I have to admit that I was not all that pleased with the outcome of the Bart Ehrman-Dinesh D'Souza debate last night. I have enjoyed a number of D'Souza's writings, and am much more (obviously) in his camp, but don't feel that he well represented the biblical position on the problem of evil. Ehrman was at his best, raising all the right questions. I found D'Souza's answers mostly flat, unsatisfying, and not really representative of the biblical/Christian position.
(Parenthetically, I will note that I am not sure why D'Souza was the one chosen for this debate... there are a number of Christian theologians who have written incredible books on the problem of evil. D. A. Carson, William Lane Craig, NT Wright, Tim Keller, John Piper, and Bruce Little (at SEBTS)... just to name a few. I have never heard D'Souza as a "go to" guy for the problem of evil. Ehrman is one of our nation's leading critics; I'm not sure why he wasn't matched with someone who has written on the topic).
Ehrman raised a number of questions that went, for the most part, unanswered. Let me BRIEFLY (this is blog, not a book) sketch the beginnings of an answer to some of them, and point you to some resources if you'd like to go deeper.
Why would a good God allow suffering? D'Souza's answer, for the most part, went back to God using suffering to teach us something. We could never develop virtue (compassion, courage, etc) without danger, pain, and suffering in the world.
This may be partially true, but it ignores the most fundamental reason why suffering exists: OUR COSMIC TREASON AND REJECTION OF GOD.
At one point, Ehrman said, indignantly, "I reject the idea that all this suffering, the holocaust, etc, was necessary just to create virtue in us." I had to sympathize with Ehrman's retort! Did God really create tsunamis just to teach us bravery? Was the massacre of thousands of Jewish children, and millions of unborn today, necessary just to make us compassionate? That's not convincing to me as a reason why a good God would allow evil.
Well, if not, why couldn't God create a world where suffering didn't exist?
Quite simply, He did. "Shalom" (peace, harmony) ruled God's world, our sin brought that crashing down. God is so fundamental to shalom that when we rejected Him and His order, the entire universe literally began to unravel. We rage against the idea that we are rightfully cursed because of our sin, but that is the plain biblical truth, as offensive as it is. We think this bad world is worse than we good people deserve. The Bible flips that on its head: if anything, any goodness in the world is better than we bad people deserve. Our rejection of God deserves ultimate condemnation. The fact that we woke up this morning, and the sun shone on our face, and we had food, friends, and love, is undeserved. God, in HIs mercy, is allowing us a space to repent. If we do not, we will face what we rightfully deserve: eternal suffering.
Jesus said as much in Luke 13:1-5. When asked why certain people died in a natural disaster, and whether the victims were deserving of what happened, Jesus said, "Not at all! In fact, unless you repent, you will all face the same judgment."
If we suffer because God allows us to have free will, how can there be no suffering in heaven? Do we not have free will there? Ehrman's question here was an attempt to challenge the assertion that our suffering is the result of our free will. This is not a really well thought out objection, in my opinion. Being free to do something doesn't mean that we automatically want to do it. As a grown man, I am "free" to eat rat dung or to jump off the Dean Dome in an attempt to fly. Though I am technically "free" to do either (i.e., if I could figure out how to get up on the Dean Dome), I probably will never choose either--so long as I retain my sanity and my good taste.
The Christian doctrine is that those in heaven are indeed free, but have been given a heart redeemed and purified by Christ, so that they would freely choose to avoid wickedness, perversion, injustice and sin because they abhor it like I do rat dung. Because they have been healed, they will not choose the insanity of sin any more than I would chose to jump off the Dean Dome.
Why then, you may ask, did Adam and Eve choose to sin in paradise, and how were they different than the people in heaven? That is a good question. A & E possessed less "sight" than we will have in heaven. They were given enough sight that they could have chosen God, by faith, if they wanted. Sadly, they (we) did not. In heaven, for those whom Jesus has rescued, our eyes will be opened sufficiently and our hearts accordingly changed that we would never choose the filth of sin any more than Ehrman would choose to eat his own children.
What is ironic is that Ehrman's point--again, that there can be free will without suffering--does not really help his case at all. Even he acknowledges that a lot of suffering does indeed rise out of free will. We all recognize that at times we use our freedom to hurt each other! So, then, how can we eliminate the suffering that arises from free will? There are only 2 options: external control (whereby you take away people's freedom so that they can't hurt others) or internal change (whereby they are changed so they wouldn't want to hurt people). The former answer is the answer of the dictator, attempted in the 20th century by Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao Tse Tung. The latter is the Christian answer, enacted by Jesus Christ 2000 years ago when He died on a cross to purchase our forgiveness and produce a change of heart). These are the only real two solutions--change imposed from the outside, or change beginning on the inside! I'd much prefer Jesus to Stalin on this.
