Authors: Bart D. Ehrman
Enlightenment (and post-Enlightenment) theodicy derives from a modern set of assumptions about the world: for example, that the world is a closed nexus of cause and effect and runs more or less mechanistically following a set of natural “laws”—which, if they’re not actually laws (as has become evident in modern studies of physics and the like), at least are highly reliable predictors of natural activity in the world. This modern view of the world probably explains why discussions of theodicy among modern philosophers is so very different from the discussions of suffering found in the biblical writings—or indeed in the writings and reflections of most human beings who think about suffering. I don’t know if you’ve read any of the writings of the modern theodicists, but they are something to behold: precise, philosophically nuanced, deeply thought out, filled with esoteric terminology and finely reasoned explanations for why suffering does not preclude the existence of a divine being of power and love. Frankly, to most of us these writings are not just obtuse, they are disconnected from real life, life as lived in the trenches—the trenches of the First World War, for example, or the concentration camps of the Second World War, or the
killing fields of Cambodia. I tend to agree with scholars like Ken Surin—who is easily as brilliant as any of the theodicists he attacks—that many of the attempts to explain evil can, in the end, be morally repugnant. I can even sympathize with theologians like Terrence Tilley, who argues that a believer’s response to theodicy should be to renounce it as an intellectual project.
3
For Tilley, the attempt to justify the existence of suffering intellectually is to grapple with the problem on the wrong terms. Suffering, at the end of the day, should not lead merely to an intellectual explanation. It should also lead to a personal response.
Unlike Tilley, I am not a Christian believer. But I do think that there’s something wrong with wrestling with problems of suffering as a purely intellectual exercise. Suffering calls for a living response, especially since so much of it is caused not by “natural” events—“acts of God,” as they are ironically called by our insurance companies—but by other people. And not just by the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, who lived in another time or a faraway place, but by people who live across the street from us, or work across the hall from us, people we see at the store and people whom we elect to office and people we pay to head the companies that provide us with our goods and services, people who exploit the workers in the world, and so on.
For me, at the end of the day, the philosophical problem called theodicy is insoluble. At the same time, while the so-called free-will defense can sometimes come across as a sterile philosophical argument, it can also be a powerfully practical one. Human beings hurt, oppress, torment, torture, violate, rape, dismember, and murder others. If ultimately there were a God involved in all this—especially if this God were responsible for all the wicked things that happen—then I suppose there is very little we could do about it. But I don’t believe this for a second. The pain done to human beings by human beings is not caused by a superhuman entity. Since human beings misbehave and hurt others out of their free will
(which does exist, even if God does not), then we need to intervene ourselves and do what we can to stop the oppression, torture, and murder—whether here at home or in developing countries, where the atrocities are both more blatant and less restricted—and so do what we can to help those who are subject to these abuses of human freedom.
People who have gone through a kind of “deconversion” experience like mine understand how emotionally wrenching it can be. It may be easy to have a good sense of humor about it now that I’m well on the other side of the crisis (a friend of mine says that I went from being “born again” to being “dead again”), but at the time it was extremely traumatic. I went from being a hard-core and committed evangelical Christian who had spent his young adulthood in a fundamentalist Bible college, an evangelical liberal arts college, and a number of Bible-believing churches, to being an agnostic who viewed the Bible as a book produced entirely by human hands, who viewed Jesus as a first-century apocalyptic Jew who was crucified but not raised from the dead, and who viewed the ultimate questions of theology as beyond a human’s ability to answer.
I don’t know if there is a God. I don’t call myself an atheist, because to declare affirmatively that there is no God (the declaration of atheists) takes far more knowledge (and chutzpah) than I have. How would
I
know if there’s a God? I’m just a mortal like everyone else. I think what I
can
say is that if (IF!) there is a God, he is not the kind of being that I believed in as an evangelical: a personal deity who has ultimate power over this world and intervenes in human affairs in order to implement his will among us. It is beyond my comprehension that there could be a being like that—in no
small part because, frankly, I don’t believe that interventions happen. If God cures cancer, then why do millions die of cancer? If the response is that it is a mystery (“God works in mysterious ways”), that is the same as saying that we do
not
know what God does or what he is like. So why pretend we do? If God feeds the hungry, why are people starving? If God takes care of his children, why are thousands of people destroyed by natural disasters every year? Why does the majority of the earth’s population suffer in abject poverty?
I no longer believe in a God who is actively involved with the problems of this world. But I used to believe in a God of that sort with all my heart and soul, and I was willing and eager to tell everyone around me all about him. My faith in Christ made me an amateur evangelist, one determined to convert others to belief as well. But now I’ve deconverted. And I have to say, the deconversion process was not easy or pleasant. As I pointed out in an earlier chapter, I left the faith kicking and screaming.
