Hi everyone, welcome to the Oak Hill podcast, conversations about theology and ministry.
Welcome, we are really glad you're here with us.
Uh, I look forward to every one of the Oak Hill podcasts, but I've been especially looking
forward to this one because I'm joined by my friend and former colleague, Chris Ansberry,
who is here in the country teaching a summer intensive for us this week on wisdom
literature, which I know is a special interest of yours.
Uh, Chris, because probably not everyone watching will know you.
Could you explain the former colleague bit and your relationship to Oak Hill and where
you are now?
Yeah, Eric, thanks for having me.
It's a delight to chat with you.
Um, I am a former colleague in so far as I taught here for eight years.
So in God's kindness and Providence, um, Carolyn, my wife, um, two children at that
point, we came over to Oak Hill to serve as a lecturer in 2013.
Um, and that continued until 2020, 2021, after which I accepted a position at a place
called Grove city college in Western Pennsylvania in the States and have since moved there.
But we had eight glorious and lovely years here with colleagues like you, Eric and others,
as well as some fine students.
Yes.
Yeah.
You were one of the colleagues that I very much didn't want to go, but given the nature
of the opportunity, I was very happy for you and it was the right fit for you.
I think at that time it was just to be able to have the opportunity to live a bit closer
to family and the timing and kids' lives and things like that.
It just seemed to make sense.
Yes.
Now you're teaching wisdom literature for us.
I am.
Which is an area of area of expertise for you.
You've been spending a lot of time on that.
Could you tell us how you got interested in wisdom literature, your, your relationship
to that part of the Bible?
Yeah, it's a great question.
I kind of fell into it in that, um, I became a Christian rather later in life.
So after my first year of university became a Christian, um, took some time off, didn't
go back to school for a few years, for about a year.
Um, when I did, I fell into sort of languages and classics and that sort of works for me.
It, um, scratched all of my itches.
I was good at it and that was helpful.
Um, after, um, university, I decided to go into graduate school with some
encouragement from some professors.
So I find myself at Wheaton doing an MA in exegesis.
And by that time, having become a fairly new Christian, having sort of discerned
aspects of the church, I find it quite striking that I didn't hear the Old Testament
preached, um, on a regular basis.
So that was sort of a red flag that sort of emerged by that point as I was moving
into grad school and, um, I had a professor in grad school, um, C.
Hassell Bullock, who was teaching a seminar, a PhD seminar on wisdom literature.
It interested me.
Um, I twisted his arm and he allowed me to take that PhD seminar.
And it was during that time that I began to recognize not only is the Old
Testament marginalized in some churches, but no one knows what to do with these
so-called wisdom books, especially if you operate strictly speaking under a kind
of linear redemptive historical model of biblical theology.
And I thought, huh, I can kind of kill two birds perhaps with one stone and
focusing on an aspect of the Old Testament that's problematic that might
better serve the church.
So that's how I got into it.
That's wonderful.
I've talked with more than one Old Testament scholar who was in a sort of
general seminary degree and many different routes they could take, but they
picked the Old Testament because there was a need there.
Um, so the Old Testament, the wisdom literature doesn't quite seem to fit.
Yeah, it doesn't.
Tell us about that.
Well, I think Will Kynes has done a good job of this and sort of identifying how
over the last 150-ish sort of years, there's been this common conception that
not only do the wisdom books not play by the rules of certain ways of going
about biblical theology, um, but these books seem to fraternize with the wrong
crowd, they're more comparable, the sort of ancient Near Eastern texts out there.
They're unusual in the canon of scripture, nothing really like the book of
Proverbs or Job or Ecclesiastes or the song, if you want to include that into the
mix, um, so they become something of a problem child within the canon of
scripture, raising the big question in terms of that, how do we, I think for me,
especially, how do we read these books as Christian scripture?
How are they Christian scripture for the church?
They can feel like the fifth wheel on the car or something like that.
Yeah, it seems to me if you're reading the Bible, you're
reading the Bible, it's not as obvious.
It's not as obvious to me, if you read Genesis to Malachi, you get a
coherent story that's echoing across each other.
It's not as obvious how Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes fit into that.
That's right.
