God's Problem (3 page)
Authors: Bart D. Ehrman
- Many people turn to the Bible as a source of comfort, hope, and inspiration. Even for those people who do not, the Bible lies at the foundation of Western culture and civilization, providing the background for the ways we think about the world and our place in it (in my opinion this is true for all of us, believers and unbelievers alike; the Bible informs our thinking in more ways than we are inclined to allow).
- The Bible contains many and varied answers to the problem of why there is suffering in the world.
- Many of these answers are at odds with one another, and at odds with what most people seem to think today.
- The majority of people—even “Bible believers,” as well as regular people on the street who might have some kind of vague respect for the Bible but no particular commitment to it—have no idea what these various biblical answers to the problem of suffering are.
Over the years I’ve talked with a lot of people about issues pertaining to suffering, and I am struck by the kinds of reactions I get. A lot of people, frankly, just don’t want to talk about it. For them, talking about suffering is kind of like talking about toilet habits. They’re there and can’t be avoided, but it’s not really something you want to bring up at a cocktail party. There are other people—again, a lot of people—who have simple and pat answers for the problem and really don’t see why there’s such a problem. I imagine a lot of people reading this first chapter are like that. When I go on about all the suffering in the world, they’re tempted to write me an e-mail to explain it all to me (it’s because of free will; suffering is meant to make us stronger; God sometimes puts us to the test; and so on). Other people—including some of my brilliant friends—realize why it’s a religious problem for me but don’t see it as a problem for themselves. In its most nuanced form (and for these friends everything is extremely nuanced), this view is that religious faith is not an intellectualizing system for explaining everything. Faith is a mystery and an experience of the divine in the world, not a solution to a set of problems.
I respect this view deeply and some days I wish I shared it. But I don’t. The God that I once believed in was a God who was active in this world. He saved the Israelites from slavery; he sent Jesus for
the salvation of the world; he answered prayer; he intervened on behalf of his people when they were in desperate need; he was actively involved in my life. But I can’t believe in that God anymore, because from what I now see around the world, he doesn’t intervene. One answer to
that
objection is that he intervenes in the hearts of the suffering, bringing them solace and hope in the time of their darkest need. It’s a nice thought, but I’m afraid that from where I sit, it simply isn’t true. The vast majority of people dying of starvation, or malaria, or AIDS feel no solace or hope at all—only sheer physical agony, personal abandonment, and mental anguish. The pat answer to
that
is that it doesn’t need to be that way, if they have faith. I, on the other hand, simply don’t think that’s true. Look around!
In any event, my ultimate goal in this book is to examine the biblical responses to suffering, to see what they are, to assess how they might be useful for thinking people trying to get a handle on the reality of suffering either in their own lives or in the lives of others, and to evaluate their adequacy in light of the realities of our world. As I’ve already intimated, what comes as a surprise to many readers of the Bible is that some of these answers are not what they would expect, and that some of the answers stand at odds with one another. I will try to show, for example, that the book of Job has two sets of answers to the problem of suffering (one is in the story of Job found at the beginning and end of the book, the other is in the dialogues between Job and his friends that take up most of the chapters). These two views are at odds with each other. Moreover, both views differ from the views of the prophets. And the prophetic answer—found throughout much of the Hebrew Bible—is at odds with the views of Jewish “apocalypticists” such as Daniel, Paul, and even Jesus.
It is important, I think, to realize that the Bible has a wide range of answers to the problem of suffering because this realization reveals the problem of thinking that the Bible has one simple answer to every issue. Many people in our world take a smorgasbord ap
proach to the Bible, picking and choosing what suits them and their views without acknowledging that the Bible is an extremely complex and intricate concatenation of views, perspectives, and ideas. There are millions of people in our world, for example, who suffer social estrangement because of their sexual orientation. Some of this social alienation originates among simpleminded Bible believers who insist that gay relationships are condemned in Scripture. As it turns out, that is a debated issue, one on which serious scholars disagree.
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But apart from that, this condemnation of gay relations “because the Bible condemns it” is a case of people choosing to accept the parts of the Bible they want to accept and ignoring everything else. The same books that condemn same-sex relations, for example, also require people to stone their children to death if they are disobedient, to execute anyone who does any work on Saturday or who eats pork chops, and to condemn anyone who wears a shirt made of two kinds of fabric. No special emphasis is placed on one of these laws over the others—they are all part of the biblical law. Yet, in parts of society, gay relations are condemned, while eating a ham sandwich during a lunch break on a Saturday workday is perfectly acceptable.
It is important, then, to see what the Bible actually says, and not to pretend it doesn’t say something that happens to contradict one’s own particular point of view. But whatever the Bible says needs to be evaluated. This is not a matter of setting oneself up as God, dictating what is and is not divine truth. It is a matter of using our intelligence to assess the merit of what the biblical authors say—whether this involves questions of suffering, sexual preferences, working on weekends, or culinary and sartorial choices.
