(electronic music)
- It is an extraordinary pleasure
to welcome professor Bart Ehrman today.
Professor Ehrman burst
on the scene in 1993
with a book that was
devoured by his fans entitled
The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture,
the effect of early
Christological controversies
on the text of the New Testament.
The scene was the small
scholarly community,
and persons devouring this
book were persons such as me.
Things by now have changed.
The Colbert Report...
Fresh Air, CNN, you name it,
Bart Ehrman has spoken there.
He has written the books persons
like me dream about writing.
When we read The DA Vinci Code and
keep thinking what is going on here?
I think it, he wrote it,
and that is true for lots of other things.
Professor Ehrman's output
has been extraordinary.
He has written about Peter,
Paul, and Mary Magdalene,
misquoting Jesus, truth and fiction,
if there is such thing as
truth in The Da Vinci Code,
and lost Christianities, which he says is,
among the many children
that constitute his books,
one of his favorite ones.
He has also just published a book entitled
God's Problem, How the
Bible Fails to Answer
Our Most important
Question, Why We Suffer.
So you know it takes a particular
passion, a really passion
to speak with such eloquence
as Professor Ehrman does
about such things as the New Testament,
how it came to be, and
what that really means
for those who read the text today.
And today it is my great pleasure
and I'm sure you will see
what I mean with this passion,
and welcome professor Ehrman.
(applause)
- Well thank you very much for
that generous introduction.
I'm really very pleased
to be with you today.
As a professor of religious studies,
I've always thought that
I had one of the best
conversation stoppers at a cocktail party.
You are gathered around
with a group of people
whom you don't know and drinking wine,
and somebody comes up and
asks oh, so what do you do?
And you reply, I teach at the University.
Oh, great, what do you teach?
I teach New Testament.
Oh.
That must be interesting.
And you can see the mental file going,
trying to think of a follow-up question.
Well, more recently I've come
up with a better conversation
stopper, I'm at the cocktail
party and somebody comes up
to me and they say so,
what are you working on?
I'm writing a book.
What's it on?
It's on suffering.
(laughter)
Oh.
What are you doing next?
So, suffering is one of those topics that
people as a rule don't want to talk about,
but everybody has an opinion on.
And I suppose it makes sense
that everybody has an opinion
about suffering, because
everybody has suffered.
And everybody knows
people who have suffered,
and everybody can read the
newspaper and can see what
kind of excruciating suffering
there is around the world.
I published my book on God's
Problem, How the Bible Fails
to Answer our Most Important
Question, Why We Suffer,
I published this book a couple
of months ago, and since then
I've gotten hundreds
of emails from people.
Most of them are very well-meaning emails,
and a number of them are intent
on telling me what the answer is.
And so in an email of 12 lines
one can answer the problem
that has plagued the human
race since time immemorial.
And I appreciate these
emails and I appreciate
the thought that goes behind
them, but one wonders,
if you can really solve
the problem of suffering in
twelve lines, well, some
people think that you can.
As I give talks about
suffering around the country,
I am impressed by the number
of people who are sure
that they know what the
answer, the answer, is.
My thinking on suffering actually
began about twenty years ago.
I was teaching at the
time at Rutgers University
and they had a course on the books called
The Problem of Suffering
in the Biblical Traditions,
Dealing with both Hebrew
Bible and New Testament,
and they wanted me to teach this course,
and I thought it would be
a good course to teach.
In part because virtually
everybody that I knew
who thought about this
issue had a set answer
to why there's suffering in the world.
It's the freewill response
that sometimes I call
the robot answer, which goes like this.
Human beings were given free will by God,
and since human beings were
not, they weren't programmed
like robots just to obey,
they were given the ability
to obey or disobey, and since
people are free to love God
they can also, they're free to hate.
And since they're free to do good,
they're also free to do
evil, and so that's why
there's so much suffering
in the world, is because of
free will, or as I say,
the robot solution.
And I think that in fact there's
a lot to be said for this,
I mean obviously a lot of
evil in the world happens
because people have
the free will to do it.
But of course it doesn't
answer everything.
It doesn't answer why there
are tsunamis, and hurricanes,
and earthquakes, and
other natural disasters.
Free will leaves a lot of
things out of the equation,
and so I thought it'd be
interesting to teach a class
on what the Bible has
to say about suffering,
and one of the things that
struck me in teaching the class
is that the Bible has a lot of
different things to say about
suffering, as it has a lot
of different things to say
about a lot of different topics.
