God's Problem

This book deals with a matter that is very important to me, not just professionally but also personally. I have written it for a broad audience of regular readers, not for a narrow audience of specialists (who might, I suppose, be considered irregular readers). In view of the intended audience, I have kept endnotes and references to a sparse minimum. Anyone interested in further, in-depth scholarship can easily find it by looking around a bit. Two excellent places to start are James L. Crenshaw’s
Defending God: Biblical Responses to the Problem of Evil
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), and Antti Laato and Johannes C. de Moor’s
Theodicy in the World of the Bible
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2003). Both books are fully documented, and the former provides an extensive bibliography.

I have focused on the biblical “solutions” to the problem of suffering that strike me as the most important. Since the so-called classical view dominates the Hebrew Bible and the apocalyptic view dominates the New Testament, I have devoted two chapters to each. A single chapter is devoted to each of the other views I discuss.

Translations of the Hebrew Bible are from the New Revised Standard Version; translations of the New Testament are my own.

Special thanks go to my wife, Sarah Beckwith, Professor of Medieval English at Duke and dialogue partner
sans pareille;
to Roger Freet, Senior Editor at HarperOne, who is tops in his field, and who gave the manuscript a thorough and helpful review; and to my daughter Kelly, who worked over every line with a keen eye.

I would like to thank three gracious, generous, and very smart people who have read the manuscript for me, asking me to make changes, and laughing at my folly for occasionally refusing: Greg Goering, my temporary colleague in Hebrew Bible at UNC–Chapel Hill; my longtime friend and confidant Julia O’Brien, Hebrew Bible scholar at Lancaster Theological Seminary; and one of my oldest friends in the field, the Neutestamentler Jeff Siker, at Loyola Marymount.

I have dedicated the book to Jeff and his wife, Judy Siker. I introduced them to each other more than eleven years ago; they fell madly in love and have lived happily ever after. I take all the credit. They continue to be two of my closest and dearest friends who, knowing the most intimate details of my life, still deign to spend long evenings with me drinking fine scotch, smoking fine cigars, and talking about life, family, friends, work, love, virtues, vices, and desires. Does it get any better than that?

Suffering and a Crisis of Faith

 

If there is an all-powerful and loving God in this world, why is there so much excruciating pain and unspeakable suffering? The problem of suffering has haunted me for a very long time. It was what made me begin to think about religion when I was young, and it was what led me to question my faith when I was older. Ultimately, it was the reason I lost my faith. This book tries to explore some aspects of the problem, especially as they are reflected in the Bible, whose authors too grappled with the pain and misery in the world.

To explain why the problem matters so much to me, I need to give a bit of personal background. For most of my life I was a devout and committed Christian. I was baptized in a Congregational church and reared as an Episcopalian, becoming an altar boy when I was twelve and continuing all the way through high school. Early in my high school days I started attending a Youth for Christ club and had a “born-again” experience—which, looking back, seems a bit strange: I had been involved in church, believing in Christ, praying to God, confessing my sins, and so on for years. What exactly did I need to convert from? I think I was converting from hell—I didn’t want to experience eternal torment with the poor souls who had not been “saved”; I much preferred the option of heaven. In any event, when I became born again it was like ratcheting my religion up a notch. I became very serious about my faith and chose to go off to a fundamentalist Bible college—Moody Bible Institute in Chicago—where I began training for ministry.

I worked hard at learning the Bible—some of it by heart. I could quote entire books of the New Testament, verse by verse, from memory. When I graduated from Moody with a diploma in Bible and Theology (at the time Moody did not offer a B.A. degree), I went off to finish my college work at Wheaton, an evangelical Christian college in Illinois (also Billy Graham’s alma mater). There I learned Greek so that I could read the New Testament in its original language. From there I decided that I wanted to commit my life to studying the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, and chose to go to Princeton Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian school whose brilliant faculty included Bruce Metzger, the greatest textual scholar in the country. At Princeton I did both a master of divinity degree—training to be a minister—and, eventually, a Ph.D. in New Testament studies.

I’m giving this brief synopsis to show that I had solid Christian credentials and knew about the Christian faith from the inside out—in the years before I lost my faith.

