Ehrman and Wright on the Problem of Suffering

The following exchange on beliefnet is worth checking out for those interested in the problem of suffering and evil, and how the biblical narrative addresses (or fails to address) it. Bart Ehrman is a former Christian and professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina who has recently authored God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question–Why We Suffer. N.T. Wright is a biblical theologian, the Bishop of Durham, and the author of numerous books on the the historical Jesus and the early church, as well as, more relevant to this discussion, Evil and the Justice of God.

Their discussion is a very interesting one, although as always in this age-old issue, there are many questions that go unanswered. Both make compelling arguments and are persuasive to differing degrees on on various points. To be honest, I resonate more deeply with Ehrman’s obvious pain and bewilderment when he thinks about the sheer amount and variety of horrific pain in the world; Wright isn’t blithe about it, to be sure, but you really do get the sense that this is much more than an academic issue for Ehrman (again, not to suggest that this isn’t the case with Wright, just that it is more obvious with Ehrman in this exchange).

After reading this exchange, I’m left with the same question I had when I first saw the title of Ehrman’s book, and after reading the introduction to the book while waiting for a flight last month: Does he think he’s offering us some kind of new information? It’s hard for me to understand how a man as obviously intelligent and morally sensitive as Ehrman could imagine that he’s “discovered” something here - as if for most of two millennia of Christian history people had never witnessed horrific evil and wondered how it fit into their view of a good and powerful God; as if most of those who have lived with and under Scripture throughout history were under the misguided impression that the Bible provided an airtight argument explaining the philosophical problem of evil. At best, Ehrman’s book seems to be a chronicle of how he, personally, arrived at a place in his life where he found the disjunction between the existence of evil and his faith in God to be existentially untenable.

I’m intrigued by Ehrman because he’s so honest. Suffering is, simply, a massive problem, and he feels the full force of it. On top of that, he’s spent a good portion of his life in the Christian tradition as a pastor and an educator. His is not some ignorant dismissal of Christianity based on trolling around a few fundamentalist websites - he’s read his theology, he’s done his exegesis (although thinkers like Wright have major disagreements with his conclusions), and he’s spent decades of his life in the community of faith. No one can accuse him of not taking matters of faith seriously. It seems like the pain of the world has just become too much for him to bear.

As always, however, I’m left wondering what positive alternative Ehrman has substituted or would recommend substituting for the Christian view he has deemed insufficient for providing the biblical, philosophical, or existential resources for dealing with the problem of suffering. Wright touches on this quesstion briefly in his last post, but I think much more could be made of this. As many have pointed out, suffering and evil are only problems if you think you have good reasons to expect otherwise.

Unless I missed something obvious in the “blogalogue” (another wonderful technologically-fueled addition to our lexicon!), Ehrman doesn’t address this. I’ve not read his whole book, to be fair, so it’s possible that he does have some groundbreaking insight into this question (although I’m not too optimistic). From my perspective, it’s not worth sacrificing my own moral intelligibility for the sake of a very specifically conceived understanding of how a good God and evil fit together. As I’ve said elsewhere (probably too many times, by now), I just don’t see how things get better (logically or existentially) once God’s out of the picture.

Well (sigh) this was supposed to be a very brief post and is increasingly looking like, well… not that. I suppose I can’t help myself when it comes to this question - it’s something I spend a lot of time thinking about. I’ll simply conclude by recommending that you read what is a very interesting, engaging, and civilized exchange between Ehrman and Wright.

h/t: Mark Roberts via Ben Witherington

 

How Do You Know?

This weekend, a friend alerted me to an interesting DVD special where four of the more prominent atheists out there right now (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris) get together for a round-table discussion. The two hour unmoderated discussion is, interestingly, entitled “The Four Horsemen” - a reference, presumably, to the protagonists’ understanding of themselves as the agents entrusted with the hastening of the demise of the blight upon human history that is religion.

From the bit that I watched, the special seems to be mainly about these four guys sitting around congratulating themselves on the obvious superiority of their views, ridiculing religious people, and sharing stories about the “persecution” they’ve experienced from those who have not yet attained their level of intellectual development. I watched twenty minutes or so of the first hour on YouTube and found it fairly uninteresting - mostly, I presume, because I’ve read each of their books and they don’t really say anything in their discussion that they don’t say in their published works.

One part that did interest me, however, was near the end of the first hour when Sam Harris asked his fellow atheists if they had ever come across an argument that gave them pause, that planted even the smallest seed of doubt in their minds that their militant assault on religion might be misguided. For the most part, they said that they could not. Dennett just bluntly said “no”; Dawkins and Hitchens said something to the effect that they sometimes wondered about the political ramifications of angering religious groups, but not one of them claimed to have ever come across an actual argument that wobbled the foundations of their atheism in any way. One gets the sense that it is literally beyond their capacity to imagine how or why any intelligent person could possibly not see thing the way they do.

