Baggas’ Blog

Excellent ‘blogalogue’ series here at Beliefnet, between skeptical religious scholar Bart Ehrman and Anglican Bishop N T Wright on the problem of pain and suffering and it’s relationship to the claims of Christianity. Ehrman describes how his struggles with this issue ultimately wrecked his Christian faith. He comes from a Christian background, he knows his stuff, and he raises questions that we should take very seriously indeed. Pat answers just won’t do.

EHRMAN : Suffering increasingly became a problem for me and my faith. How can one explain all the pain and misery in the world if God—the creator and redeemer of all—is sovereign over it, exercising his will both on the grand scheme and in the daily workings of our lives? Why, I asked, is there such rampant starvation in the world? … If God is concerned to answer my little prayers about my daily life, why didn’t he answer my and others’ big prayers when millions were being slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, when a mudslide killed 30,000 Columbians in their sleep, in a matter of minutes, when disasters of all kinds caused by humans and by nature happened in the world?

He even provides a pretty good answer to the question himself, but for him it was ultimately still not strong enough for him to retain his belief in God.

EHRMAN : God himself is deeply concerned with suffering and intimately involved with it. The Christian message, for me, at the time, was that Jesus Christ is the revelation of God to us humans, and that in Jesus we can see how God deals with the world and relates to it. He relates to it, I thought, not by conquering it but by suffering for it. Jesus was not set on a throne in Jerusalem to rule over the Kingdom of God. He was crucified by the Romans, suffering a painful, excruciating, and humiliating death for us. What is God like? He is a God who suffers. The way he deals with suffering is by suffering both for us and alongside us.

Fortunately we have one of the best theologians/scholar/pastors in the world today to try and address these questions, and Wright does a good job - although I (like Ehrman) found his first post was not entirely convincing, in his second entry Tom really starts to approach the heart of the matter :

WRIGHT : If one believes, not merely as an intellectual assent to doctrine but as a living relationship with God through Jesus Christ, then the dark mystery of suffering can be seen within the context of his suffering, and be transformed by it.

Of course, for its fullness this necessarily generates, as I said, the life of the church in and through which evil is then addressed. Part of the ‘transformation’ is that Jesus’ followers go to work as healers, reconcilers, and so on. That’s why the last two chapters of my book are a small attempt to say that the work of believing people in addressing the urgent needs of the world is actually a part of the biblical answer – if you can call it an ‘answer’ – to the problem.

The beginining of God’s answer to the problems of pain and suffering in the world is Jesus’ own sufferings and subsequent resurrection (which, as Wright points out is the climax of the OT story of Abraham and Israel). But the continuation of God’s solution is through the church - we need to be God’s means of reaching out and addressing the pain and suffering of the world.

But then Ehrman goes on to raise another tricky, and most appropriate, question. What about all the instances in the Old Testament where people’s suffering is blamed on their sin - ie. suffering as punishment? And what about all those instances where God himself, or God’s chosen people, inflict mass casualities (eg Noah’s flood, Joshua’s invasion of Caanan)? Very good questions - ones I personally would struggle to answer (and unfortunately Wright doesn’t really address this stuff in much detail in his reply). A strong come back from Ehrman, and yet again he raises a point about Jesus that I would agree with ( for an agnostic he seems to have some good theological insights, just a shame he doesn’t believe them) - The Kingdom of God is not manifest in Jesus only in his sufferings..

EHRMAN : … the Kingdom is manifest in Jesus’ life and work: in the kingdom there will be no disease, no demons, and no death. Jesus manifests this kingdom in the meantime: he heals the sick, he casts out demons, and he raises the dead. This was not a message about some vague power of God breaking in at some period thousands of years hence. It was God breaking in now

The ministry of Jesus in the gospels gives us a good example how we, as part of his Kingdom, should be working in the world - feeding the hungry, healing the sick, remembering the forgotten. Ehrman touches on this point in the following quote :

EHRMAN : Even if we cannot, in the end, know the reasons for suffering, we can at the least have appropriate responses to it. We ourselves can feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, clothe the naked; we can work to solve problems of poverty; we can give money to agencies finding cures for cancer and AIDS; we can volunteer more often locally; we can give more to international relief efforts. We can, in fact, fulfill the urgent demands implicit in Matthew’s account of the judgment between the sheep and the goats, for “as you have done this to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you have done it unto me.”

But ultimately Ehrman’s view is that the Kingdom never did come, and presumably never will. Wright begs to differ, and brings it back to what is the central issue in much of his work - the resurrection.

WRIGHT : But the real dividing line, still – and you still haven’t addressed it – comes with the resurrection. I do think, and I think the early Christians thought, and I think the evangelists (yes, in their different ways) thought, that the kingdom did come through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Not ‘come’ fully, of course; but, in the usual language, it was radically inaugurated … For the early Christians, God’s new world – the world where God’s writ runs – had already begun, and they were living in it by the power of the Spirit. Things did change. The early Christians did make a difference. Yes, of course, earthquakes and tsunamis still happen. The NT writers knew that as well as we did, and they went on saying that Jesus was already Lord, not simply that he would become that one day. They weren’t mostly offering, either, an analysis of ‘why evil/suffering happens,’ but they were implementing Jesus’ kingdom-work of challenging evil/suffering in the power of God – not in a sudden all-powerful theocracy, banishing every evil at a stroke, but in their continuing work on the model of Jesus himself and his parables.

All up a great series of posts. Ehrman provides some challenging questions an Wright coming back with some excellent (although perhaps not decisive) answers. Although my heart sides with Wright, I think I’d have to call this debate a draw. If you’d like to read through the posts (and it’s well worth doing) you can start here and just click the right arrowed links at the top of the page to follow them through.

[thanks to Ben Witherington for the link to this debate]