How the Bible Explains Suffering

do it is an extraordinary pleasure to welcome professor bart ermann today professor ehrmann burst on the scene in 1993. with a book that was devoured by his fans entitled the orthodox corruption of scripture the effect of early christological controversies on the text of the new testament the scene was the small scholarly community and persons devouring this bookmark persons such as me things by now have changed the colbert report fresh air cnn you name it but irman has spoken there he has written the books persons like me dream about writing when we read the da vinci code and keep thinking what is going on here i think it he wrote it and that is true for lots of other things professor erman's output has been extraordinary he has written about peter paul and mary magdalene misquoting jesus truth and fiction if there is such thing as truth in the da vinci code and lost christianities which he says is among the many children that constitute his books one of his favorite ones he has also just published a book entitled god's problem how the bible fails to answer our most important question why we suffer so you know it takes a particular passion a really passion to speak with such eloquence as professor irman does about such things as the new testament how it came to be and what that really means for those who read the text today and today it is my great pleasure and i'm sure you will see what i mean with this passion and i'm welcome professor ehrmann well thank you very much for that generous introduction i'm really very pleased to be with you today as a professor of religious studies i've always thought that i had one of the best conversation stoppers at a cocktail party uh you are gathered around with a a group of people whom you don't know and uh drinking wine and somebody comes up and asks so so what do you do and you reply i teach at the university oh great what do you teach i teach new testament oh that must be interesting and you can see the the the mental file going trying to think of a follow-up question uh well more recently i've come up with a better conversation stopper i'm at the cocktail party and somebody comes up to me and they say so what are you working on i'm writing a book what's it on it's on suffering oh what are you doing next uh so suffering is one of those topics that uh people as a rule don't want to talk about but everybody has an opinion on and i i suppose it makes sense that everybody has an opinion about suffering because everybody has suffered and everybody knows people who have suffered and uh everybody can read the newspaper and can see what kind of excruciating suffering there is around the world i published my book on uh god's problem how the bible fails to answer our most important question why we suffer i published this book a couple of months ago and since then i've gotten hundreds of emails from people most of them are very well meaning emails and a number of them are uh intent on telling me what the answer is and so in an email of 12 lines uh one can answer the problem uh that has uh plagued the human race since time immemorial uh and i i and i appreciate these emails and i i appreciate the thought that goes behind them but one wonders if you can really solve the problem of suffering in 12 12 lines well some people think that you can as i give talks about suffering around the country i am impressed by the number of people who who are sure that they they know what the answer the answer is my thinking on suffering actually began about 20 years ago i was teaching at the time at rutgers university and they had a course on the books called the problem of suffering in the biblical traditions dealing with both hebrew bible and new testament and they wanted me to teach this course and i thought it would be a good course to teach in part because virtually everybody that i knew who thought about this issue had a set answer to why they're suffering in the world it's the free will response that sometimes i call the robot answer which goes like this human beings were given free will by god and since human beings uh were not they weren't programmed like robots just to obey they were given the ability to obey or disobey and since people are free to love god they can also they're free to hate and since they're free to do good they're also free to do evil and so that's why there's so much suffering in the world is because of free will or as i say the robot solution and i think that in fact there's a lot to be said for this i mean obviously there a lot of evil in the world happens because people have the free will to do it but of course it doesn't answer everything it doesn't answer why there are tsunamis and hurricanes and earthquakes and other natural disasters free will leaves a lot of things out of the equation and so i thought it'd be interesting to teach a class on what the bible has to say about suffering and one of the things that struck me in teaching the class is that the bible has a lot of different things to say about suffering as it has a lot of different things to say about a lot of different topics uh some parts of the bible think that uh that the reason people suffer is because they've they've sinned against god and god is punishing them so uh suffering comes as a penalty from from god for wrongful acts other other parts of the bible think that it's not god who's punishing people it is evil forces in the world that are opposed to god that are punishing people there are some parts of the bible that think suffering is a test of faith to see whether you will remain faithful to god even when things go bad some authors of the bible think that suffering is a huge mystery that we can't ever understand why they're suffering and even to ask why we suffer is itself virtually blasphemous some authors of the bible simply think that chaos happens and sometimes we get in the way and so i thought it'd be interesting to teach this class at rutgers on the problem of suffering and to uh and to deal with it turned out the biggest problem i had in my class was convincing my 19 and 20 year old new jersey middle upper class white students that there was a problem and so uh so this was this was uh this was actually in the mid-80s it was during one of the horrible ethiopian famines and i i resorted to doing things like bringing in pictures