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The Variety of Views of Suffering in the Bible

Some thirty years ago now, when I taught my class at Rutgers on “The Problem of Suffering in the Biblical Traditions,” I came to realize – or at least came to realize more clearly – that a number of the views set forth in the Bible simply did not resonate with me. Which, I suppose, is a more tactful way of saying that I simply didn’t agree with them. By far the most prominent explanation for suffering in the Bible is that God is using pain, misery, and human disaster in order to punish his people because they have failed to live up to his standards and to follow his will. He penalizes them by inflicting pain That is why there are droughts, famines, economic crises, and military disasters. That lesson is taught time after time after time in the Hebrew Bible – just read Deuteronomy, or Amos, or Jeremiah, or, well, any of the prophets. I suppose when I was a fundamentalist I completely accepted that view. But eventually – probably when teaching this [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:09:43-04:00July 9th, 2017|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Teaching about How The Bible Explains Suffering

I’m not sure exactly when the suffering of others came to pose a problem for my own faith; but I do remember clearly when the issues first crystalized for me. I started my teaching career at Rutgers University while I was a PhD student working on my dissertation in 1984. It was a fantastic job for me (teaching at a very good research university, without yet even having my degree), but it was not tenure-track. I was a poorly-paid adjunct instructor, teaching two or three courses a semester, in a range of areas: Introduction to the New Testament; Introduction to the Hebrew Bible; The Life and Letters of Paul; The Gospel of John; and so on. I had never taught any of these courses before, of course, since this was just the beginning of my career. And back then my idea was that when I gave lectures, I would actually write out them out, word for word, by hand (I didn’t own a computer then), on yellow pads. If I was teaching three courses – [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:09:53-04:00July 7th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Is Suffering Our Fault?

Some people have responded to my comments on suffering with the interesting observation that most suffering, in their view, is caused by humans against humans, so that there is no reason to “blame God” for it. That is obviously true of some of the most horrific things that happen in our world: murder, genocide, torture, war, refugee crises, and on and on and on. And one could argue that it is true of even “natural” disasters, such as starvation: there is more than enough food in the world for everyone to be well-fed, so if people are starving, it is *our* fault, a lack of social and political will. No need to doubt that God exists just because we’re too stupid, lazy, or self-centered to deal with any problems that come along. I have several reactions to this view. The first is that on one level I heartily agree. So many of the unspeakable things that happen to people, destroying their lives, causing unspeakable pain and misery, and often leading to death, are caused by [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:10:19-04:00July 5th, 2017|Bart's Debates, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Would I Call Myself Both an Agnostic or an Atheist? A Blast From the Past

My personal beliefs came up in my debate with Dinesh D’Souza that I posted last week, and I received several questions about how I classify myself: agnostic or atheist? I’ve talked about that on the blog a couple of times, but as I am constantly reminded, many of the people who are on the blog now were not on it a year or two ago, as there is turnover and our numbers continue to grow. And certainly no one (well, almost no one) goes back and reads everything from, say five years ago! So I thought it would be fine to repost my earlier comments. It was in response to a question I received back then, very similar to the questions I’ve received over the past week. ****************************************************** QUESTION: If you don't think God exists, why do you refer to yourself as an agnostic? If this is your perspective, why not refer to yourself as an atheist? Could it be that you don't believe the Christian God exists, but are open to the possibility [...]

BDEhrman2018-06-10T09:27:03-04:00July 4th, 2017|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Was Marcion Declared a Heretic?

The question I will be dealing with this week relates to the issue of heresy and orthodoxy in early Christianity. If you have a question you would like me to address, let me know! QUESTION: As I am reading about Marcion being declared a heretic I wonder, who had the authority to do this? RESPONSE: It’s a very good question, and more significant than, on the surface, one might think. First some background. Marcion was a second-century philosopher/theologian/teacher who eventually came to be branded as one of the arch-heretics of early Christianity. Our only sources of information about him are the writings of his enemies – proto-orthodox church fathers (church writers who embraced the theological views that later came to be endorsed as “orthodox” – that is, teaching the “right beliefs”) who saw him, and his views, as dastardly and demonic false teachings meant to led the faithful astray. It is much debated how much we can trust what his enemies said if we want to determine what it is that [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:10:32-04:00July 3rd, 2017|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Do I Need to Suffer Myself to Question Whether God Exists?

