I started writing this blog post in my head on Friday night when I was feeling a bit surly...let's see how this turns out.
So Dr. Ehrman, UNC's resident Biblical studies professor extraordinaire, is releasing a new book called "God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer."
In order to serve the good Doctor and to save his breath, a note to Christians re: suffering and one of the pre-packaged answers we try to give for it.
A student of mine was in Dr. Ehrman's Old Testament class last semester. In said OT class, he would regularly go off on rants about the problem of suffering and the insufficiency of the answers in the Bible. One student offered this pre-packaged Christian solution: the only way for us to know good is to know evil. Apart from seeing what is bad, we wouldn't see the good as clearly, wouldn't understand the goodness of it.
This, my friends, is patently false. We do not have to know evil in order to appreciate good. God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit before the worlds began did not experience the presence of evil in their perfect relating and were perfect for it. In heaven, we will not be bummed out that there's not adultery and murder and more poverty and homelessness and disease in order for us to more fully appreciate all that we have.
We do not have to know evil to know good. Indeed, one day we will know nothing but good and we will be a whole lot better off for it.
If we can get past this particularly poor excuse for the problem of suffering then perhaps we can move on to a more meaningful exploration of the issue.
3 comments:
The problem I see with people's general misconception of suffering existing in the world is that people tend to blame its existence on God. In other words, they ask the wrong question. The question should not be "Why does God allow suffering?". The question should be be why did man (Adam and Eve) choose to allow suffering to enter the world through his choosing to sin?" The only question to be asked of God is "When will He ultimate alleviate man's suffering by His return?" But even here we have no right to finger point at God because He has not returned yet. How could we have the audacity to complain to God that He has not yet cleaned up our mess?
I should have said "completely" cleaned up our mess. He obviously has addressed the most important piece of that "cleanup" with His Son's propitiation for our sins. And we await the culmination of this cleanup process as we wait for His return as we live in the "already/not yet".
going off of "st. greg"'s comments, there is a question in play here of divine sovereignty & the goodness of God. if God is really good, why does he allow pain and suffering to exist? for though He didn't bring it into the world, as "st. greg" mentions, should an omnipotent God be able to do something about that?
which brings interesting questions into this overarching "Problem of Evil" that relate to human free will, God's love, etc.
i wrote a paper on this in my philosophy class last year, and find it a fascinating topic, and relevant to how we see God. i argued in the paper, as i will briefly here, that while God is completely good AND completely powerful, He limits His own ability to stop bad things from happening in order to respect our decisions. ultimately, He wants us to love and make decisions out of that love. but what kind of love is it if you are only a puppet on a string being "forced" to do the right thing (i.e. not cause suffering) by some Puppetmaster?
references are quite obviously lacking in this short response, but that's the basic framework of my thoughts on the "problem of suffering/evil."
thanks for this post, alex!
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