from the new york times of women starving to death with children on their breasts starving to death pointing these to pointing my students to these pictures and saying this is a problem uh and well by the end of the semester i think they at least got that that point uh down what the way i set up this class was by talking about what is the classical uh problem of suffering which is the problem of uh typically traditionally called theodicy uh the word theodicy comes from two greek words that mean god's justice and the question of theodicy is how can god be just given the state of things in this world given the pain and misery all around us how can we possibly think that god is just and often this problem of theodicy is set up as a kind of logical problem the logical problem involves three statements that are typically made in the judeo-christian tradition each of which is seems to be true on its own but when you put the three together there seems to be a contradiction and so these are the three statements first that god is all-powerful second god is all loving third there is suffering how do you reconcile these three statements if god is all-powerful he can do anything he wants including he he can prevent suffering if god's all loving he certainly wants to prevent suffering he doesn't want people to suffer and yet they're suffering so how does one explain all three statements being true simultaneously throughout the history of christian thought there have been two basic approaches to dealing with this problem of theodicy one approach is to deny one of the three statements so one could deny for example that god is all-powerful this is the approach taken by rabbi harold kushner in his very popular book when bad things happen to good people i used this book in my class at rutgers that year that i taught this course my students started calling it when bad books are written by good people the um the uh the point of the book is that uh god in fact really wants to help you when you suffer he wishes he could prevent the suffering he he wishes there was something he could do but his hands are tied and so he he can stand by you and and help you through your suffering and he can comfort you in your suffering he can make you face your suffering god is more like instead of the kind of great grandfather in the sky he's more like your mother uh your mother in this guy who really puts her arm around you and kind of gets you through it but there's nothing he can do his hands are tied he can't prevent suffering so god god is not all powerful well for a lot of people that's a satisfying solution for other people it doesn't really seem like god is much of a god if he can't do what he wants and if if he can't intervene in the world then in what sense is he really god there are other people who want to deny the second proposition that god is all loving this comes very close to the position that you find in some of the writings of elie wiesel many people have become reacquainted with his book knight his classic another book of his is called god on trial where in effect wiesel finds god uh guilty for crimes against humanity uh so that he's not loving in any traditional sense so one could deny that god's all loving or one could deny that they're suffering but there aren't too many people who want to go that route since one just needs to look around the world a little bit so one could deny one way of getting around the problem is denying one of the three statements another way of getting around it is to is to call on some kind of extenuating circumstance that can explain it all that there's some something that explains all three things by bringing something else in from the outside for example this idea that you're suffering because god's punishing you god might be all-powerful and he might be loving and he might be causing you to suffer precisely in order to get you to change your ways and so that's an extenuating circumstance that can make a sense of of suffering well in any event these were the uh these were the issues that i was dealing with uh in my class uh at rutgers 20 years ago and at the time when i finished teaching this class i thought you know that was kind of interesting i i think maybe i'd like to write write about it then i thought you know you're only 30 years old you're not old enough to write a book on suffering so about three years ago i was fishing around for the next thing to write i'd written a lot of kind of things that were on sort of a similar line i thought you know i wouldn't mind going back to that problem of suffering book and i thought no you're only 50 years old you're too young to write the book then i thought you know when i'm 80 years old i'm going to think you're too young to write the book and so i just decided to go and write the book and so i did and so that's that's what the book is about is about the problem of suffering as dealt with in the bible specifically how do the authors of the bible deal with suffering and the reason i think this is an important topic is because whatever one's view of the bible happens to be whether one actually believes in the bible as somehow inspired scripture or not for everyone the bible is the most important book in our history of the history of our civilization without any without parallel really this is the most important book and it's worthwhile seeing what the authors of the bible have to say about this most important uh question so what i'm going to do in the rest of my lecture is look at two of the major answers to suffering that one finds in the bible an answer that dominates the hebrew bible and an answer that dominates the new testament and i'm not saying that one view the the hebrew bible view is not also found in the new testament new testament if you not also found the hebrew bible they're actually found throughout the but but there are two views that dominate both testaments and then after that i'll talk about the view that i find myself to be personally most palatable so first a view that is very common throughout the uh throughout the hebrew bible is a view that is in fact embraced by the prophets the prophets such as isaiah and jeremiah ezekiel hosea joel amos all all of the prophets of the hebrew bible in fact i would argue that all of them have the same basic view about why why they're suffering specifically the prophets