I recently watched a debate between New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman and Apologetic Press’ Kyle Butt, both arguing whether or not world suffering disproves the existence of God. Dr. Ehrman’s popular book, “God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why Do We Suffer?” a New York Times best seller, says no: the suffering of our world is proof that God doesn’t exist.

Kyle had studied every scrap that Bart Ehrman had written, now face-to-face with one of the most renowned, erudite New Testament scholars of our day. He was dauntless, responding with courage, passion, and an air of disrespect.

This was a crucial battle, and Bart Ehrman was the bad guy.

While some of Kyle’s responses were downright insulting, I understand where he’s coming from. Us American God-followers place a high value on theological “right-ness;” when we interact with a lesser mortal, we’re tempted to downgrade, sometimes asserting our not-so-God-given right to be jerks as we exalt our beliefs over others.

I’ve done that.

Many would say that Kyle is a solid guy, theologically speaking, but I was left with the impression that his grasp of human suffering wasn’t tempered by the horrible things that so often attend humanity. At no time in the 2-hour debate did he acknowledge how dreadful things can be.

He offered a few seconds’ lip service in his closing argument but quickly spring-boarded into the idea that we’ll all end up in a place where suffering doesn’t exist. The fact that everything will ultimately be OK makes all the presently horrible things so OK that we don’t need to talk about them.

Add to that our Western way of life – safe, predictable, wealthy – and we find ourselves in a bit of an ivory tower as we ponder the Almighty’s ways.

The rest of humanity doesn’t live so comfortably, and doesn’t interpret as we do.

It might be that our relative lack of suffering has nurtured an understanding of God that’s just as disembodied from world suffering as we are.

Embracing Insanity

It’s impossible to wrap our heads around the issue of suffering without feeling like everything’s gone out of control. Things get really bad here. For us God-followers, an out-of-control world can only be presided over by an out-of-control God. But that idea frightens us: few are interested in one who can’t keep this place glued together. I need a God who acts as He should, who shares my values, my desire for personal safety, yearly vacations, etc.

Feeling out of control runs counter to everything within us. It’s as if we were made for a place where things are much more predictable.

NASA once used black box recordings to study what happens to pilots when they realize that everything had gone haywire, just before a fatal crash. The results were fascinating, and awful. Across the board, the initial reaction was to deny what was happening, or disengage completely. In one incident, just before his aircraft struck the ground, the pilot calmly uttered, “Mom?”

Maybe Kyle’s problem, and ours, isn’t arrogance, or a lack of experience with suffering, but a very human need to live in a place that doesn’t mop the floor with us whenever it wants.

That might have more authority over our theology than it should.

On the other hand, Dr. Ehrman asks questions about God and suffering that us believers don’t always have the guts for. He’s an honest, ex-Evangelical, somewhat punchy, agnostic scholar with no congregation to get angry if he says something wrong.

His questions dig at the truth of what we’re all feeling:

“Why does God allow some people to suffer but not others?”
“Why doesn’t God always intervene when things go wrong?”
“What should we do with all of the truly horrible scenes in the Old Testament, most of which came at the hands of God Himself?”
“How can a God who loves us without condition, who can do whatever He wants, allow this world to suffer as it does?”

Most of us wouldn’t agree with “God’s Problem,” i.e., suffering is final proof that God’s not real. I don’t. But we’ve got something to learn from Dr. Ehrman’s honesty. We’ll miss the truth entirely if we fail to engage, much as we can, the tears, bloodshed, loss, war, disease, and general horribleness that are part and parcel to human existence.

But it’s scary. Honesty forces us to embrace the reality that our lives hang on the Almighty’s whim. Am I next? My wife? Kids for God’s sake? We say, “God is good, don’t worry, he’ll take care of you,” but honest people have a hard time with that one. I have a close friend who says, “As we speak, so many people are suffering. Why would God take care of me but not them?”

Pulitzer Prize winning author and psychologist Ernest Becker wrote long ago, “The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”

I think the same is true for our theology. Thoughts of God get smaller when they shrink from the frightening realities of our world.

But to fully understand God, we’d need a full understanding of human suffering, something akin to the one He has, and nobody could handle that. A god-level cognizance of world suffering would destroy us. We’re forced instead to work with a scaled-down version, and we control the scale.

As such, American Christian theology doesn’t pair well with the painful parts of our world.

How many “positive and encouraging” sermons have you sat through? How many times have you left Sunday services in mourning? Our passion to fill the pews, entertain the devout, and surrender to a God who reigns over utopia has truly shrunken the way we think about Him.

Escape-Pod Theology

Much as I respect Dr. Ehrman, I don’t agree that the existence of suffering backs us into a corner where we’re forced to believe that God isn’t real. “Suffering proves that God doesn’t exist” is a proposition that offers an easy escape from the tension that good theology creates. It’s nearly the exact opposite of Kyle’s “It’ll all be OK in the end” remedy.

Between the extremes of “it doesn’t matter,” and “God doesn’t exist” is an ocean of things to discuss, ponder, argue, study, and pray about. Allowing a holy God to preside over a world in bed with evil will cause significant tension as we’re forced from simple answers into something deeper, more painful – closer to the truth and more able to change our lives.

When we hit the eject button, we miss out on too much.

Who could blame us? Relational tension, cognitive tension, physical tension, etc., all require discomfort and incite us to jump ship. But if we want good relationships, physical fitness, intelligence, wisdom, good theology, etc. we’re going to have to get used to tension and the pain that it causes.