My experience was doing nothing with wisdom literature, getting through all
my schooling, getting a job, right, to teach it every year.
And I knew literally nothing about it.
So it was a crash course for me, but that's how the teaching, uh, uh, schedule worked out.
So what would be lacking from our Bibles?
If Job and Ecclesiastes were not there, if Genesis was not there, Deuteronomy,
the text, the Old Testament would be incoherent.
What, what is crucial that we need to understand about living before God and
living with each other that we find improv, just say, just in Proverbs to
begin with, that we don't see anywhere else?
Great question.
Um, I want to be very careful that I don't sort of go to the point where I say,
we wouldn't have X, Y, or Zed without Proverbs, Job or Ecclesiastes.
I do think in large part, these books, along with the song are reinforcing voices
and witnesses that we find elsewhere in the Canon, but because they're framed
and formed in a different way, they help us to understand some of these motifs
we find in what elsewhere in the Canon differently.
And I find that quite helpful.
So wisdom is a concept that pervades the Canon of scripture, for example.
But I think Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes help us to understand wisdom in
different ways, through different angles, you know, almost through different facets.
An example of that being how does one acquire wisdom?
I think Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes might answer that question in
complimentary ways, but in different ways in the same way, what is the fear of the Lord?
I think Proverbs unpacks what that means and what that looks like in a particular way.
I think Job unpacks that in a complimentary yet distinctive way.
And the same with Ecclesiastes.
So I think if all you had was Deuteronomy, you'd have a particular understanding of
what the fear of the Lord is that would be good and right, but it would lack a
sort of thickness and a depth that I think something like Proverbs and Job
and Ecclesiastes help us out with.
It fascinates me.
Tell me if you agree with this or not.
It fascinates me how comfortable wisdom literature is with diversity and tension.
Not everything has to be exactly the same.
Ecclesiastes, there are a couple of passages as well where the author says,
here's my theology, here's my lived experience.
It doesn't seem to fit very well with it.
I'm not going to deny either.
I'm not going to let my lived experience destroy my faith.
I'm not going to let my faith, I'm not going to put blinkers on so I can't see
what's happening and it's just comfortable with it.
That seems like a very wise theological method.
Tell me, could you tell me one example outside of Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes,
where you see wisdom present and biblically, what does wisdom mean?
I mean, I suppose we all have some definition what that means as English
speakers, but what does wisdom mean in the Old Testament?
Wisdom broadly conceived in the Old Testament, I would say, is a skilled practice.
So it's up and here I'll riff off aspects of Michael Fox.
I think it is cognitive.
It is emotional.
It involves right loves, right desires.
It is aesthetic.
It involves a recognition of what is good and fitting and beautiful.
And as you bring all of those together and sort of the concrete in and out
circumstances that we find ourselves in everyday life, it has to do with not
only an embodied form of life, how I go about living my life, but it also involves.
How do I best read people?
How do I best read situations?
What's the right word at the right time in the light of my reading of
this person in this situation?
So it almost encompasses all aspects of the Christian life and pastoral ministry
in terms of how do I frame and understand the ins and outs of life and my various
interactions within the world?
Right.
Tell me if you agree with this.
It seems to me part of what Proverbs is saying is obeying God's rules is not enough.
It's necessary.
If you, if you ignore and flaunt those rules, it's going to be a train wreck,
but that is not enough to live blessedly and successfully in God's world.
You need a kind of facility where you know the right thing to say or not say
in a certain situation.
Absolutely.
It fascinates me that God has put his world together in such a way.
It's not just a matter of applying rule number 34 or whatever crucial as that is,
you know, um, you, you, you mentioned the right things to say in certain situations.
How much of, of Proverbs do you think is about good people skills?
I think a lot of it is.
And I think not only about people skills and some of those soft skills that it seeks to
cultivate within a certain virtues that help us out in those situations.
Um, and Stuart talks a lot about how Proverbs sort of train our moral reasoning in
different ways, direct desires and things of that nature through its different forms
and its, its pedagogical techniques.
I was struck, I have to admit in my dissertation, I was sort of selective in sort
of what I treated in the book of Proverbs, but now having done a commentary on the book,
having to translate everything.
I mean, it messes with your mind.
I mean, certain sayings like what's the subject, what's the predicate?
