Bart Ehrman: What About the Actual Suffering?

Wow, so even when Errhman was a Christian "scholar" he didn't believe in the inspiration of scripture??? I find it incredible that someone can go through seminary and come out the other end without seeing the big picture. 2 Co 4:3-4 comes to mind.

What I want to know is how he was able to remain unchecked as a Christian leader/teacher for so long. I think this is a damning indictment on the state of the protestant church in the US where there is this terrible lack of accountability.

I live in Nigeria and travel around Africa often. The poor suffer terribly, but they often have an amazing hope in Christ in a country where there is only 0.04% atheism. They are joyful in this hope despite their horrible living conditions. Given a choice, I am sure they would chose to remain in Christ rather than having an opulent lifestyle if it meant giving up on their Savior. I am sure they would also be bemused that Errhman would fail in his faith on the account of their suffering and him feeling so sorry for them. That is NOT a Christian response, no matter what way you try to slice it.

Don’t feel sorry for the poor as they would probably feel even sorrier for someone like Errhman who obviously never had the indwelt spirit or the love of Christ, but was merely a walking parody of a Christian.

I was in Uganda last month. While there I saw, if not hell, some of its suburbs. The stories are familiar to us all - dying children, slums beyond description, systemic brokenness that robs hope. So many of those questions popped into my head - How could God allow this sort of thing? What kind of god could allow children to live like this.

It isn't a new question for me or for any of us. It is among the world's oldest questions I suspect. But as I thought about it something clicked. God isn't allowing this suffering. I am. You are. We are.

I will focus on Africa's suffering. Africa finds itself where it does today because of a billion or more decisions that people made... individual decisions. A decision not to invest here. A decision to buy a slave there. A decision to drive an unfair trade deal here. A decision to pay diamond miners pennies. Billions and billions of decisions like this have been made over the centuries. The result? Africa today.

Is that God's fault?

I think not. Because at every moment those decisions were made God was whispering for people to do the right thing, the just thing, the merciful thing. But we chose not to listen.

God has done his job. We haven't done ours.

I used to think the suffering question was a serious head scratcher, a truly troubling thing - the best evidence against God. No more. I think it is largely an excuse to make ourselves comfortable in our complacency by blaming God for the suffering we aren't spending our lives addressing.

The belief that evil (and death) came into the world only when Adam and Eve sinned seems to be in stark contrast with the billions of years of death and suffering evidenced by the fossil record. If the cause of death and suffering is evil then it's pretty clear that the earth was created evil a good three or four billion years before Adam and Eve were confronted by a talking snake.

There is an old story about a glass of water. Poured fresh from the spring it is “very good”. Then someone comes along and adds a drop of sewage. It still has all the things that once made it pure, but now it is contaminated. That’s the way the heavens and earth were created in my opinion. There has always been a snake in the water.

First off, thanks for taking the time, Dr Ehrman and Bishop Wright, to exchange ideas about such an important topic.

I can relate to Dr Ehrman's version of his former Christian faith. I grew up in a fairly conservative, fundamentalist home in which I was taught about the inerrancy of Scripture, the omnipotence of God etc. I commend Dr Ehrman's passion for dismantling and uncovering inconsistencies in the doctrine of "sola scriptura", for in what it appears to me, a real desire to get at the truth. I also believe that the strong emotions you have about evil in the world are also signs that you posit a belief in justice and a moral law giver. It seems like what you are questioning is not a general belief in God, but in the impotence of Christian theodicy. Like Dr. Ehrman, I have left behind a fundamentalist and conservative view of the faith in my adult years as well. However, unlike Dr Ehrman, I have discovered a richer, fuller and more meaningful Christian faith in place of the former.

Dr Ehrman, you said in this recent response to Bishop Wright:

"But I am personally dead set against an approach to suffering that thinks that human agony is to be seen from the distance of intellectual engagement with the “issues.”

I admire your desire to keep emotions in the dialogue. But isn't the fact that you're asking the question of where is God in all this a plea for some sort of rational explanation? Interestingly, your comment seems to propose that Tom is talking about a hands off Deist god in which this god sits back in the skies and lets all hell break loose because he/she/it doesn't care. On the contrary, all of Tom's work, which in the irony of this very limited discourse includes tomes of critical realist historical research about the grand narrative of scripture, also encompasses standing up for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised in his diocese to defending the rights of immigrants being who are being mistreated by a government which is still run on deist principles.