The Biblical authors were big fans.

Take the issue of “salvation” for example (theologians call this “soteriology”). Some passages suggest that heaven is something you earn (Mt 7:21, Ro 2:6-8, John 5:28-29), while others seem to say that only those who believe in Jesus get in (Ro 4:4-5, Ro 5:1, Acts 16:30-31). Others suggest everyone gets in (Gal 2:21, Ro 5:8, Ro 5:18, Ro 11:6, 1Pet 2:24). Evangelicals are firmly set in the “believe it to get it” group, while Catholics tend to embrace the “earn it to get it” perspective. Neither really knows what to do with the “everyone gets in” passages. Rob Bell tried to clear some space there and we nearly crucified him.

But if we were to entertain the idea that God’s version of soteriology somehow espouses all three views, our heads would explode, unless we’re willing to give up our need for quick answers and instead embark on a journey of discovery, one that requires comfort with confusion, frustration, and humble ignorance.

Missing What Matters

In my early twenties, armed with some money from grandpa and a newly found confidence compliments of Top Gun, I took my first private-pilot lesson. Floating over the Fort Worth skyline at 90 mph with my instructor in a beat up Cessna, I decided to begin a career in aviation.

I was hooked.

Shortly after the FAA bestowed upon me the much coveted “Private Pilot” license, I realized that I was merely a fledgling in the piloting world; I couldn’t wait to fly bigger planes and one day land that left-seat, high-salary captain gig. For years I flew as much as my rotating credit line would allow and took a job as a flight instructor so I could build the experience needed to climb to the next rung. I was hired by a company out of Texarkana and flew occasionally as co-pilot on some of their bigger planes. It was one of the best times of my life; teaching hillbillies how to fly and occasionally co-piloting the big rigs, making my “baby” pilot friends jealous.

I was anxious to advance, always feeling like I was on the bottom of the food chain – even my girlfriend flew bigger planes than I did. I quickly garnered a reputation for being driven, which seemed like a good thing to me; up to this point I had always shuffled aimlessly through life. Aviation gave me a passion for career advancement and an overall sense of responsibility that I never had.

About the time that I was ready to advance, a close family member died. I went into a tailspin, re-thinking everything including my coveted career. A few years later I enrolled in one of the most renown, conservative Evangelical seminaries in the country and began a career in ministry leadership. The same thing happened on that journey – driven, only able to see what was missing, comparing myself to others.

Eyes on the prize.

I’ve lived most of my adult life like this – hopes, dreams, heart, everything tied to some future destination, all of my energy and attention expended with a clear goal in sight, unable to see anything else.

It’s like crawling through a steel tube. You can see just enough at the end to keep you going, but the beauty, weight, people, depth, and meaning that surround you are invisible, out of reach, weightless, meaningless.

It’s common to live this way in our culture, always hoping to “get somewhere” – a new relationship, marriage, salary, position, image, possessions. We’re so focused on the future that we miss out on the powerful things happening around us.

We’re tempted to do the same thing with theology. Too many times the end game of our doctrinal oddysey is propositional truth – straightforward, black-and-white solutions to the toughest issues.

Anything less is failure.

We see ourselves as leaders and teachers, seeking to set straight the atheists and other spiritual ne’er do wells or our world. Why wouldn’t we? The Bible is God’s word, anchored at the core of everything we do. We study it like no other contemporary religious expression and place immense pressure on ourselves to have all the answers. That’s our mission.

So we study, discuss, think, and pronounce in the steel-tub endgame of black-and-white propositional truth. We’ve been doing this for years and have created a culture of answer-people who tolerate neither the faithless hordes outside our camp nor the myriad points of tension that infest our sacred scriptures.

But in our haste to blow past mystery and tension, what are we missing? Just like the guy who dilutes his life’s endgame to an impressive salary and a vacation home – how are we cheating ourselves when the sole purpose of our theology is “right-ness?”

Who sits down to a movie and fast forwards to the end?

If you could turn water into wine, would you do it? After the nostalgia and whatever residual fame wore off, it would become just as “normal” as any other miracle in our world. Better to take the year-long journey from ground to bottle and all of the people, parties, setbacks, and victories that entails.

Maybe that’s why none of us get to do the magic stuff Jesus did – If we could work miracles, we’d be all about the destination at the expense of everything else. So He’s limited us to the “everyday” miracles of humility, sacrifice, mercy, compassion, love, etc.

In the same vein, the Bible isn’t an appeal for us to fast-forward to the final answer. It’s an invitation to dig deeper, to allow theological tension to bleed into all of our God-thoughts while denying the temptation to hitch a ride on someone else’s propositional-truth escape-pod.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes the black and white stuff is important; our life with God relies on specific beliefs. I lean heavily on the idea that God is real, that He can do anything He wants, even cheat death. I believe that He is the embodiment of good, patience, peace, and forgiveness. He loves us without condition or limitation and I’m compelled to do the same. These are clearly laid out in scripture – inarguable in my opinion.

But so many other propositions lie in a different arena, full of tension, complication, rife with “contradiction.” Here, tension is good. Confusion is good. Rabbit trails, wrong conclusions, hours of reading, thinking, discussing, trying to live it all out – good stuff.

Throw in a cigar and a recreational beverage now and again – even better.

 

Photo by Kari Shea on Unsplash.com