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Tim Gorringe, Job and the Disruption of Identity: Reading beyond Barth. By Susannah Ticciati., The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 60, Issue 2, October 2009, Pages 759–760, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flp042
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In the course of the Church Dogmatics Karl Barth illuminated (or obscured, according to your point of view) his argument by detailed exegeses of texts from the Hebrew Bible. The most extraordinary of these is probably the account of 1 Kings 13 in CD II/2, but the most famous is his account of Job in IV/3. Unlike many twentieth-century exegetes Barth did not treat Job as an essay in theodicy, and unlike most of them he did not begin from a text analysis which assumed that some parts (for example, the prologue and epilogue, or the Elihu speeches) were ‘not original’ and could therefore be discounted. Barth worked with the text as given. For Barth Job was a type of Christ, the true Witness, and the friends were a type of resistance to the truth. Job is vindicated, according to Barth, for refusing to give God up. As Dr Ticciati reads it, it is a study of the problem of obedience and sanctification. Agreeing with Barth that theodicy is not the issue she subjects his account to close analysis, finds it wanting, and accordingly turns to a close reading of Job herself. The result is an account of what it means to be human before God. In other words, what we have here is not simply a contribution to Barth scholarship, nor Job scholarship, but a contribution to fundamental theology which, like all real theology, aims to help us work out what living in relation to God might mean. The book is a work of creative theology which Barth would as surely have admired as he would have disagreed with. In the spirit of the book I shall try to set out where I think the reading of Barth may be mistaken, not because I have any interest in Barthian scholasticism but because it bears on the central question.