I agree with you Dr Ehrman, that the problem of evil is a great one, too great to be fully treated in such a small blog posting. But the varied and multi-faceted accounts of God in the scriptures still point to a larger story of a God who became flesh, pitched his tent among us, wept over Jerusalem, overturned tables in his anger at the injustice of the system and promised to make all things new. Lest we grumble and complain as the Israelites did in the desert, we might miss out on the miraculous exodus that God provided for us in the life of his Son. The mood of the day is to be skeptical of anyone that offers an answer such difficult questions, but it's time to realize that while the Enlightenment quest for truth has let us down, there is still good news when we remember the faithfulness of God.

Dr. Ehrman's new book points out that the snake used to have legs. Makes sense to me. It's a lot harder to get things done when you're forced to slither on the ground. But the snake is still at work. He's a crafty devel.

My husband and I have been suffering terribly for 15 years with a somewhat mentally ill nearly genius 28 yr old daughter who is also a substance abuser. Even worse than that...we lost our only Son at age 23 in a horrific airplane crash in Feb. 2007. Why was our only Son who was an real angel on Earth taken away from us? We are devout Catholics and I am a Parish/ Faith Community Nurse and work at taking care of church members and also the indigent of the city. He was the type of boy/man who never ever caused a bit of trouble and we never even had to yell at him in his life...maybe only 1 time in 23 years. The night before he was killed in the airplane crash he dreamt that his fiance was pregnant with his baby. His dream was true, my dead Son and his fiance have a wonderful 6 month old baby boy named after our son. We suffer every single hour of every day over losing our Son. He was a Christian Catholic and an altar boy until age 18. That is unheard of in this day and age. My question is why would God take such a lovely Son away from us and his fiance and Baby that he only knew he was having in his dream the night before he was tragically killed. His boss forced him to fly in bad weather and his boss was a 5o some year old arrogant powerful elitist and he is responsible for the death of our Angelic son. Any comments on why God would have allowed us to lose our only Son in a manner like this??? Mike lead a wonderful life, very kind hearted and never gossiped about people, always taught the slower kids in his school years, was a track star, an All American boy. Why would god take him away from us all, expecially his baby boy who looks just like our son and has his same mannerisms. Does God like us to suffer like this? Every one is avoiding us and family and friends have deserted us. What kind of comment can you offer on this, we are christian Catholics who are raising two Grandchildren also because their Mother, our dauther is unfit to care for them..Do you think some one put a curse on our family or is it God trying to punish us. Please let us know why you think God didn't save Mike that terrible night. The only thing that gets me through the day is that our son was so special that God simply wnted him back! Any comment on that\? He could he have but let our son be so badly disfigured and viloently killed that we never saw him again. Mike was also as handsome as a movie star, and he was robbed of his life by his boss who was negligent, arrogant, and an elitist, the opposite of our son, who was so kind hearted and down to Earth. Please comment on this...A suffering Mother who will love her Son forever and can't wait til the day I can join him! Thank You.

This is where the argument breaks down between Ehrman and Wright. Obviously Ehrman has a postmodern hermeneutic which excludes any metanarrative in the Bible or life.

Let's see Bart:

"But I wonder if you are willing to take a similar stand, that is, whether you too would be willing to say that you also are not interested in converting people to your way of thinking or believing?"

I'm not sure what kind of debate tactic that is but I know it's designed to do one thing...shift from the real argument and help you perpetuate more WHINING about why God looked over your memo, and doesn't do what YOU think he should.

I liked this:

"The issue of human suffering is not a logical problem to be solved or some kind of mathematical equation. It is a human problem that requires empathy, sympathy, emotional involvement, and action"

[Now how much of your anti-Christ book proceeds have you contributed to helping to end suffering? I've given so much until I've had to borrow to pay bills and God steps back in and provides...what about you Professor?]

Further off base I see:
" In your book on evil you treat the Hebrew Bible as if it were one continuous narrative written by a single author with one overarching theme (with Abraham as the lynchpin)It is not that, any more than the New Testament, or even the NT Gospel literature, represents one point of view of one author."

[Well do tell doc...I thought it was ONE author...God himself moving upon Holy men, but you're starting to let your antisupernatural bias show through...well' we shouldn't be surprised!]

