Conference Season and Divine Filiation as Deification through Suffering

June 3, 2026

May and June bring a new season for the Augustine Institute faculty: after a deluge of grading, faculty take a breath and settle into their next writing project, prepare for summer courses, and disperse to various conferences. This May, professors attended the annual meetings of the Academy of Catholic Theology at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC and the North American Patristics Society in Chicago.

This June, the Augustine Institute is stepping into new territory with our campus in Florissant, hosting The Sacra Doctrina Project’s annual conference. This year’s theme is Divine Filiation, with papers ranging from systematic reflection on the Trinitarian relations to our participation in Christ’s sonship, and from the sacramental economy to Divine Sonship in scripture, including its antecedents in the Old Testament. My own contribution will be on the Book of Job, by no means an obvious candidate for divine sonship: in Job, the only son(s) of God are the angels who appear before God alongside Satan!

Nonetheless, if we consider St. Paul’s discussion of divine sonship in Romans 8, we can see how Job anticipates our adoption and conformation to the Son. Paul concludes:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom 8:35–39, ESV)

There are three things I would like to draw out of this beautiful and familiar passage. First, the first list of items that might be understood as separating us from the love of Christ refers to elements (“tribulation or distress…”) of the historical, human experience, which correspond at least partly to the covenantal curses. So, what previously would have signified divine wrath for sins in the book of Deuteronomy for example, no longer has this signification. Rather, the cross has definitively revealed that historical suffering can express and accomplish the love of God, and so conquers. Second, then, the second list of things that might have separated us from that love includes death, life, angelic principalities and the like. Not only can these not separate us from God’s love, but historical suffering in fact allows us to conquer any angelic principality that would seek to bar us from God’s love: in short, how to participate in Christ’s victory over sin, death, and the devil (cf. Rev 2–3,12:10–12). And third, St. Paul finds a helpful antecedent for this notion of suffering in Ps 44:22, as the psalmist specifically denied the community’s infidelity to God and the covenant (Ps 44:17–22), concluding that their suffering must be in some mysterious way, ‘for God’s sake.’

Of course, the Gospel reveals the mysterious way that suffering can be for God’s sake, in the passion and death of Christ. And this mystery is lodged in the revelation of the still larger mysteries of the Trinity, the incarnation, and the Church as the Body of Christ. But prior to Christ’s revelation of those ultimate mysteries, the Old Testament explored how Israel’s sufferings were for God’s sake rather than merely God’s wrath for violations of the Deuteronomic covenant. The Suffering Servant, of course, was preeminent among these explorations, as Isaiah 40–55 refused to let the meaning of Israel’s exile be reduced to God’s displeasure with Israel, but rather expanded Scripture’s teaching on the character and vocation of true Israel; and the Suffering Servant was therefore a preeminent resource for the New Testament’s Christology.

But another, perhaps even richer exploration is found in the Book of Job, since it takes up Isaiah’s reflections on the meaning of Israel’s exile. Much like in Romans 8:35, the author of Job refused to accept Deuteronomy’s account of human suffering without qualification. Consider how the Satan’s rhetoric and activity change the meaning of Israel’s experience of the covenantal curses (ESV, lightly edited):

Job 1:9–10, Then Satan answered the Lord and said, “Does Job fear God for no reason? Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land.	Deut 28:12, The Lord will open to you his good treasury, the heavens, to give the rain to your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hands. And you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow.
Job 2:7, So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and struck Job with evil boils from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.	Deut 28:35, The Lord will strike you on the knees and on the legs with evil boils of which you cannot be healed, from the sole of your foot to the crown of your head.

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These comparisons reveal that the author of Job has crafted the story to create a dialogue with Deuteronomy that radically shifts the paradigm for understanding God’s relationship with Israel.The Satan denies that Job is capable of loving God for God’s own sake. But the idiom, ‘bless the work of your/his hands,’ is specific to Deuteronomy and a leitmotif (cp. Dt 2:7, 14:29, 16:15, 24:19, 28:12, 33:11), so the Satan’s charge in fact attacks the very idea of the Deuteronomic covenant. It is only through profound suffering that Job can dispel the Satan’s assessment of God’s relationship with Job, Israel, and indeed the human creature universally understood, and in fact grow in his love for God, no longer dependent on God’s material blessings.

Furthermore, the meaning of suffering is here being changed. No longer does it reflect God’s operative will punishing evil but God’s permissive will, allowing Satan’s evil attacking Job. It follows God’s love for Job and Job’s justice, not Job’s sin and God’s wrath. And it is the means by which Job conquers the Satan’s paradigm, with which the Satan continues to identify himself; this angelic, ‘son of God,’reduces himself to the accusing antagonist who refuses to accept the possibility of God’s love. And Job, by responding to the love of God with his own filial love, overcomes the Satan’s critique and anticipates and participates in Christ’s own definitive conquest of Satan himself.

So, when we are conformed to the Son (Rom 8:29) to participate in his cosmic victory over the Devil through suffering united to Christ’s (Rev 12:11), we fulfill the mystery of Christ already being seen through a glass darkly in the Book of Job. The author was able to see so much because he followed Isaiah’s response to Israel’s exilic experiences and continued to reflect on what it meant to be the Servant of the LORD (cp. Isa 52:13–53:12, Job 1:8, 2:3, 42:7), and he saw Israel’s historical experience against a cosmic backdrop. He could not anticipate the revelation of the Trinity and the Incarnation, where the Son of God himself would become the Servant of the LORD, but he already saw how to be conformed to that Servant, and so dimly how to be adopted as a divine son.