explanatory effectiveness for the experiences of some of his clients, namely those afflicted by narcissistic symptoms.2 3  Unlike Freudian conflict psychology which excludes narcissistic disorder from those possible for therapeutic healing4, Kohut concluded that narcissistic disorder is treatable.  By expanding the scope of empathy, he was able to identify transferences associated with narcissistic symptoms in addition to transferences associated with neurosis.  The identification of narcissistic or self transferences made it possible for the analysis to take place.  It was when he decided to accept his clients’ experiences to be their real and true experiences instead of treating them as Freudian notion of defenses and resistances against undesirable drives that he discovered narcissistic transferences.5

In addition, Kohut posits that narcissism should not be viewed as a pathological manifestation of turning love for the object into one’s own self.  Instead, he posits that it is one kind of an object relationship.  He suggests that the nature of relationship associated with narcissism is not one’s relationship with oneself as it appears to be so but instead it is an object relationship.  Accordingly, he posits a separate developmental line for narcissism to that of object love.  In other words, he proposes two independent developmental lines for object love and narcissism.  He writes:

[My] observations have led me to the conviction that it is fruitful, and consistent with the empirical data, to postulate two separate and largely independent developmental lines:  one which leads from autoerotism via narcissism to object love;  another which leads from autoerotism via narcissism to higher forms and transformations of narcissism. 6

A person’s immature narcissism is to develop into a more mature form of narcissism as well as object love.  Both narcissism and object love are object relationships.  Kohut writes:  “[T]he antithesis to narcissism is not the object relation but object love.”7

The development of narcissism and object love is not defined by whether or not it is an object relationship but by the quality of such an object relationship.  The development of object love involves a relationship with an object which is experienced completely separated  from the self whereas the development of narcissism involves a relationship with an object which is experienced as a part of the self.  In the case of the development of immature narcissism into a more mature form of narcissism, while the relationship involves a physically separate other, the object is psychologically experienced as a part of the self.  The transformation of immature narcissism into a more mature form thus takes an object relationship where the object is experienced as a part of self but not as a separate agentic being.  Thus he defines his term, “selfobject.”

The development of the self occurs as the immature form of narcissism transforms into a more mature form with the necessary nutritions provided by empathy from the willing selfobjects.  Immature narcissism is a condition that lacks the development of the self and, as a result, one without the development of the self experiences others and the surrounding as a part of the self by default.  It is another’s able and willing empathy that can make the development of the self possible.  In other words, one’s development of the self depends on the intervention from without or is at the mercy of another whose self is developed enough to provide necessary empathic ability and, more importantly, is willing to be experienced as the selfobject by the self.  As the self develops, one increases his or her ability to relate to objects either as independent objects or selfobjects in a flexible way depending on the needs in specific contexts.

The development of the self or the mature narcissism, according to Kohut, manifests in one’s empathy, creativity, awareness of one’s own finitude, sense of humor, and wisdom.8  More importantly, one is able to live in joy by taking initiatives in life with an intact self-esteem and constructively addressing anxieties in life.  It takes devoted care by the primary selfobject such as mother or another caring figure during one’s infancy and childhood for one’s self to develop or immature narcissism to transform into a more mature one.  Kohut, however, does not claim that the development of the self is complete once and for all or that the self no longer has the need of selfobjects.  Instead, one is in need of selfobjects throughout one’s life even after the self has been cohesively developed.  Following the development of cohesive self, one may be subject to the enfeeblement of the self due to traumatic incidents in one’s life.

While the developed self can ward off most anxieties in life, including those from life’s traumatic experiences, it is not fully immune to all of life’s anxieties.  A self enfeebled by a lack of the development of the self would experience many anxieties of life as threatening, whereas a cohesive self with a full development of the self would experience most anxieties of life to be manageable.  Yet it remains true that life offers a full spectrum of experiences so there will still likely be anxieties that surpass the ability of one’s cohesive self.  In these situations, one is temporarily in need of a selfobject or selfobjects in order to regain the equilibrium in one’s narcissistic state.  In other words, we are in need of object relationships throughout our lives;  we can not live in isolation or complete independence from others.  Thus, maturity, according to Kohut, is not a complete independence from others but a combination of independence and mutual dependence.

What then is the role of the able and willing selfobject?  Unlike an object relationship which claims the role of the object providing psychological products such as soothing or calmness, Kohut’s self psychology posits that the selfobject replaces the self’s function to bring narcissistic equilibrium in the self.  A selfobject thus fulfills a functional role that is needed by the self.  A selfobject becomes the very function in the self instead of engaging in a relationship with the self as a separate object.  Kohut initially had a hard time entertaining “the possibility that [he] was not an object for the patient, not an amalgam with the patient’s childhood loves and hatreds, but only, as [he] reluctantly came to see, an impersonal function, without significance except insofar as it related to the kingdom of her own remobilized narcissistic grandeur and exhibitionism.”9 (italics mine)  For instance, instead of the object’s independently creating psychological soothing in himself or herself and giving it to the self who then appropriates the received “soothing,” the object actually soothes the self as if the self is the one doing the soothing, both creating and appropriating “soothing.”   Thus the most important aspect about the selfobject is that it does what the self needs to do by being contented as being a mere replacement of the self’s needed function so that the self claims it as its own experience. 

While Kohut did not make it explicit, I posit that the pinnacle role of the selfobject is its willingness to embrace those attributes and functions that contradict its desirable notion of self-identity/functions in order to avail itself for another self’s empathic needs for its development.  The roles of selfobjects can vary as selfobject is a value-free notion.  A selfobject can be helpful or harmful in one’s development of the self.  It is a self with a cohesive self that can become a helpful selfobject to others.  A cohesive self is able to be empathic with another’s narcissistic needs and respond with in-tuned empathic responses.  By contrast, an enfeebled self will demand adjustments on the part of others in order to manage its precarious narcissistic state.  The aspect of a cohesive self that is crucial toward meeting the needs of an enfeebled or precarious self is its flexibility in adjusting one’s self-definition.  The cohesive self is reassured of its own self-definition, or rather its own sense of existence so that it is able to take a certain amount of ambiguity in its self-definition.