Some parts of the Bible
think that that the reason
people suffer is because they've sinned
against God, and God is punishing them.
So suffering comes as a penalty
from God for wrongful acts.
Other parts of the Bible
think that it's not God who's
punishing people, it is
evil forces in the world
that are opposed to God
that are punishing people.
There are some parts of the
Bible that think suffering is
a test of faith, to see whether
you will remain faithful
to God even when things go bad.
Some authors of the Bible
think that suffering is
a huge mystery, that we
can't ever understand why
there's suffering, and
even to ask why we suffer
is itself virtually blasphemous.
Some authors of the Bible
simply think that chaos happens,
and sometimes we get in the way.
And so I thought it'd be
interesting to teach this class
at Rutgers on the problem of suffering.
And to deal with, it turned
out the biggest problem I had
in my class was convincing my
19 and 20 year old New Jersey
middle upper-class white students
that there was a problem.
(laughter)
So this was actually in the mid 80s,
it was during one of the
horrible Ethiopian famines,
and I resorted to doing things
like bringing in pictures
from the New York Times
of women starving to death
with children on their
breasts starving to death,
pointing my students to these pictures
and saying, this is a problem.
And, well, by the end
of the semester I think
they at least got that point down.
The way I set up this
class was by talking about
what is the classical
problem of suffering,
which is the problem of, typically,
it's a tradition called theodicy.
The word theodicy comes from
two Greek words that mean
God's justice, and the
question of theodicy is
how can God be just given the
state of things in this world?
Given the pain and misery
all around us how can we
possibly think that God is just?
And often this problem
of theodicy is set up
as a kind of logical problem.
The logical problem involves
three statements that are
typically made in the
Judeo-Christian tradition,
each of which seems to be
true on its own but when you
put the three together, there
seems to be a contradiction.
And so these are the three statements.
First that God is all powerful.
Second, God is all loving.
Third, there is suffering.
How do you reconcile
these three statements?
If God is all-powerful he
can do anything he wants,
including he can prevent suffering.
If God's all loving he
certainly wants to prevent
suffering, he doesn't
want people to suffer.
And yet they're suffering.
So how does one explain all three
statements being true simultaneously?
Throughout the history
of Christian thought
there've been two basic approaches to
dealing with this problem of theodicy.
One approach is to deny one
of the three statements.
So one could deny, for example,
the God is all-powerful.
This is the approach taken by
rabbi Harold Kushner in his
very popular book, When Bad
Things Happen to Good People.
I used this book in my class
at Rutgers that year that
I taught this course, my
students started calling it,
when bad books are written by good people.
(laughter)
The point of the book is that God in fact
really wants to help you when you suffer,
he wishes he could prevent the suffering.
He wishes there was something he could do,
but his hands are tied,
and so he can stand by you
and help you through your
suffering, and he can
comfort you in your suffering,
he can make you face
your suffering, and God is
more like, instead of the
kind of great grandfather in the sky
it's more like your mother,
your mother in the sky,
who really puts her arm
around you and kind of
gets you through it, but
there's nothing he can do,
his hands are tied, he
can't prevent suffering,
so God is not all-powerful.
For a lot of people that's
a satisfying solution,
for other people it
doesn't really seem like
God is much of a God if
he can't do what he wants,
and if he can't intervene
in the world then
in what sense is he really God?
There are other people
who want to deny the
second proposition that God is all loving.
This comes very close to
the position that you find
in some of the writings of Elie Wiesel.
Many people have become
reacquainted with his book, Night,
his classic, another book of
his is called God on Trial
where in effect Wiesel finds God guilty
for crimes against humanity.
So that he's not loving
in any traditional sense.
So one could deny the God's
all loving, or one could deny
that there's suffering, but there aren't
too many people who want to go that route.
Since one just needs to look
around the world a little bit.
So one could deny, one way
of getting around the problem
is denying one of the three statements.
Another way of getting around
it is to call on some kind of
extenuating circumstance
that can explain it all.
That there's some something
that explains all three things
by bringing something
else in from the outside.
For example, this idea that you're
suffering because God's punishing you.
God might be all-powerful
and he might be loving,
and he might be causing you to suffer
precisely in order to get
you to change your ways.
And so that's an extenuating circumstance
that can make sense of suffering.