The new atheists are frequently accused of a rather breathtaking and condescending form of arrogance in claiming to understand and diagnose the “disease” that is religion, but for me, their arrogance is most obvious in their implicit view of the history of human thought and experience. They really do portray themselves as representing the absolute pinnacle of human intellectual development; they, alone, occupy the privileged position of surveying the human condition with absolute clarity, free from the superstitious fantasies that have clouded the judgment of the overwhelming majority of human beings who have ever inhabited the planet.

C.S. Lewis once said that one of the things he found most troubling as an atheist was the view he was forced to take with respect to how others think. In Mere Christianity, he says:

If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view.

The “Four Horsemen,” it seems, have no such misgivings. They simply know the truth; the only issue is how to break the news to the rest of us - how to relieve us of our delusions in the most painless manner and avoid stoking the flames of religiously-fueled violence.

In each of the new atheists’ books that I’ve read, the author expresses astonishment at how religious people can claim to have certainty about their beliefs. After reading their books, observing a few of them in debates, and now my brief exposure to their discussion amongst themselves, I can only wonder where the epistemological humility they plead for from religious folks is. John Stackhouse, in a word of warning to those tempted toward claims of certainty in the arena of faith, has recently posted on the importance of recognizing the epistemic limitations faced by all human beings, religious or not. Here’s a summary passage:

This is, finally, the point of it all. We Christians “live by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7)—and so does everybody else, actually, since no human being can transcend our common situation of epistemic finitude. In fact, if we enjoyed all the certainty (in the former sense) that some Christians say we should claim, well, then, we wouldn’t need faith anymore. We would just know things, and we would know that we were entirely right about them.

I think that a little more humility would be a very good thing, on both sides of the atheist/theist divide. We simply are not the sort of creatures who can know, with 100% certainty, that we are right - especially when it comes to metaphysical questions of meaning and purpose. A kind of “fortress mentality” is as evident in “The Four Horsemen” as it is in the most dogmatic circles of religious fundamentalism. In response to the ambiguities and complexities of the real world, both retreat to the safety of certainty, simply declaring (louder and more angrily if necessary) that they are right and everyone else is wrong.

The problem is that the certainty being sought and claimed (on both sides) is illusory. As Stackhouse reminds us, it simply is not possible to transcend the inherent limitations of being human. A wider appreciation of this truth could lead to the welcome recognition that conviction and commitment can be held and articulated humbly and graciously, without demonizing, ridiculing, or questioning the intelligence of those who do not share it.

 

Offended by God?

Over the course of my thesis research over the last year or so, I have come across a lot of different reasons for doubting the existence of God. One major stumbling block for those who reject Christianity is those parts of the Bible which seem to justify actions that we consider to be culturally backward, confusing, and irrelevant or, even worse, immoral. And I think that most Christians, if they’re honest, will agree that there are parts of the Bible that they find baffling, frustrating, or, possibly, just plain offensive.

A friend and I were in Alberta for a speaking engagement this past weekend and one of the biblical figures we focused on in one session was Moses. Most people are fairly familiar with Moses and the cluster of stories in his life which are prominent components of our biblical imagination (scenes like the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, the receiving of the Ten Commandments, etc). One feature of Moses’ journey that is, perhaps, less well-known is the way in which he boldly interceded to God on behalf of his people when God seemed ready to wipe them out for their idolatry. Moses repeatedly calls on God to remember what he promised, to consider what the other nations would think, to turn away from his anger and show mercy (Ex. 32:9-14; 33:12-17).

Surprisingly, God relents. Moses’ courage and boldness appear to earn him God’s favour in a manner  somewhat analogous to how Job’s blunt expressions of confusion and outrage at his misfortune led God to ultimately declare that he, and not his friends with their neat and tidy religious formulas explaining human suffering, had spoken rightly of God (Job 42:7-10). In both cases, confusion, ambiguity, and outrage were presented to God honestly and unapologetically. In both cases, it seems that God was less interested in human beings pretending that God’s actions and intentions were perfectly obvious, transparent, and morally praiseworthy from a human perspective than he was in an honest acknowledgment of the pain and offense that walking with him can and does cause.

I’ve been reading Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God over the last week or so. Here’s what he has to say about what to think when we come across a passage in Scripture that we find outrageous:

To stay away from Christianity because part of the Bible’s teaching is offensive to you assumes that if there is a God he wouldn’t have any views that upset you…. Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? … Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination.