were concerned why the people of god suffer to understand what the prophets have to say about this i need to provide a little bit of background the prophets many of the prophets explicitly were rooted in traditions found in ancient israel that god at some point in the in the past had saved israel from a disastrous situation that it was experiencing as it was enslaved to a foreign nation this is found in the exodus traditions you find in in the book of exodus the basic line is that that the children of israel had gone into egypt to escape a famine and while there they had become enslaved and they served as slaves to the egyptians for 400 years but god raised up a savior for the for the israelites moses who uh performed ten plagues against the egyptian pharaoh uh so that the pharaoh then drove the people out of his land and then had second thoughts and started chasing them ended up at the red sea moses depart parted the red sea the whole charleston heston thing and uh and uh the egyptian army was drowned the people of israel were saved and uh they ended up getting the law of god on mount sinai and then they eventually got the promised land these traditions were taken quite seriously by many people in ancient israel and that god had in fact intervened on behalf of the people uh in order to save them from their slavery there were some theological implications that were drawn by some thinkers in ancient israel first that god is all-powerful more powerful than the egyptians for example second that god is on the side of israel and has chosen israel to be his people and third that god will intervene on behalf of his people when they get into trouble those were the theological implications drawn from the exodus tradition as time went on however there were historical problems with these theological implications because if god is powerful and on the side of israel and willing to intervene on its behalf why is it that israel continues to experience one disaster after another drought and famine and pestilence war military defeat eventually the northern part of the kingdom of israel was destroyed by the assyrians in the 8th century bce 150 years later the southern part of the kingdom was destroyed by the babylonians then there were the persians then there were the the greeks and it just went on and on how does one explain the fact that israel continues to suffer despite the fact that god is on its side and god has chosen it to be his to to be his god and they to be his people the prophets of scripture had answers to why the people of god continued to suffer as an example of this answer that is found throughout the prophets i'll read a couple of brief passages from the book of amos one of the earliest authors among the prophets amos chapter 3 verse 2. this is god speaking god says to his people israel you only have i known of all the families of the earth therefore i will punish you for your iniquities why is it that israel suffers because god is punishing them that's the prophetic solution the people have broken god's law god is angry with them and he's punishing them to get them to turn around so that they'll repent if they repent of their sin then god will cause the suffering to abate and good times will return amos goes on to explain that god has created all sorts of havoc among his people in order to get them to repent and so he says in chapter 4 i this is god speaking i gave you cleanness of teeth in all your cities he says not that he this isn't he invented toothpaste or something it means that they've they've had nothing to eat cleanness of teeth and lack of bread in all your places yet you did not return to me says the lord in other words god created a famine he starved people to get them to return i also withheld the rain from you when there were three months to the harvest i would send rain on one city and send no rain on another city so two or three towns wandered to another town to drink water and they were not satisfied and yet you did not return to me says the lord so he created a drought that didn't work either i struck you with blight and mildew i laid waste your gardens and your vineyards the locusts devoured your fig trees and your olive trees yet you did not return to me says the lord i sent among you a pestilence after the manner of egypt i killed your young men with the sword this is god speaking i killed your young men with the sword i carried away your horses i made the stench of your cap go up into your nostrils yet you did not return to me says the lord i overthrew some of you as when god overthrew sodom and gomorrah and yet you did not return to me says the lord therefore thus i will do to you o israel because i will do this to you prepare to meet your god o israel in this context meeting your god is not a happy prospect that is not something you want god says you've had it bad so far you've had famine and drought and pestilence and war and people are dying right and left and now you're really going to get it more specifically amos thinks that that there's going to be an invasion from an enemy from the north and the nation is going to be wiped out in a military defeat why is it that israel is suffering because god wants them to turn back to him they refuse and so the punishment continues this is what i call the prophetic answer to why the people of god suffer it's a it's a view found not only in the prophets it's found throughout much of the historical narratives of the hebrew bible i mean the bible begins of course with adam and eve they're told not to eat the fruit they eat the fruit they get punished the whole world becomes wicked and how does god respond he destroys the whole world with a flood killing everybody on it except for noah and his family and so it goes through the historical narrative of the hebrew bible sin brings punishment people suffer because they have violated god's will because they have sinned one might ask whether this is a very uh accept whether this is acceptable at all as an understanding of why people suffer uh in our own context for example is it really true that suffering comes because god is punishing people people continue to feel this way whenever something bad happens and someone says what have i done to deserve this right well the whole idea behind that is that you've done something that deserves merits the punishment or when somebody says