by Jeff Treder
Bart Ehrman’s book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer suffers from one massive, overarching lapse in logic and one particular but remediable blind spot. The lapse in logic is indicated in the title itself, God’s Problem. Ehrman says he no longer believes that God exists—specifically, the God of the Bible. He calls himself an “agnostic” (one who doesn’t know whether any god exists), but he avowedly doesn’t believe the God of the Bible exists. If any supreme being does exist, he (or she or it) cannot be good. Ehrman never really takes this unknown evil deity idea seriously, though; he just basically no longer believes in God. Effectively, he is an atheist.
But if God doesn’t exist, God can’t have a problem. The one with the problem, of course, is Ehrman, and for 278 passionate pages his beef is with God. Who doesn’t exist. But this won’t do: Ehrman can’t have it both ways. Either God does exist, in which case all of Ehrman’s genuine, serious questions and all of his furious indignation have an actual object and therefore a point; or else God does not exist, in which case one must conclude that Ehrman has misdirected all his accusations. Who, then, should he be blaming for all of humanity’s miseries? The people who believe in Jesus and love him for dying in their place so that they can live with him eternally? To his credit, Ehrman doesn’t blame them. But his white-hot, moralizing attack against a nonexistent God is simply not logical. (C.S. Lewis, by the way, in the first chapter of The Problem of Pain, pointed out the same logical inconsistency in his own former atheism.)
Ehrman is by no means the first person or author to get all worked up over the injustice of the God they don’t believe in. And it makes me wonder what is really going on. If an atheist were logically consistent, he would believe that there is nothing to the universe but matter and energy, which have evolved into bacteria and then fish and then cave men, who now wear suits and talk on cell phones. That’s all we are. The consistent atheist is a moral and cultural relativist. There is no absolute moral code because without God there is nothing really absolute. So each human culture has its own moral code (Aztec, Polynesian, Viking, Chinese, French Enlightenment, and so on), and each individual within a certain culture has his or her own personal version of their culture’s moral code.
An individual may reject his culture’s code altogether. A woman raised in a Hindu culture might become a rationalist skeptic or a Christian. A man raised in a predominantly Christian culture might become, like Ehrman, an atheist. But if he does become an atheist, he should go the whole way and be a consistent atheist. There is no God, there is no absolute morality, there are only cultural norms and personal codes. One culture or person has no right—no logical basis from which—to judge another’s code. I may consider Hitler’s moral code evil, but that’s just my opinion. I am offended when babies are murdered; Hitler wasn’t. I may fight to defend and extend my moral code. Along with others who agree with me I may go to war against Hitler and Nazism. If I am an atheist, however, I can’t bring God into the debate. God had nothing to do with the scourge of Nazism because God doesn’t exist. Hitler and Nazism evolved just like Buddhism, Christianity, and atheism did. All there really is is evolution, the struggle for survival, and the survival of the fittest organisms and cultures. “Fittest” here means “strongest,” not “best,” since there is no absolute moral standard by which goodness can be measured. Basically it’s all nothing but matter and energy doing their thing. Things just happen, there is no purpose behind them. What’s to get worked up about? Maybe Hitler or name-your-own-villain. But not the God who doesn’t exist.
That would be the attitude of a consistent atheist toward human injustice and suffering, as represented at their harshest by Nazism. Ehrman, though, is not a consistent atheist. His passionate anger against God suggests that, at heart, he isn’t really an atheist at all. He is what, according to both Socrates and the Bible, all serious thinking people are, a seeker after the truth. He thinks he has discovered the truth—atheism—but his logical fumbling along with his moral passion indicate that he is mistaken about that. He is still a seeker.
Besides his problem with logic, as I said at the outset, Ehrman has a blind spot. His blind spot is his persistent failure to understand the Bible’s answer to “Our Most Important Question.” This answer, which the New Testament makes very clear, and which is understood by millions of Jesus-followers with a fraction of Ehrman’s education, is the Cross. “The Cross” is the common shorthand term, used by New Testament authors and by people ever since, to refer to the sacrificial death and glorified bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Cross is God’s answer to our problem. People like Ehrman need to have it somehow pumped into their consciousness that sin and all its wretched ramifications are our thing, not God’s thing. Sin is our problem, to which God has willingly, graciously and creatively provided the solution, at his own expense.
