Barts problem

David Scott
Essays & Reviews

The mansion of the new atheism has many rooms.

The top floor is reserved for scientific types like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.
These are the folks who claim that religious beliefs cant bear up to rational scrutiny and
that God is a dangerous delusion we need to be done with.
The mansions left wing is given over to smash-mouth cranks and provocateurs like
Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. They carry on all night over there like naughty frat
boys, writing open letters to the Christian nation about how God is not great and
guffawing over the religious equivalent of fart jokes.
Did you hear the one about the atheist who goes out fishing with his believer friend?
The atheist pulls up his net and finds a rock inscribed with the words: I do not exist.
Signed: God.
The atheist turns to his friend: Whatd I tell you!
Also in the house, theres a long, ambient corridor for tortured souls like the brilliant
literary critic James Wood, whove been driven to unbelief by the problem of
theodicyhow there could possibly be a good God in charge of a world filled with so
much suffering. These are the only people in the house worth talking to. They know how
high the stakes are.
Theres a noisy backroom packed with God-haters and Church-baiters, ex-Catholics and
conspiracy-theorists. These people dont seem to know The Da Vinci Code was bad
fiction. They really believe that Jesus was a phony and that Christianity was cooked up
two thousand years ago by celibates with dark motives.
In this backroom is where youll find Bart Ehrman holding court. Ehrmans up from the
basement on the basis of his unlikely 2005 bestseller Misquoting Jesus: The Story

Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (HarperOne).

The mansion basement is where all the spade work of the new atheism gets done. Its a
viral hive of activity down there as professional Bible scholars hunch over the ancient
texts, theorizing away the last remnants of their mystery and authority.
The basement floor is littered with parts of the Bible these scholars have deemed to be
mythical or never to have happenedNoahs Ark and Moses parting the Red Sea, all
the miracles worked by Jesus, not to mention his virgin birth and resurrection from the
dead.
Ehrman, 51, labored for years in this subterranean precinct of anonymous junior
professors and wannabe grad students, honing his chops and writing more than a
dozen books, mostly for scholars and specialists.
A Deconversion Story
And to hear him tell it, the biblical has increasingly become personal for Ehrman.
For a number of years now, hes been retailing what he calls his deconversion storya
prosaic coming-of-age fable about how he lost his religion through his scholarly study of
the Bible and his thinking about the problem of innocent suffering in the world.
He would have us know that its been quite a tumble for the former born-again Youth for
Christ, who graduated from the fundamentalist Moody Bible Institute and went on to
become a Baptist pastor and a Ph.D. graduate of Princeton.
Ehrmans creed now reads something like this: Jesus was just a charismatic man, not
the Son of God made flesh; the Bible is not the Word of God but the flawed work of
human scribes; and in the beginning there were many Christianities, until that is, the
Catholic Church stamped out all the competitionGnostics, Marcionites, Ebionites and
the restdestroying their scriptures and banishing them as heretics.
These views have made Ehrman a kind of American idol for the academic religion set.
Surely the only New Testament scholar to ever appear on Jon Stewarts Comedy
Central show, Professor Barts now the go-to guy whenever CNN, the Discovery

Channel, or NPR needs a talking head to explain why we shouldnt believe anything
weve ever been taught about Jesus or the Bible.
His classes at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill are standing-room only.
These days he drives a BMW convertible to work from his home in the country, where
he lives with his second wife, Sarah Beckwith, a creative scholar of medieval culture at
Duke University.
Ehrmans publisher, HarperOne, has high hopes for his new book, Gods Problem: How
the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important QuestionWhy We Suffer.
It arrived earlier this monthjust in time for Holy Week and Easterin an initial press
run of 100,000 copies, according toPublishers Weekly.
But judging from this latest offering, Professor Bart has already become something of a
burnt-out case.
There has always been something a little suspect about Ehrmans story. You never
sense the genuine angst that you feel in the writings of Wood or in the problematics of
Dostoevsky.
Then theres the fact that Ehrmans scholarship invariably tends to exaggerate the
significance of his findings and to choose the interpretation likely to wreak the most
havoc on the Christian establishment and tradition. His eager participation in promoting
the National Geographic Societys discovery of a long-lost Gospel of Judas is a good
case in point.
The personal totally eclipses the biblical in his new book. Gods Problem is all primal
screed. Its a disturbing and dishonest manifesto against the God of the Bible.
To make his case Ehrman hauls in all the usual suspectsgenocide in Cambodia,
ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, tsunamis, starving babies, birth defects, and of course, the
Holocaust.
For a book thats supposed to be about the Bible, a surprising percentage of Gods
Problem is devoted to set pieces on such topics as the Battle of the Bulge, the AIDS
pandemic, potable water issues in sub-Saharan Africa, the flu epidemic of 1918, and the
scourge of cancer (It can hit any of us anytime.). For several pages near the end,