why me well that that implies that there's some reason for what's happening but is this really true is it true that every five seconds a child dies of starvation because god's trying to punish somebody or that every minute 25 people die from drinking unclean drinking water every hour in our world 700 people die of malaria is this because god's punishing people is this why tsunamis hit the indian ocean and kill 300 000 people overnight or why a holocaust happens that kills six million jews or a purging in cambodia that kills two million cambodians under the khmer rouge we still have this answer with us today but i certainly don't think that uh very many of us are going to find it a very satisfying answer but it is surprising how many people have it i was on a radio show a couple months ago uh i was in lincoln nebraska and i was on this radio show with a pastor who told me that a couple months before this he had a woman in his congregation whose 12 year old daughter had died of a brain tumor and he was talking with this woman and this woman told him she knew why her daughter had died it was because she this mother had promised god that she would quit smoking and she hadn't done it and so god was punishing her well uh yeah so uh most of us don't find this very satisfying uh and luckily there are other answers in the bible besides this one uh this answer which dominates the hebrew bible can be found to some extent in the new testament is one of the many answers that biblical authors had for suffering another answer that i want to look at is one that is found in the latest book of the hebrew bible and comes to be a very dominant understanding among jews in early judaism and then among christians the followers of jesus it's a response to suffering that i'll call the apocalyptic response the term apocalyptic first needs to be explained the word apocalyptic comes from a greek word apocalypses which means an unveiling or a revealing this view is called an unveiling or revealing because jewish thinkers began to think that god had revealed to them the heavenly secrets that could make sense of earthly realities god had revealed the heavenly secrets that could make sense of earthly realities specifically these apocalyptic thinkers came to understand that suffering was not coming as a punishment from god suffering was coming from other sources in the world besides god before i explain what this uh what the view itself is let me say how we have information about this particular view that became prominent prominent in early judaism daniel the book of daniel is probably the latest of the hebrew bible books to be written possibly 150 160 years before the life of of jesus and it embodies this apocalyptic point of view as i'll explain in a second jewish apocrypha which are outside the traditional protestant canon of scripture the apocrypha also contained books that relate this view and the dead sea scrolls which were discovered in the 1940s also widely contained this apocalyptic point of view it became a view that was dominant among jews in the uh time of the the beginning of christianity uh and it ended up being a view that dominated the new testament itself the basic view of the apocalyptic response is this god is not causing suffering there are enemies of god who are cosmic forces in the world that are causing suffering god has personal enemies these enemies include the devil and his demons in the apocalyptic view god has a personal opponent the devil throughout most of the hebrew bible you don't find a devil figure at all you don't find him in the prophets for example but apocalyptic thinkers started thinking that god had a personal opponent who stood over against him the devil and that just as god has angels under him the devil has demons under him these uh these forces had other had other powers aligned with them for example god had the power of life and the devil had the power of death god had the power of righteousness and the devil had the power of sin in the apocalyptic view sin is not simply something that you do wrong it's not simply an act of disobedience sin for an apocalyptic jew is a cosmic force that's in the world that is trying to enslave you to force you to do things contrary to what you want to force you to violate god's will the psychology of this is you know there are people sometimes who just uh they do things that are against their best interests and they just can't stop themselves and what is that that you know what the right thing to do is and you can't do it or you know that something is wrong and you just can't stop yourself i've never had this experience myself but but i but i've heard that some people have had this experience and and what is that well for an apocalyptic jew that is the power of sin that is enslaving you and making you do something that's wrong so there are these cosmic powers in the world that are forcing you to do things wrong and these cosmic powers are what is bringing suffering in the world it's the devil and the demons and the other cosmic forces but eventually god is going to overthrow these forces and bring in a good kingdom on earth in which there'll be no more suffering there'll be no more pain or misery there'll be no more sin or death that's the basic view of the apocalyptic response but i want to unpack it by explaining it in greater detail by talking about four major tenets of apocalyptic thinking four major botanists first of all dualism uh and the apocalypticists were basically duelists they thought there are two fundamental components of reality as i pointed out these are cosmic forces the forces of good and the forces of evil but the thing to re to to know about these apocalypticists is they thought that everything and everybody participates on one side or the other everybody sides either with god or with the devil either with good or with evil so that there's no neutral territory you have to choose which side you're going to be on if you side with god in this world you are likely going to suffer because the powers in control of this world are the powers of evil so that siding with god is not going to make you rich and famous and prosperous what's going to happen if you sided with god is the powers of evil are going to get you but there's going to come an a a future life in which you will be rewarded so you have to decide which side you're