It is the enfeebled self which has to insist that it is understood precisely in a certain way.  It is the precarious self which engages in a never-ending pursuit of perfection so that it has no blemishes.  The cohesive self, by contrast, retains sufficient self-assurance that it does not feel the need to be perfect or without any blemish in order to feel the security of its sense of existence.  The cohesive self would not feel a significant damage to its own self-definition even if some misunderstanding is directed toward it or it is seen to be less proper, adequate, right, truthful, etc.  For instance, a mother with an intact sense of self is not afraid to exercise tough love with her child in discipline even though she prefers to be a loving and agreeable mother.  Another mother, however, whose sense of self is not secure enough, would choose to indulge her child because of her fear that her child would not like her any more or think less of her as Mom.

This flexibility on the part of the selfobject is noted in Kohut’s caution about how empathic responses to narcissistic needs inevitably moves us away from being correct, right, truthful, or conventionally proper.  An under-developed self usually does not have a good sense of proportion and narcissistic needs often are expressed in either depleted or exaggerated ways.  Our common-sensical approach informs us that we need to help them see how unrealistic is their assessment of themselves or their situation.  We have been in situations like this enough to know that the common-sensical approach in these cases is usually ineffective.  Kohut’s approach suggests that we accept the unrealistic assessment by the incohesive self to be its real experience.  For instance, a child who is three feet tall comes up to her uncle who is close to six feet tall and tells him that she is taller than he is.  The uncle is not about to tell her how dumb she is not to know how shorter she is compared to him or even to demonstrate that she comes up only to his waist by telling her to stand next to him.  The uncle would instead exclaim in joy, saying, “My, you have grown so much!  You are indeed taller than I am.  I sure need to grow more to catch up with you.”

It is this role of the selfobject to be able and willing to embrace the “not-self” as a part of the self in order to make itself available for another self’s narcissistic needs that I claim as the role of God in the book of Job.  In fact, I argue that God willingly and audaciously takes the initiative by taking the undesirable “not-self” as part of God’s Self to help hassattan and Job as well as his friends to see the world as God sees it.  God’s role in the book of Job can be seen as the Selfobject to both hassatan and Job.  While God does not have to agree with hassatan over the testing of the virtue of Job, God goes ahead and agrees with hassatan.  God’s agreement with hassatan often is overlooked or looked down upon as a game between God and hassatan in which they treat humans as objects used in their game.  Most scholars either ignore the narrative in the prologue, or, if any attention is paid, make it a subject of criticism.  The narrative is criticized for its portrayal of “barter religion,” and God’s treatment of Job as a toy in a game, and the imposition of suffering on Job for God’s own pleasure in a bet with hassatan.  I suggest a different reading of the narrative.

Instead of God telling hassatan how wrong s/he is about Job, i.e., giving an independent knowledge to hassatan or simply telling him how righteous Job is, God agrees to go along with hassatan in order for hassatan to own the discerning process so that hassatan comes to such knowledge on his/her own even at the cost of God’s owning the violent aspect as God’s Self-Attribute.  Here Jung’s interpretation of God owning both benevolent and violent attributes is helpful in waking us up to the reality instead of our hiding behind either the denial of the existence of evil or blaming it all to the depravity of humanity.  While Jung admits that his work in Answer to Job is a “purely subjective reaction”10 expressing his “affect fearlessly and ruthlessly”11 and not a theological or exegetical work, his contribution is significant by helping us to be honest with our experience of God in the book of Job.  Just as Job’s friends and Elihu did in the book of Job, Jung pointedly notes that we too have used our rationalistic ability to protect the benevolence of God and done injustice to our emotional experiences.

Jung is indeed right in pointing out how God has violated at least three of God’s own ten commandments by “the dark deeds that follow one another in quick succession:  robbery, murder, bodily injury with premeditation, and denial of a fair trial.”12  While it is enormously difficult and creates a seemingly un-resolvable internal conflict within us to perceive God to be behind robbery, murder, bodily injury, etc., we need to accept what is accounted in the book of Job.  We can excuse God in many different ways, but it is still undeniable to note how God was a co-partner in inflicting this pain and sufferings on Job.  If we blame it all on hassatan, we are in fact robbing God’s own agency and elevating the agency of hassatan.  We are saying that God’s agency had no place in the negotiation between God and hassatan.  Or, the agency of hassatan took priority over the agency of God.  We need to accept that God was an active partner in crime with hassatan in taking the lives of Job’s livestock, means of transportation, servants, and children and causing the excruciating and debilitating physical pain of sores on Job’s body.

To be sure, while Jung’s depiction of God’s violent side is a fresh wake-up call for us in facing the reality of the dark side of God, God should not be seen as being in the process of individuation with the help of Job’s prior knowledge about God’s violent side as Jung would otherwise have us convinced of.13  Jung identified God to have not yet achieved individuation that God is dependent on humans to validate God’s own existence:  “Such dependence on the object is absolute when the subject is totally lacking in self-reflection and therefore has no insight into himself.  It is as if he existed only by reason of the fact that he has an object which assures him that he is really there.”14  It is not that God is not individuated but Job was experiencing temporary disharmony in narcissistic equilibrium.15  It is not that God had to embrace opposites in God’s nature, both love and violence, but it is rather God’s audacious initiative in embracing God’s self-contradiction such as violence and bear God’s own inadequacy in order for hassatan, Job, his friends, and his community as well as us to own our own experiences of God and God’s world.  It is thus imperative for us to re-envision God’s omnipotence away from the notion of all-powerful at all-times and envision God’s “audacious inadequacy” as an attribute of God’s omnipotence.