Our problem, then, ever since Adam and Eve, has been sin and its consequences. Sin may be defined as our rejection of God’s authority over us and our desire and determination to live independently of him. The first consequence of our sin is fear (see Gen.3:10 and my article “The Good King”). Independent humanity is, quite naturally, afraid of everything—afraid of God (Will he punish us? How? When?), afraid of the natural world (droughts, wildfires, freezing, wild animals, disease, aging, dying), and above all afraid of each other. All this fear is bound up with radical insecurity. Alienated from God, we are alone in a vast, unknown universe which seems utterly indifferent to us. Having lost our true home as children of God, we can never be really at home in the universe he created, no matter how hard and how long we try. We do not truly know who we are or the reason for our existence. Our first priority has to be defending ourself and our family against all the dangers we face from both the natural world and other people—other clans and tribes. (We are, of course, defenseless against any threat from God.) So we make weapons and build fortresses and walled cities. History progresses. The norm, in most times and places, is the exploitation of the weak—slaves, women and the poor—by the strong. We have empires, armies, and almost continuous warfare. There are good things in the mix too (all of them gifts from God, by the way), but human history apart from God has been, overall, an exhausting muddle.
Now consider the situation from God’s point of view, as the Bible has revealed it to us. Our sin and its consequences are no fun for him either. Early on he wiped out the whole human race, saving only one family. That episode was no accident; with God there are no accidents. Noah’s part was active faith: building a huge boat in a desert just because God told him to. God’s part was selective destruction and salvation. If he wanted the whole race destroyed, he would never have created us in the first place. Knowing all things, he knew what he was getting, and he knew what it would eventually cost him. The Flood was an acted parable of God’s answer to the problem of our sin. Sin and its agents must be destroyed, because sin itself is inherently and thoroughly destructive. If sin were not destroyed, it would just go on corrupting and destroying all within its reach. But there must also be salvation, because of who God is. “Jesus” means “God saves.” “God is love.” The Flood prophesied the Cross, whereby God took the destruction of our sin on himself and provided a way (the one Way) for our deliverance. In the same way the Mosaic Covenant, with its pattern of law, sin, and sacrifice, prophesied the Cross, the New Covenant. The Old Testament is loaded with these foreshadowings of the New Covenant: the sacrifice of Isaac, the saga of Joseph, the Passover, Ruth, and Jonah, to name just a few. All pointing to Jesus. “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.” (1John 3:16)
If there are no accidents with God, what about things that we call “acts of God” like an earthquake that kills thousands of people? In such events, as ever, God says to us, “Trust me. I love even the sparrows. I was there. I am always there. I hold the keys. I know what I’m doing. This ‘accident’ is temporal, the outcome is eternal. Trust me.” Our options as survivors are what our options always are: trust Jesus, or not. See Luke 12:4-7, 2Cor.4:16-18, Rev.1:17-18.
Ehrman, however, doesn’t see or understand the logic of God’s answer to our problem. His view of human history and God’s involvement in it is, for all his erudition, essentially that of the village atheist: God demands that people behave according to his rules, and every time we break even the least of his rules, he punishes us. Since God allows sin to occur, he is responsible for all of its horrors and miseries, and yet he punishes us hapless sinners. Punish, punish, punish, all the way to Hell—everlasting punishment. This is justice? Of course he saves some, arbitrarily, and they go to live in Heaven where they spend countless hours and eons worshiping God, an endless, relentless hymn-singing church service. Meanwhile most of us are roasting in Hell, which might be the better deal after all.
Perhaps I am parodying Ehrman’s slant on things a bit here, but not too much. Read his book and see.
Ehrman claims to have had a “born again” experience of faith in Christ, followed by Bible college and seminary training, followed by years of deep involvement in a variety of church settings. From both his own viewpoint and mine, however, his spiritual regeneration was an illusion. As he now sees it, there is no such thing, objectively, as spiritual regeneration, since God doesn’t exist. It is a subjective experience, an objective illusion. As I see it, regeneration through faith in Christ is a real, objective (and subjective) experience. And it is absolutely crucial (pun meaningful). Jesus said it once for all: “You must be born again.” (John 3:7) Otherwise you not only remain separated from God, lost and alone in the universe, but you remain blind to the true nature of reality. This is why I conclude that Ehrman’s “born again” experience was illusory, because he looks intently into all that the Bible says but fails to see it. He doesn’t get it. The apostle John wrote: “We know also that the Son of God has come, and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true.” (1John 5:20) Without that God-given understanding, we cannot see reality as it is, because we are blind to spiritual reality—that is, to God, who is the source and basis of the natural world. “The man without the Spirit,” Paul wrote, “does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.” (1Cor.2:14) To be born again is to be born by the power of the Holy Spirit (John 3:5-8) into a whole new kind of life. The born-again person must be baptized in water, baptized (immersed, soaked) in the Holy Spirit, and continuously, willingly, thankfully, gladly filled (re-soaked) with the Holy Spirit. How? By reading the Bible faithfully, worshiping with other believers, and praying to God and asking him, among other things, Please, Lord, keep me soaked in you! Again, these are not only subjective experiences but also objective events caused by an objective, actual God. A really good God.
