Bestselling author and scriptural scholar Bart Ehrman has just released his God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question— Why We Suffer. The problem, however, seems to be in Ehrman rather than the Bible. The flaws in Ehrman’s efforts are especially evident when we compare them with the wisdom of scriptural scholar N. T. Wright’s Evil and the Justice of God.

The subtitle of Ehrman’s book pretty much says it all—at least for Ehrman. The Bible fails to answer the most important question human beings ask: Why do we suffer? Ehrman maintains it was this very failure—and not his baptism in the corrosions of modern biblical scholarship—that caused him to lose his faith.

To his credit, Ehrman is unsatisfied with theologically pat answers to this most important of questions. He cannot accept pabulum for meat when the suffering in the world is all too real. But that having been said, Ehrman’s analysis of the biblical account of suffering is unsatisfying fare, to say the least. And the problem is, ironically, Ehrman’s approach to the Bible. As someone completely indebted to the secularizing strands of modern biblical scholarship, he cannot get at the inside story of the Bible, and it is only on the inside that one can find the biblical answer to why we suffer.

What do I mean? One of the tenets of modern biblical criticism is that one must treat Scripture as he would any other text—not as a believer, but as a kind of skeptic. That puts the biblical scholar on the outside of the text, looking in with curiosity but not belief. One result of being on the outside looking in, is that the scholar then thinks that his task is merely to take the text apart, and categorize the pieces.

That is just what Ehrman’s approach is in God’s Problem, and that accounts for his rather dry and formulaic treatment of suffering and evil in the Bible.  He categorizes each “answer” in the biblical text—suffering as punishment for sin, redemptive suffering, suffering as part of apocalypticism—spends some scholarly discussion on each, and then concludes in each instance (after naming some horrifying example of suffering), that each biblical answer falls woefully short.

To top off the disappointment, Ehrman’s own answer to the problem of suffering is gratingly comfy and self-serving. Borrowing his response from Ecclesiastes (although really it is, as he admits, from the Greek hedonist philosopher Epicurus), Ehrman concludes that “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.” To his credit, at least Ehrman is donating half the proceeds from God’s Problem to charity.

As Ehrman admits, he’s lost his faith, and that loss keeps him from seeing what scriptural scholar N. T. Wright does see—the answer to suffering and evil as seen from within faith.

Every bit the scholar as Ehrman, Wright allows his scholarship to enrich faith, rather than destroy it. That means, first of all, that he strives to understand the scriptural understanding of suffering in light of the whole Bible. On this approach, the Bible is not merely a collection of answers to the question of suffering, each of which can then be judged in isolation and detachment. Instead, Scripture is taken as a whole, and the whole reveals a drama of redemption from evil, a drama of which suffering plays a profound part.

This brings Wright to take suffering and evil more seriously than Ehrman. In the great cosmic drama narrated in the Old and New Testaments, “Evil is the force of anti-creation, anti-life, the force which opposes and seeks to deface and destroy God’s good world,…and above all God’s image-bearing human creatures.”

On this view, evil is not a problem to solve intellectually. The solution is something that God is doing in and through human history despite our efforts to the contrary (and most of the suffering pointed out by Ehrman is precisely what human beings are doing to derail God’s redemptive efforts).

From the vantage point of faith, the believer holds that God is solving the problem of evil by bringing about a new creation, one not marred by human evil and suffering, but one (paradoxically) ushered in through suffering and evil. The gateway between the old and new creation is the crucifixion, where Christ reveals that “the victory of God in the world” over evil and suffering” must occur “through suffering love.”

Obviously, Wright’s solution fundamentally differs form Ehrman’s. Where Ehrman bids us to enjoy this life to the fullest and so avoid as much suffering as possible, Wright admonishes us to throw ourselves into it, and suffer for the sake of overcoming suffering once and for all. And that is all the difference in the world.

Pastor Tim Keller draws on rich resources to make the case that making sense of suffering and evil proves more challenging for atheists than for theists

Horrendous, inexplicable suffering, though it cannot disprove God, is nonetheless a problem for the believer in the Bible. However, it is perhaps an even greater problem for nonbelievers. C. S. Lewis described how he had originally rejected the idea of God because of the cruelty of life. Then he came to realize that evil was even more problematic for his new atheism. In the end, he realized that suffering provided a better argument for God's existence than one against it.

