In the Whirlwind: God and Humanity in Conflict by Robert A. Burt (review)
- In the Whirlwind: God and Humanity in Conflict by Robert A. Burt
Burt’s study of the interaction of divinity and humanity in establishing authority, divine and human alike, in the Bible is a closer literary reading of the entire Bible than most on offer from either divinity schools or literature departments. Yet his interest as a professor of law in contrasting the reciprocal establishment of mutually heteronomous authority in the Bible with the unilateral establishment of autonomous authority in modern political theory gives his work the forward thrust of a courtroom argument. The book of Job, in which the protagonist calls God’s authority into explicit question, and then God, from the whirlwind, calls the protagonist’s standing into question, becomes here the fulcrum of a study that brilliantly establishes this problematic as common to the Old and the New Testaments alike.
Jack Miles’s book GOD received the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1996. His other books include Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God and (as editor) the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions. A former MacArthur Fellow, he is currently a senior fellow for religious affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy and Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
