Engaging God's Problem -- Disagreements with Chapter Two

As short as my last post was, this one is going to be a little longer.

The first thing I want to make abundantly clear is that think that Bart Ehrman's book God's Problem is not evil. In fact I am glad he wrote it. These issues need to be front and center because if Christians just stick their head in the sand about them it is cowardly -- people are asking these questions and we need to give reasoned responses.

1. The first disagreement I have with this chapter and one that I have throughout the book is that Ehrman seeks constantly to avoid human responsibility for evil. The one thing that Bart constantly harps on is God is responsible for evil according to the Bible. I disagree. Bart says that while many things can be attributed to freewill he says that things like natural disasters cannot be attributed to human responsibility. I believe that Bart's great weakness in his book is that he does not consider the stories of Genesis and their showing of the origins of evil seriously. His contention is that THE BIBLE does not answer the problem of suffering but then he dismisses some of the Bible's explanation because he does not want to believe it. If I say as a apparent to a child -- "don't do that or you will be punished" and then the child does it who is going to be responsible when the punishment is carried out? This kind of puts God in a position of 'damned if He does, damned if He doesn't" If God does -- he is too harsh. If he doesn't -- he does not keep His Word. No matter what God does he loses to Bart.

2. This leads to my second problem with Bart Ehrman -- His constant reliance that liberal views of the text of Scripture is absolutely true. He uses the JEPD theory in this chapter and I find it interesting that He on the one had dismisses the text of Scripture of the New Testament (See Misquoting Jesus) but then supports and uses as a guiding light for his interpretation a theory that has NO TEXTUAL SUPPORT AT ALL. It is inconsistencies like this in Bart's reasoning that bother me.

3. Bart has problems with God's treatment of Israel after their disobedience. God promised to protect them and make them great but then he destroys them. "What kind of God is this?" Bart contends. He is a God that keeps his word. You cannot read Deuteronomy and not get the impression that God's promises were conditional, very conditional and that IF they did not keep their end they were bring the punishments on themselves. Bart never brings this out or seems to even have considered it.

4. Bart contends that the prophets only spoke to their time. I am not sure other Biblical writers would agree. The Gospel writers in particular believed that Jesus fulfilled a lot of things said by OT prophets. I think this a poor understanding of prophecy by Bart as poor as the Evangelicals have at times. Egotism aside, that does not mean the prophets did not speak to the future of God's activities. As to some predictions being unfulfilled -- Prophecy is also conditional, if the conditions change, the results change. Being an open theist my understandings of prophecy are different -- God makes promises but he can choose the time and place of their fulfillment and if the other side of the relationship does not keep their end he is free to not keep His.

5. In punishment, God is not trying to improve morale as Bart contends (humorously but the point is wrong) the point of punishment is correction of behavior. The fact is that Israel could have avoided the evil it suffered by doing one thing -- OBEY, and it wouldn't be to hard. It was only hard because the Israelites thought it was more important to serve themselves than God.

Next: Agreement with Chapter Three