Theology Today - Vol 42, No. 4 - January 1986 - ARTICLE

423 -Why, God? A Tale of Two Sufferers

Why, God? A Tale of Two Sufferers
By Burton Z. Cooper

"Perhaps the book of Job will not make sense until we see it as turning away from the monarchial image of God and toward an image of God as vulnerable. Our failure to look forward, so to speak, in interpreting Job makes us like Job's friends who cannot speak rightly about God because they cannot break away from earlier patterns of thinking."

KIERKEGAARD used to inveigh against theologians who wrote about matters of faith and salvation as if they were objective commentators on the human scene and not poor, suffering individuals caught like the rest of us in the struggle to affirm life despite its vicissitudes. He did not mean to suggest that there is a direct correlation between pain and insight, as if the more we suffer, the more insight we gain. Intensity of feeling is not necessarily a barometer of truth. Often the opposite can be the case. But those who allow their suffering to form the way they think about the world will surely become more sensitive to the truth of the human situation. It is one of the sadder aspects of life that painful experiences do not necessarily make us more mature, either morally or intellectually. Indeed, pain can lead to our becoming more selfish, more paranoiac, more brutal. Still, our maturing does not take place apart from physical and mental pain. It is when our lives are touched by tragic suffering that we lose our childhood innocence.

This essay is, in part, a tale of two sufferers: the Job of the Bible and Russell Baker of The New York Times. Baker is a nationally-syndicated columnist with a wry sense of humor. I begin with an account, taken from his recently published autobiography, of that moment in his life when his young cousins find the five-year-old Baker playing in the woods and blurt out the news that his father is dead.

"Your father's dead," Kenneth said.

It was like an accusation that my father had done something criminal and I came to my father's defense.

Burton Z. Cooper is Professor of Philosophical Theology at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He has also taught at The College of Wooster, and Mary Washington College of the University of Virginia. Among his publications is The Idea of God (1974). He is currently completing a book on theodicy entitled Why, God?, and this article is excerpted from one of its chapters.

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"He is not," I said.

But of course they didn't know the situation. I started to explain. He was sick. In the hospital. My mother was bringing him home right now ….

"He's dead," Kenneth said.

His assurance slid an icicle into my heart.

"He is not either!" I shouted.

"He is too," Ruth Lee said. "They want you to come home right away."

I started running up the road screaming, "He is not!"

It was a weak argument. They had the evidence as I hurried home crying, "He is not … he is not … he is not …."

I was almost certain before I got there that he was. And I was right. Arriving at the hospital that morning my mother was told he had died at 4:00 a.m. in "acute diabetic coma."

He was 33 years old. When I came running home, my mother was still not back from Frederick, but the women had descended on our house, as women there did in such times, and were already busy with the housecleaning and cooking that were Morrisonville's ritual response to death. With a thousand tasks to do, they had no time to handle a howling five-year-old. I was sent to the opposite end of town to Bessie Scott's house.

Poor Bessie Scott. All afternoon she listened patiently as a saint while I sat in her kitchen and cried myself out. For the first time I thought seriously about God. Between sobs I told Bessie that if God could do things like this to people, then God was hateful and I had no more use for Him.

Bessie told me about the peace of Heaven and the joy of being among the angels and the happiness of my father who was already there. This argument failed to quiet my rage.

"God loves us just like His own children," Bessie said.

'If God loves me why did he make my father die?"

Bessie said I would understand someday, but she was only partly right. That afternoon, though I couldn't have phrased it this way then, I decided that God was a lot less interested in people than anybody in Morrisonville was willing to admit. That day I decided that God was not entirely to be trusted.

After that I never cried again with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me deeply in pain. At the age of five I had become a sceptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim, cosmic joke.¹

Baker lost more than his father that day. His experience of tragedy also cost him his childhood and his faith in a beneficent deity. He was only a five-year-old when his father died, but there was nothing childlike in his sense that "any happiness that came [his] way might be the prelude to some grim, cosmic joke." He had not ceased believing in God; he had ceased believing that God was to be trusted. Baker had decided, and apparently nothing that happened later in his life dissuaded him, that "God was a lot less interested in people than anybody in Morrisonville was willing to admit."

