EVEN THE MONSTERS

An autobiographical/spiritual work offers a new interpretation of the meaning of the book of Job, considered from the perspective of the author’s own personal tribulations.

At the prompting of his friend Jamie, a preacher, Potter embarked on a study of the book of Job, a project he had no idea at the time would last more than 20 years. His interpretation is a combination of scholarly exegesis and deeply personal reflection, a poignant attempt to overcome the “unacceptable divide” between the two, a source of abiding miscomprehension. According to the author, the “Standard View” looks at Job’s suffering as the consequence of moral transgression. He must have sinned in order to warrant such a catastrophe, and, as a result, the proper response to him is judgment, a tidy analysis of both his travails and the cosmos in which they occur: “The Standard View promised programmable predictability to the cosmos: know what makes God tick, and you can get him to sing and dance at will. The implication for Job was that, since things had gone horribly wrong for him, he was obviously guilty of some horrible crime and therefore needed to put things straight with God.” But Potter contends that the real lesson is that the world—and the pain it contains—may ultimately be inscrutable, though God’s love for all is imperishable. To an impressively searching tour of Job’s “journey through spiritual alienation, personal desperation, and deep depression,” the author pairs an admirably candid account of his own struggles, focusing on the terrifying “combination of rare conditions” that ravaged his daughter’s health and the emotional toll it took on his marriage. Potter writes with unfailing clarity and confessional power—his interpretation of Job is profoundly informed by both rigorous study and thoughtful, personal meditation. The author doesn’t simply implore readers to lean on the Bible for moral counsel and encouragement—he furnishes an illustrative example of how this can be done.

A stimulating reassessment of a key section of the Bible coupled with an affecting memoir.