Ehrman even reads to us from his local newspaper.

Inflationary Prose
The problems with Gods Problem run deeper than its ripped-from-the-headlines feel.
He begins: If there is an all-powerful and loving God in this world, why is there so much
excruciating pain and unspeakable suffering? The problem has haunted me for a long
time.
Notice the inflationary prosethe unnecessary modifiers for pain and suffering
(excruciating, unspeakable), the appeal to the authority of his own anguish (hes not
disturbed or concerned, but haunted).
Ehrman prosecutes his battle against belief through existential yowling and the
indiscriminate and overwhelming use of adjectives.
There arent realities, there are gruesome realities. Sin doesnt bring judgment, it
triggers horrible judgment. AIDS isnt a public health crisis, but a hellish nightmare for
millions. Jesus doesnt suffer, he experiences a horrible passion and death.
The Holocaust makes Ehrmans prose run positively purple. It is the most heinous
crime against humanity in the known history of the human race. Its very mention often
necessitates double adjectival deployment (horrible and bloodcurdling).
All this horrible writing points to the larger problem with Gods ProblemProfessor
Bart has nothing new to contribute on this subject. On every page we see the signs of a
man struggling mightily to pump up his page count, to turn what amounts to an angry
op-ed piece into a 275-page next-bestseller.
Theodicy and its Discontents
Theodicy has had its discontents since people first started to think about religion.
Everyone quotes the equation in British philosopher David Humes Dialogue Concerning
Natural Religion (1779): Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent.
Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence,

then, evil?
But the character in Humes dialogue was actually summarizing the taunt of Epicurus,
an atheist philosopher who lived in Athens about 300 years before Christ.
Whoever said it first, thats the essence of the problem of evil and innocent suffering.
Ehrman claims to have found in the Bible four conflicting explanations for why we suffer:
suffering is Gods punishment for sin (he calls this the classical view); we suffer that
God might bring good out of evil (the redemptive view); those who suffer on earth will
find their reward in heaven or at the end of time (the apocalyptic view); and suffering is
a mystery we cant explain (the view, he says, of Job, Ecclesiastes, and Bart Ehrman).
But readers looking to Ehrman for a thoughtful sifting and analysis of the biblical
evidence will come away feeling short-changed and manipulated.
Many pages of Gods Problem consist of nothing more than long quotes from Scripture
interspersed with Professor Barts arch asidesmostly of the gotcha and aha variety.
To wit: One can hardly read this without thinking of that fierce cartoon with the caption:
Beatings will continue until morale improves. That indeed is Isaiahs message.
Ehrman settles into a lazy rhythm of summoning up texts in order to pronounce
judgment upon them. Many of his biblical readings conclude like this: I find this view
offensive and repulsive or The problem with this view is not only that it is scandalous
and outrageous, but
Ehrman writes in the bullying, pedantic tone of a man used to holding forth before
undergraduates in the rathskeller. Indeed hes known as one of those cool profs who
holds office hours in the campus pub. And this kind of rhetorical gauntlet-downing is no
doubt entertaining over a couple of pints. But on the page it makes for a rather thin ale.

God Said to Abraham . . .

Consider Ehrmans treatment of one of the Bibles most infamous passagesthe story
of Gods command that Abraham make a burnt offering of his beloved son Isaac (Gen.

