The Bible is not an answer machine to all your questions (despite what billboards on US I-40 tell me); many of our modern questions are not addressed in the Bible (most of them, in fact: think of the issues people are each others’ throats about half the time in our country); the Bible often gives a range of answers to various issues; sometimes these contradict one another; and sometimes they simply don’t make any sense in our modern context (if you think they do, then look through your closet to see if you have any clothing made out of more then one fabric).

These are some of the issues I address toward the tail end of my Introduction in my book God’s Problem (HarperOne, 2008), excerpted here.

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It is important, I think, to realize that the Bible has a wide range of answers to the problem of suffering because this realization reveals the problem of thinking that the Bible has one simple answer to every issue.

Many people in our world take a smorgasbord approach to the Bible, picking and choosing what suits them and their views without acknowledging that the Bible is an extremely complex and intricate concatenation of views, perspectives, and ideas.

There are millions of people in our world, for example, who suffer social estrangement because of their sexual orientation. Some of this social alienation originates among simple- minded Bible believers who insist that gay relationships are condemned in Scripture. As it turns out, that is a debated issue, one on which serious scholars disagree.

But apart from that, this condemnation of gay relations “because the Bible condemns it” is a case of people choosing to accept the parts of the Bible they want to accept and ignoring everything else. The same books that condemn same-sex relations, for example, also require people to stone their children to death if they are disobedient, to execute anyone who does any work on Saturday or who eats pork chops, and to condemn anyone who wears a shirt made of two kinds of fabric. No special emphasis is placed on one of these laws over the others—they are all part of the biblical law. Yet, in parts of society, gay relations are condemned, while eating a ham sandwich during a lunch break on a Saturday workday is perfectly acceptable.

It is important, then, to see what the Bible actually says, and not to pretend it doesn’t say something that happens to contradict one’s own particular point of view. But whatever the Bible says needs to be evaluated. This is not a matter of setting oneself up as God, dictating what is and is not divine truth. It is a matter of using our intelligence to assess the merit of what the biblical authors say–whether this involves questions of suffering, sexual preferences, working on weekends, or culinary and sartorial choices.

Having said this, I should stress that it is not the goal of this book to convince you, my reader, to share my point of view about suffering, God, or religion. I am not interested in destroying anyone’s faith or deconverting people from their religion. I am not about to urge anyone to become an agnostic. Unlike other recent agnostic or atheist authors, I do not think that every reasonable and reasonably intelligent person will in the end come to see things my way when it comes to the important issues of life. But I do know that many thinking people think about suffering.

This is in no small measure because all of us suffer, and many of us suffer a lot. Even those of us who are well off, who are well educated, who are well cared for-even we can experience professional disappointment, unexpected unemployment and loss of in- come, the death of a child, failed health; we can get cancer, or heart disease, or AIDS; all of us will eventually suffer and die. It is worth thinking about these things, and in doing so it is worth seeing how others have thought about them before us -in this case, those others who produced the books that be- came the Bible, the best-selling book of all time and the book that lies at the core of our civilization and culture.

And so my goal is to help people think about suffering. There are, of course, numerous books about suffering al- ready. In my opinion, though, many of these books are either intellectually unsatisfying, morally bankrupt, or practically useless. Some of them attempt to give an easy or easy-to-digest answer to the question of why people suffer. For people who prefer easy answers, those can be useful books.

But for people who struggle deeply with life’s questions and do not find easy answers at all satisfying, such books merely irritate the mind and grate on the nerves-they are not helpful. Still, there is a good deal of simplistic schlock written about suffering. Pious-sounding or pat (and very old, unimaginative) answers sell well, after all these years.

Other books are morally dubious, in my opinion-especially those written by intellectual theologians or philosophers who wrestle with the question of evil in the abstract, trying to provide an intellectually satisfying answer to the question of theodicy. What I find morally repugnant about many such books is that they are so far removed from the actual pain and suffering that takes place in our world, dealing with evil as an “idea” rather than as an experienced reality that rips apart people’s lives.

This book will neither provide an easy solution nor attack the question philosophically by applying difficult intellectual concepts and making hard-to-understand claims with sophisticated and esoteric vocabulary. My interest for this book is instead with some of the age-old and traditional reflections on evil found in the foundational documents of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The questions I will be asking are these:

• What do the biblical authors say about suffering?
• Do they give one answer or many answers?
• Which of their answers contradict one another, and why does it matter?

How can we as twenty-first-century thinkers evaluate these answers, which were written in different con- texts so many centuries ago?

My hope is that, by looking at these ancient writings that eventually came to form the Bible, we will be em- powered to wrestle more responsibly and thoughtfully with the issues they raise, as we ponder one of the most pressing and wrenching questions of our human existence: why we suffer.