Baker's decision regarding God's character seems to place him beyond the pale of biblical faith. Yet it is remarkable how much, both in tone and in content, his dialogue with Bessie Scott evokes an earlier

¹ Growing Up (New York: Congdon and Weed, 1982), pp. 61-62.

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dialogue, this time a biblical one:

Though I am innocent, I cannot answer [God] …
For he crushes me with a tempest
And multiplies my wounds without cause;
he will not let me get my breath
but fills me with bitterness….
I am blameless … Therefore I say
He destroys both the blameless and the wicked.
When disaster brings sudden death,
he mocks at the calamity of the innocent.

The words, of course, are Job's (chap. 9). They were written almost 2,500 years ago by an Israelite who came to question what he once deeply believed. Job's encounter with tragedy leads him to repudiate an ancient tradition, passed down in Israel in both written and oral form, which accounted for human suffering with the theory that it is only the guilty who suffer. In the book of Job, the traditional explanation of evil is put into the mouth of the three friends who come to comfort Job after they hear of his sufferings.

The first of Job's friends asks him, "Who that is innocent ever perished?" (4:7) and advises him to "despise not the chastening of the Almighty" (5:17). The second friend suggests that Job is being punished for the sins of his children (8:4), and the third assures Job "that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves" (11:6). But Job no more accepts the explanations of his friends Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar than Baker accepted the explanations of Bessie Scott of Morrisonville.

Baker knew, as Job knew, that he did not deserve his suffering, and that a loving God would not have decreed or allowed his father to die. The five-year-old boy knew this with an immediacy that was so intense that neither adult authority nor religious tradition could wither its certainty. Later reflection seems only to have reinforced this conviction despite the fact that Baker, like Job, prospered in his life after his calamity. Baker went on to college, married, had children, and pursues a remarkably successful career as a nationally-known journalist.

But Baker's life parts from Job's at a crucial point. Job, the questioner, is vindicated by God and the religious community. The defenders of the tradition, Job's comforters, are condemned. In Baker's case, however, skeptical questions alienate him from religion and from the religious community (which continued to embody the tradition he had come to question).

If we ask ourselves why Baker remained alienated while Job was able to overcome his alienation, we do not come up with any simple answer. Job repents; that is, he turns away from his alienated relation to God, after being addressed twice by God. We must pay careful attention to the speech of God in these addresses. That famous speech in which God speaks out of the whirlwind neither attempts to account for Job's suffering nor for the presence of suffering in human life. Instead, Job is simply reminded of all God's mighty, creative works: the sea, the light,

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the winds, the stars, the rain, the lion, the wild ox, the horse. All these were created by God. Even the mighty monsters, Behemoth and Leviathan, symbols of chaos and evil, are God's creatures and owe their powers to God. Job is asked by God:

Will you condemn me that you may be justified?
Have you an arm like God
and can you thunder with a voice like his?(40:8-9).

After standing silent before God's two speeches, Job finally responds:

I have uttered what I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me, which I did not know ….
I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees thee;
therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes (42:3,5).

III

There are two possible interpretations of this speech. The most obvious one is that Job has simply given up. He has not received any answers to his questions, but he comes to recognize the impossibility of his position before God. His confrontation with God, the creator of the universe, dramatizes his own impotence and insignificance in the great scheme of things. Who is he, a mere mortal, to raise questions about God's use of power? As the voice out of the whirlwind reminds him, he neither has "an arm like God," nor can he "thunder with a voice like his" (40:9).

But if we follow this interpretation, we need to ask whether Job "gives up" out of a sense of wrongness in questioning God or because he thinks that it is futile to do so. Whichever answer we give, we run into difficulties. We cannot say that Job is. wrong in raising questions, since the voice out of the whirlwind has already declared that Job has "spoken of me what is right." If we answer that it is futile to raise questions of justice with God, we undermine the essential role of justice in Israel's faith. The justice of God was always as significant to Israel as the power of God. To cut God's power off from questions of justice would leave us with a God worshipped only for the awe that power inspires. But this is impossible for Israel. If Israel knows God at all, she knows God as just. There is another interpretation, popular for some time now among theologians, which holds that Job acted correctly in raising the question of divine justice. In this view, Job's friends erred in allowing an ideology-only the guilty suffer-to override the experience of undeserved suffering. Job knows that his suffering is undeserved. What he does not know is how it is possible for undeserved suffering to exist. That question remains unanswered. But he does experience God's holy and healing presence. He discovers that in the presence of God's love, his complaints can find their resting place. His pain is stilled and he attains a state of mind in which there is no desire to ask "about the justice of God." The experience of God's love has proven sufficient to him: "now

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my eye sees thee." It is enough. All else appears superfluous. Therefore, he repents; he turns away from that state of mind which needs to question God.

