God's Problem (38 page)
Authors: Bart D. Ehrman
Some of the biblical authors believed that suffering was ultimately redemptive; and it is true that there can often be a silver lining in the hardships we encounter. But I just don’t see anything redemptive when Ethiopian babies die of malnutrition, or when thousands of people die today (and yesterday, and the day before) of malaria, or when your entire family is brutalized by a drug-crazed gang that breaks into your home in the middle of the night.
Some authors thought of suffering as a test of faith. But I refuse to believe that God murdered (or allowed the Satan to murder) Job’s ten children in order to see whether Job would curse him. If someone killed
your
ten children, wouldn’t you have the right to curse him? And to think that God could make it up to Job by giving him an additional ten children is obscene.
Some authors thought that the suffering in the world is caused by forces opposed to God, forces that oppress his people when they try to obey him. This view at least takes seriously the fact that evil exists and that it is all-pervasive. But it is ultimately rooted in mythological views of this world (a three-storied universe; demons as malevolent little devils that try to invade human bodies and do nasty things to them) that do not jibe with what we know about the world today. It is also rooted in a blind faith that eventually everything wrong will be made right—a nice thought, and one that I wish were true. But it is, at the end of the day, blind faith; and it can lead all too easily to social apathy: since problems won’t be solved until the end, there is no point in our working to solve them now.
Some authors—such as the one who wrote the powerful poetic dialogues of Job—maintained that suffering is a mystery. I resonate with this view, but I do not think highly of its corollary—that we have no right to ask about the answer to the mystery, since we are, after all, mere peons and God is the ALMIGHTY, and we have no grounds for calling him to task for what he has done. If God made us (assuming the theistic view for a moment), then presumably our sense of right and wrong comes from him. If that’s the case, there is no other true sense of right and wrong but his. If he does something
wrong, then he is culpable by the very standards of judgment that he has given us as sentient human beings. And murdering babies, starving masses, and allowing—or causing—genocides are wrong.
I have to admit that at the end of the day, I do have a biblical view of suffering. As it turns out, it is the view put forth in the book of Ecclesiastes. There is a lot that we can’t know about this world. A lot of this world doesn’t make sense. Sometimes there is no justice. Things don’t go as planned or as they should. A lot of bad things happen. But life also brings good things. The solution to life is to enjoy it while we can, because it is fleeting. This world, and everything in it, is temporary, transient, and soon to be over. We won’t live forever—in fact, we won’t live long. And so we should enjoy life to the fullest, as much as we can, as long as we can. That’s what the author of Ecclesiastes thinks, and I agree.
In my opinion, this life is all there is. My students have difficulty believing me when I tell them that that’s a view taught in the Bible—but it is. It is explicitly the teaching of Ecclesiastes, and it is a view shared by other great thinkers, such as the author of the poetic dialogues of Job. So maybe I’m a biblical thinker after all. In any event, the idea that this life is all there is should not be an occasion for despair and despondency, but just the contrary. It should be a source of joy and dreams—joy of living for the moment and dreams of trying to make the world a better place, both for ourselves and for others in it.
This means working to alleviate suffering and bringing hope to a world devoid of hope. The reality is that we can do more in dealing with the problems people experience in our world. To live life to the fullest means, among other things, doing more. There does not have to be world poverty. The wealth could be redistributed—and still there would be enough for plenty of us to be stinking rich. Even on a microlevel, we could redistribute some of our wealth (I’m not calling for a Marxist revolution). There don’t have to be people sleeping on the streets in my city of Durham. Children really don’t need to die of malaria; families don’t need to be destroyed by
waterborne diseases; villages don’t need to die of massive starvation. Old people do not need to go for weeks on end without a single visitor. Children don’t have to face the prospect of going to school without a healthy breakfast. A living wage for everyone doesn’t have to be just an idealistic vision for a group of wide-eyed liberals. The nation doesn’t have to spend billions of dollars on wars it cannot win to empower regimes that cannot survive.
We do not have to sit idly by while governments (even in strategically unimportant lands) practice genocide on their people. A lot of people have read about the Holocaust and said “never again.” Just as they said “never again” during the mass murders in the killing fields of Cambodia. Just as they said “never again” during the slaughters in Bosnia. Just as they said “never again” during the massacres in Rwanda. Just as they are now saying “never again” during the rape and pillaging and rampant murders in Darfur. It doesn’t have to be this way. This is not a liberal plea or a conservative one: it is a human plea.