There's a gap here.
This is asymmetrical.
Like it just plays with your mind and rewires the way that you think.
So that you begin to recognize sort of the messiness in human interactions, in
human situations, and it kind of sharpens your perception to almost expect that
that grayness in the, in the everyday of, I found that extremely surprising and
helpful because I opened up my English by learning through Proverbs and it seems
rather banal, basic and straightforward, but it's not.
That's fascinating.
Yeah.
Translations by their nature are going to clarify and simplify and smooth off rough
edges.
So the text itself is helping train you to make judgment calls in difficult
situations in the way that it's written.
Yeah.
And I think an example of that is sort of, you look across, for example, the
words of the wise in Proverbs 22 17 to 24 34 and the two sections there.
And it's quite striking to me that you, you move from chapters one to nine.
You're the sort of passive silent recipient.
That's the position you're called to assume receiving the parental advice,
the discourses of wisdom, lady folly.
Then you enter into chapters 10 to 22 16.
And it's like, Oh, there's no more spoon feeding here.
I got to kind of fend for myself and sort out, you know, I'm no longer being sort
of held by the hand here and spoon fed in my baby chair.
I got to kind of sort out this wisdom on my own.
And then you return in 22 17 to the words of the wise and there's direct address
there it's direct admonitions commands.
There's moral motivations there.
Does the carrot on the stick to get me to sort of embrace certain actions, but
then I'm being thrown into all kinds of social situations.
I'm a parent, you know, discipline your child.
You won't die. And then it's like, hold on.
I'm a military commander wage war with advice.
What, you know, now I'm a drunkard, you know, now I'm responsible for making
sure innocent people aren't carried off to execution.
You're being thrown into these different social situations.
It's like, Whoa, I have to kind of assume this position and think through as a
citizen or a military commander or, or whatever it might be.
How might I act?
How might I live?
What would I do?
What's the best way to negotiate these sorts of scenarios?
If I'm sitting at your home tomorrow for dinner, the home of a superior, should I
grub out or should I put a knife to my throat?
I mean, what should I do?
You know, as I'm thinking about perhaps social advancement, whatever it might be.
So I find that quite fascinating.
Yeah.
It's amazing how in the geniuses, I think the people who wrote the Old Testament
were geniuses in the way it's put together that as, as you said, it goes to
work on your mind in a certain way.
It, it rips some wires up and rewires things.
It goes to work on your heart in a certain way.
You find yourself attracted to and loving certain things that you didn't before.
And especially that teenage males, which is who the book is addressed to in a
certain, in a certain sense, don't naturally love.
I have this feeling of chaos when I read Proverbs 10 through 31, just saying
after saying after saying, I read half a chapter and I'm lucky if I can remember
any of it, is that intentional?
Is that kind of training for the, you know, the really different situations
you'll find yourself in?
Yeah, I think we kind of read the seemingly random nature of the
collections within proverb, how they've been organized and collated in one of two
ways, I think we can see the rhetorical significance of that as look, you're
going to be thrown in all kinds of situations.
Things are going to come at you across your day that you don't necessarily
anticipate or expect, and you're going to have to be nimble.
You're going to have to have the sort of moral reasoning and character that's
able to negotiate those situations.
I'm also quite convinced by the work of Bill Brown, who isn't necessarily as
concerned with sort of coherence and organization at sort of the micro level
between individual sayings or materials across the collections, but does sort of
look at the book at sort of 10,000 feet at a more macro perspective and recognizes
if Proverbs one to nine, which most agree is something of an introduction to the
book as a whole, it sits in unified relationship with at least chapter 31.
I would argue also chapter 30.
There's something of a framework there that helps us to understand the middle
as we negotiate the middle.
And if Proverbs one, one to seven, the preamble really crystallizes.
This is really the rhyme and reason, the purpose of the book.
I think Proverbs one, one to seven is something of the core syllabus of the
book of Proverbs.
You have your learning outcomes there, you know, the address ease, you have your
prerequisite in chapter one, verse seven, the expectations are set.
You're going to counter Proverbs and sayings, the words of the wise, these
riddles, it's not going to be easy.