going to be on the the people who are rich and powerful prosperous by the way famous people they're obviously on the side of evil this is this is explaining why it is that the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer the prophets had a hard time explaining that but the apocalyptis had a very easy time explaining that the reason the wicked prospers because they're on the sides that they're on the side of evil that has dominance in this world at the time for the time this cosmic dualism was worked out in a historical scenario apocalyptus believed that there were two ages of this world there's this age that we live in now and there's an age to come the age we're living in now is controlled by the forces of evil and it's just going to get worse and worse but god is going to intervene and there will become a cataclysmic break at the end of this age and god will bring in a new age a new kingdom there'll be a utopian-like existence in which there'll be no more pain or misery and so you have this age and the age to come the kingdoms of evil now and the kingdom of god yet to come so these uh these jewish apocalypticists were dualistic they were pessimistic they did not think that we could improve our life in this world we can't improve our lot we can't make things better we can't decide which nations to uh to attack in the middle east so as to stabilize or destabilize the region we we can't decide to put more cops on the beat or more teachers in the classroom i mean we can do all these things but it's not going to matter because the powers of evil are going to increase in their intensity and their their power until at the end of this age literally all hell is going to break out and there's nothing we can do to stop it things are going to get worse but at the end of this age there will be a divine vindication god will vindicate his name and his people he will redeem this world that he created he himself will once again become sovereign this vindication at the end of this age will involve a judgment the powers of evil will be destroyed and taken away and everybody who has sided with them will face punishment those who are good however who have sided with god will be given an eternal reward an eternal reward so there will be a future judgment everybody will ju be judged and when i say everybody will be judged i mean literally everybody you shouldn't think that you can side with the forces of evil become rich and powerful and prosperous and then die and get away with it you can't get away with it because at the end of this age there's going to be a resurrection of the dead god is going to raise everybody bodily from the dead everybody who's ever lived will face judgment you can't get away with siding with evil and succeeding because of it because god's going to raise you from the dead to face judgment and there's not a sweet thing you can do to stop him you will face either an eternal reward or an eternal punishment and the choice is yours well uh so i should point out that within the history of ancient israelite thought most ancient jews thought either that when you died your soul went to some kind of shadowy place called sheol where everybody kind of went whether they were good or wicked they all sort of went there and that's where they lived forever other jews thought you died and that was the end of the story that was it it was only with apocalyptic thinking that the idea that you were going to live forever came about with apocalypticists in a sense immortality came into into being and immortality came into being as a kind of theodicy an explanation about how things can be so rotten now they're rotten now because they're going to be made right in the future kingdom of god but this was not a belief in the immortality of the soul per se in the sense of the soul apart from the body apocalypticists did not think your soul was going to live on after death your body was going to be reconstituted and you're going to live forever bodily this is the beginning though of the idea of having some kind of afterlife after this death with the resurrection of the dead that was going to transpire at the end of this age well when is the age going to end when will it all happen jewish apocalypticists believed it was going to be imminent it was right around the corner things had gotten bad and they were just about as bad as they possibly could be god was soon going to intervene and overthrow the forces of evil and set up his kingdom on earth and when would this be truly i tell you some of you standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of god has come in power the words of jesus mark chapter 9 verse 1 or as he said later to his disciples this generation will not pass away before all these things take place jesus anticipated that the end of the age was coming within his own generation that his disciples would live to see it that the kingdom of god would arrive in power it's not surprising that jesus followers after his death continued on with his vision the apostle paul for example thinking that he himself would be alive when jesus returned and down to the present day there continue to be christians who think that in fact the end is coming sometime next tuesday afternoon this is an apocalyptic view that the end of the age in fact is imminent this apocalyptic view is dominant throughout the new testament it predominates in the teachings of jesus and in the writings of paul and in most of the writings of the new testament including of course the book of revelation i think that there are some serious upsides to this way of looking at suffering and why they're suffering this view takes evil seriously it takes evil as a power that is bigger than any of us the holocaust is bigger than the individuals who made it happen this takes evil as a very serious phenomenon in our world it asserts that god will eventually make right all that is wrong that is a hopeful thought that eventually god will make right all that is wrong that evil does not have the last word but god has the last word and that death is not the end of the story this is a view that can provide hope in a world of hopelessness at the same time i think that there are some downsides to this point of view one obvious downside is that it makes possible moral complacency in the face of evil and suffering if in fact things are just going