March 2012

Ehrman’s Problem 10: Special Pleading

This is my last post on Ehrman’s errors regarding his understanding of the classical view of suffering—that God punishes people for their sins. Here I will focus on what he calls “unfortunate historical realities.” Ehrman complains that the “predictions of future success and happiness” promised Israel if they obeyed “never did come to fulfillment” (89). …

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Ehrman’s Problem 9: He Minimizes the Horror of Sin

My first two posts on Ehrman’s discussion of the “classical view” of suffering—that God punishes people for their sins—were mostly about clearing up ambiguities and misapplications. In this blog we come to some unambiguous examples of God punishing people for their sins which Ehrman protests. For example, Ehrman is dismayed about the destruction of the …

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Ehrman’s Problem 8: The Strawman

Ehrman points out that the “classical view” of suffering—that God is punishing people for their sins—does have some merit: “The prophets, in short, were concerned about issues of real life—poverty, homelessness, injustice, oppression, the uneven distribution of wealth, the apathetic attitudes of those who have it good toward those who are poor, helpless, and outcast. …

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Ehrman’s Problem 7: The “Classical View” & the Holocaust

In my first series on Ehrman’s book God’s Problem, I reviewed some of his random ramble through the free will defense (there’s more to come). Now in his chapters two and three we turn to an even longer ramble spanning 69 pages!—of what he calls “the classical view of suffering”: that sometimes people suffer because …

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