Answering Ehrman's Objections Part 1: Is God an Interventionist?

Last Wednesday UNC's most famous agnostic Dr. Bart Ehrman posed two very important questions that did not get addressed during his debate with Dinesh D'Souza on the question of the Christian God and suffering.

First, when Ehrman took inventory of the suffering around the world, it seemed that God did not act. The God of the Bible, it seemed, DID act--to free the Israelites from the Egyptians, for example. So how could it be that the God of the Bible existed when so much pain exists and so many prayers for rescue go un-answered?

Ehrman's answer: he doesn't. If there is a God, he/she/it is far off and un-involved in this world.

And secondly, if the answer the problem of suffering is human choice (the classic "free will" defense offered by Christians and by D'Souza that night) is it not possible that God could have created a world where free will existed while suffering does not? In heaven, for example, Christians seem to believe that somehow freedom will exist while suffering will not. Is it necessary to have suffering to have free will?

Here's my shots at answering the first of these really good, really thoughtful objections posed by Dr. Ehrman.

The first question: God intervenes in the Bible, but there's no evidence of such intervention today, ergo there is no God like that. This seems to me to take the extraordinary works of God and mistake them for normative workings of God.

The OT story of the Israelites being freed from Egypt? That happens after 430 years. That's right: 430 years. That's thousands of prayers later, God acts. If you took a snapshot at any given moment, it certainly did not appear that God was particularly interventionist.

The Bible is indeed full of miraculous and wonderful saving, very interventionist, acts of God. And those are recorded precisely because they were miraculous, they were outside the normal workings of physics and nature and politics and military.

But these are recorded in order that the character of God might be made known, not to establish a normal operating procedure for how God will behave in every circumstance. God does act, in his timing, in his way. And when he does act, there is no force or army or kingdom or natural cause that can stand against him. That's what we learn from his interventions in the Scriptures.

And in regard to today--who knows how much suffering actually is relieved by God's working?

There are literally millions of testimonies, stories, all over the world of this same God working to do miraculous things to save people from all sorts of suffering. Not every time. But sometimes. Certainly some of those stories are bogus, and most are simply un-prove-able...just like in the Bible.

But to the woman or man of faith, with eyes to see and ears to hear, the stories bear a striking family resemblance, the flair and flavor of the same Artist at work.

This doesn't answer the question of why God chooses to intervene sometimes and not at other times. But let's not paint the false picture of a God who moves at the slightest whim of people in the Scriptures who has suddenly disappeared today.