God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer, by Bart D. Ehrman (HarperOne 2008) [B&T Books] BS680.S854 E37 2008.

Ehrman has written a string of highly readable and engaging books in the popular mode which present the state of current biblical scholarship, or rather critical biblical scholarship as it exists outside evangelical or traditional circles. He as done so again but with the twist that it is through the lens of what philosophers call “the problem of evil,” namely how can it be that a morally perfect and almighty being should allow evil and suffering. Ehrman has precious little patience for the nuances of philosophical responses and rejoinders. To an extent, this is all well and good. As Ehrman points out, holy writ does not include anything that vaguely resembles Plantinga's God, Freedom and Evil or Leibniz's Theodicy. On the other hand, he takes the nuances of such arguments to be inherently evil and so comes off a bit less than cogent when explaining why he no longer believes in God.

Ehrman breaks God's Problem down by the various traditions found in the Bible (Yes there is something called Tradition Criticism, though Ehrman never explicitly states that this is what he in engaging in). These would include the Deuteronomic (“the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children and their children's children”), Prophetic (“you have not heeded the word of the Lord”), Wisdom (“in a perfectly good world, one gets what one deserves,” or “its a mystery,” or “God knows,”) and Apocalyptic(“God is testing the righteous to make them worthy”) Traditions, along with some of their variants. There is actually very little here that a college or seminary student would not have learned twenty-five or thirty years ago. That is to say, there are no bombshells or revelations. What is valuable is how each of these traditions dealt with the issue of suffering.

On this level Ehrman is brilliant. Where Ehrman fails is to establish his assumption that the question of why we suffer actually drives both the biblical writers or the direction that the various traditions within scripture weave in and out. Is the question of suffering really our most important question and was it really the most important question for the biblical writers? Even if the former is true for us, I see no reason for the latter. If not, then there may well be a good reason why scripture does not give a definitive answer, any more than one would find an argument for the existence of God.

What gives God's Problem pathos, however is Ehrman personal introduction to each chapter, which is interspersed with horrors he has either encountered or has some direct knowledge or acquaintance. These serve to show his transformation from an conservative Evangelical Christian to a reflective and liberal agnostic. Each chapter ends with a personal reflection. At times it seemed these were working on two levels, one as an apology for his current relationship toward Christianity and the other as a personal expression of the biblical material. If so, the former is more effective than the latter.

Grave suffering has often been enough to make one loose one's faith, and Ehrman is in good company. However, given his background and predilections in biblical scholarship, that the Bible doesn't give a direct answer to his question is not sufficient. His own method presents at least two alternatives (should he have been so inclined). On the one hand he as presented the biblical writers as as shifting their positions as to the relationship that exists between God and the world and so came up with different answers to the question of suffering. Unless Ehrman believes that the writers have exhausted the possibilities (and given the state of theology, I would say not), it would seem that he has sufficient warrant to do some shifting himself, or he could attempt to do what theologians have done for centuries, synthesize the various strains of the biblical witness into a larger whole. Perhaps, though, Ehrman is not so much arguing as confessing.

Jimm Wetherbee

If God's Problem looks good, here are some other interesting Baker and Taylor Books. . .

• God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens.
  Call Number: BL2775.3.H58 2007

Updated August 14, 2008