This week I’m taking a break from writing something original, but I want to recommend to you three very interesting things I found on the web this week, two of which will enhance the recent “Why Believe?” series. The first is a “blogalogue” debate between N.T. Wright and Bart Ehrman on the subject of pain and suffering. N.T. Wright is the Bishop of Durham for the Church of England, has taught at McGill, Oxford, and Cambridge, and has authored many books, including one that is relevant to this dialogue, Evil and the Justice of God. Bart Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the author of God’s Problem: How the Bible fails to answer our most important answer – Why we suffer and Misquoting Jesus, among others.
Bart Ehrman N.T. Wright
This debate is worth reading because Ehrman is a former evangelical Christian turned agnostic, educated at Moody, Wheaton, and Princeton Seminary, and is therefore much more Biblically-literate than many others atheists/agnostics who are out there. Wright, on the other hand, is a Christian and first-rate theologian. They have had three opportunities each to argue their case so far, and will hopefully add more soon. I think the biggest revelation for me has been that Ehrman is taking his question “Why do we suffer?” to the Bible and finding many different (and sometimes contradictory) answers that do not satisfy him, while Wright believes that the Bible does not try to answer that question, but instead is more concerned with the question “What is God doing about evil?” Ehrman goes to books like Job, Amos, Ecclesiastes, Revelation, etc. and teases out what he hears as explanations for why people suffer (as punishment for sin, as a test from Satan, etc.). Wright does not see that as an appropriate use of the Bible (coming to it with the grid of our own questions), and instead centers on the death and resurrection of Christ as the key to understanding evil and how God is dealing with it. The debate hasn’t been a slam-dunk for either party, in my opinion, but does reveal how one side (Ehrman) is forced to judge a Creator God by human standards of and perspectives on morality, while the other (Wright) ultimately can offer no satisfactory reason as to WHY we suffer, but can point instead to the truth of what God is doing about suffering.
The second thing I would recommend to you is a two-minute excerpt from Opfer der Vergangenheit (Victims of the Past) , a Nazi propaganda film that you can see on YouTube (thanks to John Umland for the link). I don’t usually recommend Nazi films, of course… but it fits very well with my recent sermon on reconciling science and faith. One of my main points was that if we are simply the product of a godless process of natural selection, where the strong and adaptable survive and the weak and less adaptable die, why are we so convinced about human rights and so opposed to injustice? When the strong eat the weak in nature we call it natural selection; when it happens among humans we call it genocide and protest. If we are simply the product of a godless natural selection, I’m not sure there is good reason to be offended by the Nazis.
Anyways, this disturbing Nazi propaganda film appeals to natural selection to encourage the German people to exterminate those “inferior life-forms” (specifically the mentally ill) so that they would not weigh down the progress of humanity. It begins with these chilling words: “All that is non-viable in nature invariably perishes… we humans have transgressed the laws of natural selection in the last decades. Not only have we supported inferior life-forms, we have encouraged their propagation.” The excerpt, along with the truth of what happened in Nazi Germany, is a brutal testimony to what we would expect if there is no God, and is a powerful argument that human beings are more than just a product of a godless natural selection.
Lastly, there is an interesting discussion that happened last week on Public Radio’s Speaking of Faith program, hosted by Krista Tippett, on how Christians should live out their faith with regards to politics and political issues such as the war, poverty, abortion, and gay marriage (thanks to Rex Fowler of Hartford City Mission for the link). The participants were Charles Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship and author of God and Government, Greg Boyd, Senior Pastor of Woodland Hills Church in Minnesota and author of The Myth of a Christian Nation, and Shane Claiborne, founder of The Simple Way and co-author of Jesus for President. These three men are of different generations and have some interesting things to say about the relationship of the Christian to politics, which is certainly a very timely topic. You can watch the discussion, listen to it, or read the transcript by clicking on the above link.
If you have any comments on those links, I’d love to hear what you have to say!
Write a comment