Problem of suffering...Sin entered INTO the world through ONE MAN Adam(He was a real man...not figurative allegory or whatever) That sin had an effect on ALL of God's creation which was without the effect or stain of sin prior to that...Jesus dealt with the eternal aspects of sin and destroyed it's power on us but the pratcical application of sin will not be broken until a New Heaven and Earth are created in which there will be NO sin and...whaaaalllllaaaa...NO more suffering...

No not a big theological discourse but JUST THE TRUTH! Stop crying professor! My question is...If ALL suffering were eliminated RIGHT NOW, would you repent of your sins?....NOT!

An interesting discussion. I'm only sorry I found it so late.

What strikes me is that there seems to be a consensus here dividing Mankind into those who suffer and those who don't. Are the people who survived the earthquake in China not suffering because their government has accepted the aid offered them while the people in Myanmar who survived the cyclone ARE suffering? Are the people in Oklahoma who lost loved ones in the recent tornados not suffering because they live in America? Is the mother whose son was innocently shot in a police action suffering less than the mother whose child dies of AIDS? Did the 90-year-old great-grandmother who was killed in a hit-and-run suffer less because she was ... well, old? Did the 76 year old man who died alone in his garden of a sudden heart attack suffer less because he died quickly ... and therefore suffer not at all?

My point is this. Mankind suffers. Mankind dies. It is exactly what God said would happen upon the entrance of sin into the world. To categorize suffering by listing out the thousands and tens of thousands who die because of this or that, minimizes the millions who die as a result of being part of the human race. We all will die. Death is not pretty or neat or easy. It is clearly the enemy.

And it is the enemy Jesus took on. Professor Ehrman, you were right when you understood Jesus as coming to suffer with and for Mankind, but He also did something else. He dealt the mortal blow to spiritual death.

I'm not pretending to understand this completely, but Scripture seems clear that physical suffering—at whatever level—is temporary, if for no other reason than that this life is temporary. The real concern, then, ought to be for spiritual suffering, because that will have lasting implications.

Becky

If Jesus suffered the Atonement so that he would understand our suffering so he could deal with it. And if we are to become like him as John 17 suggests, and live the kind of life he lives, then it follows that our suffering gives us understanding so that we can comfort others in trials, temptations, suffering, sickness pain and grief.

An example:

When I was young I had terrible excema on my feet. They would itch so badly that I would rub them on the rug until I got carpet burn. They would crack and peel and itch and burn and weep and partially heal and then start the cycle all over again.

We tried all sorts of treatments, the black evil smelling coal tar salve was the nastiest. The excema eventually ran it's course and disappeared after a number of years.

One night after I was married and had children, my second son woke up with a terrible itch. He whined and whimpered and generally caused a sleepless night for all of us. After some hours of this I almost lost my patience with him.

Then I remembered how sometimes a lukewarm bath would calm my itch when I was little. I ran a bath and put him in it and gently poured water over his itchy little body. He calmed, stopped crying and we quitely played and talked.

Suddenly, without warning, I had an epiphany. I was thnkful that I had itched, so that I would know how to help my son when he itched.

Mike's explanation begs the question, why did either he or his son need to suffer from the foot condition? So the logic falls apart. Those who suggest suffering is due to "free will" neglect the fact that many serious kinds of suffering (like a baby with cancer) has no obvious connection to anyone's free will, just as natural disasters are not due to free will. Those who suggest it is in some indirect way, from sin entering the world (i.e. "original sin" from Adam) fail to explain any fairness in this, or why for example, little babies should starve to death, because of what one man supposedly did thousands of years ago (assuming a literal Adam, which is itself dubious). To those who claim it is jsut a "mystery" and that does not botehr you much, you are either cold, or in denial. Indeed, if I hooked all believers to a polygraph, I suspect we'd find most do find it a problem, even if they do not openly acknowledge it. As a struggling believer myself, I always knew it was. Last, if Jesus suffered in our place, and took our "penalty" for us, why do each of us still suffer and die? Jesus suffered for a few days, but many people suffer in excrutiating pain for months and years, and then die, but this does not even pay their own price according to Christian theology. Where is the logic in it? If the "price" for sin is not physical death and suffering but eternal hell, then how did Jesus pay the price, since he did not spend eternity in hell, or even a tiny portion of it? Anyway you slice it, the problem of severe pain and suffering seems to have no satifactory explanation if there is an all loving an all powerful God. As the author points out, even Biblical explanations are incomplete and contradictory. Sorry that it is the case, but it sure appears that way.