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Authors: Bart D. Ehrman
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this view. God sometimes visits judgment on his own people—especially since they are his own people—because they have abandoned him and his ways.
What can we say about such a view? On the positive side, this view takes God and his interactions with the world seriously. The laws that his people broke, after all, were laws meant to preservethe welfare of society. They were laws designed to ensure that the poor were not oppressed, that the needy were not overlooked, that the weak were not exploited. These were laws as well that dictated that God be worshiped and served—God alone, not other gods of other peoples. The prophets taught that adherence to God’s will would bring divine favor whereas disobedience would lead to hardship—and surely obedience would be better for everyone involved, especially the poor, needy, and weak. The prophets, in short, were concerned about issues of real life—poverty, homelessness, injustice, oppression, the uneven distribution of wealth, the apathetic attitudes of those who have it good toward those who are poor, helpless, and outcast. On all of these points I resonate deeply with the prophets and their concerns.
At the same time, there are obvious problems with their point of view, especially if it is generalized into some kind of universal principle, as some people have tried to do over the ages. Do we really want to say that God brings starvation as a punishment for sin? Is God at fault for the famines in Ethiopia? Does God create military conflict? Is he to blame for what happened in Bosnia? Does God bring disease and epidemics? Was he the one who caused the 1918 influenza epidemic that killed thirty million people worldwide? Is he killing seven thousand people a day with malaria? Has he created the AIDS crisis?
I don’t think so. Even if one wants to limit the prophetic view to the “chosen people,” the people of Israel, what are we to say? That the political and military problems in the Middle East are God’s way of trying to get Israel to return to him? That he is willing to sacrifice the lives of women and children in suicide bombings to get his point across? Even if we limit ourselves to ancient Israel, do we really want to say that innocent people starved to death (starvation does not hit just the guilty, after all) as a divine punishment for the sins of the nation? That the brutal oppression of the Assyrians and then the Babylonians was really God’s doing, that he urged the soldiers on as they ripped open pregnant women and dashed little children against the rocks?
The problem with this view is not only that it is scandalous and outrageous, but also that it creates both false security and false guilt. If punishment comes because of sin, and I’m not suffering one bit, thank you very much, does that make me righteous? More righteous than my next door neighbor who lost his job, or whose child was killed in an accident, or whose wife was brutally raped and murdered? On the other hand, if I am undergoing intense suffering, is it really because God is punishing me? Am I really to blame when my child is born with a defect? when the economy takes a nosedive and I can no longer afford to put food on the table? when I get cancer?
Surely there must be other explanations for the pain and misery in the world. And as it turns out, there are other explanations—lots of them—even within the Bible itself. Before examining these, however, we should see how the prophetic view of suffering affected writers who were not prophets but whose books also eventually came to be seen as part of Scripture.
More Sin and More Wrath: The Dominance of the Classical View of Suffering
As horrible and bloodcurdling as the Holocaust was, it was obviously not the only terrible consequence of the Second World War. War affects entire nations, and, of course, the people who live in them, both civilians and soldiers. It is relatively easy to come up with statistics for the major international
What can we say about such a view? On the positive side, this view takes God and his interactions with the world seriously. The laws that his people broke, after all, were laws meant to preservethe welfare of society. They were laws designed to ensure that the poor were not oppressed, that the needy were not overlooked, that the weak were not exploited. These were laws as well that dictated that God be worshiped and served—God alone, not other gods of other peoples. The prophets taught that adherence to God’s will would bring divine favor whereas disobedience would lead to hardship—and surely obedience would be better for everyone involved, especially the poor, needy, and weak. The prophets, in short, were concerned about issues of real life—poverty, homelessness, injustice, oppression, the uneven distribution of wealth, the apathetic attitudes of those who have it good toward those who are poor, helpless, and outcast. On all of these points I resonate deeply with the prophets and their concerns.
At the same time, there are obvious problems with their point of view, especially if it is generalized into some kind of universal principle, as some people have tried to do over the ages. Do we really want to say that God brings starvation as a punishment for sin? Is God at fault for the famines in Ethiopia? Does God create military conflict? Is he to blame for what happened in Bosnia? Does God bring disease and epidemics? Was he the one who caused the 1918 influenza epidemic that killed thirty million people worldwide? Is he killing seven thousand people a day with malaria? Has he created the AIDS crisis?
I don’t think so. Even if one wants to limit the prophetic view to the “chosen people,” the people of Israel, what are we to say? That the political and military problems in the Middle East are God’s way of trying to get Israel to return to him? That he is willing to sacrifice the lives of women and children in suicide bombings to get his point across? Even if we limit ourselves to ancient Israel, do we really want to say that innocent people starved to death (starvation does not hit just the guilty, after all) as a divine punishment for the sins of the nation? That the brutal oppression of the Assyrians and then the Babylonians was really God’s doing, that he urged the soldiers on as they ripped open pregnant women and dashed little children against the rocks?
The problem with this view is not only that it is scandalous and outrageous, but also that it creates both false security and false guilt. If punishment comes because of sin, and I’m not suffering one bit, thank you very much, does that make me righteous? More righteous than my next door neighbor who lost his job, or whose child was killed in an accident, or whose wife was brutally raped and murdered? On the other hand, if I am undergoing intense suffering, is it really because God is punishing me? Am I really to blame when my child is born with a defect? when the economy takes a nosedive and I can no longer afford to put food on the table? when I get cancer?
Surely there must be other explanations for the pain and misery in the world. And as it turns out, there are other explanations—lots of them—even within the Bible itself. Before examining these, however, we should see how the prophetic view of suffering affected writers who were not prophets but whose books also eventually came to be seen as part of Scripture.
More Sin and More Wrath: The Dominance of the Classical View of Suffering
As horrible and bloodcurdling as the Holocaust was, it was obviously not the only terrible consequence of the Second World War. War affects entire nations, and, of course, the people who live in them, both civilians and soldiers. It is relatively easy to come up with statistics for the major international
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