These are two different interpretations. The first moves toward a God awesome in might and power; the second moves toward a God of grace and love. Yet the two have something in common: they both stop the argument about evil. This is obvious in the first interpretation where it is either futile or wrong to argue about the relation of power to justice. But even the second interpretation suggests that while it was right and perhaps even necessary in the sixth century B.C. to question God's justice, it is no longer necessary or even right to continue to do so. Job may compare God to a lion hunting its prey (1: 11) or to a taskmaster over slaves (3:18), or accuse God of multiplying his wounds without cause (9:l7). But because we have come to know God as graciously present in our suffering, such accusations now seem to be inappropriate for faith. Today, those who would speak the words of Job, like Russell Baker, see themselves and are seen by others as having placed themselves outside biblical faith.

There are, however, some signs that we are changing our minds on that score. Elie Wiesel, the Jewish novelist and survivor of the Nazi death camps, has faulted Job for cutting off his argument with God. Even if Job does experience divine grace, Wiesel does not think that the experience of God's love should obscure God's concern for justice. In ancient Israel, God was proclaimed as having a passion for justice. Indeed, Israel's passion for justice was rooted in God's passion. When Job calls God to account, he does so not on the basis of a human ideal, but on the basis of Israel's knowledge of God's own nature. Wiesel, therefore, insists that we must take the early Job as our model. We must continue to call God to account. We must even bring God to trial. We do so not out of human arrogance, but out of biblical faith. The God of the Bible has been revealed to us as just, and we must be vigilant about that justice.

We are left with two questions. Does Job stop questioning God because divine grace gives him rest, stills his pain, and makes questions of justice appear superfluous? Or are questions of God's justice questions which a biblical community is continually called to ask?

The odd thing about biblical texts is that they never seem to allow us to rest with the meanings we give them. They have a way of raising questions which force us to go back and struggle some more. Let us return to the text in order to complete the story. We are told that the "Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning." He had twice as many camels, oxen, and asses as he had before and ten more children were born to him. He "saw his sons and his son's sons, four generations. And Job died an old man, and full of days" (42:12-17).

The text tells us that Job was given more than he had. But it does not

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tell us that Job felt that the birth of new children justified the death of his first children. Job lived to be an old man, "full of days." But there is nothing in the text that stops us from thinking that on any one of those days, or even on all of those days, Job might awaken with the memory of one of his dead children in his head and bitter tears on his face. Wiesel may be correct. The earlier experience of God's grace might not stop Job from shouting, once again, that God is more like a lion hunting his prey than like a just ruler of a kingdom. Of course, the text tells us nothing of this. But we imagine what it would be like for us, and we listen to those other voices in Scripture which do not allow the experience of grace to shut off the questions of divine justice. The psalmist cries:

Thou hast made us like sheep for the slaughter
and hast scattered us amongst the nations ….
All this had come upon us,
Though we have not forgotten thee,
Or been false to thy covenant (44:11,17).

Has there ever been a time when this cry has not been true for some person or some people somewhere? Perhaps the book of Job is trying to tell us not that it sees a way through the problem of evil, but that it sees through the answers we have used to comfort ourselves. The Bible responds profoundly to the deepest problems of life and faith, but that does not mean that the Bible has one answer, or a final answer, or even consistent answers to the problem of God, power, and evil. We have a tendency, sometimes, to think of Scripture as if it were a train on a single track heading determinedly for its final destination. But the Bible is not really like that. Perhaps the Bible is more like a deep coal mine with many seams, some of which are rich with coal and others not; some when pursued seem to be endless, while others become thinner and thinner.

If we think of the Bible as a coal mine with seams we have been mining for centuries and others we have hardly touched, then we have our clue to how a view of God other than that of the main theological tradition can also be a biblical view. The theological tradition has mined one of the large seams in Scripture. Let us call that seam the monarchial image. In this seam, God is a great, awesomely mysterious and powerful creator. God is a loving and just King. All-controlling and all-knowing, nothing happens outside the divine will. God never changes in any way; God is eternally the same.