Well in any event, these
were the issues that I was
dealing with in my class
at Rutgers 20 years ago.
And at the time when I
finished teaching this class,
I thought, you know that
was kind of interesting,
I think maybe I'd like to write about it.
Then I thought, you know,
you're only 30 years old,
you're not old enough to
write a book on suffering.
So about three years ago I was
fishing around for the next
thing to write, I'd written
a lot of kind of things
that were on sort of a similar line.
I thought you know, I
wouldn't mind going back
to that problem of suffering book.
Then I thought no,
you're only 50 years old,
you're too young to write the book.
Then I thought you know
when I'm 80 years old,
I'm gonna think, you're too
young to write the book.
And so I just decided to
go and write the book,
and so I did and so that's
what the book is about,
is about the problem of suffering
as dealt with in the Bible, specifically.
How do the authors of the
Bible deal with suffering.
And the reason I think this is
an important topic is because
whatever one's view of
the Bible happens to be,
whether one actually believes
in the Bible as somehow
inspired scripture or not,
for everyone the Bible is
the most important book in our history,
the history of our civilization,
without any, without parallel really.
This is the most important
book, and it's worthwhile
seeing what the authors
of the Bible have to say
about this most important question.
So what I'm going to do
in the rest of my lecture
is look at two of the
major answers to suffering
that one finds in the Bible.
An answer that dominates the Hebrew Bible
and an answer that
dominates the New Testament.
And I'm not saying that one
view, that the Hebrew Bible view
is not also found in the New
Testament, the New Testament
view not also found in the Hebrew Bible,
they're actually found throughout the,
but they're two views that
dominate both Testaments.
And then after that I'll
talk about the view that
I find myself to be
personally most palatable.
So first...
A view that is very common
throughout the Hebrew bible
is a view that is in fact
embraced by the prophets.
The prophets such as Isaiah
and Jeremiah, Ezekiel,
Hosea, Joel, Amos, all of the
prophets of the Hebrew Bible,
in fact I would argue
that all of them have
the same basic view about
why there's suffering.
Specifically the prophets were concerned
why the people of God suffer.
To understand what the prophets
have to say about this,
I need to provide a
little bit of background.
The prophets, many of
the prophets explicitly,
were rooted in traditions
found in ancient Israel.
That God at some point in
the past had saved Israel
from a disastrous situation
that it was experiencing,
as it was enslaved to a foreign nation.
This is found in the Exodus traditions
you find in the book of Exodus,
the basic line is that the
children of Israel had gone into
Egypt to escape a famine, and
while there they had become
enslaved, and they served as
slaves to the Egyptians for
400 years, but God raised up
a savior for the Israelites,
Moses, who performed ten
plagues against the Egyptian
pharaoh so that the pharaoh
then drove the people
out of his land and
then had second thoughts
and started chasing them,
ended up at the Red Sea,
Moses parted the Red Sea, the
whole Charlton Heston thing,
and the Egyptian army was
drowned, the people of Israel
were saved, and they ended
up getting the law of God on
Mount Sinai and then they
eventually got the promised land.
These traditions were taken
quite seriously by many people
in ancient Israel, that God had
in fact intervened on behalf
of the people in order to
save them from their slavery.
There were some theological implications
that were drawn by some
thinkers in ancient Israel.
First that God is all-powerful,
more powerful than the
Egyptians for example.
Second that God is on the side of Israel
and has chosen Israel to be his people,
and third, that God will intervene
on behalf of his people
when they get into trouble.
Those were the theological implications
drawn from the Exodus tradition.
As time went on, however,
there were historical problems
with these theological implications.
Because if God is powerful
and on the side of Israel
and willing to intervene on
its behalf, why is it that
Israel continues to experience
one disaster after another?
Drought and famine and pestilence,
war, military defeat
eventually the northern part of
the Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by
the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE.
150 years later the
southern part of the kingdom
was destroyed by the Babylonians,
then there were the Persians,
then there were the Greeks,
and it just went on and on.
How does one explain the
fact that Israel continues
to suffer despite the fact
that God is on its side
and God has chosen it to be his,
to be his God and they to be his people?
The prophets of scripture had answers
to why the people of
God continued to suffer.
As an example of this answer that is found
throughout the prophets,
I'll read a couple of
brief passages from the Book of Amos,
one of the earliest
authors among the prophets.
Amos chapter three verse
two, this is God speaking.