I do think 10 to 29 is set up at the macro level, a sort of 10,000 foot view
along the lines of our educational curriculum, moving from some of not in a
simplistic way, the ABCs elementary wisdom, but I do find if 10 to 15 is
dominated by antithetic sayings, you know, what's coming next.
There's this pedagogical experience of dependability.
You're learning and sort of contrasts.
There are some gray areas there.
And then you move into 16 to 22 and it's a, oh, there's no, almost no antithetic
sayings here.
Like I need to think differently in different ways.
There's fresh themes being introduced.
My worldview is being nuanced.
Then you're directly addressed in the words of the wise.
Okay.
I'm being commanded to assume different positions here, almost gaining some
vocational wisdom and then advanced wisdom.
In Proverbs 25 to 29, where, you know, 25 to 27, you have all these rich analogies
that you don't encounter elsewhere in the book.
And you're thinking, what's the image?
What's the referent?
How do I put these things together to make sense out of it?
You know, it's almost as if you're at a more advanced level of education.
There's more responsibilities that's required of you to interpret this stuff.
And then even when you get to chapters 28 to 29, I've found that even though we
return at that point to antithetic sayings with Bill Brown, Christine Yoder, I mean,
it's a highly conflicted world at that point, you know, tyrannical rulers, the
wicked ruling over people.
It's very realistic to the nature of our own world.
And I found most of those antithetic sayings are asymmetrical.
So explain more what you mean antithetical sayings and an asymmetry with
it, explain more for.
So you expect sort of things to be nicely paired together of righteous against the
wicked and then some sort of action with its opposite the results and then being
the opposite of the case.
I find across Proverbs 28 to 29, most of them, they don't line up and you're
forced to fill in gaps or to fill out sayings and extend them.
Again, it requires more of you.
You're you're at the advanced stage now.
You got to do some of this on your own.
It's kind of build your own proverb at that point with a little bit of help.
That's fascinating.
So perfectly symmetrical proverb would be, you know, a wise son rejoices his father,
a foolish son is a shape of his mother.
Yeah, something like that.
Yeah.
And we're not getting that toward the end.
No, we're not.
So so in Proverbs 20 to 29, as it were, giving us the advanced M.A.
version to see if we can get through that.
Is that the book of Proverbs recognizing the limits of wisdom or a chaos and
confusion in the world or both?
Or why?
Why? Can you think?
Can you reflect with me on why Proverbs is so sort of articulate about and
insistent on our real ability to know the world, but also the limits of our
ability to grasp this confusing world we're in?
Is that is that the fault with wisdom and human knowing?
Is it something about the world after the fall?
Is it both?
Do you have any sense of that?
I think it's both.
I think I've been really influenced.
I mean, having studied wisdom books over a decade, I think finitude,
who we are as creatures is a prominent theme across these texts.
I think even in the light of Kelly Capek's recent work,
it's a recognition that our finitude is a good gift.
It's a good thing.
Finitude, the limits of more of our finitude is not the product of the fall.
You know, you can make a case with Drew Johnson and others that
Adam has to learn stuff in Genesis two.
Like, it's just the nature of our finitude as he depends on God to come to know,
not good that I'm alone.
Well, these creatures aren't appropriate sort of, you know, helpers and mates for me.
So, yeah, I think that, of course, post Genesis three,
there is going to be some confusion and difficulties in understanding the nature
of the world, understanding people, understanding ourselves.
But even with that recognition, we are finite.
That is a good thing.
That is a gift.
We're ultimately dependent on God.
We're dependent on others.
We are not self-sufficient beings.
And the wisdom books in different ways sort of leverage that and lean into that,
I think, in very helpful ways, whether it's in Proverbs,
which recognizes the wise can always grow in wisdom.
You can always grow in wisdom.
You never made it.
You've never graduated.
You're never going to sort of move on in the life of wisdom.
I find that quite striking where the wise can always grow in wisdom.
And if you have these character types in the book,
most of whom are sort of coreferential, the righteous and the wise,
the diligent, the generous, if they're all sort of the same sort of person
described with different characterizations, it strikes me that
while the righteous can never grow in righteousness.
Or never stop growing?
Well, according, you can say the wise can always grow in wisdom.
OK.