We are all familiar with this image of God. It is the one with which most of us have been brought up. It is also the one that troubles our faith when we ask how God can allow so much senseless human suffering to occur.

There is no question that Scripture contains an extensive seam to which this monarchial image of God can trace its origins. As we saw in the book of Job, the monstrous Behemoth and Leviathan are considered playthings of God (40:15-41:34). Job himself declares, "I know that you

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can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted" (42:2). In the book of Isaiah, God says, "I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe, I am the Lord, who do all these things" (45:7). In the fourth Gospel, Jesus says to Pilate, "You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above" (19:11), and, in Matthew, Jesus declares, "With God all things are possible" (19:26). In Romans, Paul writes that God "has mercy upon whomever he wills, and he hardens the hearts of whomever he wills" (9:18).

This is an extensive seam and we are all familiar with it. Its view of God has impressed itself upon the mind of the theological tradition and upon the imagination of the church. It is the image that Baker knew. But there are other seams in the Bible, seams which run toward a different image of God-an image which has been barely explored because the monarchial image is so strongly established. It seemed to be the case that the monarchial image had riches deep enough to meet our needs.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian who was executed by the Nazis in 1945 for his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler, portrayed an alternative image of God in the following lines written from his prison cell:

People go to God when they are sore bestead,
Pray to God for succour, for peace, for bread,
For mercy for the sick, sinning or dead:
All people do so, Christian and unbelieving.

People go to God when God is sore bestead,
Find God poor and scorned, without shelter or bread,
Whelmed under the weight of the wicked, the weak, the dead:
Christians stand by God in God's hour of grieving.

God goes to all people when sore bestead.
Feeds body and spirit with God's bread,
For Christians, heathens alike, God hangeth dead:
And both alike forgiving.²

Here is an image of God which runs against the notion of an unchanging, controlling, awesomely powerful, predestinating planner. It is an image which seems to emerge when the experiences of evil and undeserved suffering find a way to break through traditional modes of thinking. Here is God imaged with real limits, "whelmed under the weight of the wicked and weak," grieving, weak by worldly standards and conceptions, and coming to us in suffering and forgiveness. This is'the vulnerable image of God.

Of course, it is but an image. We need to fill it out, ask questions of it, and think systematically about it. We need, also, to find the seam in the

²Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Christians and Unbelievers" in Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. E. Bethge, tr. R. H. Fuller (New York: Macmillian, 1953), pp. 224-25. Trans. adapted by author.

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Bible to which it corresponds and which nourished it, sometimes hiddenly, all these years.

For example, there is a startling text found toward the end of the book of Isaiah:

In all their affliction he [God] was afflicted,
and the angel of his presence saved them;
in his love and in his pity he redeemed them (Isa. 63:9).

The text here dwells not on the monarchial power of God as the source of Israel's salvation, but on the tender elements in God which we associate with the image of vulnerability. God is present in our affliction. God is even afflicted in our affliction. It is in love and pity that God redeems us. Similarly, in the "suffering servant" passages in Isaiah, the redemptive power of God is identified not by the attributes of monarchy but of vulnerability:

The servant was despised and rejected by every one,
was full of sorrows, and acquainted with grief
….Surely this one has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows;
… but this servant was wounded for our transgressions,
was bruised for our iniquities,
bore the chastisement that made us whole
and the stripes by which we are healed (Isa. 53:3-5).

The text here speaks not of God's suffering, but of the suffering of one sent by God. Even so, the text clearly relates suffering to redemptive power. It is as if the power of vulnerability now appears where once monarchial power appeared. In texts which we can date to the sixth century B.C., suffering is being understood not only as the consequence of God's love (as in the earlier texts of Israel's faith) but as the mode of God's redeeming power. God redeems us through suffering. But is it possible that this is also the case in the book of Job?³ Certainly there is no justification to interpret Job as a suffering servant figure, as an innocent one being punished for the sake of the guilty many. And yet, we gain the clue into interpreting the book of Job by asking ourselves why the suffering servant passages in Isaiah are so powerful for us.