During my time in college and seminary I was actively involved in a number of churches. At home, in Kansas, I had left the Episcopal church because, strange as this might sound, I didn’t think it was serious enough about religion (I was pretty hard-core in my evangelical phase); instead I went a couple of times a week to a Plymouth Brethren Bible Chapel (among those who
really
believed!). When I was away from home, living in Chicago, I served as the youth pastor of an Evangelical Covenant church. During my seminary years in New Jersey I attended a conservative Presbyterian church and then an American Baptist church. When I graduated from seminary I was asked to fill the pulpit in the Baptist church while they looked for a full-time minister. And so for a year I was pastor of the Princeton Baptist Church, preaching every Sunday morning, holding prayer groups and Bible studies, visiting the sick in the hospital, and performing the regular pastoral duties for the community.

But then, for a variety of reasons that I’ll mention in a moment, I started to lose my faith. I now have lost it altogether. I no longer go
to church, no longer believe, no longer consider myself a Christian. The subject of this book is the reason why.

In an earlier book,
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why,
I have indicated that my strong commitment to the Bible began to wane the more I studied it. I began to realize that rather than being an inerrant revelation from God, inspired in its very words (the view I had at Moody Bible Institute), the Bible was a very human book with all the marks of having come from human hands: discrepancies, contradictions, errors, and different perspectives of different authors living at different times in different countries and writing for different reasons to different audiences with different needs. But the problems of the Bible are not what led me to leave the faith. These problems simply showed me that my evangelical beliefs about the Bible could not hold up, in my opinion, to critical scrutiny. I continued to be a Christian—a completely committed Christian—for many years after I left the evangelical fold.

Eventually, though, I felt compelled to leave Christianity altogether. I did not go easily. On the contrary, I left kicking and screaming, wanting desperately to hold on to the faith I had known since childhood and had come to know intimately from my teenaged years onward. But I came to a point where I could no longer believe. It’s a very long story, but the short version is this: I realized that I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of life. In particular, I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. For many people who inhabit this planet, life is a cesspool of misery and suffering. I came to a point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of it.

The problem of suffering became for me the problem of faith. After many years of grappling with the problem, trying to explain it, thinking through the explanations that others have offered—some of them pat answers charming for their simplicity, others
highly sophisticated and nuanced reflections of serious philosophers and theologians—after thinking about the alleged answers and continuing to wrestle with the problem, about nine or ten years ago I finally admitted defeat, came to realize that I could no longer believe in the God of my tradition, and acknowledged that I was an agnostic: I don’t “know” if there is a God; but I think that if there is one, he certainly isn’t the one proclaimed by the Judeo-Christian tradition, the one who is actively and powerfully involved in this world. And so I stopped going to church.

Only on rare occasions do I go to church now, usually when my wife, Sarah, very much wants me to go. Sarah is a brilliant intellectual—a distinguished professor of medieval English literature at Duke University—and a committed Christian, actively involved in the Episcopal church. For her the problems of suffering that I wrestle with are not problems. It’s funny how smart and well-meaning people can see things so differently, even on the most basic and important questions in life.

In any event, the last time I was in church was with Sarah, this past Christmas Eve, while visiting her brother Simon (another agnostic) in Saffron Walden, a market town near Cambridge, England. Sarah had wanted to attend the midnight service at the local Anglican church, and Simon and I—who both respect her religious views—agreed to go with her.

When I was young I always found the Christmas Eve service to be the most meaningful worship experience of the year. The sacred hymns and carols, the prayers and praises, the solemn readings from Scripture, the silent reflections on this most powerful of nights, when the divine Christ came into the world as a human infant—I still have a strong emotional attachment to the moment. Deep down I am profoundly stirred by the story of God coming into the world for the salvation of sinners. And so I was prepared, even as one who no longer believes, to find the service on this Christmas Eve to be moving and emotional.

It was emotional, but not in the way I had expected. Hymns were sung, the liturgy recited, the sermon delivered. What moved me
most, however, was the congregational prayer, which did not come from the Book of Common Prayer but was written for the occasion, spoken loudly and clearly by a layperson standing in the aisle, his voice filling the vast space of the cavernous church around us. “You came into the darkness and made a difference,” he said. “Come into the darkness again.” This was the refrain of the prayer, repeated several times, in a deep and sonorous voice. And it brought tears to my eyes as I sat with bowed head, listening and thinking. But these were not tears of joy. They were tears of frustration. If God had come into the darkness with the advent of the Christ child, bringing salvation to the world, why is the world in such a state? Why
doesn’t
he enter into the darkness again? Where is the presence of God in this world of pain and misery? Why is the darkness so overwhelming?