In other words, one skeptical assumption worth challenging is that if God exists and chooses to reveal himself to human beings, he is obliged to do so in a way that will simply confirm and validate our (profoundly historically and culturally conditioned) conceptions of what is good, admirable, and admissible.

On one level, I don’t find this much easier to accept than an atheist or an agnostic. I don’t find the idea that my moral conceptions might not represent the last (or at least the best thus far!) word on the question of what God is like to be a particularly comforting or comfortable one. But if I take seriously the fact that human beings are finite and fallen creatures, whose only access to reality is profoundly shaped (in positive and negative ways) by a whole host of historical, cultural, and psychological factors, then it makes sense to say that my vantage point might not be the plumbline which these matters are adjudicated.

In one of my philosophy classes in university, a professor told the story of a friend of his who was a committed Christian and a celibate homosexual. When my professor asked his friend if he agreed with the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality, his friend said that he did not. This, my professor found truly baffling. How could he possibly choose to commit to a religious tradition when he was in such obvious disagreement with it on a matter as important as his sexual identity? His friend said that Christianity made sense of enough important elements of his experience, and that God had proven faithful enough over the years that he had learned to trust and yield to him when it came to matters that he disagreed with. His confusion and disagreement with God were preserved within the context of faith, and with the understanding that it is at least possible that human conceptions of what is right and wrong might require modification.

My professor obviously found this pretty difficult to stomach. What, after all, could be more important than being true to one’s own beliefs? If anything is sacred in our post-Christian Western culture it is the individual’s freedom to decide what is true and meaningful for themselves. Yet I got the sense that he had a deep respect for his friend, as well. His friend’s position was not inconsistent or absurd. It simply took seriously the fact that human beings don’t see the whole picture and exhibited a conviction that faith does not require us to sacrifice our honesty - before God or before each other.

I find that facing the implications of the inherent limitation of the human condition - even when it comes to our moral intuitions - it is somewhat liberating in a strange sort of way. I don’t have to pretend that I love everything in the Bible, nor do I have to pretend that God’s way of acting in the world makes obvious sense and demands nothing but my reflexive and unthinking praise. Whatever else may be going on in the stories of how Moses and Job related to God, it seems that one important lesson is that God is not put off by human doubt, anger - even offense - in response to their understanding of how he is working in the world.

 

Worth Reading

I came across two pieces of writing today well worth taking the time to have a look at. First, there’s an excellent article by Tom Ryan recently posted at The Other Journal. Here’s a little excerpt from what is an excellent challenge to the church to be honest about both the the inherent limitations (epistemological and otherwise) of being human, and of the uniquely human capacity for spiritual transformation in and through doubt:

So what are we to make of this reactionary and defensive posture of the church? If this sort of apologetic defense against anything resembling doubt or atheism is the reality of our current ecclesial climate, then it is critical for us to wonder about what sort of spirituality this fosters. In other words, how does an implicit posture of defensiveness influence the very ways we seek to gather and practice our faith? And can the church, so preoccupied with cultivating a people who believe biblical absolutes passionately and confidently, find space and a language to warmly welcome those with doubts into their communities? The failure to do so—and the tendency to entrench ourselves within our certainty—will only serve to objectify and demonize those who don’t share what we perceive to be “God’s way.” It will artificially pit believers against non-believers, faith against doubt, sacred versus secular, and will miss the point of our Christian faith entirely…. What if, rather than adhering to a spirituality staked on the clarity and defense of one’s beliefs, we discovered a spirituality which held both belief and doubt as critical to our journey? What if we could see the process of doubting not as something to lightly entertain while we quietly and confidently “know” underneath it all, but as one of the hallmarks of a sincere and wise spirituality?

Second, Eric Meyer (a fellow Regent sojourner) has written a really thought-provoking piece examining the historicity of truth, the “reasonableness” of religion and whether a demonstration of this is (or ought to be) a goal worth pursuing. Another excerpt to pique your curiosity:

[T]here is no way out of history and into the universal—at least not without making some very “religious” sounding claims about the capabilities of human reason. Likewise, any notion of the steady progress of humankind under the tutelage of Reason (now unshackled from superstition) is telling a story about the origin, goal, and meaning of human life, and as such is making religious claims. Finally, secular ethics is, at its best parasitic on the values inculcated by religious traditions. At its worst, it is unaccountable to religious traditions altogether and falls prey to the temptation to objectify and instumentalize human beings and the rest of creation for the sake of whatever appears “rational” at the time. The “universal truths” of secular ethics are a harvest planted by someone else.

Two different pieces addressing different concerns, but both containing much to think about, I think, as we head into the Easter season.