"My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of "just" and "unjust"?...What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?...Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies...Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple."

Lewis recognized that modern objections to God are based on a sense of fair play and justice. People, we believe, ought not to suffer, be excluded, die of hunger or oppression. But the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak--these things are all perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust? The nonbeliever in God doesn't have a good basis for being outraged at injustice, which, as Lewis points out, was the reason for objecting to God in the first place. If you are sure that this natural world is unjust and filled with evil, you are assuming the reality of some extra-natural (or supernatural) standard by which to make you judgment. The philosopher Alvin Plantiga said it like this:

"Could there really be any such thing as horrifying wickedness [if there were no God and we just evolved]? I don't see how. There can be such a thing only if there is a way that rational creatures are supposed to live, obliged to live...A [secular]way of looking at the world has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort...and thus no way to say there is such a thing as genuine and wickedness. Accordingly, if you think there really is such a thing as horrifying wickedness (...and not just an illusion of some sort), then you have a powerful...argument [for the reality of God]."

In short, the problem of tragedy, suffering, and injustice is a problem for everyone. It is at least as big a problem for nonbelief in God as for belief. It is therefore a mistake, though an understandable one, to think that if you abandon belief in God it somehow makes the problem of evil easier to handle.

Timothy Keller
The Reason For God

Why Pastor Keller Wrote The Reason for God

I've been working for some time on a book for the ordinary (which means very sharp) spiritually skeptical New Yorker. Ever since I got to New York nearly two decades ago I've wished I had a volume to give people that not only answered objections to Christianity (what has been called 'apologetics') but also positively presented the basics of the gospel in an accessible yet substantial way. I had some books that did the one and some that did the other, but only one did both—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. As you know, I think Lewis' book is peerless, and foolish would be the author who tried to replace him!

However, the issues in the public discourse around Christianity have become much more complex than they were in the mid and late 20th century. The questions are now not just philosophical (e.g. Is there evidence for God's existence?) They are also now cultural (Doesn't strong faith make a multicultural society impossible?), political (Doesn't orthodox religion undermine freedom?) and personal. Also fifty years ago, when C.S. Lewis was writing, there was general agreement that rational argument and empirical method were the best ways to discover truth. That consensus has vanished. Today there are deep disagreements over how we know things and how certain we can be about anything. Most of the older books presenting Christianity now are only persuasive and even comprehensible to a very narrow range of people.

R.C. Sproul reviews N.T. Wright's robust account, from the Old Testament to the New, of God's redemptive action in his book Evil and the Justice of God.

"He’s happy that on the one hand postmodernism has deconstructed the myth of progress, which was the legacy of 19th century evolutionary philosophy, but at the same time exposes the face of postmodernity for its untenable approach to evil. The new problem of evil in this cultural circumstance manifests itself in three characteristics that Wright elucidates.

The first is that as postmodern people we tend to ignore evil when it doesn’t hit us in the face. As long as we escape the reach of Katrina or even the Twin Towers of 9/11, we manage to keep it a distance from us. However, when it does fall like a bombshell on the serenity of our disassociation, we are shocked. Then, as a result of this shock, the tendency is to react in immature and dangerous ways. This is the summary of the process and response to evil that Bishop Wright notes in the postmodern culture, and in many ways he has astute insights to this sophomoric behavior towards evil that so characterizes our age. We indeed all but eliminate the term evil and treat it as an archaism until we feel its painful slap in the face, and then we have the tendency to react to evil as if it is merely the problem that comes to us from without rather than from in. We dig our trenches, draw our lines in the sand, and make the lines of demarcation between us and them. We never stop to consider that perhaps we are part of the axis of evil and may even be building an evil empire of our own. Bishop Wright works from the front backwards in the Old Testament to see how the Old Testament comes to grips with evil. The call of Abraham to be the father of the faithful and to implement God’s agenda of redemption in the world cannot be understood without first looking at the chaos of the building of the Tower of Babel, and even before that, the influence of the serpent in the Garden. What Wright so astutely demonstrates in the reconnaissance of the Old Testament history is that even with Abraham and his descendants, evil has not been eliminated. The saints of the Old Testament repeatedly seek to build their own towers of Babel and continually find themselves easy prey for the serpent’s temptations. What the Old Testament does reveal, however, is a plan. It is the plan of God to conquer and triumph and redeem evil. That plan reaches its culmination in the cross of Christ."

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