When I talk about how the problem of suffering has made me question the existence of a loving God in control of the world, I sometimes get asked “What *happened* to you?” The assumption seems to be that the only reason a person would question the existence of God is if something terrible had occurred that didn’t make sense in light of their beliefs. I’ve always thought this was a very curious way to think about it, as if the only reason a person would think there was a problem is if they themselves had undergone some horrendous kind of suffering. The fact is that I’ve never experienced suffering in extremis. I’ve never had leprosy, never starved, never had multiple family members die in a senseless accident, never … never had any really excruciating suffering that stands out as unusual. Just the standard fare for middle-class Americans: death of loved ones, shattered relationships, hard times, divorce, and so on. Nothing that would be completely inexplicable if there were a God in charge of my world. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:10:47-04:00July 2nd, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Not Believe in a Different Kind of God?

I have been talking about why suffering is a “problem” in the Jewish and Christian traditions, and here I would like to reflect a bit on a point that some commenters have made, that it is a problem if and only if one has a certain conception of God as a being who is all-powerful, loving, and active in the world. Someone who has a different understanding of the divine being – or divine beings – almost certainly won’t have this problem. I will let others on the blog comment on divine beings in other modern religious traditions, outside of traditional Christianity. But I will say that the pagan world in which Christianity originally began, there were much easier answers to why people suffer if there are powerful deities in the world. The key is that in the ancient world, everyone except Jews acknowledged that there were *lots* of other deities, at all kinds of level and of all sorts of temperament. Some divine beings could be hateful, malicious, and antagonistic. Can’t do much about [...]

BDEhrman2018-01-17T00:20:06-05:00June 30th, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Classic “Problem” of Suffering

I have indicated a bit in previous posts on why the Problem of Suffering is a “problem.” Here I want to explain just a bit further, before going on, in later posts, with the question about how and why it became a problem for me personally, in my movement away from Christianity to agnosticism. Here is what I say about “the problem” as it is classically understood, by philosophers who wrestle with the issue of “theodicy,” in my book God’s Problem. *********************************************************** Theodicy is a word invented by one of the great intellectuals and polymaths of the seventeenth century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who wrote a lengthy treatise trying to explain how and why there can be suffering in the world if God is all powerful and wants the absolute best for people. The term is made up of two Greek words: theos, which means “God,” and dikē, which means “justice.” Theodicy, in other words, refers to the problem of how God can be “just” or “righteous” given the fact there is so much suffering in [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:10:58-04:00June 28th, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Two Unsatisfactory Solutions to the Problem of Suffering

In this thread I have started to grapple with the question of how there can be a good, loving, and powerful God in charge of the world in the face of the massive suffering experienced by the human race – not just in general terms (“there sure is a lot of suffering out there!”) but in very specific concrete terms, as what individuals experience. What we experience. What you have experienced. How does one make sense of personal suffering (especially intense suffering) in a Judeo-Christian world in which it is widely believed that there is a God who is sovereign and in control? One of the most interesting things about this question is that – unlike anything else I ever encounter, think about, read about, or write about in my career as a biblical scholar – this is a question that virtually *everyone* has reflected on and has an opinion about. Just about everyone. Even those who say “I have no idea!” are invariably people who have thought about it and realized that none of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:11:11-04:00June 27th, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Kind of Suffering that is a Problem

I’m not completely sure when I first started realizing that the enormous amount of suffering in the world, so much of it completely gratuitous, is a problem for anyone who believes that there is a loving and powerful God who is in control of what happens. Before reflecting on the evolution of my own thinking on the problem from years ago, let me stress a couple of points. First I am talking about enormous suffering. I am not talking about the small and even not so small aches and pains of daily life – the broken wrists or torn ligaments, the fender-benders, the shattered relationships, the worries about the mortgage, or the loss of a loved one. Such things, in my view, do not call into question the existence of God, because they could well be explained if there is a loving and powerful God in charge of the world. They could, for example, be “teaching us something,” or molding our character, or making us more grateful for the (other) good things we have (no [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:11:24-04:00June 26th, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why I Was Afraid to Become an Agnostic