As Job is subjected to the speechless and excruciating nature of violence done to him by God’s audacious inadequacy, Job’s claim of his innocence does not fade away.  Job’s insistence on his innocence extends beyond his immediate family (his wife) and a progression of his insistence of his innocence spreads to his fellow human beings (his friends) and then to God.  In chapters 3 through 31, while Job’s three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, who should know Job well, accused Job of wickedness before God, yet Job did not rescind his conviction concerning his own righteousness.  His friends, who earnestly try to help both him and themselves, try to convince him first that his suffering is a result of his secret wickedness and he should come clean before, confess to, and ask God for God’s mercy.  Second, they try to convince him that his suffering is a form of educational discipline to strengthen Job’s moral judgment;  and third, that his suffering is to be borne by him with full trust in God’s restoration of his situation at a later time.  In other words, all three of Job’s friends were advocating the tradition that was handed down generation after generation, that God is always right, and, suffering or not, human beings are to find and learn some lessons or intentions of God in all situations.

Job’s friends saw the relationship between God and human beings in terms of power, i.e., God is all powerful and all-knowing and human beings are not.  They also saw the relationship between God and human beings in terms of right or wrong, i.e., God is always right and human beings are not.  In addition to their inflexibility in their theological understanding of the relationship between God and human beings and the significance of suffering in the relationship, they were not willing to hear Job at all.  It never occurred to them that Job is the expert of his own experience.  Instead, they assumed that theological precepts took an a priori over an individual’s experience so   that they never took the time to truly hear Job and his plea of innocence.  By so doing, they did not realize that they were molding human experiences by theological precepts. Instead of taking the time to hear Job, they quickly respond to Job with theological precepts.  Their rather quick reactive responses to Job’s situation demonstrates the lack of the development of cohesive selves in them, instead of showing them as empathically in-tuned with Job and fully aware that Job is relating to them his real experience.

When one’s self is already in a precarious state due to its lack of development, one is prone to being pushed into narcissistic disequilibrium.  Narcissistic disequilibrium is an experience of disintegration of one’s own existence.  It is not about one’s rightness or wrongness but is about one’s sense of adequacy.  The question, “Am I adequate enough to exist?” is at the basic core of one’s existential struggle.  Job’s friends who are faced with their perceived seeming inconsistency in life, i.e., the impossibility of innocent suffering, do not respond well to such inconsistency but can be seen to experience narcissistic disequlibrium.  It was not God who was so dependent upon human validation of God’s existence as Jung had noted, but it was Job’s friends who, in order to have the sense of their existences, needed the validation from God and the world in the form of theological precepts.  In order to bring narcissistic equilibrium as quickly as possible, as Renee Girard piercingly points out in his book, Job the Victim of His People, they scapegoat Job who once was elevated to the highest pedestal by his community and turn him into the victim of his people.   Because of Job’s unwavering sense of innocence in spite of the “formidable unanimity surrounding him,”16 Job, however, turns out to be a “failed scapegoat.”17

Who then was right, Job or his friends?  Was Job innocent as he claimed it as if his life depended on it?  Or, were his friends right that Job had some hidden sins?  While some scholars have argued for multiple authors for the book of Job and have even suggested rejection of some parts of the book because of certain inconsistencies noted, Marvin Pope,18 Norman C. Habel,19 and Carol Newsom20 have argued for single authorship and rightly suggested the examination of the possible reasons or meanings behind certain discrepancies within the book of Job instead of imposing readers’ own rationalistic perspectives.  They also make a very sound suggestion regarding the literary form despite many scholars having debated over the genre of Job without bearing much fruit.  While acknowledging the common understanding among scholars that the book of Job contains many different literary forms within it such as wisdom writing, drama, tragedy, poem, dialogue, lament, trial speeches, hymnic materials, etc., they, instead of boxing the book of Job into one form, suggest that the book of Job should be treated as one of a kind which utilizes various literary forms to bring genius effects in different parts of the book.

In understanding the role of different genres in the book of Job, I particularly find Newsom’s suggestion to read the book of Job as a polyphonic text to be most helpful.  Newsom appropriates Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on “his distinction between monologic and dialogic truth and his conception of the polyphonic text.”21  Newsom starts with more dynamic definition of genre by Medvedev and Bakhtin as “a means of grasping or perceiving reality, quite literally a form of thought.  Genres are samples of the world grasped in a particular way.  They are not simply forms, nor simply ideologies, but ‘form-shaping ideologies.’”22  Polyphonic text, according to Bakhtin, has a more “becoming” sense of truth that truth occurs in the act of dialogue among various sub-texts or genres.  While truth is created in dialogical process, no closure to the final say on the truth is guaranteed and no single position takes the priority over others including that of the author.  Basing her work on Bakhtin’s concept of polyphonic text, Newsom intends to make both the unity of and disjunctures in the book accountable in the reading of the book of Job.  She concludes, rightly so, that different genres in the book of Job represent plural and contrasting moral imaginations, in particular, about the nature of piety.

Newsom classifies the genre of the prologue as the didactic literature.  Newsom’s classification of the genre of the prologue as the didactic literature is very helpful for concluding that Job suffered for nothing, i.e., his suffering was a case of innocent suffering.    Didactic literature, according to Newsom’s careful and comprehensive survey, through its simplistic language, use of exaggeration for the character, situation and actions, repetition of language or theme, and redundancy, conveys a coherent, authoritative, absolute, and often single proposition.23  I posit that the prologue takes the form of didactic literature in order to convey the fact that Job is a righteous man without any confusion or any room for doubt.  Just as Job wonders if his children might have cursed God “in their hearts” (1:5), the author forsees the possibility of such speculation or doubt in the readers’ mind on Job’s righteousness as the story unfolds especially when it is the very argument of Job’s friends.  The author is thus making the case for Job’s righteous status in an absolute sense.  The author’s intention is to hold fast the fact that Job is indeed innocent of any guilt before God.  Job’s innocence is not questionable in any sense as one would never question the color of table salt.

