Bart Ehrman. Photo by Coke Whitworth; ©2008 Endeavors.
Asking Why We Suffer
by Mark Derewicz
(filed under: religious studies)
God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer. By Bart Ehrman. HarperCollins, 294 pages, $25.95.
Last time we checked in with Bart Ehrman he had just published his best-selling book, Misquoting Jesus, in which he showed how scribes made many errors while copying the Bible and sometimes even added new material to the text. In his latest book, God’s Problem, Ehrman shows that the Bible is full of different and sometimes contradictory answers to the tough question of why humans suffer.
Ehrman says that Bible writers do give some good answers that we can relate to. Some people say they’ve suffered but then seen a purpose in it later. We’ve all done wrong, and sometimes people say they’ve experienced karmic justice.
But Ehrman says the Bible falls way short of explaining why the world is full of suffering.
After interpreting and deconstructing hundreds of Bible passages, Ehrman winds up agreeing with Ecclesiastes: why we suffer is a mystery. And that, Ehrman says, isn’t really an answer at all, if God is all-loving the way humans define all-loving. Ecclesiastes also says there’s no afterlife, so we might as well eat, drink, and be merry.
“My addendum to that,” Ehrman says, “is that it’s impossible to enjoy life fully if we know that other people are suffering. So part of embracing life should involve helping people who are suffering.”
Bart Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. God’s Problem is a New York Times best-seller. See the full transcript of the Endeavors interview with Bart Ehrman at http://research.unc.edu/endeavors/fall2008/.
