Authors: Bart D. Ehrman
God's Problem (28 page)
But with this view of the world—what about suffering? For the Teacher, pain as well as pleasure is fleeting and ephemeral. He does not deal with the kinds of intense pain and misery found, say, in the book of Job. His concern is more with the pain of existence itself, the existential crises that all of us confront simply as part of being human. It is not difficult, though, to recognize how he would deal with suffering in extremis were he confronted with it. It too is
hevel.
To be sure, we should work to overcome suffering—in ourselves and others. Freedom from pain is a major goal for those of us living these fleeting lives of ours. But life is more than simply avoiding suffering. It is also enjoying what can come to us in our short stay on earth.
In some respects the Teacher appears to have had a view of suffering similar to that found in the poetic dialogues of Job—but decidedly
not
like the view in the folktale at the book’s beginning and conclusion. The author of Ecclesiastes is explicit that God does not reward the righteous with wealth and prosperity. Why then is there suffering? He doesn’t know. And he was the “wisest man” ever to have lived! We should take a lesson from this. Despite all our attempts, suffering sometimes defies explanation.
This is like the poetic dialogues of Job, where God refuses to explain to Job why he has inflicted such pain upon him. It differs from Job in that for Ecclesiastes God is not responsible for the pain in the first place. For Job, God inflicts pain and suffering but refuses to say why. As I pointed out, I find this view completely unsatisfying and almost repugnant, that God would beat, wound, maim, torture, and murder people and then, rather than explain himself, overpower the innocent sufferers with his almighty presence and grind them into silence. I find the Teacher’s view much more amenable. Here too there is, ultimately, no divine answer to why we suffer. But suffering doesn’t come from the Almighty. It is simply something that happens on earth, caused by circumstances
we can’t control and for reasons we can’t understand. And what do we then do about it? We avoid it as much as we can, we try to relieve it in others whenever possible, and we go on with life, enjoying our time here on earth as much as we can, until the time comes for us to expire.
When I tell people that I’m writing a book about suffering, I typically get one of two responses. Some people immediately feel compelled to give me “the” explanation for why there is pain and misery in the world: almost always the explanation is that we have to have free will; otherwise, we would be like robots running around on perfect planet Earth; and since there is free will, there is suffering. When I respond by suggesting that free will can’t solve all the problems of suffering—hurricanes in New Orleans, tsunamis in Indonesia, earthquakes in Pakistan, and so on—my discussion partner normally gets a kind of confused look and is either silent or decides to change the subject.
The other response, though, is actually more common. Some people, when they hear that I’m writing about suffering, want to talk about something else.
I used to think that I had the perfect conversation-stopper at cocktail parties. All I had to do was mention what I do for a living. Someone comes up to me, Chardonnay in hand, we make small talk, and he asks me what I do. I tell him I teach at the university. “Oh, what do you teach?” “New Testament and early Christianity.” Long pause, and then, “Oh. That must be interesting.” And then he heads off, without a single idea about how to ask a follow-up question. Now that I’m writing this book, I have an even better stumper.
“What are you working on these days?” “I’m writing a book about suffering.” Pause. “Oh.” Longer pause. “And what will you be doing next?” And so it goes.
The reality is that most people don’t want to talk about suffering—except to give you an answer that explains all the pain, misery, and anguish in the world in fifteen seconds or less. This, of course, is completely human and natural. We don’t want to occupy ourselves with pain but with its absence—or even better, with its opposite, pleasure! And it is very easy for those of us in comfortable American circumstances to keep far removed from the pain of the world. We don’t have to deal with death very much: the funeral home makes all the arrangements. We don’t even have to grapple with the death of the animals we eat—heaven forbid that we should actually have to observe the butcher cutting up the meat, let alone watch the poor beast get killed, the way our grandparents did.
We are particularly adept at keeping suffering around the world at bay—especially the suffering that does not make the headlines. But in some parts of the world it is there, every day, front and center, impossible to ignore. Most of us had not thought much about malaria until October 2005, when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it was funding three grants, totaling just over $250 million, to help find and develop an effective vaccine and to work out ways to control the spread of the disease, which occurs almost entirely through mosquito bites. Then some of us took notice.