But it strikes me that the righteous, at least explicitly within Proverbs,
it seems, can never grow in righteousness.
It seems just simply to be a state.
OK, interesting.
That is yours.
Interesting.
But the righteous, according to Proverbs 9, 7, right,
it's sort of the hinge there between the two invitations of lady wisdom and woman folly.
The righteous can grow in understanding.
So you can always grow.
You've never made it.
You've never arrived.
And I think that captures something of the nature of who we are as creatures and our affinity.
There's a wonderful subversion of any pretension of mastery.
Which is something Christians can fall prey to.
Absolutely.
But at the same time, it's very much not skepticism or relativism or something.
Not at all.
Like we're assured in Proverbs, your life will go really well with the help of this book.
Yeah.
And yet we're brought, you know, resolutely home to our own limitations with which we engage the world.
Maybe one more question about Proverbs.
I keep picking your brain about this for a long time.
But before we move on briefly to some other books,
it's very striking to me in Proverbs how it seems to me like every second or third
Proverb is about speech and especially about limiting speech and just saying less than you
might want to.
It seems to me that Proverbs will make huge promises for achieving wisdom.
But if you want to be wise, it feels to me like you're about halfway there.
If you can just be willing to admit you're wrong and talk less.
No, I think you're right.
That's very striking to me and seems very relevant to the church today in terms of
sins of the tongue and the way we talk about each other, especially the way we talk about
each other online.
Are there other aspects of Proverbs that you find very insightful that have really sort of
knocked you on the side of the head and made you look at everything differently?
Yeah, I think Proverbs knows and recognizes how we tick.
It has a lot to say about desire.
It puts carrots on sticks as sort of a helpful technique.
I think that says something about who we are.
We love things.
We're fundamentally desiring beings.
And if that's the case, the book is trying to orient our desires to those things that
are good and beautiful.
I always, you know, I love I love Agar's discourse in Chapter 30.
I mean, I think he just dishes out a healthy portion of humble pie.
And I just I find that refreshing and helpful.
And it just reorients me to you're never going to know it all.
It's not about what you know.
It's about whom you know, relationship with God.
That enables you to see that you are a creature.
You know, he feigns I'm an animal.
I'm a brute and not a man.
And I don't have wisdom and understanding.
Right.
But he really does.
And he's just trying to get us to confess that we really don't know and that we ought
to be humble.
And that really, I think Mike Ovi told me that's really the meta skill of the wise
person, humility.
And Agar reminds me of that.
He claims to be an animal, but he's really genuinely wise.
So long as we acknowledge who we are, what we don't know, what we do know.
Whom we know.
And that as he goes on in Chapter 30, it's striking how he'll talk about animals who
know that they're animals and they're they're wise.
But then he'll talk about those that don't know that they're acting like an animal who
are just proud and they ought to realize who they are.
And so that sort of discourse on humility there, which is also captured in Job just
fessing up to your limits.
Ecclesiastes rubs your face in that.
And so I find that really, really helpful.
Wow.
I read somewhere, I don't remember where I read somewhere that the first lesson in the
book of Job is how little we know.
And as the characters talk, it's not the only lesson, but it's the first one.
As the characters talk to each other and they're certain that they know things, all of them
are wrong.
But they don't know that they're wrong and they don't really have any other way of figuring
that out.
But we as the reader know.
So it causes self-reflection.
No, sure.
Could I ask you, I'm genuinely, I have some thoughts about this, but I'd like to hear
what you say.
I've read a number of scholars say that Proverbs represents, maybe they don't describe it this
way, but there's a level of naiveté to Proverbs.
Seems to promise too much, life's a little bit too ordered.
And Job and Ecclesiastes are later biblical authors saying, hey, it's not that simple,
guys, kind of disagreeing with Proverbs.
People will talk about a crisis in wisdom literature.
Do you find that helpful or convincing?
Do you?
I don't find it convincing.
I can understand why one might read Proverbs as rather naive.
It seems to be rather simplistic, too black and white, not enough nuance.
And then Job and Ecclesiastes come along and just blow up the whole business.
I think I find it quite striking that in contrast to the ways in which the early church read
Proverbs, Job or Proverbs, Ecclesiastes in the song in accord with a particular curriculum,
almost along a particular trajectory that Proverbs is going to teach you ethics,
Ecclesiastes, it then prepares you virtue.
