Ehrman calls the other answer to why God allows suffering found in the book of Job, “The Poetic Dialogues of Job: There Is No Answer” (172). Ehrman concludes that “God does not listen to the pleas of the innocent; he overpowers them by his almighty presence” (183). Ehrman writes that Job wanted a divine audience […]
Ehrman’s Problem 17: Humility Is Absent Without Leave Read More »
We come next to Ehrman’s chapter, “Does Suffering Make Sense?” In it he divides the book of Job into two separate answers and concludes, no surprise, that neither of them succeeds in answering our many questions. Ehrman even argues that the book of Job has two separate authors, but that’s just an assertion largely based
Ehrman’s Problem 16: Cosmic Issues He Doesn’t Understand Read More »
I mentioned previously that most apologists argue that the reason God allows evil is that it is a greater good for God to allow evil than to create a world where evil is impossible. For God to create a world with significantly free beings, He must allow these free beings to use their free will
Ehrman’s Problem 15: He Failed to See Eternity Read More »
Beginning on his first page of his chapter on “The Mystery of the Greater Good,” Ehrman relates his disappointment with God (125-126): If (IF!) there is a God, he is not the kind of being that I believed in as an evangelical: a personal deity who has ultimate power over this world and intervenes in
Ehrman’s Problem 14: He Misunderstood God’s Promises Read More »
For more than forty years Christians have appealed to what is called the “bibliographical test” as a means of establishing the New Testament’s (NT) transmissional accuracy. The bibliographical test examines the overall number of extant manuscripts (sometimes abbreviated to MSS or MS for the singular) and the difference between the date of the original writing,
The Bibliographical Test Updated Read More »
Chapter five of Bart Ehrman’s book, God’s Problem, is entitled “The Mystery of the Greater Good: Redemptive Suffering.” In it Ehrman writes, “Sometimes, for some biblical authors, suffering has a positive aspect to it. Sometimes God brings good out of evil, a good that would not have been possible if the evil had not existed.
Ehrman’s Problem 13—Spanking the Strawman… again Read More »
Many Christian parents are concerned that their kids may graduate from college no longer believing that Christianity is true. After all, the secular campus confronts them with questions about supposedly suppressed gospels, James Cameron supposedly finding the lost tomb of Jesus, the Zeitgeist movie madness, and erudite sounding “science” which proclaims that all the complexity
Next we come to one of the weirdest aspects of Ehrman’s problem project. Ehrman grouses (121-122): I don’t know if you’ve read any of the writings of the modern theodicists, but they are something to behold: precise, philosophically nuanced, deeply thought out, filled with esoteric terminology and finely reasoned explanations for why suffering does not
Ehrman’s Problem 12: Our Answer too “Finely Reasoned” Read More »
Ehrman begins his fourth chapter, “The Consequences of Sin,” by detailing horrific things humans do to each other. Then he asks “How can human beings… treat other human beings in this way?” (96). Indeed, much suffering is the result of people hurting each other.
Ehrman’s Problem 11: It’s Hard to Argue with the Consequences of Sin Read More »
You’ve probably heard the story about the blind men and the elephant. The story is supposed to help us understand that we can’t ever really know truth about God. Here’s the poem by John Godfrey Saxe: It was six men of Indostan To learning much inclined, Who went to see the Elephant (Though all of
Six Blind Idiots and an Elephant Read More »