People do not
have
to be bigots, or racists. Our laws and customs don’t have to discriminate on the basis of gender or sexual orientation.
By all means, and most emphatically, I think we should work hard to make the world—the one we live in—the most pleasing place it can be
for ourselves.
We should love and be loved. We should cultivate our friendships, enjoy our intimate relationships, cherish our family lives. We should make money and spend money. The more the better. We should enjoy good food and drink. We should eat out and order unhealthy desserts, and we should cook steaks on the grill and drink Bordeaux. We should walk around the block, work in the garden, watch basketball, and drink beer. We should travel and read books and go to museums and look at art and listen to music. We should drive nice cars and have nice homes. We should make love, have babies, and raise families. We should do what we can to love life—it’s a gift and it will not be with us for long.
But we should also work hard to make our world the most pleasing place it can be
for others
—whether this means visiting a friend in the hospital, giving more to a local charity or an international relief effort, volunteering at the local soup kitchen, voting for politicians more concerned with the suffering in the world than with their own political futures, or expressing our opposition to the violent oppression of innocent people. What we have in the here and now is all that there is. We need to live life to its fullest and help others as well to enjoy the fruits of the land.
In the end, we may not have ultimate solutions to life’s problems. We may not know the why’s and wherefore’s. But just because we don’t have an answer to suffering does not mean that we cannot have a response to it. Our response should be to work to alleviate suffering wherever possible and to live life as well as we can.
Chapter One: Suffering and a Crisis of Faith
1.
A new translation by Wiesel’s wife, Marion Wiesel, is now available:
Night
(New York: Hill & Wang, 2006).
2.
Harold S. Kushner,
When Bad Things Happen to Good People
(New York: Schocken Books, 1981).
3.
Archibald MacLeish,
J.B.: A Play in Verse
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
4.
G. W. Leibniz,
Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God and the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil
(Chicago: Open Court, 1985).
5.
David Hume,
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,
edited by Martin Bell (London: Penguin, 1991), 108–09. The sentiments are those expressed by Hume’s fictitious character Philo.
6.
Voltaire,
Candide: or Optimism,
translated by Theo Cuffe (New York: Penguin, 2005).
7.
See, e.g., the discussions and bibliographies of Dale Martin,
Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), and Jeffrey Siker,
Homosexuality in the Church: Both Sides of the Debate
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994).
8.
I don’t need to list examples of this kind of book: they are available in the hundreds. Simply visit any Christian bookstore!
9.
Again, examples of this kind of book are legion. Many of them have titles like “The Problem of Evil” or “God and Evil” or “God and the Problem of Evil.” For hard-hitting and critical evaluations of modern philosophers’ attempts to deal with theodicy, see especially Kenneth Surin,
Theology and the Problem of Evil
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), and Terrence W. Tilley,
The Evils of Theodicy
(Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2000).
Chapter Two: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: The Classical View of Suffering
1.
Raul Hilberg, ed.,
Documents of Destruction: Germany and Jewry, 1933–1945
(Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971), 68.
2.
Hilberg,
Documents of Destruction,
79.
3.
Primo Levi, with Leonardo de Benedetti,
Auschwitz Report,
translated by Judith Woolf (London: Verso, 2006).
4.
Levi,
Auschwitz Report,
62–63.
5.
Rudolph Höss,
Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz
(New York: Da Capo, 1992).
6.
Höss,
Death Dealer,
36.
7.
Höss,
Death Dealer,
37.
8.
Miklos Nyiszli,
Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account,
translated by Tibère Kremer and Richard Seaver (New York: Arcade, 1993), 87–88.
9.
The Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal
(Nuremberg: International Military Tribunal, 1947), vol. 8, 319–20.
10.
Hilberg,
Documents of Destruction,
208.
11.
Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity After the Holocaust,” in
Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? Reflections on the Holocaust,
edited by Eva Fleischner (New York: Cathedral of St. John the Divine, 1974), 13.
12.
For a highly accessible account, which nonetheless is built on substantial historical scholarship, see Richard Friedman,
Who Wrote the Bible?
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).
13.
There is a massive scholarship on the history of ancient Israel and the historical reliability of the Hebrew Bible’s narratives. Some of the most widely used studies, written from various perspectives, are: Gösta W. Ahlström,
The History of Ancient Palestine
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993); Philip R. avies,
In Search of “Ancient Israel”
(Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992); William Dever,
Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003); and J. Maxwell Miller and John H. Hayes,
A History of Ancient Israel and Judah,
2d ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006).