But what can else could I do? What can
you,
or anyone else, do when you’re confronted with facts (or, at least, with what you take to be facts) that contradict your faith? I suppose you could discount the facts, say they don’t exist, or do your best to ignore them. But what if you are absolutely committed to being true to yourself and to your understanding of the truth? What if you want to approach your belief with intellectual honesty and to act with personal integrity? I think all of us—even those of us who are agnostics—have to be willing to change our views if we come to think they were wrong after all. But doing so can be very painful.
The pain for me was manifest in lots of ways. One of the hardest things was that I was now at odds with many of those who were near and dear to me—members of my family and close friends—people with whom I had once shared an intimate spiritual bond, with whom I could, before, pray and talk about the big questions of life and death with the full assurance that we were all on the same page. Once I left the faith, that no longer happened, and friends
and family started treating me with suspicion, wondering what was wrong with me, why I had changed, why I had “gone over to the dark side.” Many of them, I suppose, thought that I had learned too much for my own good, or had opened myself up to the snares of the devil. It’s not easy being intimate with someone who thinks you’re in cahoots with Satan.
Probably the hardest thing for me to deal with personally involved the very core of what I had believed as an evangelical Christian. I had become “born again” because I wanted “to be saved.” Saved from what? Among other things, from the eternal torments of hell. In the view that was given to me, Christ had died for the sins of the world, and anyone who accepted him in faith would have eternal life with him in heaven. All those who did
not
believe in him—whether out of willful refusal or sheer ignorance—would necessarily have to pay for their own sins in hell. Hell was a well-populated place: most people went there. And hell was a place of everlasting torment, which involved the spiritual agony of being separated from God (and hence, all that is good) and the physical agony of real torment in an eternal lake of fire. Roasting in hell was, for me, not a metaphor but a physical reality. No wonder I was so evangelistic in my faith: I didn’t want any of my family or friends to experience the fires of hell for all eternity, and so I did everything I could to make sure they accepted Christ and received the free gift of salvation.
This view of hell was driven into me and deeply burned, so to say, onto my consciousness (and, probably, my unconscious). As a result, when I fell away from my faith—not just in the Bible as God’s inspired word, but in Christ as the only way of salvation, and eventually from the view that Christ was himself divine, and beyond that from the view that there is an all-powerful God in charge of this world—I still wondered, deep down inside: could I have been right after all? What if I was right then but wrong now? Will I burn in hell forever? The fear of death gripped me for years, and there are still moments when I wake up at night in a cold sweat.
All of this is rooted in a sense of suffering, of course. The evangelical theology I had once held was built on views of suffering: Christ suffered for my sins, so that I would not have to suffer eternally, because God is a righteous judge who punishes for all time those who reject him and the salvation that he has provided. The irony, I suppose, is that it was precisely my view of suffering that led me away from this understanding of Christ, salvation, and God. I came to think that there is not a God who is actively involved with this world of pain and misery—if he is, why doesn’t he
do
something about it? Concomitantly, I came to believe that there is not a God who is intent on roasting innocent children and others in hell because they didn’t happen to accept a certain religious creed.
Another aspect of the pain I felt when I eventually became an agnostic is even more germane to this question of suffering. It involves another deeply rooted attitude that I have and simply can’t get rid of, although in this case, it’s an attitude that I don’t really want to get rid of. And it’s something that I never would have expected to be a problem when I was still a believer. The problem is this: I have such a fantastic life that I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for it; I am fortunate beyond words. But I don’t have anyone to express my gratitude to. This is a void deep inside me, a void of wanting someone to thank, and I don’t see any plausible way of filling it.
I began detecting this as a problem at about the time I was seriously considering becoming an agnostic, and, again, it happened in a way I wouldn’t have expected. When I was growing up, my family always said grace before dinner. Often, it was just a little prayer that we kids took turns reciting when we were little: “God is great, God is good, and we thank him for our food.” I still think this is a beautiful prayer for its simplicity, in saying just about all that needs to be said. As I got older, the thanks became more sophisticated and the praise more nuanced. But there came a time in my life when I found that I simply could no longer thank God for my food. And the irony is that it was because I came to realize (or,
at least, came to think) that if I was thanking God for providing me with my sustenance, and acknowledging that I was fed not because of my own good efforts but because of his gracious actions toward me, then by
implication
I was saying something about those who didn’t have food. If I have food because God has given it to me, then don’t others lack food because God has chosen
not
to give it to them? By saying grace, wasn’t I in fact charging God with negligence, or favoritism? If what I have is because of what he has given me, what about those who are starving to death? I’m surely not all that special in the eyes of the Almighty. Are these others less worthy? Or is he starving them, intentionally? Is the heavenly Father capricious? or mean-spirited? What would we think of an earthly father who starved two of his children and fed only the third even though there was enough food to go around? And what would we think of the fed child expressing her deeply felt gratitude to her father for taking care of her needs, when her two siblings were dying of malnutrition before her very eyes?