22).
Its a raw tale that has exercised people from the rabbis and Church fathers to Sren
Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling) and Bob Dylan (Highway 61 Revisited).
The Abraham story should be a perfect foil for Ehrman to study. Certainly the biblical
author doesnt shrink from the awfulness of what unfolds in his narrative. Throughout the
passage the words father and son are deliberately repeated, building to the tense
climax: Isaac said to his father Abraham, My father! And he said, Here I am, my son.
Ehrman, however, boils it all down to a few lines of melodramatic caricature, his
indignation frothing into a lather of invective at Gods horrible directive (that word
horrible again!). As always he is keen to stay on message:
It has all been a test, a horrible test. The point of the story is that whatever
God commands must be done, no matter how contrary to his nature (is he or is he not a
God of love?), no matter how contrary to his own law (is he opposed to murderor
human sacrificeor not?), no matter how contrary to every sense of human decency.
There have been many people since Abrahams day who have murdered the innocent.
What do we do with such people? We lock them up in prison or execute them. And
what do we do with Abraham? We call him a good and faithful servant. I often wonder
about this view of suffering.
Thats the end of the discussion for Ehrman. Another horrible has been added to the
bill of particulars against God. The reader is expected to share Ehrmans outrage and
incredulity and be ready to move on to his next proof-text.
But is Ehrman right about the point of the story?
Certainly he hasnt demonstrated any point through sustained study of the biblical text.
All the reader knows is how the text makes Professor Bart feel. His book, in a curious
and unexpected way, is a kind of faith-sharing Bible studyall heart and no head; or
maybe just all spleen.
But how are we to read Abrahams motives and actions, and what are we to make of
Gods intent in demanding this sacrifice of him?
The text itself suggests there is far more going on than the attempted murder that

Ehrman describes.
A key line is what Abraham tells his servants before climbing the mountain with Isaac:
The boy and I will go up there; we will worship and we will return to you (Gen. 22:5).
One explanation is that Abraham is here trying to cover up the terrible deed he is about
to commit. But its also possible that we have here an expression of Abrahams faith that
God would not require him to take Isaacs life. We, Abraham is sayingboth he and
Isaacwe will return from the mountain.
Thats how ancient rabbis interpreted this passage, following leads picked up in Genesis
and elsewhere in the Old Testament. Thats also the conclusion reached by the author
of the New Testaments Letter to the Hebrews. In fact, Hebrews interprets this passage
as reflecting Abrahams belief that God would raise Isaac from the dead (Heb. 11:17
19).
Throughout the New Testament, the story of Abraham and Isaac is presented as a
symbolic foreshadowing of God the Fathers offering of his only Son for the life of the
world.
Gods praise for Abraham at the end of the story is picked up almost word-for-word by
both St. Paul and St. John to describe how God did not spare his own Son but gave
him up for us all (compare the Greek versions of Genesis 22:15; Rom. 8:32; John
3:16).
It remains a shocking text. But even a brief study exposes the insulting inadequacy of
Ehrmans overheated and jejune approach. One could go on multiplying similar
examples from Gods Problem.
Ways of Reading
Ehrman likes to give the aura of providing us with the benefits of an objective, scientific,
and historical study of the Bible.
He pads the pages of Gods Problem with boilerplate background about Israels history,
the literary forms of biblical books, the dating of the Gospels, and the like.

But most of what he says about the origins of the Bible is speculative and the
conclusions he draws are exaggerated.
Like many of those in the mansion of the new atheism, Ehrman works with a
hermeneutic of suspicionhe figures that the Bible reflects the ideology of early Church
leaders and that Jesus original teachings can only be found by stripping away the
veneer of dogma and doctrine that the Church has overlaid on his figure and words.
Aside from anticlerical prejudice, theres no scholarly basis for this line of interpretation.
Nonetheless, on the basis of such science, many mansions of mischief continue to be
built.
Ehrman recycles much of this mischief in Gods Problem. He claims, for instance, that
the original Gospel writers didnt believe Jesus was God, alleging those aspects of the
Gospels to be much-later additions by Church authorities. He also contends that Jesus
and the early Christians believed the end of the world was near and that this outlook
colors all of the New Testaments teachings.
Such conclusions are hardly the scholarly consensus that Ehrman makes them out to
be.
In fact, other biblical scholars are making exciting discoveries that have nothing to do
with the deconstructive turns of Ehrman and his conferees.
These scholars take a canonical or inner-biblical approach to interpretation. When
you read the Bible this way you notice how much biblical interpretation goes on within
the covers of the Bible itselfhow passages in later books are always explaining and
commenting upon those in earlier ones.
You notice, too, how certain themes keep coming up again and again: Gods creation
and his saving plan for history; the Exodus and wilderness wandering of the Jews;
Gods covenant as establishing his elect people as his sons and daughtersto name
just a few of the more prominent themes.
Ehrmans work takes no notice of more recent developments in biblical scholarship.
Reading him is like entering a scholarly time-warp. Its always 1978 in there. Its as if
progress in the field ended in the late disco era.

