I recently watched a debate between New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, and an Evangelical Christian apologist, Kyle Butt, who argued that God and His suffering world can exist in harmony. Dr. Ehrman’s most recent book, “God’s Problem,” a New York Times best seller, says no – suffering is proof that God doesn’t exist.

Kyle opened, guns blazing. He had studied every scrap of everything that Bart Ehrman had ever written, now face-to-face with one of the most renown, debate-hardened, erudite New Testament scholars of our day.

Dauntless, Kyle responded to Dr. Ehrman’s challenges with courage, passion – and an air of disrespect. He seemed to think that Dr. Ehrman was his enemy and that this debate was some kind of war.

While some of his responses bordered on insult, I understand Kyle’s posture. In the Evangelical world, we’ve placed a high value on theological “right-ness.” When we interact with someone who doesn’t think like we do, we’re tempted to downgrade them, sometimes asserting our not-so-God-given right to be abusive as we exalt our beliefs over everyone else’s.

I’ve been guilty of this so many times.

Kyle’s theology is what many of us would consider solid, but his lack of humility betrayed a deeper problem: it seemed that his understanding of suffering hadn’t yet been 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 – earthquakes, war, famine, blood, weeping, horror.

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 heaven – a place where suffering doesn’t exist. The fact that everything will ultimately be OK, seemed to make all the presently horrible things OK too.

Many of us approach the issue of God and suffering, and other theological conundrums, the same way. We live in a safe, predictable, wealthy place that gives us a bit of an “ivory tower” complex as we ponder the Almighty’s ways. A much larger chunk of our world doesn’t live so comfortably, and doesn’t think about God as we do.

It might be that our comparative lack of suffering has nurtured a theology that’s just as disembodied from world suffering as we are.

But there’s a deeper problem here. The true horrors of this world make it seem like things have gotten out of control, which makes God seem like He’s out of control.

We’re not interested in a God who can’t/won’t deal with this mess.

Maybe what was happening with Kyle wasn’t arrogance, or a lack of experience with suffering, but a very human need to live in a place that doesn’t wipe the floor with you whenever it wants. Perhaps this desire has leaked into his thoughts about God, and into ours.

In his book, Dr. Ehrman asks questions about God and suffering that us believers don’t usually ask. He’s an honest, ex-Evangelical, somewhat punchy, agnostic scholar with nothing to lose. His questions dig at the truth of what we’re all feeling, whether we want to admit it or not. “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, and who can do whatever He wants, allow this world to suffer as it does?”

Most of us wouldn’t agree that suffering is proof that God doesn’t exist, but we’ve got something to learn from Dr. Ehrman’s honesty. We’ll miss the truth entirely if we fail to engage, as much as we can, the tears, bloodshed, loss, war, disease, and general horribleness that are part and parcel to our existence.

But that would force us to accept the idea that our lives hang on the almighty’s whim.

Am I next?

Well-meaning Christians often say, “God is good, don’t worry, he’ll take care of you.” I have a friend who always chokes on this. “Right now, in this moment, hordes of people will suffer,” she’ll say. “Why would God take care of me but not them?”

As you read this, hundreds of good, God-fearing people will cry out to Him, “Why have you forsaken me?” Our simple, pithy, narrow solutions to the problem of suffering do nothing for these people, and are in need of redaction.

Pulitzer Prize winning author 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.”

The same is true for our thoughts of God. When we shrink from the realities of death and annihilation, or any other tension-laden proposition, our theology gets smaller.

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, especially when we run into the myriad places in the Bible that are difficult to reconcile.

Escape Pod Theology

As 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, like Kyle’s, that allows for an easy escape from the tension that this issue creates.

Between the extremes of “it will all be OK in the end,” and “God doesn’t exist” is an ocean of things to discuss, ponder, argue, study, and pray over. Allowing an all-powerful God to preside over a world in bed with evil will, by definition, 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.

I get it, and I’ve done it a million times – we don’t like tension. Relational tension, cognitive tension, physical tension, all have one thing in common – they insight us to bail. But if we want good relationships, wisdom, good theology, etc. we’re going to have to get used to tension.

The Bible’s authors were big fans of tension.