In contrast to his friends, Job’s firm belief that his suffering was not a form of judgment or a lesson from God and that his righteousness was intact, despite his suffering or his friends emphatically speaking to Job regarding their understanding of God and the world, not just once but three different times individually, can be seen to demonstrate the cohesiveness of Job’s self.  In addition, his accusation to his friends of their not being his friends and even his accusation that God was his enemy, also display the development of Job’s cohesive self.  In contrast to psychological readings of Job by Jack Kahn, Michael Corey, and Jaco Hamman who argue that Job is moving from a form of immaturity into a form of maturity in his psychological development, I posit that, his unwavering claim to his innocence and his unapologetic accusations that his friends and God were wrong can be seen as a manifestation of a cohesive self in Job, i.e., Job was already psychologically mature before the unimaginable violence was imposed on him. 

According to Kohut’s psychology of the self, courage is a manifestation of the self’s attempt to remain true to itself.  He states:  “The remarkable psychological quality [of heroes or courageous people] is their capacity not to withdraw from an inner conflict of extraordinary proportions.  ….  They must identify their nuclear self, resist their tendency to disown it, and ultimately resolve to shape their attitudes and action in accordance with the basic design of the nuclear self, despite inner doubts and external threats and seductions.”24  While it is true that all courageous people do not necessarily have cohesive selves developed, i.e., one’s courage alone is not a decisive aspect in determining the development of one’s cohesive self, Job’s courage to withstand the unanimous discourses of accusations that surrounded him with exposing and piercing eyes like a hawk flying above and waiting to devour one as soon as one gives one’s self up for the last breath can be a good indication of a cohesive self especially since his courage is expressed not in tyrannical and totalistic mode but in a desperate plea for his innocence even at the risk of losing his friends and community.

Job’s insistence on his innocence thus added to his suffering.  He not only lost his possessions, slaves, and children but also his relationship to those outside his family.  An immature self could not withstand a further loss of connection to others, a lose of one’s status and relationships to others in the community, and face the world all by himself.  An immature self would almost immediately be confused and start to doubt one’s own innocence and allow others’ discourses to dictate one’s self perception of one’s innocence.  An immature self would start believing that one must indeed have secret sins as one’s erudite friends unwaveringly and persistently pronounced him or her to have.  Thus the role of prologue is very significant, particularly as a didactic genre as suggested by Newsom, in helping us as readers to resist the natural tendencies in us to cohort with Job’s friends and doubt Job’s innocence as we find ourselves to have at least one or two, if not more, hidden secret sins from others.  Job’s suffering was not about punishment for his hidden sins nor was it about disciplining him for his spiritual or psychological maturity.  Job’s life thus has significance in addressing different aspect of God and humanity.

What then was Job’s struggling experience that pushed him to the extreme of even accusing God as his enemy?  How did Job shift from being an obedient to rebellious servant of God?  I propose that Job’s main struggle was experiencing a seeming silence by God in the midst of his suffering as God’s abandonment of him.  As much as Job was certain about himself and his being righteous, what Job desperately needed was for God to confirm his conviction.  Job’s need for confirmation was not to validate his rightness and wrongness of his friends but his existence by having a sense of God present with him.  Indeed Job wanted God to speak to him, his friends, and the world that Job was indeed a wise one and his friends are ignorant ones, because he needed to know, not that he was right, but that he is real or he exists because his experience of innocence is real as it is validated by God.  I am sure that if the confirmation from God had come as the slightest of hints, righteous man that he was or rather cohesive that his self was, Job would not have experienced a complete break from God.  It was this sense of worthlessness from the experience of abandonment that raised the final question in Job.

The sense of abandonment from God made Job start wondering about some basic question that he never used to doubt, such as:  Why is this happening?  What did I do to deserve this?  Is God an evil God?  Does God even exist?  Why was I born and even continue to hold the breath of life?  In other words, what is my existence in this world?  While “why” questions may be important for one suffering from one’s worthlessness, the real question is thus “am I?”  Lyotard poignantly describes this tragic dynamic of the abandoned while discussing Newman’s 1966 exhibition of the fourteen Stations of the Cross at the Guggenheim that had the subtitle:  “Lama Sabachthani” or “My God, why have you forsaken me?”:  “The only ‘response’ to the question of the abandoned that has ever been heard is not Know why, but Be.”25 

Job’s experience is an experience of his existence or life robbed of all meaning and purpose, “perceiving that it does not really matter whether he does right or wrong, is responsible or irresponsible, keeps or breaks promises, speaks truth or tells lies, lives or dies.”26    In fact, for Job, facing death is much sweeter than facing the hollowness and bitterness that come from the experience of abandonment.  It wasn’t the question whether Job was right or wrong that was tearing Job apart, but it was the sense of abandonment in the midst of anguish and suffering that made him feel that his suffering and even his existence was meaningless.  Capps rightly identifies Job’s experience as an experience of shame and notes a shift in Job’s self-perception from “blameless man to hapless victim”27 and thus “[o]bjectively, he was guiltless, but subjectively, he felt shame.”28  Job’s experience was one of shame and not of guilt.
How was it that Job experienced abandonment from God since Job is understood to have his cohesive self developed and since one of the major functions of a cohesive self is the provision of assurance in life that one’s existence is intact and real?  How is it that Job’s cohesive self became so impotent for helping Job deal with his situation?  While one could argue that anyone in Job’s situation would become as disintegrated as Job was, such statement loses its explanatory power due to the lack in its discretionary ability.  Kohut’s psychology is helpful here again.  Kohut’s psychology of the self does not claim the maturity or the development of the cohesive self as the permanent achievement as it is noted above.  Kohut instead formulated an understanding of cohesive self which continues to need the help of selfobjects, though far less frequent and intense.  Kohut thus envisioned psychological dynamic between the self and the selfobject as both independent and interdependent relationships.29