Ecclesiastes then teaches you sort of physics, the sort of the nature of the world and how
to see it.
And then the song is for those who are able to discern higher realities.
I find there you have what seems to be a fascinating sort of curriculum in church.
A sort of curriculum and trajectory where they build on one another.
And yet this sort of model that you've set up that many have set up in terms of this
conflict among the so-called wisdom books, it feels to me that it's just sort of tracing
much of the thought of Western thinking and philosophy.
You move from pre-critical naivete, which is Proverbs, and then you get the Enlightenment
with something like Job.
And then we'll just go full on postmodern with something like Ecclesiastes.
And I find that maybe that's sort of the air that we breathe.
And we've just sort of slipped into implicitly or explicitly this mode of thought that we've
just mapped these books onto the history of Western thought that I just find ironic in
many ways.
I tend to think they're complementary.
I think Proverbs is well aware of the mysteries of life in this world, especially in light
of divine action and agency.
And even many of the sayings that seem simplistic in terms of character and action and punishment,
reward, are totally open in terms of timing and agency.
When does this happen?
Proverbs is comfortable with mystery, with the inexplicable activities of life, but doesn't
foreground that as much as something like Job or Ecclesiastes.
And I think they're just showing us different facets of what it means to be human in this
world that's quite helpful.
Yeah, yeah.
We're in danger of seeing our own frustrated image in the text as modern secular people.
Oh, sure.
With the pretension of the Enlightenment to intellectually master and grasp the world
and then it shatters and doesn't work and we just find it in the text.
Whereas they're wiser than us.
Yeah.
So I'm trying to think of a brief way to ask this.
Job's a difficult book to read for all kinds of reasons.
What do you think it's fair to say that Proverbs is there, that we're supposed to read both
together and Proverbs is there to assure you that trusting God and careful attention to
the words of the wise, it may not happen quickly, it may not happen in the way or the form that
you expect, but infallibly that will result in blessing for you and the people around
you.
But that Job is helping us be very aware that the time of the day is not the time of the
day, but it's very aware that the timing and the form of that blessing coming is very much
at God's disposal and it may be a long hard road to get there.
Is that a fair way to articulate something of the relationship between those books?
I think you're right.
And I think what strikes me is I thought more about the way that the Book of Job explores
the nature of God's quote unquote policies, John Walton calls it God's policy.
So what Hasatan says in chapter one, 10 and 11.
So the adversary, the Satan, Satan, I mean, we, you can get it, we can get into the weeds
on that if you want to, but I think it's fascinating that in addition to raising the issue of whether
disinterested piety does Job fear God without benefit, is that possible?
You have the question of, look, you've just blessed the work of his hands.
You've put a hedge of protection around him.
Of course you've kind of rigged the system.
You've incentivized the whole system.
To be fake.
Yeah.
So yeah, if you're just going to crank, you know, be, do something good.
You're a good person.
Pull the lever.
Out comes your reward.
Of course people are going to fear you and worship you.
I find it quite fascinating that the way that the book as a whole explores that sort of policy
and nuances, maybe a misunderstanding of how that actually works in Proverbs elsewhere
in the canon is when you get to the divine speeches, subtly in chapter 38, God talks
about how the wicked are punished there.
The darkness on them, their punishment.
And then the beginning of the second speech, you know, he invites Job to sort of execute
justice against the proud and then against the wicked, crushing the wicked, humbling
the proud.
His justice, that those renderings of justice say nothing about rewarding righteous people.
It's only about punishing wicked people.
Yeah.
So is God in a box confined to governing the world in accord with an understanding of justice
that is both punishing the wicked and rewarding righteous people?
The answer to that question, it seems to me at the end is no rewarding righteous people
isn't necessarily constitutive of God's justice.
It just happens to focus on punishing the wicked in one way or another.
And yet the head scratcher for me is that seems to be the message of the divine.
The divine speeches, at least as it concerns retribution.
And then God turns right back around chapter 42 and rewards.
So it's like, what the heck?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
It reminds me, I read, I was reading this is completely, you know, a tangent, but somewhere
in Calvin's Institute, he's arguing with Roman Catholics about grace and reward and all that.
