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Noted ethicist David Gushee reveals Job as a model of moral agency and courage, wrestling honestly with unjust suffering while his community’s religious orthodoxy, and perhaps even his God, fails the moment. As Job refuses to deny what he knows—or silence what he must say—he risks both divine and human condemnation.
David P. Gushee, widely regarded as one of his generation’s most significant Christian moral thinkers, earned his PhD in Christian ethics from Union Theological Seminary and serves as Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University as well as Chair in Christian Social Ethics at Vrije Universiteit (Free University), Amsterdam.
“In Job in Exile, David Gushee offers a searching, pastorally attuned, and theologically rich interpretation of Job. At once a work of biblical exegesis, moral theology, and spiritual accompaniment, it unfolds not as a conventional commentary but as a series of meditations on pivotal moments that illuminate a journey through exile, protest, to the reconstruction of faith. Gushee presents Job’s witness amid inexplicable suffering as pointing to the faithfulness of relentless, even confrontational questioning of God. Drawing on a wide range of voices and traditions, Gushee’s close reading of Job refuses both reductive theodicies and brittle certainties without yielding to despair, offering instead a compelling vision of faith that can sustain solidarity, truth-telling, and hope in a fractured and wounded world.”
–Rev Canon Prof Luke Bretherton, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, University of Oxford
“A wise, compassionate guide for wrestling toward truth, justice, and a more honest faith.”
–Stacey Floyd-Thomas, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair and Professor of Ethics and Society, Vanderbilt University Divinity School
“Dr. David Gushee draws on decades of rigorous biblical scholarship and his own hard-won experience of religious displacement. Gushee’s reading of Job not as ancient curiosity but as kindred testimony. The story of a faithful person whose embodied suffering exposes the fault lines in a community’s certainties, and who is cast out for asking the questions that certainty cannot survive. This is no academic exercise. It is a lifeline for anyone who has discovered that loving the truth sometimes means losing belonging in spaces that cannot expand alongside our understanding of God. Gushee writes as both scholar and exile, and the result is a book of profound depth, pastoral tenderness, and intellectual honesty- essential reading for every post-evangelical still wrestling, like Job, in the wilderness outside the camp.”
–Keri Ladouceur, Executive Director & Co-founder Post Evangelical Collective