A developed cohesive self becomes for the most part independent from the selfobjects but remains interdependent on them as its need arises in life.  The difference between an immature self and a cohesive self is that an immature self relates to others as selfobjects by default, i.e., no discretion on the part of the self, whereas the cohesive self relates to others as selfobjects more intentionally and temporarily.  The main difference is in the quality of the way the self relates to the selfobject.  The cohesive self does not have a need for an intensely committed devotion from the selfobject.  It instead needs the selfobject only as the needs arise due to temporary setbacks in its narcissistic equilibrium and its choice of the selfobject becomes far more efficient, i.e., they find the selfobject who is able to address its precarious state of narcissistic balance instead of endlessly running to one selfobject after another without discretion as would be the case in the immature self.
I thus contend that Job’s cohesive self had a temporary setback not because of the loss of his wealth, slaves, and children nor the rejection or the abandonment by his community.  It was the seemingly unmovable silence of God that shook the core of Job’s self causing his cohesive self to be set back into a disintegrated state which experiences both the world and the self’s existence to be meaningless, untrustworthy, fragile, etc.  One may talk about Job’s situation as being in despair but I contend that the narcissistic damage to his self has robbed him of his ability to experience hope in life.  The sense of despair is a luxury for someone like Job who is experiencing a near annihilation from God and accordingly from his self.  Job’s sense of abandonment is due to his unexpected discovery of his own inadequacy or incongruity about his whole self.  As Helen Merrell Lynd in her historically decisive work on shame and identity argues for a better understanding of the differences between guilt and shame instead of absorbing shame into guilt, she illumines some distinct characteristics of shame. 30

Lynd’s understanding of shame is consistent with that of Kohut that shame involves the whole self whereas guilt addresses specific acts or non-acts or specific aspects about oneself.  Furthermore, Lynd’s work is very significant as she was one of the forerunners who disagreed with the conventional understanding of the difference between guilt and shame based on some psychological schools such as Freudian school and suggest an alternative understanding of shame.  Lynd adding to some of the pioneering works on shame, argued that the difference between guilt and shame is not whether one is experienced internally and the other caused externally.  While, in conventional understanding of shame and guilt, guilt was associated with one’s own conscience and shame with exposure to others’ ridicule and disapproval, Lynd contends that both shame and guilt are exposure to one’s own eyes although in case of shame, an exposure to others’ eyes can simultaneously be present with an exposure to one’s own eyes.  Illustrating with the experiences of shame in characters in several literatures, she points out how shame is primarily caused by an exposure to one’s own eyes.  For instance, she points out how an exposure to others’ eyes can in fact alleviate the excruciating pain of the experience of shame by quoting Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter:  “Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly upon your bosom!  Mine burns in secret!”31 

Job’s experience corresponds to Lynd’s observation of the nature of shame since his experience of shame is caused by an exposure to his own eyes.  In addition, as Lynd delineates shame as an unexpected exposure which is “incongruous with, or glaringly inappropriate to, the situation, or to our previous image of ourselves in it,”32  what was exposed to Job was the unexpected and incongruous or inadequate perception of himself.  This exposure was not caused by his friends’ unbending accusation of Job’s hidden sins but it was an unexpected discovery of inadequate or incongruous self-perception of himself in his own eyes.  He had thought that God was indeed Emmanuel in both good and bad times.  He was well aware that within God’s world, God both gives and takes away and God gives both the good and the bad to the righteous, well noted in his responses to his wife:  “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there;  the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.;  blessed be the name of the Lord.” (1:21)  and “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” (2:10)  He, however, also thought that he would experience God to be present with him or himself to be connected to God in both good and bad times.

In contrast to this expectation on his part, he unexpectedly discovers that he is not connected to God as he thought that he was.  He in fact experienced himself of dire annihilation from God that he finally realized that he stood alone.  This experience which is similar to finding oneself in foreign land is well described by Lynd:

There is nothing wrong with what we have done;  no sin has been committed.  But discrepancy appears between us and the social situation, between what we feel from within and what appears to us, and perhaps to otheres, seen from without.  We have acted on the assumption of being one kind of person living in one kind of surroundings, and unexpectedly, violently, we discover that these assumptions are false.  We had thought that we were able to see around certain situations and, instead, discover in a moment that it is we who are exposed;  alien people in an alien situation can see around us.33

This finding of discrepancy in self-perception of himself thus makes him experience shame and place him in the temporary disintegrated state of his self.  His discovery of this lone existence puts him in a state of dire precariousness where one’s sense of self now needs another to validate its own existence or is desperately dependent on others’ validations for him to experience the realness of his own existence. 

Job’s experience of shame can also point out a clue to a reason for the presence of multiple genres in the book of Job.  While Newsom’s conclusion that the book of Job as a polyphonic text presents the dynamic interaction among plural and contrasting moral imaginations is a profound and an invaluable contribution to the interpretation of the book of Job, I posit that a monologic truth can still be excavated in the midst of the presence of contrasting dialogical truths created by various forms of genres in the book of Job.  I argue that the presence of multiple genres of Job’s speeches can be seen as an indication of the incommunicable nature of Job’s experience of inadequacy.  Shame, in contrast to guilt, involves the experiences of the whole self and it is very difficult to talk about it as it is not as easy to self-reflect the its own self as whole as it is in case of guilt.  Whereas with guilt, one can easily talk about one’s specific acts or non-acts or specific aspects of one’s self, one often finds oneself dumbfounded with the experiences of shame because it is about the sense of inadequacy of the self as a whole.