to get worse and there's nothing we can do about it and they're going to get worse and worse until god intervenes then what's the point of working for justice why worry about homelessness and poverty why worry about hunger why worry about countries that are falling apart and destabilizing why worry about any of that if in fact it's only going to come become better when god intervenes this apocalyptic view can and has led to moral complacency and i think that's a problem the other problem is i think sort of the obvious problem is that this is this view is based on a belief a false belief in the imminent end of all things that everything's going to end pretty soon now this may not be such a big problem in berkeley but let me tell you it's a big problem in north carolina where i teach the buckle of the bible belt i moved to north carolina in 1988 i moved there from new jersey which was quite a shock when i moved to north carolina in 1988 i started getting phone calls from the local newspapers they wanted to know if it was true that the bible predicted that the end of the world was going to happen in september of 1988 i didn't know what they were talking about but they told me that a book had been written that said indicated that the rapture was going to occur in 1988. now for those of you who don't know the rapture is when jesus comes back from heaven and takes his believers out of this world before the great tribulation that takes place on earth when the antichrist arises so the rapture is when jesus comes back well it turns out somebody had written a book this guy's name was edgar weissent and before he wrote this book he he literally was a rocket engineer for nassau so he was a smart guy and he had written a book called 88 reasons why the rapture will occur in 1988. this book was taken very seriously in north carolina i had students whose parents literally sold the farm because they knew that jesus was coming back and the rapture would take place in 1988 and this this book this book was in there were two million copies of this book in print in circulation and was taken very seriously in the south he had 88 reasons why this was going to happen so i'll just give you one of the 88 so in in matthew's gospel jesus disciples want to know when is the end going to come and jesus says learn a lesson from the fig tree when the fig tree puts forth its leaves you know that summer is near so too when these things take place you know that the end is near truly i tell you this generation will not pass away before all these things take place so wisenet interprets this uh the saying of jesus what does it mean about the fig tree well in the bible the fig tree is often used as an image for the nation of israel when the fig tree puts forth its leaves well that's that's in the springtime when the victory has been dead through the winter it comes back to life in the spring so when does israel come back to life well israel comes back to life in 1948 when israel again began becomes a sovereign state this generation will not pass away before all these things take place how long is a generation in the bible 40 years 1948 plus 40 bingo 1988. that was one of his 88 reasons he had 87 others that i won't bother you with uh jesus rap the rapture was going to occur during the jewish festival of rosh hashanah in september of 1988. now some people pointed out to edgar weissnet that jesus actually said no one knows the day or the hour when the end will come and weissen was completely unfazed by that he said yes it's true i don't know the day or the hour i just know the week and so it goes of course what happens of course rosh hashanah came and went and jesus never appeared and so weissen did what people always do in those situations he wrote another book and and in the next book what he he said that he made a mistake in his calculations because he forgot that when they created the modern calendar they didn't include a year zero so you know it goes from one bce to one ce or you know one bc to one a d it doesn't there's no year zero so he was off by a year so in fact it was going to happen in 1989 and and so it goes uh world without end amen is there an alternative perspective to either the prophetic or the apocalyptic views well there's a lot of different perspectives in the bible i'm going to end my last couple minutes talking about another view that i personally uh relate to much better than either of the preceding two this is a view that's found in the hebrew bible book ecclesiastes one of the books that i think is much underread by readers of the bible ecclesiastes claims to be written by king solomon the wisest man on earth in fact it wasn't written by solomon it was written hundreds of years after solomon but it continues i think to be a very wise book ecclesiastes view is more or less summarized in its very opening lines vanity of vanities all is vanity says the preacher the word vanity in this uh book ecclesiastes is a hebrew word hevel hevel is a word that is used to refer to the mist that's around for a little while and then burns off so it's here for a little while and it's gone it's a word that that implies transience impermanence uh vanity in the sense that that uh that there's no substance to it the author of ecclesiastes looked around the world and he saw that in fact uh that it was all a very transient life that we live he looked and he saw that there was no justice in the world the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper and the author of ecclesiastes did not think that this problem was going to be solved in the afterlife he does not believe in the immortality of the soul he does not believe that after you die you continue to live for the author of ecclesiastes this life is not a dress rehearsal for something that's going to happen later this is not a dry run this is it this life is all we have and it is transient and fleeting how then should we live this life we should live life as fully as we can in the present this life is not going to be here forever it's not going to be here for long and so we should enjoy what we eat we should enjoy what we drink we should enjoy our work we should enjoy our spouses we should enjoy our friends and families we should grab life for all it can give us because this life is all that we're going to have that's the view of ecclesiastes and it's a view that