And Calvin just says when Christians obey God, they still don't deserve the reward.
God's just being gracious.
He gives it to you anyway.
You know, I wonder maybe if there's a similar thought there.
You mentioned Michael Fox more than once, who's a Jewish rabbi who taught in Wisconsin,
I think a wonderful scholar.
He pointed out that there are some things God could say that might seem obvious that
would completely fail.
It would destroy the relationship with Job.
If he showed up and said, oh, but look how nice I am to you.
I reward the righteous.
It would look like a father trying to pacify a spoiled child or something.
In a way, God can't talk about that, even though he is going to bless Job in the end.
I'll never forget reading Michael Fox.
He said once, inexplicable suffering has a role in the divine economy because it makes
unconditional loyalty to God possible, which is a very obvious point when you think about it.
But to pretty selfish people like me might not be obvious after I read Proverbs.
No, of course.
I think, yeah, I think it's right to note those conditions that God has created in the economy
that make that relational dependence absolutely necessary and right.
Yeah, I get the sense Job is trying to have its cake and eat it in the sense it's on the
one hand trying to say Job is not left in the darkness.
He's not left a story that's not the end of his story.
And it's also being utterly realistic about the incomprehensible heartbreaks that happen
that are never explained to Job and never revealed to Job.
Could we just say something about Ecclesiastes?
Yeah, for sure.
At the end, I love it.
Ecclesiastes feels like physical therapy to me.
It really hurts.
And then the next day I feel so much better.
Something's gotten worked out.
What would you say Ecclesiastes is about?
How is Ecclesiastes helping us be wise in God's world?
I think Ecclesiastes in its unique way helps us to see what it means to be a human being
in this world.
It encourages us, challenges us, I would almost say compels us to just embrace both our finitude.
We are very limited people.
We do not understand the past.
We do not understand the present.
We do not understand the future fully.
We do not understand the work of God.
We will never understand the work of God.
We don't have a sense of time and the sweep of time and our place within time.
And I find that liberating.
It liberates me to just respond in gratitude, in relational dependence on God, on others
and the gifts that he so graciously gives and how the teacher, how coheal it helps us
to see things not through the arithmetic of profit, but through the arithmetic of portion.
And that I think creates the conditions to engender not sort of what can I do to be a
human being, but sort of what can I do next?
How can I gain an advantage?
Is there an advantage and a benefit to be had in this?
How can I get ahead of life?
But is there just a portion that I've been given in the unique seasons that God establishes
that I can find contentment in and enjoy as His good gifts?
Chapter three of Ecclesiastes is one of the most moving things I've ever read inside of
scripture outside.
It seems like it's getting at that maddening sense that God has a plan.
I get just a glimmer of it, but I never see the whole.
I never, I just kind of get day after day in different kinds of times that I don't choose,
but I just sort of have to receive.
You're right.
Well, you've mentioned a number of other scholars through you've read in this area very deeply.
Just as we finish here, when is your commentary coming out?
So I have a commentary on Proverbs with the Zondervan Exegetical Commentary Series.
It's in press.
It'll be out next summer.
And I have a textbook for Baker on reading wisdom in the Psalms as Christian scripture.
It's one of their new textbook series that's also going to be out next summer.
Absolutely wonderful.
Everyone listening should buy those books and read them.
I've learned a great deal from you.
If there are any books, if people are listening and this is something they'd be interested in
learning more about, are there books or authors you would recommend to them?
Yeah, I think I would recommend your stuff on the book of Job.
What to recommend in Proverbs, I mean, depending on where the interest level may be, I think,
I found among other books, I found Ann Stewart's book, Poetic Ethics in Proverbs,
quite helpful thinking about the different pedagogies and how the book of Proverbs work,
really, really helpful with Ecclesiastes.
Jacques Alouel's book, Reason for Being, I find super helpful.
He's wonderful.
Yeah, it is.
He's wonderful.
Craig Bartholomew's stuff there I find really helpful too.
Yeah, wonderful.
Chris, thank you so much for, I could keep asking you questions, but I think I need to let you go.
Thank you very much for being with us.
Pleasure, Eric.
Thanks for having me.