Shame reaches into every fiber and tissue of one’s being at the same time appearing to be insignificant due to its elusive and incongruous nature and thus “is too small to refer to;  but … pervades everything.”34  This difficult nature of shame placed Job in a tough situation:  Job needed both to help his friends understand his experience of inadequacy and have them help him move beyond his experience of shame by their understanding.  He employed one genre after another to speak what his true experience was but, alas, he witnessed the dreadful failure of each different form of speech which disappeared like a smoke in air.  He even resorted to the language of court system.  Newsom intuits this in her discussion of how Job’s use of non-traditional elements in his diverse speeches demonstrates the manifestation of brokenness to his selfhood due to trauma.  While his grammar was intact, the violence imposed on Job “requires him to dislocate and remold the words, metaphors, and genres through which traditional language had constructed a world of meaning.”35  Because of the violence Job experienced, he incurred a sense of inadequacy which overcame him and left him in a desperate abyss with no bottom to sustain him.  Innocence alone is inadequate to maintain one’s sense of connectedness with God.  Both innocence and inadequacy or guilt and shame should be addressed in the restoration of one’s relationship to God.  A theology of atonement, therefore, should address both guilt and shame to bring an effective restoration of our relationship to God.

God finally appears to Job in person.  “The Lord answered Job out of whirlwind,” says verse 1 in chapter 38.  God’s personal appearance before Job disputes Elihu’s understanding of God in which human beings cannot summon God to appear before them.  God has submitted to Job’s request and appeared before him.  It is in God’s appearance to Job that God addresses Job’s sense of inadequacy.  God’s appearance spoke to Job and confirmed to him that in the midst of his anguish and suffering, he is not left alone or abandoned by God.  Job was not an orphan;  God was indeed there with him always.  God was not silent nor did God just send a messenger to Job with a clear-cut answer.  Instead, while Job is the one who basically starts the dialogue and his friends and Elihu respond to Job and Job pleads for God to respond and God did not respond to Job up to the chapter 37, in the first verse of chapter 38, out of the deepest care for Job, God personally takes God’s own initiative, as David Clines rightly notes, and Job is the one who responds to God.36 

Has God submitted to Job’s demand for an answer?  No, instead, God seems to scold Job as the ignorant one by saying, “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” (38:2)  Not only scolding Job of his ignorance, God asks Job questions that are impossible to answer.  Is God trying to confuse or complicate Job’s thought?  Is God testing whether or not Job is resilient enough to handle more impossible questions?  Hasn’t Job had enough already?  He certainly is not in the mood to answer questions but needs to hear some sensible answers.  Pope shares the sentiment of these objections to the questions and suggests that God’s questions are questions without answers and God’s intent is to expose Job’s “ignorance and folly in impugning God’s wisdom and justice.37  While Pope’s interpretation is partly correct and the divine speech has an element of reprimand for Job’s ignorance, such reprimand can be also seen as a literary or rather oratory tool to get the complete attention of Job.

By using a seeming reprimand, God heightens the tension to the highest level in anticipation of an ironic twist to one’s perspective into Job’s situation.  In addition, instead of providing answers to the question, Capps is right in contending that God reframes Job’s understanding of the situation.38  While I agree with Capps on God’s reframing Job’s situation, I use the notion of reframing in general sense instead of consulting on specific reframing techniques as he had done.39  I instead find, as does Newsom, Longinus’s discussion on the effect of the sublime as a way of reframing to have most explanatory power, i.e., the effect of the sublime  indicates the transportation of Job out of his own self and moving into God’s Self.  As Longinus explains, the sublime represents the work of the genius writers and poets who are “not to persuade the audience but rather to transport them out of themselves.”40  God’s speech coming from a whirlwind is a paradigmatic expression of the sublime that reframes Job out of his self and into God’s self.  As a result, “Job feels the words of the divine speech as though he himself were speaking them.”41

As it was noted above, the experience of another as a part of the self is the experience of the selfobject.  I thus propose that God as the Selfobject of Job is demonstrated in God’s appearance to Job in whirlwind.  God not only appears to Job but even shares the vision of God’s cosmic responsibility to Job by drawing Job into God’s own Self.  In raising questions, God is not expecting answers from Job, but the questions are used to draw Job into God’s own thought.  God brings Job into God’s own Self and allows Job to experience God’s perspective as if it were Job’s own.  By doing so, God provides the very thing that Job had sought and much more.  God confesses to Job God’s burden of being God to this world and invites Job to experience God’s cosmic responsibility as if it were his own.  Job then realizes not only that his suffering is very much part of God’s operation of the world, but also that, in spite of Job’s experience of abandonment from God, God has always been there with him and never doubted Job’s righteousness.  Job thus says:  “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you;  therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (42:5-6)
 Specifically, by allowing Job to be a part of Godself and, in turn, God as a part of Job’s self, God validates Job’s experience of his innocence.  While Job insists on his innocence, he has this sense of something wrong and he deserves God’s rebuke.  By God granting Job’s experience as a real experience, God enters God’s relationship with Job with what is expected of God by Job although such rebuking may be antithetical to God’s own nature.  God actually takes the harshest form of rebuke after a dreadful long period of silence. God has transformed God’s nature into one that is an “undesirable” nature for God, but one expected by Job.  It is God’s way of submitting to Job’s understanding of God in his particular situation in order to allow Job to immediately experience God as if God were a part of Job’s self.  God has emptied Godself even to the point of audaciously taking an antithetical aspect of the normative nature of God in order to bring God into the experience of Job.

