INVENTARIO DEL DESAJUSTE DEL COMPORTAMIENTO PSICOSOCIAL (INDACPS )

As noted in the brief analysis of John Calvin’s sermons on Job, Calvin interested himself greatly in the hiddenness of God in the book. God’s veiled state leads to the suffering of Job more than his physical ailments. As a Reformed theologian himself with

486 _{Karl Barth, CD IV.3.1, 435.} 487 _{Karl Barth, CD IV.3.1, 452.}

Lutheran influence, Barth’s interest in God’s veiling should not surprise. One may recall Calvin’s interpretation of the Book of Job as meditation on the hiddenness of God’s providential activity. However, Barth’s interpretation of Job shares little in common with Calvin’s in most other ways. In fact, the hiddenness of God in the Book of Job is less overt in Barth’s reading, perhaps because it is a presumed feature of God based on Barth’s aversion to natural theology. The dialectical theology that he espouses takes the veiling of God as an a priori fact about God that only God can overcome. The dialectical method of theology that Barth helped to establish early in his career has undergone many explanations by many theologians over the years.488 Rather than retread this well-worn path, I will merely highlight the features of it that benefit this present study.

Dialectical theology relates to Barth’s Job in that the tension that the dialectical theologians attempted to hold between the via positiva of the scholastic method and the via negativa of mysticism mimics the tension between Job and his friends during their

dialogue.489 Job’s friends’ attempts to describe God definitively frustrate Job and his personal experience which seems to negate the friends’ objective reasoning. In the end, Barth shows that Job’s friends, like the established theologians of previous generations, are both right and wrong and that Job is both wrong and right. God alone can intervene in the discussion and even then does not directly answer the question, remaining veiled even in his revelation.

488 _{For recent discussions on dialectical theology and Karl Barth, see Bruce McCormack, Karl Barth's}

Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: It's Genesis and Development 1909-1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Gary J. Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology: Theology Without Weapons

(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000); and Christophe Chalamet, Dialectical Theologians: Wilhelm Herrmann, Karl Barth, and Rudolf Bultmann (Theologischer Verlag Ag, 2005).

489 _{Alan Richardson, “The Rise of Modern Biblical Scholarship,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol.}

4: The West From the Reformation to the Present Day, ed. S. L. Greenslade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 319.

The Bible witnesses to God’s revelation in Jesus, whom Barth calls “The True Witness” in the section of Dogmatics where one finds his interpretation of Job. The Word of God, thus, comes to us in three forms: God reveals the Word in Christ, but the Word is proclaimed in preaching and it is written in the Bible.490 As Colin Gunton explains, however, God remains veiled in this act because even though the hidden God finally reveals himself in the person of Jesus Christ, “it is not obviously God…, it [is] just a man wandering around teaching.”491 However hidden God remains in Jesus, one cannot separate God from Jesus. God, in some ways, must be revealed in Jesus Christ because God is not God without Jesus Christ.492 So when Barth discusses the Book of Job and what it says about God’s relationship to humanity, he must also discuss Jesus Christ since Jesus, the “God with man,” is the true revelation of God.493 Though Christ does not appear in Scripture until the New Testament, his intrinsic relationship with God the Father necessitates discussion of him in the Old Testament.

If Jesus is God revealed and the Bible acts as that revelation written down, Barth does draw a distinction between the two Testaments. The Old Testament documents the expectation of God’s revelation and the New Testament recollects God’s revelation. This is not to say that the time for expecting the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is not revelation itself, for Barth says that “because it is the time for expecting it, it is itself revelation- time.”494 _{The Bible’s authority comes in its witness to revelation of the highest order even} though it bears the words of humans.495

490 _{Alan Richardson, "Rise," 321. Mark Gignilliat describes it as “General human history and time operat[ing]}

as the veil hiding revelation from us.” (Mark S. Gignilliat, Karl Barth and the Fifth Gospel: Barth's Theological Exegesis of Isaiah, Barth Studies (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 31.

491 _{Colin Gunton, The Barth Lectures (London: T & T Clark, 2007), 80.} 492 _{Colin Gunton, Lectures, 112.}

493 _{Roger R. Keller, “Karl Barth's Treatment of the Old Testament as Expectation,” AUSS 35, no. 2 (1997), 167.} 494 _{CD I/2, 86. Roger Keller may explain this better than Barth himself when he writes, “revelation in the OT is}

Barth finds reason to hold to this doctrine of the Old Testament in the writings of the New Testament. Because the New Testament treats the Old Testament as an authoritative witness to the revelation the New Testament recollects,496 one should not shy from the position that the Old Testament participates in the revelation of Christ, however hidden Christ is in the words of the Old Testament. This does not mean that Barth holds the New Testament in a more dignified place, only that both Testaments witness to Christ, one before the Incarnation and one after it.497

Barth’s doctrine of revelation explains in part Barth’s readiness to find Christ in the Book of Job, since Christ is present in the Old Testament in this unique way. However, before we look more closely into the intricacies of his typology it is necessary to explore his use of historical criticism. Barth’s aversion to natural revelation means that God does not work through human agents (other than Jesus). Thus, the words of the Bible are not God’s words but bear witness to God as Word.498 _{The words of the Bible, therefore, may contain} histories independent of the Canonical text. The Book of Job is certainly not immune to these histories.

awaited and expected God’s revelation of himself in the future, they already had and participated in that revelation.” (Roger R. Keller, "Expectation," 168.)

495 _{Emil G. Kraeling, The Old Testament Since the Reformation (London: Lutterworth Press, 1955), 168. See}

also Alan Richardson, "Rise," 322.

496 _{Roger R. Keller, "Expectation," 169. Barth writes, “But the New Testament writers are utterly unanimous in}

seeing, not in Judaism—not one of them was concerned with that—but in the history of Israel attested in the Old Testament Canon the connecting point for their proclamation, doctrine and narrative of Christ; and vice versa, in seeing in their proclamation, doctrine and narrative of Christ the truth of the history of Israel, the fulfillment of the Holy Scripture read in the synagogue.” (CD I/2, 72.)

497 _{Emil G. Kraeling, Old Testament, 169.} 498 _{Alan Richardson, "Rise," 322.}