i find most acceptable the problem of course is that there are a lot of people who can't enjoy life to its fullest people who are suffering because of all sorts of reasons because of natural disaster because of poverty because of homelessness i take as an implication of grabbing life for all that we can that we should work in order to make life better for others so that they too can grab life for all they can my conclusion i'm not sure at the end of the day there's an answer to suffering or at least there are lots of different answers sometimes contradictory answers but even if we don't have an answer to why there are tsunamis and hurricanes and earthquakes and genocides and murder and homelessness and poverty even though we don't have an answer i think we can have a response our response should be ourselves personally to live life to its fullest because this is all we have we should enjoy what we eat we should eat good food we should drink good wine we should drink micro brewed beer we should we should enjoy our families we should enjoy our friends we should stay up late drinking single malt scotch and talking about the big issues we should enjoy life as much as we can for as long as we can and we should also work to make life happy and satisfy satisfying for other people who are less fortunate than ourselves we all can do more in fact we can volunteer more we can give more money to deal with issues of local poverty and homelessness we can give more to international relief efforts we can do more and we should do more because this life is all there is and we should grab for it all that we can thank you very much uh i have a question which is um how does your answer solve the problem of suffering in other words do you believe there is an omnipotent holy benevolent deity uh personally i do not oh i see so nothing you you are not presenting a theodicy then uh no i i am saying my personal view actually what i deal with in my book is to explain how in fact this problem of suffering led me away from from belief in a personal uh omnipotent powerful loving god so i don't personally believe that such a being exists i don't believe that there i don't subscribe to the judeo-christian understanding of god i think though so that i don't have so i don't you my answer to suffering is not that god's involved with it because i don't think god is involved with it i think suffering comes because we live in a random and chaotic world and sometimes we get in the way of it so the solution so that's why i say there isn't necessarily an answer but there is a response right so that you really given kind of a historical description of what the bible says yes i'm not you haven't attempted to to provide a theodicy no the only the i'm not giving a theodicy because i don't believe in god uh but i am saying that at least one book of the bible seems to me to give a satisfying answer to the relationship of humans to suffering which is the book of ecclesiastes and why is that satisfying i mean what are what are the criteria that make that a satisfying response uh it's the least problematic answer okay thanks i was wondering um where do you get your morality and how do you know that or just personally why how do you know that it's not good that people suffer so where do you get your morality that tells you that suffering is bad yes good thank you it's a good question you know when i was a when i was a christian i thought that the only way a person could have morality is if there was some kind of authority figure over them telling them what was right and wrong whether it was the church or your parents or god you know that god was sort of an ultimate uh arbiter of morality and i was really afraid when i was thinking i i only became an agnostic nine or ten years ago i've been a christian for my entire life and when i was reflecting on whether i really wanted to take that leap or not the one thing that held me one of the things that held me back is i thought that it would lead to a life of complete immorality that in fact you know i'd become this complete reprobate and it would just be one party after the other and i wouldn't be able to you know then i thought well maybe that wouldn't be so bad so uh but no no seriously i i i thought that would happen and it didn't happen and i think that i had a false belief that you have to have a divine figure giving you morality before you know what's moral my own view is that as an agnostic without the existence of god how do i decide what's good and what's bad i have a fairly traditional utilitarian view whatever's good for the most people is good why is it that i don't want people to suffer i don't know i made that way i mean humans are made that way you see somebody suffering and you don't want them to suffer so i don't have deep philosophical reasons for it it's just part of being human right what do you mean by humans are made that way well humans are made that way or they evolve that way but they are that way oh yeah and one other thing is um do you think that truth is always based on what makes sense to people or do you think that truth is there despite what might not make sense or what might not be comfortable to people um well i don't believe in the capital t truth i don't believe in some kind of platonic form of truth that's sitting up there that we need to discover so i mean i think that truth i don't i don't look upon truth that way it's some kind of objective thing that's out there someplace thank you you're welcome i'm not a christian anymore either and so the the christians that i have sympathy for or some commonality are the ones that seem to read the bible i think pope might even be in this category where you just you read it and you don't understand all of it and it seems like there's contradictions so you just end up saying that it's a big mystery that you don't quite understand and i'm thinking so i'm curious actu more specifically i'm wondering uh what you think of some of the modern interpreters of the bible modern christians what do you i'm assuming that you might feel that some people have sort of the view that i already said and then other people try to explain away the contradictions and i'm wondering if c.s lewis is maybe the type of person who walks away from the bible saying like oh it's very clear to me what the response to suffering is where someone maybe