Scholars have long noted that the origin of the notion of the suffering servant may lie in the ancient Middle East practice of sacrificing a "scapegoat" for our sins by driving a goat out into the wilderness to its certain death. Yet when we interpret the suffering servant passages, we find their power not by looking back to the ancient notion of the sacrificial scapegoat but by looking forward to the New Testament affirmation that God was in Christ, the crucified one who forgives us our sins. When we read, "he has borne our griefs, … was wounded for our transgressions, … and with his stripes we are healed," we do not think backward to scapegoats but forward to Christ, whose suffering "makes us whole." The situation is not so much that the Isaiah passages

³The story of Job as a "knight of faith" who stays true to God despite calamities is an ancient Middle East folktale. The book of Job, as we have it with its long poetic dialogues, is generally dated to the mid-sixth century B.C. E., certainly no earlier.

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prophesy the coming of Christ as it is that the fullness of their meaning has to wait upon that later event. The Isaiah passages are leading us toward a new understanding and image of God, specifically toward the image of a vulnerable God whose redemptive power lies in suffering with and for us. But we do not know that and could not say that until the new image appears through the words and actions of Jesus Christ.

Is there this kind of "leading to" in the book of Job? Quite the opposite seems to be the case. The God who speaks out of the whirlwind, the God who asks Job whether he has an "arm like God" and whether he can "thunder with a voice like his" is a God of sheer power. Similarly, the God who showers new possessions and new children upon Job is a God of all-controlling power. The monarchial image of God seems to be as much affirmed at the end of the book of Job as at the beginning. There seems no place to look in Job to find the image of the vulnerable God.

VII

But what if the problem lies not in where we look but in the one who looks. What if the problem lies in our perspective, in our assumptions? We make the assumption that we can only understand Job by looking back to the monarchial image of God. But what if we look at the book of Job in the same way that we look at the suffering servant passages in Isaiah? What if we interpret Job in accordance to where it is leading us? After all, neither God's speech of power and mystery nor the "happy ending" solve the problem of evil-not in the writer's mind and certainly not in the reader's. God's controlling power is part of the problem in the book of Job-for the writer and for the reader. Perhaps the book of Job will not make sense until we see it as turning away from the monarchial image of God and toward an image of God as vulnerable. Our failure to look forward, so to speak, in interpreting Job makes us like Job's friends who cannot speak rightly about God because they cannot break away from earlier patterns of thinking.

Consider the fact that the speech of Elihu (chap. 37) is similar in substance to the speech that comes out of the whirlwind (chap. 38). Elihu praises God's power, thunderous voice, wondrous works, and incomprehensible ways, and he mocks Job as a weak, ignorant, arrogant human being who dares raise his voice against the terrible majesty of God. But this speech, which sounds so much like God's address, is placed in the mouth of the (soon to be condemned) "friends." Its content is as suspect as any of the other friends' speeches. Thus, a shadow falls over the monarchial image of God at just that moment when the voice out of the whirlwind is about to assert it.

The speech out of the whirlwind is, of course, a ringing manifesto of divine power. But perhaps it rings too much--thirty-four lines about the monstrous Leviathan and twenty-four lines about Behemoth. The picture of divine power is so overdrawn that it almost raises questions against itself. Can one think it an acceptable or even believable response to Job's questions about God's power and human suffering when the

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voice out of the whirlwind asks him: "Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his?" (40:9). Is that an answer to a cry of pain?

The question is not simply whether the monarchial image is subtly being edged out. The question is also whether the book of Job is leading us toward a new image of God-an image of a suffering, vulnerable God. To answer that question, we need to return to some earlier questions. How can we account for Job's act of repentance? Of what does Job repent? When Job says, "Now my eye sees thee," what image of God does he see?

Let us note Job's description of what has happened to him: "For the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me" (3:25). But what is it that Job dreads? It is not his own death. We are told that Job longs for death, that he seeks it like hidden treasure, and that he will be exceedingly glad to find his grave (3:21-22). Nor is it the loss of his children; that seems to be more the occasion for the dread than the dread itself. The nature of Job's dread is suggested in a question Job asks: "Why is light given to him that is in misery and life to the bitter in soul who long for death but it comes not?" (3:20-21).

