Is Suffering All About Us?

I have had a number of interesting public debates on the problem of suffering since writing my book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails To Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer. Some of these debates have been with high profile scholars, in a range of fields: N. T. Wright, professor of New Testament; Dinesh D’Souza (three times!), public intellectual and now president of King’s College in NYC; Richard Swinburne (on the radio in the UK), philosopher and Christian apologist at Oxford, emeritus, and others. One argument that frequently gets used in these debates really irritates me, aggravates me, makes my blood boil (I’m not saying that everyone I debate uses it). It is the view that suffering can be justified because it contributes to making us human. I can understand this argument, and can even affirm it in part, when it is used of our own, mild and infrequent, suffering. Sometimes when bad things happen to us it ends up being for our own good, making us stronger, better people. The example [...]

Ben Witherington Critique

Probably more than any of my other books, Misquoting Jesus provoked a loud and extensive critique from scholars – almost exclusively among evangelical Christians, who appear to have thought that if readers were “led astray” by my claims in the book (in many instances, these critics pointed to claims that in fact I never claimed!) they might be in danger of losing their faith – or worse – changing what they believed so that they would no longer be evangelical. I’m not so sure there is really much danger in presenting widely held scholarship to a lay-readership, and so I was a bit surprised at the vitriol I received at the hands of some of my evangelical critics. There were four entire books written to refute my discussion: (1) Dillon Burroughs, Misquotes in Misquoting Jesus: Why You Can Still Believe; (2) Timothy Paul Jones, Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus"; (3) Nicholas Perrin, Lost In Transmission?: What We Can Know About the Words of Jesus; and (4) Gregory Koukl, [...]

Sorting by

Is Suffering All About Us?

Ben Witherington Critique