Having said this, I should stress that it is not the goal of this book to convince you, my reader, to share my point of view about suffering, God, or religion. I am not interested in destroying anyone’s faith or deconverting people from their religion. I am not about to urge anyone to become an agnostic. Unlike other recent agnostic or atheist authors, I do not think that every reasonable and reasonably
intelligent person will in the end come to see things my way when it comes to the important issues of life. But I do know that many thinking people think about suffering. This is in no small measure because all of us suffer, and many of us suffer a lot. Even those of us who are well off, who are well educated, who are well cared for—even we can experience professional disappointment, unexpected unemployment and loss of income, the death of a child, failed health; we can get cancer, or heart disease, or AIDS; all of us will eventually suffer and die. It is worth thinking about these things, and in doing so it is worth seeing how others have thought about them before us—in this case, those others who produced the books that became the Bible, the best-selling book of all time and the book that lies at the core of our civilization and culture.
And so my goal is to help people think about suffering. There are, of course, numerous books about suffering already. In my opinion, though, many of these books are either intellectually unsatisfying, morally bankrupt, or practically useless. Some of them attempt to give an easy or easy-to-digest answer to the question of why people suffer. For people who prefer easy answers, those can be useful books. But for people who struggle deeply with life’s questions and do not find easy answers at all satisfying, such books merely irritate the mind and grate on the nerves—they are not helpful. Still, there is a good deal of simplistic schlock written about suffering. Pious-sounding or pat (and very old, unimaginative) answers sell well, after all these years.
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Other books are morally dubious, in my opinion—especially those written by intellectual theologians or philosophers who wrestle with the question of evil in the abstract, trying to provide an intellectually satisfying answer to the question of theodicy.
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What I find morally repugnant about many such books is that they are so far removed from the actual pain and suffering that takes place in our world, dealing with evil as an “idea” rather than as an experienced reality that rips apart people’s lives.
This book will neither provide an easy solution nor attack the question philosophically by applying difficult intellectual concepts and making hard-to-understand claims with sophisticated and esoteric vocabulary. My interest for this book is instead with some of the age-old and traditional reflections on evil found in the foundational documents of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The questions I will be asking are these:
What do the biblical authors say about suffering?
Do they give one answer or many answers?
Which of their answers contradict one another, and why does it matter?
How can we as twenty-first-century thinkers evaluate these answers, which were written in different contexts so many centuries ago?
My hope is that, by looking at these ancient writings that eventually came to form the Bible, we will be empowered to wrestle more responsibly and thoughtfully with the issues they raise, as we ponder one of the most pressing and wrenching questions of our human existence: why we suffer.
Suffering and the Holocaust
How can we discuss the problem of suffering without beginning with the Holocaust, the most heinous crime against humanity in the known history of the human race? It is relatively easy to cite the standard numbers of those murdered by the Nazi killing machine but almost impossible to imagine the intensity and extent of the misery produced. Six million Jews, murdered in cold blood, simply for being Jews. One out of every three Jews on the face of the planet, obliterated. Five million non-Jews—Poles, Czechs, gypsies, homosexuals, religious “deviants,” and others. A total of eleven million people killed, not in battle as enemy combatants but as human beings unacceptable to those in power and brutally murdered. Knowing the numbers somehow masks the horror. It is important to remember that each and every one of those killed was an individual with a personal story, a flesh-and-blood human being with hopes, fears, loves, hates, families, friends, possessions, longings, desires. Each of them had a story to tell—or would have had, if they had lived to tell it.
The firsthand accounts of those who survived will haunt you and give you nightmares, accounts of being systematically starved, beaten, abused, experimented upon, worked almost to death in foul and inhumane conditions. We treat animals better.
It is the killings, of course, that are most remembered: some three million Jews from Poland; one and a half million from Russia; entire Jewish populations of some smaller places. From Budapest: 440,000 Jews were deported in May 1944; 400,000 of them were killed in Auschwitz. In Romania, the city of Odessa had some 90,000 Jews when the city fell to the Germans in October 1941. Most of them were shot to death that month.
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So too in nearby villages, as recounted in a later report:
In the fall of 1941 an SS detachment appeared in one of the villages and arrested all the Jews. They were arrayed in front of a ditch by the road and told to undress. Then the leader of the SS group declared that the Jews had released the war and that the assembled people had to pay for that. After this speech the grown-ups were shot and the children slain with rifle butts. The bodies were covered with gasoline and set on fire. Children who were still alive were tossed into the flames.
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Children burned alive. This is a theme repeated throughout the sources.
