A Generated Theology Proper

I've come to prefer a God who is invisible and mostly silent. Not as a consolation for the God I wish I had, but because I've started to suspect the invisibility and the silence are the point. Start with the obvious complaint: an invisible God is a hidden God, and a hidden God is hard to trust, hard to love, hard to build a life around. I understand the complaint. I've made it myself, on worse days.

A Generated Argument on Job Being the Old Testament's Most Important Text

Ask most readers to name the most important book of the Old Testament and they will say Genesis, for origins, or Isaiah, for prophecy, or the Psalms, for devotion. Job rarely makes the list. It sits quietly among the wisdom books, easy to skip, harder to preach from than a psalm and less quotable than a proverb. That neglect is a mistake. Of every book in the Hebrew canon apart from Isaiah and the Psalms, Job does the most direct work of preparing the reader for the New Testament — not by predicting Christ in the way a prophecy does, but by exhausting every alternative to him. Job's importance is not that it answers the question of suffering. It is that it stages, in full, the failure of every answer available before Christ, and leaves the reader with nowhere else to go.