14.
For general discussions of the Hebrew Bible, see these two excellent introductions: John Collins,
Introduction to the Hebrew Bible
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004); and Michael D. Coogan,
The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006).
15.
For a general, accessible introduction to the writing prophets of the Hebrew Bible, see David L. Petersen,
The Prophetic Literature: An Introduction
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002).
16.
For brief discussions of Amos, see Collins,
Hebrew Bible,
286–95, and Coogan,
Old Testament,
311–18.
17.
Here, again, we do not need to understand Amos as a crystal-ball gazer. Lots of people near the end of 2001 were saying that Saddam Hussein’s days were numbered—years before his execution. Amos, possibly in a similar way, saw that Israel’s days were numbered. Some scholars, however, have suggested that the specific “prophecies” of destruction were actually written later and placed back on Amos’s lips in anticipation of what was to take place.
18.
See preceding note. It is not easy to tell if these predictions were made in advance of the events themselves or were written as retrospective prophecies.
19.
The phrase “for three transgressions…and for four” simply indicates an indefinite number of transgressions.
20.
See Miller and Hayes,
History of Ancient Israel,
286–89.
21.
For a useful discussion of Hosea, see John Day, “Hosea,” in
The Oxford Bible Commentary,
edited by J. Barton and J. Muddiman (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 571–78. See also Collins,
Hebrew Bible,
296–304, and Coogan,
Old Testament,
318–25.
22.
See Collins,
Hebrew Bible,
307–21, 334–47, and Coogan,
Old Testament,
331–39, 366–76.
23.
One key difference is in Isaiah, however. Rather than harking back to the covenant that God made with Israel at the exodus event, Isaiah focuses on the covenant that God made with David—that David would always have a descendant on the throne and that Jerusalem would be inviolable.
24.
On Jeremiah, see Collins,
Hebrew Bible,
334–47, and Coogan,
Old Testament,
366–76.
25.
As with Amos, some scholars have seen this as a “prophecy” made in retrospect, after the events themselves had transpired.
Chapter Three: More Sin and More Wrath: The Dominance of the Classical View of Suffering
1.
For an introduction to the Wisdom literature, see Richard J. Clifford,
The Wisdom Literature
(Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), and James Crenshaw,
Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998). On Proverbs, see Collins,
Hebrew Bible,
487–502, and Coogan,
Old Testament,
468–75.
2.
For a good discussion of the Deuteronomistic History, see Steven McKenzie, “The Deuteronomistic History,” in
Anchor Bible Dictionary,
edited by David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 2:160–68.
3.
See the discussion in Dever,
Who Were the Ancient Israelites?
4.
See the useful discussion of Gary Anderson, “Sacrifice and Sacrificial Offerings,” in
Anchor Bible Dictionary,
5:870–86.
5.
See Anderson, “Sacrifice.”
6.
See Collins,
Hebrew Bible,
380–89, and Coogan,
Old Testament,
408–25.
7.
See the works cited in note 13 in chapter 2.
8.
Some scholars see the “servant” as an individual (not as the nation, or part of the nation, of Israel), a kind of representative of the people as a whole. If this view was shared by ancient readers as well, it would naturally have led to the Christians’ understanding that the individual was none other than their messiah, Jesus. See the following note.
9.
For other interpretations of the “suffering servant,” see any good commentary on 2 Isaiah, such as Richard J. Clifford,
Fair Spoken and Persuading: An Interpretation of Second Isaiah
(New York: Paulist, 1984), or Christopher Seitz, “The Book of Isaiah 40–66,” in
The New Interpreter’s Bible,
edited by Leander Keck (Nashville: Abingdon, 2001), 6:307–551.
Chapter Four: The Consequences of Sin
1.
Josephus,
Jewish Wars,
bk. 6, ch. 4.
2.
See note 9 in chapter 3.
3.
See note 9 in chapter 1.
Chapter Five: The Mystery of the Greater Good: Redemptive Suffering
1.
See Bart D. Ehrman,
The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings,
3d ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), ch. 9.
2.
See Ehrman,
New Testament,
288–91.
3.
See John Collins,
The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature
(New York: Doubleday, 1995).
4.
Thus 2 Corinthians 11:22–29; see the discussion in chapter 4.
Chapter Six: Does Suffering Make Sense? The Books of Job and Ecclesiastes