like gary wills or kierkegaard is more of a i'm trying to make sense of this and maybe this is an answer but it's still bigger than i am and it's and it's more of a mystery right well i mean there are a range of their range of thinkers who deal with the problem of suffer suffering some of them are more biblically oriented than others uh and uh i mean kierkegaard wasn't particularly biblically oriented in the way uh that c.s lewis was and c.s lewis isn't as particularly oriented toward the bible as as new testament uh interpreters are and so there's a whole range a whole range and i think uh you know in my uh in my book on this i'm not really dealing with uh issues of uh philosophical approaches toward suffering uh so i uh it's really more dealing with what the bible itself actually has to say about it so yeah i am an atheist as well as a revolutionary and a communist and i wanted to say that i really appreciated a lot of what you said about suffering in particular that if there were such a god you know why is all this suffering happening um i wanted to ask you a question um there's a new book called away with all gods by bob avakian and one of the question it asks is is believing in god's actually harmful and is believing in god and religion does it stand in the way of emancipating humanity and it makes the point that religion is a very negative role in particular because it it blinds people to the way the world really is i was wondering if you could comment on that yeah i thank you i haven't i haven't read that book somebody earlier gave me a copy i think a group group of you all are here uh thank you uh and uh so i don't have anything directly to say to that because i haven't read the book i i have read the other uh neo-atheists as they're being called dawkins and hitchens and and um sam harris and um i think the thing that is most disappointing to me about these authors is that they know very little about religion as a rule and they make claims about religion that simply uh are are sophomoric and silly and that i think if there's going to be a bona fide attack on religion it has to be somebody who actually understands religion and doesn't make claims about religion that aren't true i mean sam harris acts as if everything that's evil that ever happened in the world is because of religion well i think that's completely bogus i think religion in fact does a lot of good as well as a lot of evil and that you can't blame a religion for uh for everything wrong that's happened but again i haven't read this book so i i can't really comment on it one quick comment and a question uh my comments is that as jesus said it's coming back soon or within this lifetime two thousand years later you haven't shown up i think there should be a statue of limitation and which just says forget it uh my question do you mention uh exodus in the ur deuteronomy history uh in your opinion how much of that is uh really history and how much is that bunch of hurtsmen sitting around fireplace shooting the bull okay so these are my two choices i think that the uh i i personally am skeptical about most of the uh incidents narrated in exodus and the deuteronomistic history i think the the later you get in the deuteronomistic history the more you're actually getting history but uh but i am um closer to uh those scholars who call themselves minimalists when it comes to things like the exodus i don't really believe that there was a parting of the red sea and that the entire egyptian army got drowned and that you know and that there were millions of these israelites wandering around the wilderness i i just i don't think that happened yeah i really appreciated everything you said but at the end you you talking about kind of a summation about suffering maybe there's not an answer but at least there should be a response which i find kind of agnostic in itself if if we look at the world and the suffering that's happening in the world and where that's coming from there is obviously an answer it seems to me i mean you have you know everybody in the world producing everything you have a small group of people that are in control of that and we could take care of all the starving and the and people dying of thirst and preventable diseases almost overnight yes and and to say that you know all we can have as a as a response to that and not an answer seems again to go back to this biblical understanding that the poor will always be with us and and uh this is just human nature and all of these other things that the bible you know and other religions really put forward so it it seems to me that there's still even within what you're saying are kind of a default back to the sense of morality which in fact belief in god belief in things unseen and biblical in other ancient scriptures yes have as a substance no i i understand how you're hearing me and i think you're not hearing me the way i'm i'm mean to be heard uh that that's not what i really mean at all part of our response to suffering is in fact to deal with just what you're talking about i mean we are at a moment in history when there is absolutely no reason for there to be starvation in the world we have more food in the world than is necessary for everybody to be overweight we can solve malaria we can solve all sorts of things so i don't mean that we should just be complacent about that i think we in fact really and you know we lack the political will it's the that's the only thing we lack the political will to do what's necessary um so i completely agree with that but when i say that there's no answer what i i just mean in kind of the philosophical sense i mean why is there a tsunami that kills 300 000 people i mean it just doesn't you know for some of us it just baffles our minds over you know a couple years ago there was this earthquake in the himalayas that left uh fi that killed 50 000 people and left 3 million people facing winter without shelter and i'm not so when i'm saying is there an answer to that i'm saying there's no i mean stuff happens thank you very much you

Channel: Bart D. Ehrman

Views: 90,577

Rating: 4.7307692 out of 5

Keywords: UC Berkeley, Foerster Lectures, Bart Ehrman, Susanna Elm, Suffering, New Testament, Atheist, Agnostic, The Bible (Religious Text)

Id: bz-MQgzxua8

Length: 58min 6sec (3486 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2015