Wissam Al-Aethawi's Review of Scott Cherry's New Book, "The Reason of Job"
by Wissam Al-Aethaw
وجاء حينها (سكوت شيري)—الصديق والواعظ والمعلم الذي يحسن الجوار في تلك المدينة المتعددة الثقافات (وايضا الفيلسوف, الا انه لا يحب ان اناديه ذلك ولذا لن اضايقه بذلك اللقب). يتمتع سكوت بشخصية هادئة تدعو من حوله الى الحوار معه وهذا ما يدفعني فيه الى الجنون, الا ان هذا هو بالضبط ما حدا به وبعماد (صديقه المسلم في الكلية) ان يشاركا بالحوار الذي ابتدأ منذ اربعة عشر قرنا من الزمان واتخذا منعطفات وعرة منذ القرن العشرين. مر حوار سكوت وعماد مرور الكرام بقصة ايوب, وبالذبيحة التي امره الله ان يقدمها كفارة لذنوب معزييه الذين فهموا كلام الله ولم يفهموا تطبيقاته, وتلك الكفارة هي التي دفعت سكوت الواعظ ليؤلف هذا الكتاب.
قد تكون لغة الكتاب (نموذج المسيح) عسرة الهضم على المبتدئين, الا ان الكتاب يوفر كل المعلومات اللازمة لفهم اطروحته. يجادل المؤلف ان قصة ايوب هي نموذج المسيح, وان هذا النموذج يتكرر على طول الكتاب المقدس وعرضه. والنموذج هو نمط متكرر يمكن تمييزه مرئيا او سمعيا او خياليا. وايوب هو نموذج من نوع (النزول للصعود) لانه ينحدر الى وادي الياس ليخرج منه بافضل حال. يتولى سكوت مهمة طرح حجته في رحلة تاخذك للكتب السماوية والادب والثقافات المعاصرة ومحاوراته مع اصدقائه, والكتاب مساهمة ثرية للمكتبة المسيحية وقد يكون بركة شخصية للقارئ.
وسام العيثاوي, الخدمة العربية المسيحية
Get the book here: The Reason of Job on Amazon.com
Translation
One of the first things that attracted me to the Bible, including the God it portrays and the message it conveys, was what many agree to be the most difficult part of it—the Wisdom Literature. Coming from a culture that preached an absolute monarch of a God that is black-and-white on the complicated matrix we are in which we call life, the Bible introduced a God that acknowledges the difficulties we often go through and even takes the time to sit shiva and ask “Why?” when the answer is the last thing we need. Of course, I am specifically talking here about the Book of Job. In it I have met a God who is powerful enough to recognize me as an individual, hold hands with me and say “I know it is difficult, and we will get through all this together.”
A decade later, I left my home country of Iraq, went to a Bible school, became a minister, and moved to Dearborn, Michigan. Enter Scott Cherry—the friend, the evangelist, the philosopher, the teacher, the good neighbor in a diverse city. Scott is of a disposition so engaging and a demeanor so calm it drives me crazy, and yet that is how he and Emad (a Muslim friend he met in college) hopped on to a fourteen-century-old conversation that has been made a little rougher since the twentieth century. The conversations, which took long months, came nonchalantly across the story of Job, and the sacrifices that God ordered him to offer to atone for the sins of his comforters—four men who got the exegesis right and the hermeneutics totally wrong. That atonement triggered Scott to write this book.
The Reason of Job may have a vocabulary that is challenging to decode, and yet the book provides all the necessary basics needed to understand its argument. The author argues that “the story of Job is the motif of the Messiah, and this motif runs all through the Bible.” A motif is a recognizable and recurring pattern that is visual, auditory or imaginative. Job is a [descent-to-ascent] motif because he goes into the valley of despair and comes out better on the other side.
In this book, Scott Cherry has assumed the monumental task of building his argument in a journey that takes the reader through scriptures, literature, pop culture as well as real-life conversations with his friends. This book is a rich contribution to the world library and can be a real blessing to the reader, Christian, Muslim, or other.
–Wissam Al-Aethawi, Arabic Christian Ministry, Dearborn, Michigan
Get the book here: The Reason of Job on Amazon.com