I came across this great quote last night, and I thought I would share it. Enjoy!
“The satan has uncovered an ideological contradiction in the religious discourse that, when brought to light, threatens to render meaningless the fundamental category of that discourse. As this proto-Nietzschean figure says in his clever genealogy of piety, “Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not hedged him about…?” Fear of God as an absolute value is contradicted by the practice of blessing. What had been represented as the very image of a coherent and meaningful world in 1:1-3 (blessed existence) is now argued to be a kind of false consciousness. A hermeneutics of suspicion, if persuasive, performs an unmasking, displacing the false consciousness of ideology with an account that claims to be real truth. Once exposed, the old categories are emptied of meaning, and a world is destroyed.
In this surprisingly philosophical little didactic tale, what is at stake is not simply the testing of a virtue but the testing of the conditions that make virtue itself possible. As compelling as the satan’s challenge appears to be, the conventions of didactic story ensure that the hero will meet the challenge and the threat will be discharged. The interest thus turns to how Job will articulate a form of piety that persuasively resolves the threat of contradiction and incoherency and so restores the conceptual and experiential wholeness of the moral world.”
Newsom, Carol A. “Narrative Ethics, Character, and the Prose Tale of Job.” Pages 121-134 in Character & Scripture: Moral Formation, Community, and Biblical Interpretation. Edited by William P. Brown. Grand Rapids, MI.: Eerdmans, 2002. 126
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