NOTES for Job 25:1-6

As if answering Job's doubts, Bildad again reminds him that the ways of God are inscrutable, and that no one is pure before Him (vv. 1-6). Such an answer, as one can easily guess, only added fuel to the fire of the doubts and torments that troubled Job. He wanted answers, wanted the certainty he had had before and had now lost; Bildad's answer only increased the uncertainty. Of course, for a religious person such uncertainty often even has its appeal. This is not surprising: religious consciousness is always to a certain degree abstract. The God of religion is usually not the living God, but a scheme, an abstraction, a speculation. Religiosity was born not from the experience of revelation, but from speculation; at its foundation lies not so much communion with God as theology.

Of course, the experience of revelation was often clothed in religious forms, but it nevertheless always remained in a certain sense alien to religion. For a person seeking a meeting with the living God, God's incomprehensibility is the main problem: until God Himself throws a bridge across the abyss that separates Him from human beings, no communion with God will be possible. For a religious person, however, such incomprehensibility does not constitute a problem at all. On the contrary, it even leaves a certain space for reflections about God, for suppositions, guesses, and theological concepts. Religion, of course, also presupposes relations with God, but at a safe distance, from which it is almost impossible to discern God. That is why religiosity presupposes a certain speculative and conventional image of God: religion rarely brings a person into direct communion with God.

And for this reason the religious person is inwardly ready to accept that he will know less about God than he could. In exchange for refusing to draw near to God, religion gives him certain guarantees of safety on condition that he observe certain norms and rules that will allow him to maintain relations with God at a safe distance. But in that case, of course, the religious person can no longer claim to know the ways of God. And Bildad, repeating the well-known words about the inscrutability of God's ways, is in essence offering Job the chance to give up seeking God and limit himself to what religion can give him.