Those people who have actually been born of the Holy Spirit have a view and understanding of life, God, and the Bible that is utterly different from Ehrman’s. Jesus used the “outer darkness” as a metaphor for our final separation from God; but as the Bible tells us repeatedly, apart from Christ we are already in that darkness. We are outside of the spiritual home wherein is life and light. Ehrman’s experience of church life was the experience of an outsider mistakenly thinking, for a while, that he was inside. That is why he was frustrated, unsatisfied, and finally repelled by it. “You must be born again.”
So, how do you get to be born again? How do you get actually, objectively delivered by an actual God from a hopeless life and eternal death into an “abundant life” filled with love, joy, peace and hope? The Bible gives two answers, both of which are about choice. First, God chooses (has chosen eternally) those whom he will save. This is the doctrine of divine election, which annoys or offends many people but which the Bible teaches over and over again. One small sample is Acts 13:48: “When the Gentiles heard this [the gospel], they were glad and honored the word of the Lord; and all who were appointed for eternal life believed.” We, of course, have no control over God’s appointing; the good news is that we get to choose too, and our choice counts just as much as God’s. We can do what Jesus told us to do: “Repent and believe the good news.” (Mark 1:15) This is one of the divine paradoxes of Biblical revelation. To explain this I will quote a section from my article “Two Views—One Way—of Salvation”:
One of Jesus’ sayings gives an even deeper insight into this question of who gets saved and how:
“I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.
“All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” (Matt.11:25-27)
Am I one of these “chosen ones”? The only true answer is another question: Do I want to be? Do I want God to be eternally glorified and worshiped, and I myself to be among the worshipers? If so, I have only to look up, simply as a child, and receive and be received. In a genuine, nontrivial sense, I can choose to be chosen—but only in humility and trust. In any other frame of mind, I won’t want to be chosen.
But doesn’t this “choosing to be chosen” contradict God’s sovereignty in election and regeneration? No, but the reason is subtle. I said before that all our choices as we follow Jesus are the temporal outworking of God’s eternal choices; he works in our heart and mind, patiently over time, teaching us to make the right choices (see Titus 2:11-14). We don’t begin making moral and spiritual choices at our conversion, however. We begin making them about the time we learn to walk, and most human cultures recognize an “age of accountability” around the early teens, when we begin taking responsibility for these choices. Paul has told us to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.” (Php.2:12-13) God’s work in his people begins at our conception, and he is involved in all our choices before, during and after our conversion. Yet we ourselves are making our choices—I choose, freely and genuinely, to nab that cookie—and as adults we are held responsible for them. All human beings make hundreds of moral choices, big and little, right and wrong (more or less) every day, and over a lifetime they cumulatively form our character, who we are. We become the sum of our choices. While the sovereign God has chosen our destiny (divine election), we have chosen it too, whichever way we go. (See Lewis’s The Great Divorce for vivid illustrations of how this works in practice.) In logic, this is not contradiction but paradox—two statements which seem contradictory but which are nevertheless both true. In this case, as in several other fundamental issues in Biblical theology (such as the Trinity and the dual nature of Christ), the paradox is resolved only in the infinite mind of God, and we either accept the truth of both statements (God chooses freely and we choose freely) by faith or reject it in unbelief.
With that, I wind up this review of Ehrman’s book. As Ehrman rightly says, human history is chock full of monstrous injustice and suffering. We can choose to blame God for this, but in that case God must exist; and if he exists, the only sure way for us to know about him would be for him to reveal himself to us. As he has done, in real-time history. He has intervened decisively in our history and given us a record of that intervention in the Bible. The Bible says that God has himself taken the punishment for our sins (in judicial terms) and suffered the consequences of them (in inferential terms) and paid the price for our redemption (in slave-market terms). Jesus Christ has done that for us, just because he loves us. Take it or leave it. What Joshua said 3,400 years ago is still true, always true: “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve.” (Josh. 24:15) You can’t avoid choosing. Either build the big boat or don’t. Either way, the Flood is coming.
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