Posted by Helen on: 03.11.2008 /
In his new book, “God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer” Bart Ehrman explains why he stopped being a Christian. The Wall Street Journal included an interesting interview with him last week.
According to their interview Bart is hearing from many other people like him
WSJ: In the first chapter of your book, you write that you have lost your faith, that you no longer go to church, and that you don’t consider yourself a Christian. Isn’t this unusual for somebody with such a long and serious religious background?
Mr. Ehrman: I’m getting hundreds of emails, and more than half are from people with conservative religious upbringings who now so doubt their faith that they don’t know what to call themselves. Also, departments of religious studies are notorious for being staffed by people who don’t believe in the traditions that they teach.
Bart was also interviewed on NPR recently. Their page links to their interview and includes this excerpt from his book
Eventually, though, I felt compelled to leave Christianity altogether. I did not go easily. On the contrary, I left kicking and screaming, wanting desperately to hold on to the faith I had known since childhood and had come to know intimately from my teenaged years onward. But I came to a point where I could no longer believe. It’s a very long story, but the short version is this: I realized that I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of life. In particular, I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. For many people who inhabit this planet, life is a cesspool of misery and suffering. I came to a point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of it.
The problem of suffering became for me the problem of faith. After many years of grappling with the problem, trying to explain it, thinking through the explanations that others have offered—some of them pat answers charming for their simplicity, others highly sophisticated and nuanced reflections of serious philosophers and theologians—after thinking about the alleged answers and continuing to wrestle with the problem, about nine or ten years ago I finally admitted defeat, came to realize that I could no longer believe in the God of my tradition, and acknowledged that I was an agnostic: I don’t “know” if there is a God; but I think that if there is one, he certainly isn’t the one proclaimed by the Judeo-Christian tradition, the one who is actively and powerfully involved in this world. And so I stopped going to church.
Comment by: Mike Clawson
1 03/21/08 8:56 AM | Comment Link |It’s funny, I was browsing this book at the airport last month, and my reaction was that some of the same answers to the problem of suffering that Ehrman finds so inadequate, to me actually do seem helpful, even if sometimes incomplete. One half of his thesis in the book is that the Bible offers many different, and sometimes apparently conflicting answers to the problem of suffering. Fair enough, I agree that’s likely the case. But the other half of his thesis is that the Bible’s answers therefore are useless. This strikes me as more of the same sort of black and white, all or nothing thinking that Ehrman has displayed on other occasions. He’s demanding a simple, clear-cut answer to a complex and difficult problem. But, perhaps the Bible’s complex and multifacted answers are simply a reflection of the complex reality of the problem. I personally find that more satisfying than any monolithic, overly simplistic answers could be. What Ehrman sees as a liability in scripture, I see as a strength.
Comment by: Helen
2 03/21/08 9:39 AM | Comment Link |Mike, thanks for this perspective.
I haven’t read much Ehrman. I heard a podcast of his last year based on his earlier book in which he was talking about how interesting it is to study the gospels one by one and notice the individuality of each. I liked that.
I hadn’t picked up on him wanting overly simplistic answers but I’ll be looking out for that now. I agree with you that that’s unrealistic.
Comment by: Mike Clawson
3 03/23/08 1:00 PM | Comment Link |My take on Ehrman is that he thinks that if fundamentalism isn’t true then Christianity can’t be true at all. For instance his book “Misquoting Jesus” has a lot of good information on the thousands of variations in the New Testament texts found among the ancient manuscripts. However, he then draws the conclusion that therefore we can’t trust anything about the Bible. But that is only the case if you buy into a fundamentalist view of scripture that says it was handed to us as an “inerrant” text directly from God right from day one. On the other hand, there are many of us who view God’s “inspiration” of scripture as applying to both the initial writings, as well as the subsequent decades and centuries of coallating, revising and editing. So when Ehrman points out variations between versions of the text, many of us simply reply, “yeah, so?” Our faith isn’t dependent on the existence of one unalterable, inerrant text, so it’s not shaken by finding out that we never had that anyway.