God says to his people Israel,
'you only have I known'
'of all the families of the earth,'
'therefore I will punish
you for your iniquities.'
Why is it that Israel suffers,
because God is punishing them.
That's the prophetic solution.
The people have broken God's
law, God is angry with them,
and he's punishing them to get them to
turn around so that they'll repent.
If they repent of their sin,
then God will cause the suffering to
abate and good times will return.
Amos goes on to explain that
God has created all sorts of
havoc among his people in
order to get them to repent.
And so he says in chapter four,
I, this is God speaking,
'I gave you cleanness of teeth
in all your cities' he says.
Not that he, this isn't he
invented toothpaste or something,
it means that they've had nothing to eat,
cleanness of teeth, 'and lack
of bread in all your places.'
'Yet you did not return
to me says the Lord.'
In other words God created a famine.
he starved people to get them to return.
'I also withheld the rain from you'
'when there were three
months to the harvest.'
'I would send rain on one
city and send no rain on'
'another city, so two or three
towns wandered to another'
'town to drink water and
they were not satisfied'
'and yet you did not return
to me says the Lord'.
So he created a drought,
that didn't work either.
'I struck you with blight and mildew,'
'I laid waste your gardens
and your vineyards.'
'The locusts devoured your fig
trees and your olive trees'
'yet you did not return
to me says the Lord.'
'I sent among you a pestilence
after the manner of Egypt.'
'I killed your young men with the sword'.
This is God speaking.
'I killed your young men with the sword,'
'I carried away your horses, I
made the stench of your camp'
'go up into your nostrils
yet you did not return to me'
says the Lord.
'I overthrew some of you
as when God overthrew'
'Sodom and Gomorrah and yet
you did not return to me'
says the Lord, 'therefore thus
I will do to you O Israel.'
'Because I will do this to you,'
'prepare to meet your God, O Israel.'
In this context meeting your
God is not a happy prospect.
That is not something you want.
God says, you've had it bad
so far, you've had famine
and drought and pestilence
and war, and people are dying
right and left, and now
you're really going to get it.
More specifically, Amos thinks
that there's going to be
an invasion from an enemy
from the north, and the nation
is going to be wiped out
in a military defeat.
Why is it that Israel is suffering?
Because God wants them
to turn back to him.
They refuse, and so the
punishment continues.
This is what I call the prophetic answer
to why the people of God suffer.
It's a view found not
only in the prophets,
it's found throughout much of the
historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible.
I mean the Bible begins of
course with Adam and Eve,
they're told not to eat the fruit,
they eat the fruit, they get punished.
The whole world becomes wicked,
and how does God respond?
He destroys the whole world with a flood,
killing everybody on it except
for Noah and his family.
And so it goes through
the historical narrative
of the Hebrew Bible,
sin brings punishment.
People suffer because they have violated
God's will, because they have sinned.
One might ask whether
this is a very accept,
whether this is acceptable at all as an
understanding of why people suffer.
In our own context, for example,
is it really true that suffering comes
because God is punishing people?
People continue to feel this way.
Whenever something bad
happens and someone says,
what have I done to deserve this?
Right, well the whole
idea behind that is that
you've done something that
deserves, merits the punishment.
Or when somebody says why me?
Well that implies that there's
some reason for what's happening.
But is this really true?
Is it true that every five
seconds a child dies of
starvation because God's
trying to punish somebody?
Or that every minute 25 people die
from drinking unclean drinking water?
Every hour in our world
700 people die of malaria.
Is this because God's punishing people?
Is this why tsunamis hit the Indian Ocean
and killed 300 thousand people overnight?
Or why a Holocaust happens
that kills six million Jews?
Or a purging in Cambodia
that kills two million
Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge?
We still have this answer with us today,
but I certainly don't
think that very many of us
are going to find it a
very satisfying answer,
but it is surprising
how many people have it.
I was on a radio show a couple months ago,
I was in Lincoln, Nebraska
and I was on this radio show
with a pastor who told me that
a couple months before this,
he had a woman in his congregation whose
twelve-year-old daughter
had died of a brain tumor.
And he was talking with this
woman and this woman told him
she knew why her daughter had died.
It was because she, this
mother, had promised God that
she would quit smoking,
and she hadn't done it.
And so God was punishing her.
Well, yeah, so most of us don't
find this very satisfying,
and luckily there are other answers
in the Bible besides this one.