Malaria is a horrible disease, with ravaging and widespread effects, and it is almost completely preventable, in theory. The extent of the misery it produces is breathtaking. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases estimates that between 400 and 900 million children, almost all of them in sub-Saharan Africa, contract an acute case of malaria every year. An average of 2.7 million people dies of it, every year. That’s more than seven thousand a day, three hundred people an hour, five every minute. Of malaria! Something that most of us never devote a second’s attention to. Almost all the
fatalities are children. Somehow—apparently—it just doesn’t seem that significant to us, that all these African children are dying. But what would it be like if five children died of an epidemic in our own hometown, every minute, of every day, for years and years? Then I suppose we might be more motivated to do something about it.
It may be that the problem will eventually be solved with the generous funding of groups like the Gates Foundation. (How many of
us
can plop down $250 million to deal with a problem? On the other hand, if a million of us would plop down $250 each, it would have the same effect.) But the misery and suffering of the world sometimes seems like the many-headed Hydra that Hercules had to deal with: every time he lopped off a head, two more would grow back in its place. Every time one problem is solved, we come to realize that there are two more, just as severe. Solve malaria, and then you have the problem of AIDS. Solve AIDS and then you have the problem of drinking water. And so on.
Drinking water, as it turns out, is an enormous problem. Most of us, again, don’t think that much about it. Our choices are tap or bottled. Some of us are far beyond drinking anything from the tap, thank you very much, and have our bottled water delivered every week. A good part of the world would give a right arm just for the clean tap water that we reject; in fact, millions of people are giving up their lives for not having it.
According to an organization known as Global Water, founded in 1982 by former U.S. ambassador John McDonald and Dr. Peter Bourne, a former United Nations assistant secretary, there are more than one billion men, women, and children in the world (something like one out of every five living human beings) who do not have safe water to drink. The situation such people typically face is dire. Many of them are malnourished to begin with, and the contaminated water they drink carries waterborne parasites that continuously multiply in their weakened bodies, robbing them of the nourishment and energy they need to sustain health. Global Water
indicates that 80 percent of the fatal childhood diseases throughout the world are caused not by shortages of food and medicine but by drinking contaminated water. Something like forty thousand men, women, and children die
every day
from diseases directly related to the lack of clean water. Break it down again: that’s more than twenty-five a minute. Every minute.
Surely there’s a way to solve these problems. If I can drink bottled water delivered to my door every week, nice French wine, microbrewed beer, and Diet Cokes on demand, surely someone living somewhere else should be able to drink water without parasites in it. I admit, I don’t much like thinking about this myself. When I turn on the NCAA basketball tournament tonight and pour out a Pale Ale or two, I probably am not going to be reflecting on the fact that during the time it takes me to watch the game, three thousand people around the world will die because they have only unsanitary water to drink. But maybe I should think about it. And maybe I should try to do something about it.
This book is not really meant to explain just what we should be doing. There are other authors far more qualified than I to talk about devising a solution. This book is designed to help us think, not about the solution, but about the problem. And the problem I’m addressing is the question of why. Why—at the deep, thoughtful level—is there such pain and misery in the world? I’m not asking the scientific question of why mosquitoes and parasites attack the human body and make it ill, but the theological and religious question of how we can explain the suffering in the world if the Bible is right and a good and loving God is in charge.
Different biblical authors, as we have seen, have different explanations for all the pain and the misery: some think that pain and suffering sometimes come from God as a punishment for sin (the prophets); some think that misery is created by human beings who abuse and oppress others (the prophets again); some think that God works in suffering to achieve his redemptive purposes (the Joseph
story; the Jesus story); some think that pain and misery come as a test from God to see if his people will remain faithful to him even when it does not pay to do so (the folktale about Job); others think that we simply can’t know why there is such suffering in the world—either because God the Almighty chooses not to reveal this kind of information to peons like ourselves (Job’s poetry) or because it is information beyond the ken of mere mortals (Ecclesiastes). When I think about malaria, or parasites ingested through contaminated water, or other related forms of misery, pain, and death, I personally resonate much more closely with Ecclesiastes than with any of the other options we’ve seen so far. To think that God is punishing the population of the sub-Sahara for its sins strikes me as grotesque and malevolent. They certainly aren’t suffering from malaria because other human beings are oppressing them (directly), and I see nothing redemptive in their deaths, or any indication that God is merely testing them to see if they’ll praise him with dying lips, wracked with pain. Maybe it is simply beyond our ability to understand.
