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. On all of these points I resonate deeply with the prophets and their concerns” (54).

So far so good.

But in his next sentence he makes another bizarre turn: “A the same time, there are obvious problems with their point of view, especially if it is generalized into some kind of universal principle, as some people have tried to do over the ages” (54). Ehrman then tells us how unfair making this view a universal principle would be by bringing up things like the famines of Ethiopia, the Bosnian war, the 1918 influenza, malaria, and AIDS.

But why bring this up?

After all, his book is about whether the Bible can answer why God allows suffering, and Ehrman has already admitted that the Bible doesn’t make punishment for sin a universal principle! Also, I don’t know any Bible-reading Christian, and I mean not even one, who has generalized this into a universal principle. After all, anyone who reads the Bible at all knows the story of Job and knows about Jesus healing the blind man who hadn’t sinned (John 9:2-3). So why bring it up?

On the next page (55) he writes,

The problem with this 1 view is not only that it is scandalous and outrageous, but also that it creates both a false security and false guilt. If punishment comes because of sin, and I’m not suffering one bit, thank you very much, does that make me righteous? More righteous than my next door neighbor who lost his job, or whose child was killed in an accident, or whose wife was brutally raped and murdered? On the other hand, if I am undergoing intense suffering, is it really because God is punishing me? Am I really to blame when my child is born with a defect? when the economy takes a nosedive and I can no longer afford to put food on the table? When I get cancer?

But, again, this argument would be valid only if you generalized the “classical view” into a universal principle, something that neither the Bible (again, Ehrman himself admits this) nor even one Christian that I know of does.

But, strangely, Ehrman again bemoans the horror of turning the classical view into a universal principle when he concludes his discussion of the “classical view” of suffering on page 90:

But readers [of the Bible] over the years have sometimes extracted a universal principle from these writings and insisted that suffering comes because God is punishing us for our sin. People who take this point of view, as I have pointed out, often suffer unnecessarily from self-imposed guilt. Is suffering really our fault? Is it not the case that this very explanation—as prevalent as it was in antiquity and as it is today—simply doesn’t work in view of the realities of our world?

Ehrman then brings up tsunamis, starvation, AIDS, genocide, and so on. But, for the last time: the Bible doesn’t teach that all suffering comes from sin, Ehrman agrees that it doesn’t, and I don’t know even one Christian who thinks it does!

Maybe Ehrman does know of some bumbling Bible readers, somewhere, who hold this view but, for the most part, hasn’t Ehrman just kicked the stuffing out of a strawman?

Now, all this being said, the Bible does teach that suffering often is the result of sin. We’ll talk more about that tomorrow.

  1. It isn’t entirely clear what “this” refers to. In the preceding paragraph Ehrman talks about modern Israel and then ancient Israel and complains about how the prophetic view would be unfair (we’ll get into that in tomorrow’s post), but in the sentence at hand and the sentences that follow he apparently switches back from addressing either modern or ancient Israel to talking about how horrible it would be if the “classical view” were generalized to a universal principle.[]

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