There is a lot of starvation in the world. According to reports released by the United Nations (see, e.g., www.wfp.org), about one out of every seven people in the world—that’s 850
million
people—does not have enough food to eat. Every five seconds a child dies of starvation in the world. Every five seconds. A child. I, on the other hand, have way too much to eat. Like most Americans, I’m a bit overweight, and every week I dig through the fridge and find some molding (and often unrecognizable) mass that I’ve left too long and it’s gone bad. Elsewhere on the planet, people are malnourished, famished, starving for want of basic foodstuffs. Every day an average of twenty-five thousand people die because of hunger and poverty-related issues, while I debate whether to grill steaks or ribs, whether to open a microbrew or a nice bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape. There’s something wrong with this world.
A natural reaction, of course, is that I should cut way down on what I eat, drink only water (it’s clean, after all!), and give the money I save to charities that feed the poor. But the problems are
far more complex and cannot be solved that way. If they could, that’s certainly what we would do. And I absolutely agree that we—all of us—should give more, more to local charities dealing with homelessness and poverty in our communities, more to national charities dealing with relief efforts around the country, more to international organizations devoted to dealing with hunger on the worldwide scale. Absolutely, we should give more, lots more. And urge our government to give more. And vote to elect officials who see world hunger as a major problem. And on and on.
But even having said that, I’m left with my fundamental dilemma. How can I thank God for all the good things I have while realizing that other people don’t have good things? How can I thank God without, by implication, blaming God for the state of the world?
I’m reminded of the scene we have all observed at one time or another on the televised news, when there has been a major airline disaster, a plane wreck with hundreds of people killed, and one of the survivors comes on the air thanking God for being with him and saving him. You wonder what people are thinking—or if they are thinking. God saved
you
? What about those other poor souls who had their arms and legs ripped off and their brains splattered all over the seat next to you? By thanking God for your good fortune, aren’t you implicating him for the misfortunes of others?
I’m also reminded of something else you can see on television, not just occasionally but every Sunday morning: slick televangelists who are convinced that God wants the best for your life and who have a nifty twelve-step program—all based on a careful reading of Scripture, of course—that will enable you to enjoy the riches and prosperity that your heavenly Father has in store for you. The amazing thing is how easily people are convinced: God wants them to be rich! God has shown them how! They too, like Pastor X, can receive all the blessings God is eager to bestow on them! Millions of people buy this (or at least pay for it). Look at the megachurches in our country, where tens of thousands of people go every week to
hear about God’s secrets to successful and prosperous lives. And Jesus wept.
It may be important to remember that Jesus wept. And that Paul suffered. That, in fact, Jesus rebuked his disciples who thought that following him meant the pathway to glory; he told them that being his disciples meant taking up the cross and dying with him a painful and humiliating death. I suppose that message doesn’t sell so well these days. Nor does Paul’s insistence that the power of God is manifest in weakness, and that it was precisely because he had been flogged, and beaten, and subjected to stoning, shipwreck, and constant danger—that it was because of these things (not his nonexistent material prosperity) that he knew he was a follower of Christ.
The televangelists have it wrong from both a real-life point of view and a New Testament point of view. God doesn’t make people rich. Being rich—or at least having enough food in the fridge (which for much of the world would count as incomprehensible prosperity)—is largely serendipitous: it is based on where you were born and the conditions of life that were handed to you, as well as what you do with the opportunities that come your way.
Some of us are lucky. The vast majority of people who have ever lived were and are not. Most have suffered from physical hardship and died without any resolution of the problem. How do we explain that? Or how do we explain the rampant suffering to which the human race has always been subjected?
We have already seen two ways the Bible explains suffering: sometimes suffering comes from God as a punishment for sin; and sometimes it comes from human beings as a consequence of sin. Now we can look at a third solution. Sometimes, for some biblical authors, suffering has a positive aspect to it. Sometimes God brings good out of evil, a good that would not have been possible if the evil had not existed. In this understanding, suffering can sometimes be redemptive. One of the first instances of this teaching is found in Genesis, in an extended passage that involves famine and starvation.
Redemptive Suffering in the Story of Joseph