Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: theology as wisdom
- 1 Wisdom cries
- 2 A wisdom interpretation of scripture
- 3 Job!
- 4 Job and post-Holocaust wisdom
- 5 Jesus, the Spirit and desire: wisdom christology
- 6 Learning to live in the Spirit: tradition and worship
- 7 Loving the God of wisdom
- 8 An inter-faith wisdom: scriptural reasoning between Jews, Christians and Muslims
- 9 An interdisciplinary wisdom: knowledge, formation and collegiality in the negotiable university
- 10 An interpersonal wisdom: L'Arche, learning disability and the Gospel of John
- Conclusion: love's wisdom
- Index of citations
- Subject index
4 - Job and post-Holocaust wisdom
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: theology as wisdom
- 1 Wisdom cries
- 2 A wisdom interpretation of scripture
- 3 Job!
- 4 Job and post-Holocaust wisdom
- 5 Jesus, the Spirit and desire: wisdom christology
- 6 Learning to live in the Spirit: tradition and worship
- 7 Loving the God of wisdom
- 8 An inter-faith wisdom: scriptural reasoning between Jews, Christians and Muslims
- 9 An interdisciplinary wisdom: knowledge, formation and collegiality in the negotiable university
- 10 An interpersonal wisdom: L'Arche, learning disability and the Gospel of John
- Conclusion: love's wisdom
- Index of citations
- Subject index
Summary
The wisdom of the book of Job, even in those few parts of it discussed in the previous chapter, is difficult to summarise. This is inherent in its intensive particularity, focussed through one ‘experiment’ on one person, combined with its plurality of voices in dialogue and multiple moods of discourse. Above all it is the cries that cannot be summarised, synthesised or done justice to in prose. The cries ring out again and again, and the poetry imprints them in the heart and memory.
Jean Amery in At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities gives a piercingly graphic and thoughtful account of being tortured. ‘Whoever was tortured stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him, even when no clinically objective traces can be detected.’ Amery reflects on the unknown victims and those who are undergoing torture at this minute: ‘From other places the screams penetrated as little into the world as did my own strange and uncanny howls from the vault of Breedonk … Someone, somewhere is crying out under torture. Perhaps in this hour, in this second.’ On 17 October 1978, Jean Amery committed suicide. This was no Joban ending; and his writings and his death insist that, whatever the joys and blessings, the cries of Job continue to be heard, and the analogous cries today continue to be listened for.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Christian WisdomDesiring God and Learning in Love, pp. 121 - 152Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007