Engaging God's Problem -- Disagreements with Chapter Nine

This is the final disagreement post with Bart Ehrman's God's Problem, although I have a few more to close the discussion out about this book. Disagreements with chapter nine are many so hang on.

1. More politics --the book is obviously written before the surge which worked and ended the main problems in Iraq.

2. Bart restates his idea that God's discipline of the Israelites was too harsh but the question remains: how do you discipline a nation without doing something that effects the nation as a whole?

3. God held responsible, mankind let off the hook again.

4. Bart decries this world as a good world God has created. My point is this -- this is not the world as God created it --it is a world that stands as it is because we have ruined it. I don't believe God made the best possible world he could make but one in which free creatures could grow and develop in their relationship with him. We destroyed that with sin.

5. Bart continues to rely on a Reformed/Baptist/Classic view of God's nature in his criticism and states that the God of the Bible is incompatible with the world as it is -- but not all view of God do this but Bart never explores them. When talking about God being all powerful he uses classic definitions but not Biblical ones.

6. God does suffer in a sense because of sin -- he grieves over it, gets angry over it, and gets disappointed with sin and human beings. To say God does not suffer in some sense is not Biblically true. This doesn't make God any less God as Bart would assert but it odes make him a person. Bart makes a leap of logic here on p. 274 that he cannot back up -- that the God of the Old Testament and the New Testament cannot be the same because the way of dealing with the problem of evil is different. The problem is he never really proves that the Bible's answers to the problem of evil contradict each other as he claims.

7. Bart does not think that some suffering is redemptive but the problem is that he dos not have God's perspective on the event. How does he know for certain that there is no redemption in events for sure -- is he God?

8. Suffering is only a test of faith if it is faith that causes the suffering-- this is a point Bart seems to miss.

9. Bart talks about the gift of life we have -- but who or what is it a gift from? Ironic that when you get rid of God you don't really have anyone to say life is a gift from anymore.

10. Bart ultimately shows a lot of pride -- he does not want to admit that in the grand scheme of things - -he might just be a peon after all. After a final reading i can also say there is a lot of self righteousness to someone who wants to call God to account but sees no problem with himself or his own contributes to the problem of evil.

Next: Wrap Up #1 -- Over Reliance on Classic Theology