I don't understand why the cross was the necessary way to save us, and why God doesn't just go ahead and stop all evil... I would have done it differently! Ehrman never said these exact words, but this is the undertone of much of what he said. Ehrman did say, "If God is good, then He would want purposeless evil to be stopped. If God is all powerful, then He could stop it. That evil exists proves the Christian God could not exist."The hidden premise in this is that if there were a purpose in evil, Ehrman could perceive it, and if Ehrman can't perceive the purpose, then it must not exist. This is an extraordinary faith in his own powers of reasoning! This confidence, imho, is quite unfounded, if not illogical. Don't get me wrong, Ehrman is brilliant... but just think about it: if God is INFINITE in love, and INFINITE in power, does it now also follow He is INFINITE in wisdom? And if he is INFINITE in wisdom, and the magnitude of His wisdom exceeds ours as the magnitude of His power must exceed ours, does it not follow that there will be many things on earth we can't understand yet?
You can't have it both ways, Dr. Ehrman. If God is infinite in love and power, you have to concede He would be infinite in wisdom also. And if He is infinite in wisdom, of course there are things that your finite mind, though comparatively brilliant, cannot yet understand. Think about it: If God is as big as Christian doctrine teaches, and the immensity and complexity of creation demands, that He is, how could we possibly think we would understand all His purposes?
It's foolish to set ourselves up as the judge of the wisdom of God. That's like my 2 year old declaring herself the best judge of the political turmoil in Iran. Let's be temperate and rational about our own brilliance.
Is that unreasonable?
Where was God when the Holocaust was happening? Quite simply, He was on the cross. If the Christian revelation is true, then what was happening on the cross was truly staggering: the only ever truly innocent and perfect One died the most unjust and cruel death of all. Why? He was doing what was necessary to save us. Our sin requires any true salvation to do 2 things: Satisfy justice, and change our hearts to make us love the good. Jesus' death did both. In His death He satisfied the righteous wrath of God for our sin; in His resurrection He gave us the power of a new life.
Ironically, the best answer for the problem of evil for the night was given by Ehrman himself, when He said that the "historical" Jesus believed that through His Kingdom all wrongs would be put to right. That is exactly true. What Ehrman doesn't understand, or doesn't believe, is that our salvation required more than just a change of politics and circumstance. Jesus' Kingdom was not just a new regime. Jesus' Kingdom required a heart change and the removal of God's wrath.
Dr. Ehrman underestimates the damage our sin has caused to us, as well as the majesty of the God that was offended. He underestimates the true "sinfulness of sin"; how truly evil our evil really is. That's why, I think, He finds the Christian explanation for the cross so offensive.
Dr. Ehrman also believes that history proves that Jesus was mistaken in His hopes that a Kingdom of justice and righteousness would come. Almost 2000 years later, injustice still abounds! So how, Dr. Ehrman contends, could Jesus not be wrong in His hopes? But again, think about the size of God. 2000 years may look like a long time to us, but is it really that long for the Creator of the Universe, light years, black holes and string theory?
The weakest part of Dr. Ehrman's defense, and one I so wished D'Souza would have gone after, was Ehrman's very unsatisfying explanation about how he can call certain actions, like the Holocaust, truly evil. Ehrman said something about accountability to each other, but never really spelled out what me meant by that or WHY I need to feel accountable to anyone. If there is no God, then we might be able to say that certain actions are UNHELPFUL for the human race, but we can't ever say something is truly evil. To say something is morally evil requires that there be a higher good that you compare it to. The moment you say "This ought to be different way," you have implied a higher standard, or a higher law, than what is. To say that actions are unjust requires that we have a higher law that tells us what justice is.
For all its philosophical wrangling, at the end of the day evolution cannot supply that law. Evolution can only explain what is, not what ought to be. You may say that is unhelpful for humanity to rape and for Hitler to murder the Jews. But that is not how evolution works. Each of us in in competition with others to have our genes replicated in future generations. If survival of the fittest is the predominant law of the universe, then our species is here and our genes are preserved because our genetic ancestors conquered and sometimes murdered their competitors. That's how survival of the fittest works.
Furthermore, Hitler, and many others, would have disagreed with you about what is "helpful" for the human race. Peter Singer, ethicist at Princeton, says that it is helpful for the human race to eliminate entirely retarded and disabled children from the gene pool. I say that even if you can prove its helpful for the gene pool, the slaughter of a 2 year old mentally challenged child is evil.
