No Easy Answers (Viewpoint Essay‪)‬

There is a certain ambiguity in the theme of this Leadership Conference. "No Easy Answers" points to the fact that certain biblical passages are hard to understand and hard to apply, and sometimes it is even hard to admit that this is finally what God would want to say. But on the other hand "No Easy Answers" reminds us that at times we would want it no other way. I think, for example, of the book of Job, which, the more I read it and the older I get, impresses me more and more with the profundity of its response to the problem of suffering. In recent years I have been handing out in my classes a list of a dozen responses to the problem of suffering proposed in the divine speeches and more than twenty responses to the problem of suffering in the rest of the book, some of which are contradictory and some clearly wrong, (1) but which in their manifold interactions and ever-changing relationship to one another allow the reader to put together again and again an almost infinite series of theological responses to suffering. Some have compared Job to a tangram, a Chinese puzzle whose seven pieces can be fitted together in a variety of ways, none of which is exclusively right or wrong.