Looking back, God’s long and dreadful period of silence can be interpreted as God’s sublime speech expressing God’s audacious inadequacy.  God  Silence is not a mere absence of speech but is a form of speech and can be used as an expression of the sublime.  As Longinus indicates, while illustrating the necessity of the great mind behind the sublime, silence can be a form of sublime.42  In this case, because of the absolute and prolonged nature of God’s silence, God’s “well-timed flash of sublimity [spoken from the whirlwind] scatters everything  before it like a bolt of lightning and reveals the full power of the speaker at a single stroke.”43  Job thus sees how vain it was for him to accuse God of not responding to him even though God does not directly respond to his questions.  Job’s agonizing experiences and sense of inadequacy are all together lifted off from him and disappear without any trace.  Job’s sense of inadequacy is single-handedly reversed and Job experiences the elevated sense of self, pride, as God transports Job into Godself to facilitate Job to experience God’s intact sense of Job’s self as if it is his own.

In addition, God as the Selfobject of Job allows Job to own for himself what God’s thoughts are instead of God immediately providing answers.  God is reminding Job who God is to Job.  In reminding Job who God is, God does not proclaim it in plain statements but God leaves room for Job to think for himself and come to conclusions by himself.  God is setting up a self-selfobject relationship where Job experiences the decision process as if he is utilizing his own independent will and mind.  While we are completely dependent on God in some sense, the book of Job, nonetheless, demonstrates to us that God’s relationship to us is more than a relationship between an all-powerful and an all-dependent.  It is not so much that God expects human beings to be completely dependent on God, but God expects human beings to join God in shaping the world.  In other words, God is not a control freak and expects more from us as co-partners of God.

Furthermore, God’s silence on or ignoring of the issue concerning Job’s righteousness, and God’s moving ahead with questions about the universe and its operation may cause one to see God, at least on the surface, as either an unempathic or absurd being who either has no concern for Job’s desperate needs or is preoccupied with God’s own concerns.  God’s silence or ignoring of Job’s very struggle in fact presumes that God never had to question whether Job was righteous or not and, because of its obviousness, it needs not be discussed at all.44  God finds Job to be the wise one who knows that God does not operate with a simple mechanical formula in which suffering happens only to the wicked and not to the righteous.  God explicitly speaks and indicates that Job’s understanding of God and the world is correct and his friends were mistaken.  This occurs in God’s speech to Eliphaz, one of Job’s three friends:  “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends;  for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.” (42:7)

God agrees with Job and confirms that Job has been right all along.  God restores Job in his community as well as his wealth and family.  God proclaims that Job is the wise one.  This is Job’s wisdom, knowing that within God’s rule, not only the wicked but also the righteous can encounter suffering.  Suffering is not just a measurement of your ways against God.  Within God’s will, one can suffer for nothing but they in fact do not suffer for nothing.  Job’s suffering was a part of God’s effort to transform hassatan and Job’s community including his friends.  Job’s suffering caused by hassatan’s challenge to God and, added to by his friends’ inflexible dogmatic positions, led to the repentances of his friends and their finding a new way of knowing.  What about hassatan?  Hassatan only appears in the prologue in challenging God:  “Does Job fear God for nothing?” (1:9)  Does this mean Job’s suffering was indeed for nothing with respect to God’s effort to transform hassatan?  While hassatan is absent in the rest of the book of Job, it is worthy to note how the voice of hassatan continued in Job’s friends’ voices.  Hassatan thus can be seen as the source of our inaccurate or inappropriate understandings of God, us, and the world.  The effort to transform hassatan can be considered won with respect to the specific challenge that hassatan brought to God.

What then are the significances of the claims of this study?  What does it mean to contend that guilt-language alone is inadequate to address the restoration of human relationship with God?  What does it mean for our understanding of human suffering to posit that God’s omnipotence should embrace audacious inadequacy?  First, the discourse for a theology of atonement should be expanded to include the human experiences of shame.  It is understandable that there have been more or less exclusive attention give in the theological discourse to guilt in the past since, as it was noted, the task of communicating experiences of shame is itself a very difficult one.  Since shame deals with the whole self, it is easily experienced as something ambiguous and elusive.  It is also very difficult to deal with shame as one’s inadequacy.  It is not easy to resolve this shame by performing or refraining from certain acts whereas with guilt wrongfulness caused by either wrong deeds or absence of desirable deeds which can be righted or rectified.  Shame thus “carries the weight of ‘I cannot have done this.  But I have done it and I cannot undo it, because this is I.’”45  It is thus easy to see how we have often absorbed shame into guilt which is far more concrete to express and address it. As Erikson points out:  “Shame is an emotion insufficiently studied, because in our civilization it is so early and easily absorbed by guilt.”46 

Lynd poignantly points this out as a reductionism in language, an “endeavor to develop a fixed, unequivocal language of signs that eliminates ambiguity and surplus meaning.”47  Lynd further notes the significant deficiency of this reductionism to the expression and experience of the fullness of human experiences:

A language that is confined to labeling rather than defining, to denotation at the expense of connotation, does not have the means of expressing experiences whose nature includes ambiguity and surplus meaning.  It omits from its purview some of the most significant dimensions of human nature, and possibly distorts others that it may seem to express more fully.48

Convenience, therefore, has been chosen by settling for a narrower or distorted perspective of human experiences  at the cost of relegating the fullness of human experiences.

I contend that this reductionism has slipped into theological discourses that employ a traditional understanding of atonement which utilizes the language of guilt.  One can argue that guilt is a theological term which embraces the human psychological experiences of both shame and guilt.  I beg to differ on this point and posit that such position is an irresponsible one since people are already inclined to absorb the experiences of shame into guilt.  Theological discourses should be responsible and sophisticated enough to make it easier for people to engage in the restoration of their relationships to God instead of being co-opted by current human tendencies.  Moreover, shame can be seen as transcultural and revelatory of human meaning in life.49  Theological discourses on atonement thus must be re-visioned to include both shame and guilt for restoring the human relationship to God.  The human experience of innocence alone is not adequate in addressing the connectedness of humanity to God;  human experiences of inadequacy should also be included.