The reference here is not to outer events, but an inner state. The terrible and tragic outer events have become the occasion for the dreadful inner event. Through no act of his own, and though he was without fault, Job has fallen among those who are embittered in soul and long for death. He continues to believe in God's existence, but he has come to loathe his life. Job had experienced death and loss in its many forms: the destruction of his wealth, his children killed, his skin infected with sores. These are dreadful things, but they are not yet dread.

Dread is despair at its furthermost point; it is, as Job says, having life where there is bitterness of soul. Dread is life which has come to hate itself; it is life turning against itself, becoming faithless to itself. It is, finally, life moving toward unfaith, unbelief, at its most primal level. Dread is rejection of life and of God who creates life. For when I dread the simple fact that I am alive, I deny, in the most basic way, the goodness of God's creation. There are more destructive and evil ways to express rejection of God, but surely there are none that cut deeper into a person's life than to dread the fact of being alive. Now we are ready to understand Job's speech of repentance:

I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees thee;
Therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes (Job 42:5-6).

Job repents, but his repentance comes after his healing. In that vision of God, "now my eye sees thee," healing power must have been communicated. Job is healed of his hatred of life. He had fallen into dread, and now be is out of it. The memory of his dead children may still cause him anguish, but it no longer leads him into dread of life.

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VIII

We come now to the crucial question. What kind of vision of God could bring about Job's healing? Surely the monarchial vision would not have this power. It might silence Job's outcry against unjust suffering, but it would not answer it. It would not heal him of his bitterness of soul. As long as Job believes that God has all-controlling power, he has reason to believe that those who are crushed in life are crushed by God. But, as we have seen, Elihu's speech and even the speech out of the whirlwind raise questions about the adequacy of that view of God. In raising these questions, the book of Job is leading us away from the monarchial image of God. And yet it does so in a way that leaves room for a new image of God to appear. Here is the clue into Job's healing and the content of his repentance.

Job is healed when a new image of God appears to him. Now be can let go of the monarchial image of God. He is healed because, in letting go of the image of all-controlling power, he is letting go of the experience of God as the enemy, the one who "crushes" him. The "thee" that he sees in "now my eye sees thee" is God the friend, the vulnerable one, who is there with him in his suffering and whose caring presence heals him. He does not repent of his concern for God's justice; biblical faith can never have enough of that concern. Job repents of his loathing for life, his sense of despair, his lack of faith in the goodness of the creation. Thus, he is ready to return to life. He can love again, work, and have children. He can die, as the text says, "full of days."

Does this interpretation strain the text? The answer is yes and no. Yes, if we think of the book of Job as if its text were without conflict, tension, and contradiction. The monarchial image is present in Job, and it is affirmed over and over again. But deliberately placed against it is the notion of undeserved suffering. The tension created by that placing must have been no less severe in the sixth century B.C., with all its violent upheavals, than it was for Baker when his thirty-three-year-old father died or than it is for us when we place the slaughter of millions of children and adults in the Nazi death camps against the monarchial image of God. That tension accounts for the conflict in the book of Job over the adequacy of the monarchial image of God. The interpretation that a new image of God is appearing in the book of Job does strain some texts. But that is because the Joban texts themselves reflect the stress of grappling with the problem of the suffering of the innocent and of writing against the dominant tradition.

We are ready now to answer the questions that the five-year-old Baker asked Bessie Scott of Morrisonville. The death of his father broke Baker's ability to worship God conceived under the image of monarchy. When the five-year-old Baker asked, "If God loves me why did he make my father die," he is presupposing the monarchial image of God. When

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the adult Baker tells us that he "never cried again with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference," he is expressing a refusal to worship a divine realty whose source of inspiration lies in sheer power. We can begin to answer Baker when we affirm him in this refusal. The Bible's evaluation of Job's words, "he has spoken of me [God] what is right," must be our evaluation of Baker's words. Baker cannot worship the God of the monarchial image. He knows that God as the enemy. That God is the God who "crushes" him. We must encourage Baker and those like him to let go of that image of God.

We continue our answer when we clarify the source of our inspiration to worship God. It is not sheer power but the vulnerability of suffering love that inspires us. It is through the cross of Christ that we learn who God is. It is the cross that finally breaks our old monarchial image of God. It is the cross that clearly provides us with a new image: an image of a vulnerable God, an image of a crucified God, an image of a God who redeems us not by coercive power but by suffering with us in our suffering.