I started feeling the tug toward agnosticism sometime during my PhD program. I remember clearly a particular moment, and it was, somewhat ironically, while I was serving as the pastor of the Princeton Baptist Church. Even though I was incredibly busy at the time (I was taking a full load of graduate seminars, preparing to take my PhD exams, serving as a Teaching Assistant for a class taught by Bruce Metzger, AND serving as the pastor of the church) I enjoyed the ministry very much. Well, parts of the ministry. I have never enjoyed transition rituals very much: baptisms, weddings, funerals, and the like. And of course pastoring a church involves doing such things. And I wasn’t thrilled with visiting the sick – I was a bit out of my depth on that one. But I did very much enjoy interactions with the people I worked with in the church, and I especially liked preaching nearly every week. I remember thinking at the time, though, that ... Only Members can read the rest of this [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:11:45-04:00June 23rd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Even Bother Being a Liberal Christian?

Some people have asked me, and I have asked myself, why, as a liberal Christian, did I continue to “believe,” or at least to act as if I believed? I didn’t think Jesus was literally born of a virgin and I wasn’t sure if he was physically raised from the dead. I didn’t think that he existed before he came into the world, let alone that he had been God from eternity past. I didn’t think there was a hell and I didn’t know about heaven. I believed in the Big Bang and evolution, not in creation. I thought the Bible was filled with mistakes, historical inaccuracies, contradictions, and discrepancies, that its authors were fully human and were (simply) providing their views of this that or the other thing. So why did I go to church every week, say the creed, sing the hymns, say my prayers, confess my sins, take communion, teach adult education, and all the rest? I’m not sure I’ve ever explained this to anyone before, though I certainly explained it to [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:13:17-04:00June 22nd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

How Biblical Discrepancies Can Be Theologically Liberating for a Christian

I have been trying to show that the portrayal of Jesus going to his death in Mark’s Gospel is radically different from the portrayal in Luke’s Gospel. I’ve been making this comparison for a purpose, in order to show as clearly as I can that reading the Bible historically – seeing its discrepancies – does not compromise its value. On the contrary, as I came to see as a committed Christian who was no longer a conservative evangelical, this way of reading the Bible *increases* its value. A person can still revere the Bible while thinking there are contradictions and discrepancies in it, not only in small things but in large things. But one has to understand it in a non-fundamentalist way to do so. The point of finding discrepancies is *not* so you can go away saying that the Bible is worthless (“bunch of contradictions”) but, on the contrary, so you can recognize the vast depths of its theological meaning, as seen precisely *in* the (big) differences you find in it. Here is how [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:13:38-04:00June 19th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

How Did Judas Iscariot Die? Readers’ Mailbag June 18, 2017

Two questions in this week’s Readers’ mailbag. The first concerns the very strange tradition about how Judas Iscariot actually died, as found in the writings of the early church father Papias; the second is about modern evangelical Christian biblical scholars: how do they deal with the fact that our manuscripts contain so many textual variants? If you have a question, feel free to ask, and I’ll add it to the ever growing mailbag. QUESTION: Papias didn’t think very highly of Judas. I can’t remember exactly what he said, is his version closer to Matthew or Acts? Or a different tradition altogether? RESPONSE: First some background. Papias is one of the fascinating and virtually unknown figures from the early church. He is normally thought to have been writing around 120 or 130 CE. His major work was a five-volume discussion of the teachings of Jesus, called Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. We very much regret that we no longer have this book – it would have been the first known explanation of/commentary [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:13:46-04:00June 18th, 2017|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

A Very Different Portrayal of Jesus’ Death

I am talking about how I came to understand and appreciate the Bible once I realized that there were widely different perspectives presented in one author or another – even when talking about the same thing. The example I’m using is the Gospel portrayals of Jesus’ death. In my previous post I laid out how Mark depicts it; here I will discuss how Luke does. What I came to see (back when I was a graduate student, still a committed Christian but no longer a fundamentalist) was that it was both fruitless and impoverished to think the two Gospels were both trying to say the same thing. Each of them is rich in meaning, but they meaning they ascribe to the event is very different. Failing to appreciate the difference means failing to understand each author and the point that he is trying to make. Here is what I say about Jesus’ death in Luke, in contrast to Mark, in my book Jesus Interrupted. ******************************************************** Luke’s account is also very interesting, thoughtful, and moving. But [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:13:54-04:00June 16th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