This answer which
dominates the Hebrew Bible
can be found to some extent
in the New Testament,
is one of the many answers that
biblical authors had for suffering.
Another answer that I want
to look at is one that is
found in the latest book
of the Hebrew Bible,
and comes to be a very dominant
understanding among Jews
in early Judaism, and then among
Christians, the followers of Jesus.
It's a response to suffering that
I'll call the apocalyptic response.
The term apocalyptic first
needs to be explained.
The word apocalyptic
comes from a Greek word,
apocalypsis, which means an
unveiling or a revealing.
This view is called an
unveiling or revealing
because Jewish thinkers
began to think that God had
revealed to them the heavenly secrets
that can make sense of earthly realities.
God had revealed the heavenly secrets
that could make sense
of earthly realities.
Specifically these apocalyptic
thinkers came to understand
that suffering was not coming
as a punishment from God.
Suffering was coming from other
sources in the world besides God.
Before I explained what
the view itself is,
let me say how we have
information about this
particular view that became
prominent in early Judaism.
The Book of Daniel is probably the latest
of the Hebrew Bible books to be written,
possibly 150 160 years
before the life of Jesus,
and it embodies this
apocalyptic point of view,
as I'll explain in a second.
Jewish Apocrypha which are
outside the traditional
Protestant canon of scripture,
the Apocrypha also contain
books that relate this view,
and the Dead Sea Scrolls,
which were discovered in the 1940s,
also widely contain this
apocalyptic point of view.
It became a view that
was dominant among Jews
in the time of the the
beginning of Christianity,
and it ended up being a view that
dominated the New Testament itself.
The basic view of the
apocalyptic response is this.
God is not causing suffering,
there are enemies of God
who are cosmic forces in the world
that are causing suffering,
God has personal enemies.
These enemies include the
Devil, and his demons.
In the apocalyptic view, God has
a personal opponent, the Devil.
Throughout most of the Hebrew Bible,
you don't find a devil figure at all,
you don't find him in the
prophets, for example.
But apocalyptic thinkers
started thinking that God had
a personal opponent who stood
over against him, the Devil,
and that just as God has angels under him,
the devil has demons under him.
These forces had other had
other powers aligned with them.
For example, God had the power of life
and the Devil had the power of death.
God had the power of righteousness
and the devil had the power of sin.
In the apocalyptic view, sin
is not simply something that
you do wrong, it's not simply
an act of disobedience.
Sin for an apocalyptic Jew
is a cosmic force that's
in the world that is trying to enslave you
to force you to do things
contrary to what you want.
To force you to violate God's will.
The psychology of this is,
you know there are people
sometimes who just, they
do things that are against
their best interest and they
just can't stop themselves.
And what is that, that you
know what the right thing to do
is and you can't do it, or you
know that something is wrong
and you just can't stop yourself.
I've never had this experience myself,
but I've heard that some people
have had this experience.
And what is that, well
for an apocalyptic Jew
that is the power of sin
that is enslaving you
and making you do something that's wrong.
So there are these cosmic
powers in the world
that are forcing you to do things wrong,
and these cosmic powers are what is
bringing suffering in the world.
It's the Devil, and the demons,
and the other cosmic forces.
But eventually God is going
to overthrow these forces
and bring in a good Kingdom on Earth,
in which there'll be no more suffering.
There'll be no more pain or misery,
there'll be no more sin or death.
That's the basic view of
the apocalyptic response,
but I want to unpack it by
explaining it in greater detail
by talking about four major
tenets of apocalyptic thinking.
Four major tenants, first of all dualism.
And the apocalypticists
are basically dualists,
they thought there are two
fundamental components of reality
as I pointed out these are cosmic forces.
The forces of good and the forces of evil.
But the thing to know
about these apocalypticists
is they thought that
everything and everybody
participates on one side or the other.
Everybody sides either
with God or with the Devil,
either with good or with evil.
So that there's no neutral territory.
You have to choose which
side you're going to be on.
If you side with God in this
world, you are likely going to
suffer, because the powers in control
of this world are the powers of evil.
So that siding with God is not going to
make you rich and famous and prosperous.
What's going to happen
if you sided with God
is the powers of evil
are going to get you.
But, there's going to come a future life
in which you will be rewarded.
So you have to decide which
side you're going to be on.
The people who are rich and
powerful prosperous by the way,
famous people, they're
obviously on the side of evil.
This is explaining why it is that
the wicked prosper and
the righteous suffer.