In Gods Problem we see how sterile and unproductive this method can be. By Ehrmans
own admission, his way of reading Scripture can find only contradiction, fragmentation,
and doubtfour incompatible explanations of the problem of suffering.
God Cannot Suffer, But . . .
But reading the evidence another way, we find the Bible does answer our most
important question.
Its the answer Christians around the world will hear this week, beginning on Passion
Sunday and proceeding through Good Friday and Easter.
There is a beautiful expression from St. Bonaventure (d. 1274)Impassibilis est Deus,
sed non incompassibilisGod cannot suffer, but he can suffer with.
The cross of Christ is the Bibles answer to the problem of evil and innocent suffering. In
Jesus God has come to suffer with us and for us. He has entered into his creation to
take away the sin of the world and to destroy the final enemy, the ultimate suffering
death.
In the New Testament we see the cross understood in terms of the great themes and
moments in the Old Testamentthe Passover and Exodus, Gods covenant with Israel,
the suffering servant of the prophets, the creation of the world, the sin of Adam.
In the Christian understanding, death and suffering entered the world because of sin. By
his act of suffering and redemptive love on the cross, Christ atones for sin and restores
creation and the human race to their original vocation. He makes it possible for us to live
again as God intended us to live in the beginningas his sons and daughters, as
sharers in his divine nature, destined to enjoy communion with him in a love that never
ends.
The redemption of the cross doesnt protect us from sufferingfrom floods, famines, or
the cruelty and injustice of others.
We remain, even after Christ, frail and finite creatures of flesh and blood, subject to the
laws of natureto sin, sickness, and decay, and to the often vicious exercise of the free

will of others, be it individuals or social structures.

What the cross gives us is the divine assurance that nobody suffers alone or in vain.
Joined to Christ, we can grow in our capacity to love our brothers and sisters with
compassion, to share in their sufferings, to see our own trials as a testing, a discipline, a
purification. We can learn Christs truth that in losing our lives we find them.
The cross tells us that each of us is worthy of the blood of Christ, that each of us can
say with St. Paul: the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me (Gal. 2:20).
This kind of talk drives Bart Ehrman to distraction.
But a serious Bible study, the only kind worthy of the blood and tears of the worlds
suffering innocents, must give some account for this languagewhich pervades the
New Testament and is there presented as the sum of Gods revelation in history and in
all the Scriptures.
Ehrman never takes up the challenge. One is surprised too that Ehrman, a renowned
expert in early Christianity, isnt interested in tracing how these beliefs played out in the
lives of the first Christians.
Its actually an amazing story, as the sociologist of religion, Rodney Stark, himself an
religious skeptic, tells it in his essential The Rise of Christianity (HarperOne, 1997).
It seems that Christians hope in the cross of Christ, in the life of the world to come,
made them fearless in combating the evils and injustices of this world.
God showed his love for humanity through what amounted to self-sacrifice; and
Christians believed that they, in turn, were to show their love for God through selfsacrifice for their fellow man and woman. These were unheard of beliefs in the history of
world religions and they had a revolutionary impact on civilization, Stark
acknowledges.
For the first time in history, there was a people whose fundamental beliefs required that
they be concerned with the most vulnerable members of society, those categories of
suffering people whom no one in history had ever before cared aboutthe unborn and