I knew that the very essence of the message of the Bible lay beneath this heartfelt and well-meaning prayer. For the authors of the Bible, the God who created this world is a God of love and power who intervenes for his faithful to deliver them from their pain and sorrow and bring them salvation—not just in the world to come but in the world we live in now. This is the God of the patriarchs who answered prayer and worked miracles for his people; this is the God of the exodus who saved his suffering people from the misery of slavery in Egypt; this is the God of Jesus who healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, made the lame walk, and fed those who were hungry. Where is this God now? If he came into the darkness and made a difference, why is there still no difference? Why are the sick still wracked with unspeakable pain? Why are babies still born with birth defects? Why are young children kidnapped, raped, and murdered? Why are there droughts that leave millions starving, suffering horrible and excruciating lives that lead to horrible and excruciating deaths? If God intervened to deliver the armies of Israel from its enemies, why doesn’t he intervene now when the armies of sadistic tyrants savagely attack and destroy entire villages, towns, and even countries? If God is at work in the darkness, feeding the hungry with the miraculous multiplication of
loaves, why is it that one child—a mere child!—dies every five seconds of hunger? Every five seconds.

“You came into the darkness and you made a difference. Come into the darkness again.” Yes, I wanted to affirm this prayer, believe this prayer, commit myself to this prayer. But I couldn’t. The darkness is too deep, the suffering too intense, the divine absence too palpable. During the time that it took for this Christmas Eve service to conclude, more than 700 children in the world would have died of hunger; 250 others from drinking unsafe water; and nearly 300 other people from malaria. Not to mention the ones who had been raped, mutilated, tortured, dismembered, and murdered. Nor the innocent victims caught up in the human trade industry, nor those suffering throughout the world from grinding poverty, the destitute migrant farmworkers in our own country, those who were homeless and inflicted with mental disease. Nor to mention the silent suffering that so many millions of the well-fed and well-tended have to experience daily: the pain of children with birth defects, children killed in car accidents, children senselessly taken by leukemia; the pain of divorce and broken families; the pain of lost jobs, lost income, failed prospects. And where is God?

Some people think that they know the answers. Or they aren’t bothered by the questions. I’m not one of those people. I have been thinking intensely about these questions for many, many years. I have heard the answers, and even though I once “knew” and was satisfied with these answers, I am no longer satisfied.

I think I know when suffering started to become a “problem” for me. It was while I was still a believing Christian—in fact, it was when I was pastoring the Princeton Baptist Church in New Jersey. It was not the suffering that I observed and tried to deal with in the congregation—failed marriages, economic hardship, the suicide of a teenage boy—that prompted my questioning, but something that took place outside the church, in the academy. At the time, in addition to working in the church, I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation and also teaching part time at Rutgers University. (It was a busy
time. On top of it all, I was also married with two young children.) One of the classes I taught that year was a new one for me. Until then, I had mainly taught courses on the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the writings of Paul. But I had been asked to teach a course called “The Problem of Suffering in the Biblical Traditions.” I welcomed the opportunity because it seemed like an interesting way to approach the Bible: examining the responses given by various biblical authors to the question of why there is suffering in the world, in particular among the people of God. It was my belief then, and continues to be my belief now, that different biblical authors had different solutions to the question of why God’s people suffer: some (such as the prophets) thought that suffering came from God as a punishment for sin; some thought that suffering came from God’s cosmic enemies, who inflicted suffering precisely because people tried to do what was right before God; others thought that suffering came as a test to see if people would remain faithful despite suffering; others said that suffering was a mystery and that it was wrong even to question why God allowed it; still others thought that this world is just an inexplicable mess and that we should “eat, drink, and be merry” while we can. And so on. It seemed to me at the time, and seems so now, that one of the ways to see the rich diversity of the scriptural heritage of Jews and Christians was to see how different authors responded to this fundamental question of suffering.

For the class I had students do a lot of reading throughout the Bible and also assigned several popular books that discuss suffering in the modern world—for example, Elie Wiesel’s classic
Night,
¹
which describes his horrifying experiences in Auschwitz as a teenager, Rabbi Harold Kushner’s best-selling
When Bad Things Happen to Good People,
²
and the much less read but thoroughly moving story of Job as rewritten by Archibald MacLeish in his play
J.B.
³
In the class students wrote a number of papers, and each week we discussed the biblical passages and the extra reading that had been assigned.