The prophets had a hard
time explaining that.
But the apocalypticists had
a very easy time explaining that.
The reason the wicked prosper
is because they're on the
side of evil that has dominance
in this world for the time.
This cosmic dualism was worked
out in a historical scenario.
Apocalypticists believed
that there were two ages
of this world, there's this
age that we live in now,
and there's an age to come.
The age we're living in now
is controlled by the forces of
evil and it's just going
to get worse and worse.
But God is going to
intervene, and there'll come a
cataclysmic break at the end of this age,
and God will bring in a new age.
A new Kingdom.
There'll be a utopian
like existence in which
there will be no more pain or misery.
And so you have this
age, and the age to come.
The kingdoms of evil now and
the kingdom of God yet to come.
So these these Jewish
apocalypticists were dualistic.
They were pessimistic.
They did not think that we could
improve our life in this world.
We can't improve our lot,
we can't make things better.
We can't decide which
nations to to attack in the
Middle East so as to stabilize
or destabilize the region,
we can't decide to put more
cops on the beat or more
teachers in the classroom,
I mean we can do
all these things, but
it's not going to matter.
Because the powers of evil
are going to increase in their
intensity and their power
until at the end of this age
literally all hell is going to break out.
And there's nothing we can do to stop it,
things are going to get worse.
But at the end of this age
there will be a divine vindication.
God will vindicate his
name and his people,
he will redeem this world that he created,
he himself will once
again become sovereign.
This vindication at the end of
this age will involve a judgment.
The powers of evil will be
destroyed and taken away,
and everybody who has sided
with them will face punishment.
Those who are good, however,
who have sided with God,
will be given an eternal reward.
An eternal reward.
So there'll be a future judgment,
everybody will be judged.
And when I say everybody will be judged,
I mean literally everybody.
You shouldn't think that you
can side with the forces of
evil, become rich and
powerful and prosperous,
and then die and get away with it.
You can't get away with it,
because at the end of this age
there's going to be a
resurrection of the dead.
God is going to raise
everybody bodily from the dead.
Everybody who's ever
lived will face judgment.
You can't get away with siding with evil
and succeeding because of
it, because God's going to
raise you from the dead to face judgment,
and there's not a sweet
thing you can do to stop him.
You will face either an eternal reward,
or an eternal punishment,
and the choice is yours.
Well, so I should point out
that within the history of
ancient Israelite thought, most
ancient Jews thought either
that when you died your soul
went to some kind of shadowy
place called Sheol where everybody
kind of went whether they
were good or wicked they
all sort of went there
and that's where they live forever.
Other Jews thought you died and that was
the end of the story, that was it.
It was only with apocalyptic
thinking that the idea
that you were going to
live forever came about.
With apocalypticists, in a sense
immortality came into being
and immortality came into
being as a kind of theodicy.
An explanation about how
things can be so rotten now.
They're rotten now
because they're going to
be made right in the
future kingdom of God.
But this was not a belief in
the immortality of the soul,
per se, in the sense of the
soul apart from the body.
Apocalypticists did not think
your soul was going to live on
after death, your body was
going to be reconstituted
and you're going to live forever bodily.
This is the beginning, though,
of the idea of having some
kind of afterlife after this
death, with the resurrection of
the dead that was going to
transpire at the end of this age.
Well when is the age going to end?
When will it all happen?
Jewish apocalypticists believed
it was going to be imminent.
It was right around the corner.
Things had gotten bad and
they were just about as bad as
they possibly could be, God
was soon going to intervene
and overthrow the forces of evil,
and set up his kingdom on earth.
And when would this be?
Truly I tell you, some
of you standing here
will not taste death before they see
that the kingdom of God has come in power.
The words of Jesus, Mark
chapter nine verse one.
Or as he said later to his disciples,
this generation will not pass away
before all these things take place.
Jesus anticipated that the end of the age
was coming within his own generation,
that his disciples would live to see it,
that the kingdom of God
would arrive in power.
It's not surprising that Jesus'
followers after his death
continued on with his vision,
the Apostle Paul for example
thinking that he himself would
be alive when Jesus returned.
And down to the present day,
there continue to be Christians
who think that in fact the end is coming
sometime next Tuesday afternoon.
This is an apocalyptic view that
the end of the age in fact is imminent.
This apocalyptic view is dominant
throughout the New Testament.
