To Suffer Or Not to Suffer Part I

My uncle called me one afternoon and told me to read an article posted on NPR's website.

A well-known evangelical Christian theologian, Bart Ehrman, had turned apostate. He walked away from the Judeo-Christian God in whom he had believed all his life because he could not find a satisfactory explanation as to why the supposedly personal God of the Bible would allow people to suffer as much as they do. The extent of excruciating pain he witnessed in the world was too much for him to keep believing, and so he stopped.

Bart Ehrman's resignation bothered me for a while, not because I began to doubt my own belief in the existence of God or who He is; rather, I was disturbed by the question of how - how Ehrman came to the point of being able to walk away from God. C.S. Lewis, the brilliant apologist he was (and not without his own painful experiences), logically reasoned himself to belief in Jehovah; Ehrman reasoned himself away. How does this happen exactly...

Suffering is a human experience that is difficult to justify as one who believes in a God of mercy, especially because the Gospel is simply the declaration that God loves, loves, loves people...enough to send His blameless son, Jesus, to suffer and die a horrible death for something he didn't do. When someone who is not a believer asks why He would have His son die, the believer answers, "because God loves us that much." This begs the question.

Love and pain seem in themselves to be irreconcilable terms, and I can't say that I have an answer that explains how they can coexist. I know what I learned growing up in Sunday school, answers like "because people are sinful," that were simple enough to comfort me until I was old enough to understand what pain looked and felt like. But then when one witnesses good, faithful people meeting terrible hardship after terrible hardship all their lives while seemingly expendable specimens of mankind live in undeserving prosperity, the "well, it's just sin" answer doesn't stretch far enough across the problem to serve as a satisfying answer.

The only thing possible for me to do in trying to understand for myself the question with which Ehrman wrestled and lost is to think about what keeps me believing instead of throwing in the towel in like fashion.

Well, before all else, I think a person has to know that God is real. And not just "real" as in "alive somewhere out there," kind of real, but real in a personal, individual way. It's not enough for me to just to believe in "the God that C.S. Lewis told me about," or "the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob" or "the God my parent believe in." God becomes my God when he answers my life's need, a need that no one else could possibly know but me. When God speaks to me in ways so specific to my life, situations and weaknesses, I know that he isn't just a God. He is a God for me.

This is why I make the distinction between faith and religion. Religion does not necessarily require faith. It is an establishment, with laws, beliefs, systems, traditions and a culture. I see it as being a sort of accessory among the other things in a person's life, as something one "does" or of which one is a "member."

I see faith, on the other hand, as more of a way of being. As C.S. Lewis said, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." Faith, therefore, is the believer's beginning. It is the point from which his or her entire life proceeds, and the means by which the believer understands his or her existence. It's like trading in old eyeballs for new ones that have a special way of seeing the world.

So, did Ehrman subscribe to a religion or believe in a living God? Because then the question that arises is, did Ehrman walk away from rules and rituals? Or did he reject a God he believed to be real and tangible because he didn't like who that God turned out to be?

There is a difference between someone believing one exists and disliking who that person is. The former originates in ignorance, the latter from disappointment. I wonder which he was.