That’s what I mean by the difference between demanding black and white simplicity versus real-world complexity in one’s approach to faith.
Comment by: Eliza
4 03/23/08 6:33 PM | Comment Link |I found “Misquoting Jesus” to be very interesting. Haven’t read anything else he’s written. Anything else by him, other than “M.J.” and this new book, that anyone would particularly recommend? [I'm finally running low on books on my "to read" list!]
Comment by: Helen
5 03/25/08 4:54 AM | Comment Link |Mike, thanks - I understand what you’re saying. Your comments are certainly making me curious about the book.
Without having read the book - I would tend to agree that ‘trusting the Bible’ doesn’t make sense if it isn’t inerrant. I understand people without that view trusting God to use the Bible in their lives in various ways - but I would reserve ‘trusting the Bible’ for context in which its considered to be inerrant. Does that make sense to you?
Eliza, I haven’t heard of Ehrman’s other books (if he’s written others) - so I’m afraid I have nothing helpful to contribute.
Comment by: Mike Clawson
6 03/25/08 2:41 PM | Comment Link |I understand what you’re saying Helen. I guess I just don’t look at it that way. I think there’s plenty of room for the Bible to be “inspired” and “useful for training in the ways of justice” (to quote what Paul says about scripture in 2 Timothy 3:15-16), without having to add unsupportable terms like “inerrant” which are fairly recent additions in the history of theology.
You might find this article by Roger Olson interesting: “Why Inerrancy Doesn’t Matter”. He suggests that the doctrine of inerrancy actually undermines biblical authority.
Comment by: Helen
7 03/27/08 7:43 PM | Comment Link |Thanks for the link, Mike. I’ll look at that when I have time.
I used to think like this: God can do whatever he wants, so he certainly could make the Bible inerrant if he wanted to.
But now I think more like this: I don’t see the reason for making the Bible inerrant - even if it is people disagree over the interpretation of it anyway, so what purpose does inerrancy serve?
A view like yours makes more sense to me, where trust is in God and God uses the Bible in the lives of Christians as they read it and discuss it - but that doesn’t require it to be ‘inerrant’.
Comment by: no offense
8 09/30/08 4:46 PM | Comment Link |…are there other areas of your life where you trust people and things? (Doctors, textbooks, newspapers, friends, a spouse, etc.) Do you only trust them after you are convinced they are ‘inerrant?’
Comment by: Helen
9 09/30/08 6:56 PM | Comment Link |no offense, I don’t expect inerrancy from people or things - I think that would be unrealistic.
I look up everything my doctor says when I get home :)
Comment by: no offense
10 10/1/08 10:38 AM | Comment Link |where are you going to ‘look it up?’
;-)
Is that ‘inerrant?’
Or is it that trustworthiness is not necessarily incompatible with errancy?
Comment by: Helen
11 10/1/08 1:50 PM | Comment Link |On the Internet of course - that’s always right isn’t it? ;-)
Seriously though - trust seems like the wrong word to me.
I make decisions based on the best information I can get. And yes it’s a judgment call somewhat based on experience and evidence which information is best. I don’t see where ‘trust’ comes into that. I may have an opinion that some sources are more reliable than others but I wouldn’t say I’m ‘trusting’ them. Maybe giving them a bit more benefit of the doubt than others. That’s all. Inerrancy isn’t a reality of the non-supernatural world and if there is no supernatural world it’s not a reality at all.
Comment by: gecko
12 10/2/08 7:33 AM | Comment Link |Withour having read anything from Bart Ehrman, just from the commentaries: Is it about the Bible or about what humans (including church founders and leaders) have made of it? As I started to read the Bible in another language, it seemed that a whole new world opened. And this was not about any church or about other people, it suddenly was about me! Others might have different new insights, but these where mine. And now I take it as my responsability to act according to them. I think that Bart was very honest and brave to leave so much behind.