Most of the Jews, and others, were killed in the camps. One of the best-known and most widely read survivors of Auschwitz, Primo Levi, provided one of the earliest firsthand accounts in his
Auschwitz Report.
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Levi was one of 650 people crammed into cattle cars for transport to Auschwitz from his hometown of Fossoli, Italy. In the end, only twenty-four survived. Upon arrival some 525 were chosen for the gas chambers. Within a couple of hours they were dead and loaded in elevators to the furnaces. Another hundred were worked to death in the camps. The brutal conditions are thoroughly documented. Levi himself provides one account, just under two years after the events:
Before that period [February 1944] there were no medical services and the sick had no possibility of getting treatment, but were forced to labour as usual every day until they collapsed from exhaustion at their work. Naturally, such cases occurred with great frequency. Confirmation of death would then be carried out in a singular fashion; the task was entrusted to two individuals, not doctors, who were armed with ox sinews and had to beat the fallen man for several minutes on end. After they had finished, if he failed to react with some movement, he was considered to be dead, and his body was immediately taken to the crematorium. If, on the contrary, he moved, it signified that he was not dead after all, so he would be forced to resume his interrupted work.
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The cold efficiency of the Nazi killing machine is nowhere described with more dispassion than in the autobiography of the Auschwitz camp’s commandant, Rudolph Höss, written during his free time while standing trial at Nuremberg.
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With some pride he describes how he himself came up with the idea of using Zyclon B—a pesticide for rats—to gas hundreds of people at a time and then of using specially built crematoria to dispose of the bodies. With some fondness he recalls having built the two large crematoria in 1942–43, each with “five ovens with three doors per oven, [which] could cremate about two thousand bodies in twenty-four hours.”
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There were two smaller crematoria as well. This was a killing machine unlike anything the world had ever seen. As Höss recalls, “The highest total figure of people gassed and cremated in twenty-four hours was slightly more than nine thousand.”
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It reads like a contest.
As horrible as it was, the gas chamber was in some ways preferable to the other options. The right-hand man of the mad doctor Mengele, Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish prisoner with advanced medical training, who did most of the requisite autopsies (for example, on twins, as Mengele “experimented” to determine how to make Aryan women doubly productive), tells of what
happened when the gas chambers were overcrowded with victims. The “surplus” were taken out, kicking and screaming, to be shot in the back of the neck in front of a huge pyre built inside a deep ditch. They were then tossed into the flames. The fortunate ones were dead first: “Even the ace shot of the number one crematorium, Oberschaarführer Mussfeld, fired a second shot into anyone whom the first shot had not killed outright. Oberschaarführer Molle wasted no time over such trifles. Here the majority of the men were thrown alive into the flames.”
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On other occasions, with the children, the rush to murder meant that there was no bullet anesthesia at all. A particularly haunting image was given at the Nuremberg trials by a Polish woman named Severina Shmaglevskaya, an Auschwitz detainee who managed to survive the camp for over two years, from October 7, 1942, until its liberation in January 1945. At the trial she described the “selection” process by which some Jews were sent to the labor camp, whereas most—including all women with their children—were taken off to an immediate death. In this excerpt from her testimony, she is being questioned by the prosecuting counsel, named Smirnov:
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV
: Tell me, Witness, did you yourself see the children being taken to gas chambers?
SHMAGLEVSKAYA
: I worked very close to the railway which led to the crematory. Sometimes in the morning I passed near the building the Germans used as a latrine, and from there I could secretly watch the transport. I saw many children among the Jews brought to the concentration camp. Sometimes a family had several children. The Tribunal is probably aware of the fact that in front of the crematory they were all sorted out…. Women carrying children in their arms or in carriages, or those who had larger children, were sent into the crematory together with their children. The children were separated from their parents in front of the crematory and were led separately into gas chambers.
At that time when the great number of Jews were exterminated in the gas chambers, an order was issued that the children were to be thrown into the crematory ovens or the crematory ditches without previous asphyxiation with gas.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV
: How should we understand that? Were they thrown into the ovens alive or were they killed by other means before they were burned?
SHMAGLEVSKAYA
: The children were thrown in alive. Their cries could be heard all over the camp.
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The cries of children, screaming from the midst of the blazing ovens.
Those who were not killed but “selected” for the labor camp were scarcely treated any better. They were systematically starved, abused, beaten, and—in most cases—literally worked to death. Mengele’s assistant Nyiszli estimated that the vast majority died from such treatment within three or four months. And this was not simply at Auschwitz: other camps were as bad or worse. Belzek, for example, had hundreds of thousands of inmates. Only one is known to have survived.
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Once one gets beyond the statistics, beyond the numbers, beyond even the mind-numbing experiences of these millions of people in-humanly treated and brutally murdered—once we try to understand it all, how can we make sense of the Holocaust? Putting aside for a moment the five million non-Jews who were killed, how can we fathom the heartless extermination of six million Jews? The Jews were to be God’s chosen people, elected by God to enjoy his special favor in exchange for their devotion to him. Were the Jews chosen for
this
?