How a Non-Historical Account Can Be Meaningful: The Death of Jesus in Mark

I am now at a point where I can explain how I read the Bible when I was a committed Christian who was not, however, a conservative evangelical convinced that the Bible was a completely inerrant revelation from God without any discrepancies or differences in it. As I have already indicated, my new way of reading of the Bible did not denigrate the Bible at all, as often happens when people realize there are mistakes in it and come away saying something like: “It’s worthless, just a pile of contradictions!” That wasn’t my view at all. On the contrary, the differences revealed the true richness of the Christian tradition. The Gospels, rather than simply being completely accurate accounts of what really happened were theological reflections on the significance of Jesus. Different reflections, by different authors, all of whom had something to teach me as someone who was himself wrestling with the significance of Jesus. One way to see the true depth of these different reflections is to compare them carefully with one another. I explain [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:14:06-04:00June 15th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

A New Way of Reading the Bible

I have been discussing how I experienced a radical change in my Christian faith, from being a conservative evangelical to being a more open-minded and better informed Christian. I can now begin to talk about how my new way of understanding the faith intersected with the scholarship I was involved with in pursuing the academic study of the Bible. As a budding biblical scholar, I had come to see that the Bible was filled with problems. As a believer with a new perspective these problems were not detrimental to my faith but actually provided important insights that previously I simply had no access to. To explain that will take a couple of posts. The overarching point is that the discrepancies, contradictions, and mistakes of the Bible reveal clearly that we are dealing here with different authors with different perspectives, and it is important to let *each* author speak for himself to see what he wants to emphasize. The viewpoint each one has is important, and it is crucial not to confuse the message of one [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-29T16:05:29-04:00June 14th, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

More of What I Believed When I Was a Committed (non-fundamentalist) Christian

Yesterday I started explaining what it was I believed when I left fundamentalism but remained a committed Christian – one who realized that the Bible was not at all an infallible book but was still a person of faith. I’ve never talked about any of this before in print, either on the blog or in any of my books. One reason for wanting to do so now is that I think I must have given some people the false impression that I went from being a fundy to being an agnostic in one step, that once I came to see that my fundamentalist views were just wrong, I immediately became a non-believer, having no other options to fall back on. In fact it didn’t happen that way, at all. I was a committed Christian for many years after giving up on conservative evangelicalism. Here is more of what I believed at the time. The ultimate teaching of the Gospel was love. Love of God. Love of neighbor. Jesus not only taught this ethic and lived it [...]

BDEhrman2018-01-17T00:36:34-05:00June 11th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

What I Believed as a Committed but but non-Fundamentalist Christian

It is a little hard to encapsulate what I thought, believed, and practiced during those years when I had moved away from being a hard-core Bible-believing conservative (as I was in college) but remained a committed Christian (as I was for years after that). The change did not come overnight so that one day I was one thing (a fundy) and the next I was something else (a liberal). It was a gradual change marked by important moments and key shifts. But let me pick a time in my life and try to explain what my faith meant to me at that time. This will take a couple of posts. Quick biographical background: when I was doing my PhD in New Testament Studies, a lot of things happened to me personally that affected my faith. My studies, of course, were one thing. But outside of that was my daily life. I was attending the small but interesting Princeton Baptist church, which was part of the American Baptist denomination (very different, and far more diverse, than [...]

BDEhrman2018-01-17T00:36:57-05:00June 10th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Can (or Should) We Change the Canon of Scripture? A Blast from the Past

Digging around in posts from five years ago now, I came across this one --as interesting to me now as it was then! Hope you think so too. It's a response to a penetrating question. QUESTION: Given the criteria used to determine what would go on to constitute the New Testament canon, how is it that Hebrews and the book of Revelation remain part of the canon? I understand that Christians came to believe that they were authored by the apostles which is why they made it into the canon, but we now know that they weren't authored by Paul or John..so why are they still in the NT? RESPONSE: Interesting idea! I sometimes get asked what I would exclude from the canon if given the choice, and I almost always say 1 Timothy (because of what it says about women in 2:11-15, and how the passage has been used for such horrible purposes over the years). But, well, it ain’t gonna happen. I don’t get a vote. And that’s the problem with Hebrews [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:14:34-04:00June 8th, 2017|Catholic Epistles, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

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