Bart D. Ehrman is a professor of religious studies and his book is
titled “God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important
Question – Why We Suffer.” A graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary,
Ehrman trained to be a scholar of New Testament Studies and a minister.
Born-again as a teenager, devoted to the scriptures (he memorized entire
books of the New Testament), strenuously devout, he nevertheless lost
his faith because, he reports, “I could no longer reconcile the claims
of faith with the fact of life . . . I came to the point where I simply
could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who
is in charge.” “The problem of suffering,” he recalls, “became for me
the problem of faith.”
Much of the book is taken up with Ehrman’s examination of biblical
passages that once gave him solace, but that now deliver only unanswerable
questions: “Given [the] theology of selection – that God had chosen
the people of Israel to be in a special relationship with him – what
were Ancient Israelite thinkers to suppose when things did not go as
planned or expected? . . . . How were they to explain the fact that
the people of God suffered from famine, drought, and pestilence?”
Ehrman knows and surveys the standard answers to these questions –
God is angry at a sinful, disobedient people; suffering is redemptive,
as Christ demonstrated on the cross; evil and suffering exist so that
God can make good out of them; suffering induces humility and is an
antidote to pride; suffering is a test of faith – but he finds them
unpersuasive and as horrible in their way as the events they fail to
explain: “If God tortures, maims and murders people just to see how
they will react – to see if they will not blame him, when in fact he
is to blame – then this does not seem to me to be a God worthy of worship.”