Bart Ehrman: April 2008 Archives

Tom,

Thanks so much for your most recent post, which clarifies your view considerably. It is a forceful, and I would even say elegant, statement.

Before responding, let me address two minor points that you make in passing, one about my argument and the other about me.

For most of my life I was a devout Christian, believing in God, trusting in Christ for salvation, knowing that God was actively involved in this world. During my young adulthood, I was an evangelical, with a firm belief in the Bible as the inspired and inerrant word of God. During those years I had fairly simple but commonly held views about how there can be so much pain and misery in the world. God had given us free will (we weren't programmed like robots), but since we were free to do good we were also free to do evil—hence the Holocaust, the genocide in Cambodia, and so on. To be sure, this view did not explain all evil in the world, but a good deal of suffering was a mystery and in the end, God would make right all that was wrong.