Still other solutions are proffered by the biblical writers, however, and we should consider these as well. Probably the most significant historically for the development of the Christian religion—and at one time for Judaism as well—is the view found in the last of the Hebrew Bible books to be written, as well as in many of the New Testament books. It is a view that scholars today call
apocalypticism.
I will explain its name and its basic overarching view later in this chapter. First, though, I need to indicate where the apocalyptic perspective came from. As it turns out, it originated among Jewish thinkers who had grown dissatisfied with the traditional answer for why there is suffering in the world, the answer of the prophets, that suffering came to God’s people because they had sinned. Apocalypticists realized that suffering came even more noticeably to the people of God who tried to do God’s will. And they had to find an explanation for it.
The Background of Apocalyptic Thinking
As we have seen, the theology of the Hebrew prophets was ultimately rooted in a belief that God had, in the distant past, intervened in earthly affairs on behalf of his people Israel. Traditions of God’s interventions are at the core of both the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History. God himself created this world, formed the first human beings, gave them their first directives, and punished them when they disobeyed. God destroyed the world by flood when humankind became too wicked. God eventually called one man, Abraham, to become the father of a great nation that would distinctively be his people and he their God. God interacted with the Jewish patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jacob’s twelve sons—in guaranteeing that his promises would be fulfilled. He guided them to Egypt in a time of famine, and then four hundred years later he delivered them out of Egypt, where they had become slaves. It was especially through Moses that God was seen to work mighty wonders for his people, by sending plagues upon the oppressive Egyptians, which in turn led to the exodus, the crossing of the Red Sea (or sea of reeds), the destruction of the Egyptian armies, the giving of the Law to Moses, and the bestowal of the promised land on the children of Israel.
God’s frequent and beneficent interventions for his people in the past created a theological problem for Israelite thinkers in later years. On the one hand, the traditions of these interventions formed the basis of theological reflection on the nature of God and his relationship to his people: he would protect and defend them when they were endangered. On the other hand, historical realities seemed to contradict these theological conclusions. For the nation suffered massively, from time to time. It experienced drought, famine, and pestilence; the crops sometimes failed; there were political upheavals; and most noticeably, there were enormous military setbacks, especially when the northern kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians in 722
BCE
and the southern kingdom by the Babylonians in 586
BCE.
The prophets, of course, had an answer ready to hand: the people were suffering
not
because God was powerless to do anything about it for his chosen ones, but precisely because God was all powerful. It was God himself who was bringing this suffering upon his people, and it was because they had disobeyed him. If they would return to his ways, they would also return to his good favor; suffering would then abate and the people would once again enjoy peace and prosperity. So taught the prophets, whether Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah in the eighth century, or Jeremiah and Ezekiel in the sixth century, or, well, any prophet writing at any time. This was the prophetic view.
But what happens when the prophetic view comes to be disconfirmed by the events of history? What happens when the people of Israel do exactly what the prophets urge them to do—return to God, stop worshiping idols and following other gods, commit themselves to following the laws of God given to Moses, repent of their evil ways and return to doing what is right? The logic of the prophetic solution to the problem of suffering would suggest that then things would turn around and life would again be good.
The historical problem was that there were times when the people did return to God and it made absolutely no difference in their lives of suffering. In fact, there were times when it was
because
they returned to following the ways of God that they suffered, when foreign powers oppressed them precisely because they insisted on following the laws that God had given Moses for his people. How could one explain suffering then? The people must not be suffering for their sins—they were now suffering for their righteousness. The prophetic answer could not handle that problem. The apocalyptic answer arose to deal with it.
At this point I should address a potential objection to my summary of what happened when Israel repented of its sins and returned to God. Many readers—especially those who come from a Christian Protestant background—will no doubt object to my claim that Jews began suffering precisely because they started living righteous lives. In some Christians’ views, the Jews never could live
righteous lives because they could never actually do everything that God commanded them to do in the Law. And since they could never obey God’s Law, they were doomed to suffer. Sometimes when Christians reflect this view, it is nothing more or less than anti-Semitic: making a claim specifically about Jews as being a “hard-necked and sinful people.” But more often this view is based on the Christian notion that no people, no matter how hard they try, can possibly do all that God wants them to do. According to this view, to say that the righteous suffer is a bit of nonsense: no one is righteous, so how can the righteous suffer?