Secondly, including God’s audacious inadequacy as a part of the understanding of God’s omnipotence brings significant new understandings of the innocent suffering of people or theodicy and human agency in addition to a new understanding of evil and God’s omnipotence.  When there is an experience of innocent suffering, we, who have benefited from Job’s experience, as a first step, need to courageously claim our own innocence as Job had done.  To wit, we need to say, “This suffering is not about me.”  As a second step, we need to realize that the suffering is imposed on us because God is working on someone else as God had done on hassatan and Job’s friends and community.  Although the magnitude and depth of suffering that we experience should not be ignored, we need to keep things in perspective not to take on the identity of victims.  Suffering thus should not be elevated to the status of a subject defining our selfhood which often is the identity of victims.  We need to say, “This suffering, though I am the one suffering, is about someone else or others.”  As a third step, God’s silence does not mean God’s inaction or lack of presence.  God’s silence is not God’s abandonment of us in suffering.  God’s silence is a message to us that we need to decipher.  Its meaning includes whether or not we have relegated our agency as God’s co-partners. 

As a final step, while the suffering is not about us and is about others, it is simultaneously also about us.  It is about us as God’s co-partners in bringing God’s peace and harmony in God’s world and not as guilty ones or victims.  Our innocent suffering is a part of the process of God’s working to bring God’s love and peace in God’s world.  Suffering imposed on us is not the ultimate that claims and defines our experiences.  Suffering is only a sign that we need to claim our full agency as God’s co-partners in fulfilling God’s love and peace.  Paradoxically, innocent suffering means the opposite of the helplessness on the part of us as victims, i.e., full agentic initiative and efficacy.  It is so because God is God of all people, both those of us who love and try to be faithful to God and those who may end up challenging God.  God wills to transform all of us, either willing or unwilling.  In God’s work to transform us, God invites us to participate in the process and can mean that our part is to suffer innocent suffering on the part of us.  We thus need to say, “It is also about me as God’s co-partner.”  We can suffer innocent suffering but we do not suffer for nothing.  Our innocent suffering is for the transformation of the world, especially when we faithfully and courageously act on our agentic identity as God’s co-partners.

Finally, God’s audacious inadequacy as a part of the understanding of God’s omnipotence bears an ethical implication.  Job’s story is very relevant for providing meaning to those who are suffering innocently, particularly for moving them away from a victim identity to an agentic identity as a co-partner of God in transforming the world.  For instance, the cases of the holocaust and the slavery of Africans are paradigmatic situations of innocent sufferings.  Weisel depicts profoundly the meaninglessness of his and other Jews’ suffering in his recounting of the blessing of God on one Rosh Hashanah at the concentration camp:

Why, but why should I bless Him?  In every fiber I rebelled.  Because He had had thousands of children burned in His pits?  Because He kept six crematories working night and day, on Sundays and feast days?  Because in His great might He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many factories of death?  How could I say to Him, “Blessed art Thou, Eternal, Master of the Universe Who chose us from among the races to be tortured day and night, to see our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, end in the crematory?  Praised be They Holy Name, Thou Who hast chosen us to be butchered on Thine altar?”50

The enormous and excruciating nature of their sufferings must not be denied nor mitigated.  God’s audacious inadequacy in no way sanctions violence on anyone and it is initiated only to address it.

Their understanding of their innocent sufferings can, however, be re-envisioned so that they may see themselves as co-partners with God to transform Hitler and his followers in one case and those who instigated and maintained slavery system in the other case.  Their new understanding moves them away from being victims and from a sense of abandonment by God.  They can unashamedly claim the innocence of their sufferings and confidently initiate the work of elimination of such injustices in the world instead of being defined by resignation and passivity.  This new understanding of their innocent sufferings can help Jews and blacks to be more empowered in dealing with the holocaust and the slavery, facing the modern day manifestations of anti-semitism and racism by having a clear sense of meaning in seemingly meaningless and abysmal situations.  This newly en-visioned understanding of inadequate innocence of human experience and audacious inadequacy of God can help them move beyond their paranoia and helplessness and forward to work for the restoration of the world, including those who instigated the sufferings upon them.

This study also has an implication for those of us who are not directly experiencing innocent suffering.  The obvious one is to acknowledge how those innocent sufferers are neither the guilty nor the victims.  Moreover, innocent sufferers are not to be understood as being helpless but they are co-partners of God in God’s effort to transform the world.  This study also calls us to be selfobjects for others as God had been to hassatan and Job.  Gutierrez’s call for our use of both prophetic and contemplative languages addressing justice in the world while experiencing gratuitousness in life is a helpful vision particularly for those who are not directly experiencing innocent sufferings.  He states:

What is it that Job has understood?  That justice does not reign in the world God has created?  No.  The truth that he has grasped and that has lifted him to the level of contemplation is that justice alone does not have the final say about how we are to speak about God.  Only when we have come to realize do we enter fully and definitely into the presence of the God of faith.  Grace is not opposed to the quest of justice nor does it play it down, on the contrary, it gives it its full meaning.  God’s love, like all true love, operates in a world not of cause and effect but of freedom and gratuitousness.”51

God as the Selfobject to Job expressed in God’s audacious inadequacy defines more specifically how this vision of holding the dialectical tension of justice and grace together without relegating either one.  We as selfobjects to others, particularly those in the middle of innocent sufferings, should be freely willing to be used by others to the point of embracing “not-self” aspects that are expected by others to be a part of our self-definition.  This is the true expression of both justice and grace expressing the love of God.

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