As hard as it is to believe, there are Christians in the world who have argued that they were. This is one of the many ways in which anti-Semitism continues to thrive as much in our day as it did during the pogroms of eastern Europe, during the Inquisition, all the way back through the Middle Ages into the early period of the
church. Right after the Second World War, the German Evangelical Conference at Darmstadt—in the country that was responsible for the genocide—claimed that Jewish suffering in the Holocaust had been a divine visitation and called upon Jews to stop rejecting and crucifying Christ.
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This was not German Christianity’s finest moment. Any way you look at it, the vast majority of those who died in the Holocaust were innocent sufferers, people like you and me, uprooted from their homes, families, and careers and subjected to unspeakable cruelty.
How could God allow it to happen? One innocent death would be hard to explain, one five-year-old boy gassed to death, one teenager starved to death, one mother of three frozen to death, one upright banker, chemist, doctor, or teacher beaten to a bloody pulp and shot when he refused to rise to his feet. But we’re not talking about one, two, or three deaths like this. We’re talking about six million Jews, and five million others. It would take many volumes to detail the pain, misery, and suffering; the world itself could hardly hold the books. How could God allow this to happen to anyone, let alone his “chosen people”?
The modern philosophical problem of theodicy, which has been with us since the Enlightenment, is how we can imagine that God exists given such senseless pain and suffering. For ancient peoples, however, there was never, or almost never, a question of whether God (or the gods) actually existed. The question was how to explain God’s (or the gods’) relationship to people given the state of the world. Given the fact—which almost every ancient person took as a fact—that God is both above the world and involved with it, how can one explain the corollary fact that people suffer?
Many of the biblical authors were concerned with this question—even obsessed with it. From Genesis to Revelation, biblical writers grapple with this issue, discuss it, agonize over it. A very large portion of the Bible is devoted to dealing with it. If God has chosen the Jews—or (also? alternatively?) the Christians—to be his people, why do they experience such horrible suffering? It is true
that there was nothing in the ancient world quite like the Holocaust. That required the technological “advances” of modernity: the ability to transport millions by rail and kill thousands by gas and incinerate hundreds in specially built crematoria. But there were slaughters aplenty in the ancient world and wretched suffering of all kinds caused by all manner of circumstances: military defeat, cruelty to POW’s, and torture; drought, famine, pestilence, epidemic; birth defects, infant mortality, infanticide; and on and on.
When these things happened, how did ancient authors explain them?
One of their most common explanations—it fills many pages of the Hebrew Bible—may seem simplistic, repugnant, backward, or just dead-wrong to many modern people. It is that people suffer because God wants them to suffer. And why does God want them to suffer? Because they have disobeyed him and he is punishing them. The ancient Israelites had a healthy sense of the power of God, and many of them were convinced that nothing happens in this world unless God has done it. If God’s people are suffering, it is because he is angry with them for not behaving in the ways they should. Suffering comes as a punishment for sin.
Where does this view come from, and how can we explain it within a biblical context? To make sense of this “classical” view of suffering as a punishment for sin, we need to consider some historical background information.
Suffering as Punishment: The Biblical Background
The religion of ancient Israel was rooted in historical traditions that had been passed from one generation to the next for many centuries. The books of the Bible are themselves written products that come at the tail end of this long period of oral (and earlier written) tradition. The first five books of the Hebrew Bible—sometimes called the Pentateuch (meaning the “five scrolls”) or the Torah (meaning “instruction,” “guidance,” or “the law,” since they contain
the Law of Moses)—recount many of these important ancient traditions, beginning with the creation of the world in Genesis, through the times of the Jewish ancestors (Abraham, the father of the Jews, his son Isaac, Isaac’s son Jacob, and Jacob’s twelve sons who became the founders of the “twelve tribes” of Israel; all in Genesis), through the enslavement of the Jewish people in Egypt (the book of Exodus), to their salvation from slavery under the great leader Moses, who led the people out of Egypt and then received the Law of God (the Torah) from God himself on Mount Sinai (Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers). The Pentateuch continues by describing the wanderings of the Israelites through the wilderness (Numbers) until they were on the verge of entering Canaan, the land that God had promised to given them (Deuteronomy). Traditionally these books were thought to have been written by none other than Moses himself (he would have lived about 1300
BCE
), but the books do not claim to be written by him, and scholars are now convinced, as they have been for more than 150 years, that they were written much later based on sources that had been in oral circulation for centuries. Today scholars maintain that there were various written sources behind the Pentateuch; typically they date its final production, in the form we now know it, to some eight hundred years after the death of Moses.
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