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Contributor
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Los Angeles area
Posts: 40,549
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A very well considered essay on theodicy as part of a Review of God's Problem
Quote:
Holiday in Hellmouth
God may be dead, but the question of why he permits suffering lives on.
by James Wood
* * *
There is something adolescent about such complaint; I can hear it like a boy’s breaking voice in my own prose. For anti-theodicy is permanent rebellion. It is not quite atheism but wounded theism, condemned to argue ceaselessly against a God it is supposed not to believe in. Bart D. Ehrman’s new book, "God’s Problem" (HarperOne; $25.95), is highly adolescent in tone. Its jabbing subtitle, "How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer," sounds as if it should be furiously triple-underlined on the dust jacket.
. . .
Awash in negative belief, Ehrman unabashedly fights his God, and wants to discover what the Bible has to say about suffering. He is a lucid expositor, the weaknesses of his book being the aural clatter of the lecture room ("Still, most Jews didn’t buy it, and this was a major source of pain to Paul") and its limited perspective. He seldom connects Biblical passages with the larger philosophical or literary traditions. You will find no Pierre Bayle or Rousseau or Schopenhauer here, and no Milton, or Hardy, or Camus. The early Church Fathers are hardly mentioned. There is almost a sense that Ehrman, fearing scholasticism, does not want to get sucked into the philosophical history of theodicy. It is also true that, as Ehrman says, theodicy as such does not exist in the Bible. Nowadays, theodicy always has a wary eye on the theological exit: this makes no sense, therefore I will have to reject the idea of God. But there was no such exit before about 1700, at the very earliest. "Ancient Jews and Christians never questioned whether God existed," Ehrman notes. "What they wanted to know was how to understand God and how to relate to him, given the state of the world."
So Ehrman concentrates on what you could call the first responders to hellmouth—the Prophets, the Psalmists, the Apocalypticists—and he is often illuminating. He separates three large strands in the Biblical writings: the idea that suffering is a punishment for sinful behavior; the idea that suffering is either ultimately redemptive or some kind of test of virtue; and the idea that God will finally vanquish evil and establish his kingdom of peace and harmony. We are probably most familiar with suffering as punishment, since it runs throughout the Hebrew Bible. Creation almost begins with a curse, God’s determination that women will give birth in pain as a result of Eve’s disobedience. The earth is then quickly condemned to the Flood, because God is unhappy with his sinful creation, and wants to start over again—what the English comedian Eddie Izzard calls the Etch A Sketch approach. (Izzard, whose standup routines often circle around religion, is very funny, also, about the unjust deaths of all those animals. What would constitute, say, a wicked giraffe? "I will eat all the leaves on this tree. I will eat more leaves than I should and then other giraffes may die.") The Israelites, of course, are alternately rescued and abandoned by their jealous God, depending on the quality of their disobedience. And the Prophets majestically harp on punishment as a consequence of sinfulness—the oppression of the poor, sexual deviance (Amos), worship of false gods and idols (Hosea). Military defeat, captivity, and exile are the retributions for this alleged errancy.
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06-10-2008, 01:37 PM