the newborn; the homeless, the terminally ill, the diseased, and the elderly; widows,
orphans, and more.
And the first Christians not only endured the most hideous tortures and executions for
their beliefs; they were also willing to suffer and die for their neighbors in the various
plagues and epidemics that beset the Roman Empire in its twilight.
Its revealing perhaps that in all the historical litany of innocent suffering in Gods
Problem, Ehrman doesnt include a single person who suffered explicitly for faith in God
no saints, no martyrs, no ordinary believers. Perhaps were to conclude that those
who suffer for their faith arent innocent but somehow deserve to suffer.
For whatever reason, Ehrman shows no interest in the beliefs of those actually do suffer.
He presumes to speak for them as he presumes to speak for the Bible. The reality, he
opines without data, is that most suffering is not positive, does not have a silver lining,
is not good for the body or soul, and leads to wretched and miserable, not positive
outcomes.
The Testament of Bart
Ehrman, for all his talent and training as textual critic, never rises to the task of a biblical
study of evil and innocent suffering. Instead, he builds Gods Problem to his own
alternative to theodicy. Call it the Testament of Bart.
It goes something like this: Theres only this one life to live, hence we should live life to
the fullest, seeking to avoid pain and to pursue the simple joys and pleasures of living
for the moment and working to make the world a better place for ourselves and others.
He even offers a helpful checklist for how we can make the world a better place. We
should fight poverty, genocide, bigotry, racism, discrimination on the basis of gender or
sexual orientation, and we should work to stop our governments spending millions on
wars [the U.S.] cannot win to empower regimes that cannot survive.
Professor Bart claims his philosophy is that espoused in the Book of Ecclesiastes. It
wouldnt do any good to try to convince him hes wrong.
He seems genuinely unaware that his philosophy is actually based on materialism and
consumerism and defines happiness according to a bourgeoisie lifestyle unimaginable

for most of the worlds inhabitants: We should make money and spend money. We
should enjoy food and drink. We should eat out and order unhealthy desserts, and we
should cook steaks on the grill and drink Bordeaux We should travel
His speech goes on in this mid-life wish-listing vein for many more lines. These are the
last words of Gods Problem.
One wants to be sympathetic to such a sincere cry of the heart. But one cant help
wondering: Is this all there is to lifepursuing a liberal social agenda while eating,
drinking, and making merry?
What happens when we suffer, when people do us wrong, when we face persecution or
attack for what we believe in, or for no reason at all? What happens when we age and
realize that this is all weve done with our lives? How would Ehrmans neo-Epicurean
platitudes pull us through?
The problem of the new atheism is the problem of the old atheism. It amounts to the
demand that God stand trial, that he justify his ways and means before a jury of his
creatures. Its the protest of reason against the uncertainties and injustices of existence.
Reason tells us that God could have made the world differentlywithout giving us the
possibility to do all the bad things we do to each other, without the possibility of all those
things insurance companies used to call acts of God.
Reason causes us to wonder why God made us with free will, knowing what we would
do with it. Why couldnt his purposes be served by creating us with a little less freedom,
or none at all?
And if its true that were made for heaven, why didnt God put us there in the first place
and let us skip this brief life of testing, pain, and heartache?
These are reasonable questions for which reason alone can give no answers.
What Ehrman and the new atheists forget is that a world without God is not a world
without evil or innocent suffering. Its simply a world in which we face sufferings without
hope, without any possibility of justicein this life or in the next.
As Thomas Carlyle wrote in the 19th century, when doubt darkens into unbelief, the

world loses is purpose and becomes a vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha and mill of
death.
Thats where the new atheism leaves us.
Ehrman is still a prisoner of his literalist and fundamentalist upbringing. He demands of
the Bible things the Bible was never meant to providecertitude, black and white
answers, the absolutes of reason. The Bible wasnt meant to tell us why people starve in
sub-Saharan Africa any more than it was meant to tell us about evolution or the big
bang.
The Bible is written as the apostle John wrotethat we might believe in Christ and that
by believing we might have life eternal. Its a book not only of reason, but of faith.
Faith helps us to see beyond this veil of tears, this gloomy Golgotha of pain and death. It
lets us see what angels longed to see, what the human eye has not seen and cannot
seethat the suffering of this present time cant be compared to the glory that will be
revealed.
Gods love is stronger than evil, suffering, and death. Thats the Bibles true answer to
our ultimate question.
For now, Professor Bart no longer has ears to hear this answer. Thats not Gods
problem. Tragically, its his.
Originally published in Godspy.com (March 20, 2008)
David Scott, 2008. All rights reserved.