Take the issue of “salvation” for example (theologians refer to this as “soteriology”), i.e., who goes to heaven and who doesn’t. Some passages suggest that heaven is something you earn, while others seem to say that only those who believe in Jesus get in. Some strongly suggest that everyone gets in. Evangelicals are firmly in the “believe it to get it” group, while Catholics tend to espouse the “earn it to get it” perspective. Neither really knows what to do with the “everyone gets in” passages. Rob Bell tried clear some space for this and we nearly crucified him.

But if we were to entertain the idea that God’s soteriology somehow espouses all three views, our heads would explode…

…unless we’re willing to give up our need for easy answers and embark on a journey of discovery – one that requires comfort with confusion, frustration, and humble ignorance.

A journey like this would affect every other thing we think about God – to the point that our lives would change.

That’s the end game of theology.

But we’re tempted to rush towards clarity. We’ve come to believe that what God really wants is truth, so we hurry to get there. Too many times, our endgame is straightforward, black-and-white solutions to the toughest issues. Anything less is failure.

We want to set straight the atheists and other spiritual ne’er-do-wells. We see ourselves as the teachers of this world. The Bible is God’s word. We study it like no other religious expression, save the Jewish leaders of Jesus’ day.

We feel pressure. We’re the ones that are supposed to have all the answers.

That’s our mission.

So we study, think, and discuss with the endgame of propositional truth driving everything. We’ve created a culture of answer-people who tolerate neither the faithless hordes outside of our camp, nor the myriad points of tension that infest our sacred scriptures.

What are we missing? Just like the guy who dilutes the end-game of his life to an impressive salary and a vacation home – what are we cheating ourselves out of 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 this world. It would be so much better to take the years-long journey from ground to bottle – hard work, colors, soil, smells, people, setbacks, victories, parties, stories, sunrise

Maybe that’s why none of us get to do the magical stuff Jesus did – If we could work miracles, we’d be all about the destination at the expense of everything else.

When our thoughts of God focus primarily on some propositional truth endgame, we’re missing out on something deeper, more real, more true, and much more capable of changing our lives.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes propositional truth is important. Our life with God relies on certain, specific, black-and-white beliefs. I rely heavily on the fact that God is real, that He can do anything He wants, even cheat death.

He is the embodiment of good, patience, peace, forgiveness, and love. Humanity is the most precious thing to Him. He loves us without condition or limitation. I’m supposed to do the same. These things are clearly laid out in scripture.

But there are so many other places in the Bible that lie in a different arena, full of weirdness, complication, and contradiction. Here, tension is good. Confusion is good. Rabbit trails, wrong conclusions, hours of reading, thinking, discussing, arguing – good stuff. Throw in a cigar and a glass of whiskey now and again – even better.

And the Bible’s not the only place to go if we want to explore the depths of God’s truth.

Years ago, I came to believe, at the behest of my Baptist girlfriend, that the Bible accurately reflects the words, perspective, values, and desires of God. Years later, I attended seminary to study the scriptures like I never had before. I’m familiar with most of the arguments against the genesis, transmission, corruption, restoration, accuracy and authority of scripture, and have found none compelling enough to sway me from a perspective that I’ve held for 30 years now.

The Bible has given me hope to be sure, but if nothing else it’s saved me on so many occasions from an absurdly repetitive propensity to embark on trajectories opposite my deepest values. In thirty-something years of becoming a follower of Jesus, I’ve put the scriptures to the test many times, and many times come out a believer.

But the Bible isn’t the only thing that bears His stamp. Humanity, desire, space, time, etc., all have this in common with scripture and should be allowed a voice. The efficacy of our theology hinges on how accurately we’ve understood the things God has written, spoken, or created.

If our understanding of one contradicts the other, we’ve gotten something wrong and should see this as an invitation into a deeper understanding as we attempt to reconcile our minds – painful as that might be.

Great care must be taken to keep our agendas, insecurities, preferences, biases, personal hurt, lust for propositional truth, etc. from getting in the way of this invitation from God to dig deeper, to experience the power and beauty of a journey whose ultimate, never-ending destination is a changed life.

Photo Credit: Deleece Cook