Our preacher was preaching on suffering a few months ago, and actually made the comment “suffering sucks” during his sermon. It was immediately followed by something like “Is it okay if I say it like that?” I don’t know if anyone was offended or not. I liked it, personally, because I thought it was right on. Suffering does suck.
I just finished reading Bart Ehrman’s newest book, God’s Problem : How The Bible Fails To Answer Our Most Important Question - Why We Suffer.
In the book, the former pastor and current religion professor looks at the reasons the Bible appears to give for suffering. In the final chapter of the book, he provides somewhat of a summary of what he’s covered earlier in the book, and the following is my summary of his summary.
He states that he is not satisfied with the explanations of suffering found in scripture, and then bumps down the list and rehashes some of his questions and/or comments about the various reasons.
Free will - people have the free will to sin and therefore cause the suffering of others. The question here is why does He “allow human caused evil in some instances but not others?” If he could intervene in the Bible, why not in Rwanda, or when a child is killed in a car accident, or many other instances of pain and suffering?
Redemptive suffering - eventually good will come from a period of suffering. What good comes from the thousands of people dying daily of malaria or other preventable diseases?
Test of faith - God will occasionally allow suffering to see how we react (see Job.) Did God really allow the murder of Job’s ten children to see if Job would remain faithful?
Forces of evil - the enemy of God will cause pain and suffering because we try to obey Him. A view rooted in blind faith that everything will eventually be made right and can too easily lead to apathy (problems won’t be solved, so don’t bother trying now.)
Suffering is a mystery - we cannot know why suffering occurs, and we have no right to ask (again, Job.) But if God created us, then our sense of right and wrong comes from Him. Therefore, He is wrong for murdering babies and allowing/causing genocide, and should be held accountable.
In the end, Ehrman believes that the author of Ecclesiastes advocates a different view - that this life is all that there is, and not everything makes sense, so we should make the best of it. We should do everything that we can to help diminish suffering in this world and make life better wherever we can.
I enjoyed this book, and one of the main reasons I wanted to read this book is that suffering in this life has increasingly been an issue for me, in that seeing the suffering in this world - many of the examples Ehrman discusses in this book and more - causes me to ask my own questions, seeking an explanation and, on occasion, wondering if God even cares. Many of my questions are the same that Ehrman raises in this book.
(One question I’ve had over the last couple of days is where was God when Duke couldn’t get the ball in the basket during the final five minutes Saturday night. Ehrman, who teaches religion at UNC, probably isn’t asking that question. Anyway…)
Ehrman - no longer a believer and now an agnostic - doesn’t really provide any new answers to those questions and I certainly didn’t expect him to do so. And I doubt he covered any new ground that’s not been covered before on the problem of suffering. The book simply looks at scripture for the reasons it provides for suffering, and explains why he rejects them. However, I still found it thought provoking, even if I am not willing to accept his conclusions as the final answer.
I heard Ehrman interviewed on NPR. I have not read the book but the impression I got from the interview is that he is looking for one single explanation for suffering. The problem is, there isn’t. There are different reasons and levels of suffering and he seemed to dismiss the explanations given in scripture for “suffering type A” because it didn’t account for “suffering type B.”
March 11, 2008
Right. He seems to view those things as contradictory, when they are not necessarily so.
March 11, 2008