If our "morality" is determined simply by what the current majority of people think is helpful for the human race, then we are on shaky ground indeed. Martin Luther King decried the evil of racism by appealing to a law higher than majority opinion. At least for MLK, if there was no God, there would have been no civil rights movement. If there is no Law Giver, there can be no true evil.
At the end of the day, I find blind, atheistic evolution a very unsatisfying answer to my deepest questions. Nothing x nobody = everything? Really? Hitler just died and faces the same future as Mother Theresa? The smothering of a 6 month old by a drunk parent is unhelpful, but not evil? When a parent buries a 4 year old killed in a car wreck, that's it--life is over altogether?
Dr. Ehrman's rather facile "kum ba yah" passage from his book that he read at the end of the debate I find VERY unsatisfying. I'll stick with Nietzsche and Richard Dawkins as MUCH more consistent agnostic/atheists than Dr. Ehrman. They are not afraid to follow their logic to its despairing end.
*****
Again, these are just the beginnings of an answer. I hope I have not been too hard on Mr. D'Souza. I have a great deal of respect for him, and appreciate his time and spirit in coming, as well as his wittiness and brilliance and passion.
I would appeal, however, to the Christian Apologetics Association to choose a more suitable "opponent" when setting up these debates. D'Souza is as smart as Dr. Ehrman, but this is just not the area of his expertise.
For those of you who really want to go deeper in this, I would commend to you Tim Keller's book The Reason for God or D. A. Carson's How Long O Lord? for starters.
Here are a few free messages, one by Dr. Tim Keller (pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan) and two 1 2 by yours truly that might also be good to download and listen to. If you're only going to do one, do Tim Keller's.
For those of you reading who are/were truly troubled by all this, please know that I or any of the pastors at the Summit Church would love to talk with you about this or anything on your heart...
This is from a discussion in the comments of my blog... and it intrigues me so I thought I'd move it to the 'main stage.' This discussion is one I'm really interested in, and feel like I have little understanding on...
Perhaps I have interpreted D. A. Carson's talk, and even the Bible, wrongly here. I am trying to learn.
Below is a response to my blog from two days ago from someone who described her/himself as "an ethnic Christian," and below that is my response to them.
What can you add? I really do want to understand this better, because it is so crucially important in our culture...
Dear J.D.,
have some serious problems with this interpretation of Carson’s talk and, ultimately, this depiction of ethnicity. I would like to ask some questions.
1. How does an individual who is a new creature in Christ live out his/her "supra-race" identity?
2. Is race/ethnicity only the color of one's skin? If it is not then how can we talk about race/ethnicity being tied to our flesh?
3. Is our flesh tied to everything that is created? If so, and our flesh is to be resisted, how do we make sense out of heaven being a place where every "tribe, nation, and tongue" is represented?
4. What role does ethnicity play in a Christian's life outside of its purpose for missions (i.e. becoming all things to all men)?
5. Are we to have a Christian identity which "supercedes ALL characteristics of [our] human flesh" or one that would make me "not [racial/ethnic] any longer" making me "only Christian?" These are clearly two different conceptions.
Finally, after listening to Carson’s talk myself I realize that he intends something very different by the “third position” or tertium quid than has been asserted here. Far from promoting some sort of colorblindness or ethnically neutral ontology for Christians, Carson actually points out that Paul understood himself to be ethnically Jewish. Carson references Romans 9:10 and that Paul sometimes makes distinctions between Jewish Christians and other Christians. Carson even says, “Paul knows full well that ethnically and racially at the end of the day he is still a Jew…there are many contexts in which he is grateful for his heritage and identifies with it.” However, in this context he speaks of his ethnic identity differently. So when Paul says that he becomes a Jew it does seem that he assumes he is not one. But as Carson points out, Paul is actually trying to show that in a certain sense he is not one, namely, that he is not under the law (which he highlights in the subsequent verse). The point of the tertium quid is that we are not slaves to our “rights,” as Carson puts it, ethnicity being one of them. This is in order that we might not think more highly of ourselves than we ought, or so cling to our “rights” (or ethnicity) to the point that we hinder the spreading of the gospel, and specifically for Paul this means not offending an immature brother in Christ who has a weak conscience. In other words, we as Christians should, as a result of our “third position,” be able to put off in a sense our rights in order to reach people with the gospel. If we were slaves to our ethnicity we would not desire to be flexible, as Carson puts it, in order to win someone outside of or inside of our ethnic group. Therefore, Carson is not trying to promote some sort of colorblindness, ethnically neutral identity, or dualistic framework.
Posted by: An Ethnic Christian | June 27, 2009 at 03:16 PM