It predominates in the teachings of Jesus,
and in the writings of
Paul, and in most of
the writings of the New
Testament, including
of course the book of Revelation.
I think that there are some
serious upsides to this
way of looking at suffering
and why there's suffering.
This view takes evil seriously.
It takes evil as a power that
is bigger than any of us.
The Holocaust is bigger than the
individuals who made it happen.
This takes evil as a very
serious phenomenon in our world.
It asserts that God will eventually
make right all that is wrong.
That is a hopeful thought,
that eventually God will
make right all that is wrong,
that evil does not have
the last word but God has the last word,
and that death is not
the end of the story.
This is a view that can provide
hope in a world of hopelessness.
At the same time, I think
that there are some downsides
to this point of view, one
obvious downside is that it
makes possible moral complacency
in the face of evil and suffering.
If in fact things are
just going to get worse
and there's nothing we can do about it,
and they're going to get
worse and worse until God
intervenes, then what's the
point of working for justice?
Why worry about homelessness, and poverty?
Why worry about hunger?
Why worry about countries that are
falling apart and destabilizing?
Why worry about any of that,
if in fact it's only going to
become better when God intervenes?
This apocalyptic view
can and has led to moral
complacency, and I think that's a problem.
The other problem is, I think
sort of the obvious problem,
is that this is this view
is based on a belief,
a false belief, in the
imminent end of all things,
that everything is going
to end pretty soon.
Now this may not be such
a big problem in Berkeley,
but let me tell you it's a
big problem in North Carolina.
Where I teach, the
buckle of the Bible Belt.
I moved to North Carolina in 1988.
I moved there from New Jersey.
Which was quite a shock.
When I moved to North Carolina in 1988
I started getting phone calls
from the local newspapers.
They wanted to know if it was true that
the Bible predicted that
the end of the world
was going to happen in September of 1988.
I didn't know what they
were talking about,
but they told me that a book
had been written that said,
indicated that the Rapture
was going to occur in 1988.
Now for those of you who don't know,
the Rapture is when Jesus
comes back from heaven
and takes his believers out of this world
before the Great
Tribulation that takes place
on earth when the Antichrist arises.
So the rapture is when Jesus comes back.
Well, it turned out
somebody had written a book,
this guy's name was Edgar Whisenant,
and before he wrote this book he literally
was a rocket engineer for Nassau.
So he was a smart guy and
he had written a book called
88 Reasons Why The Rapture
Will Occur in 1988.
This book was taken very
seriously in North Carolina,
I had students whose parents
literally sold the farm
because they knew that
Jesus was coming back
and the Rapture would take place in 1988,
and this this book, this book was in,
there were 2 million copies
of this book in print,
in circulation, and was taken
very seriously in the South.
He had 88 reasons why
this was going to happen
so I'll just give you one of the 88.
So in Matthew's gospel,
Jesus disciples want to know
when is the end going to come?
And Jesus says learn a
lesson from the fig tree.
'When the fig tree puts forth its leaves,'
'you know that summer is near.'
'So too when these things take place'
'you know that the end is near.'
'Truly I tell you this
generation will not pass away'
'before all these things take place.'
So Whisenant interprets
this, this saying of Jesus,
what does it mean about the fig tree?
Well in the Bible the
fig tree is often used
as an image for the nation of Israel.
When the fig tree puts forth its leaves,
well that's in the spring time,
when the fig tree has been
dead through the winter
it comes back to life in the spring.
So when does Israel come back to life?
Well Israel comes back to life in 1948,
when Israel again becomes
a sovereign state.
This generation will not pass away
before all these things take place.
How long is a generation in the Bible?
40 years.
1948 plus 40, bingo, 1988.
That was one of his 88 reasons.
He had 87 others that I
won't bother you with.
Jesus, the Rapture was
going to occur during the
Jewish festival of Rosh
Hashanah in September of 1988.
Now some people pointed
out to Edgar Whisenant
that Jesus actually said, 'no one knows'
'the day or the hour
when the end will come'.
And Whisenant was completely
un-phased by that,
he said, yes, it's true, I don't know
the day or the hour, I just know the week.
(laughter)
And so it goes.
Of course, what happens
of course, Rosh Hashanah
came and went and Jesus never appeared.
And so Whisenant did
what people always do in
those situations, he wrote another book.
And in the next book what he
said that he'd made a mistake
in his calculations because he
forgot that when they created
the modern calendar they
didn't include a year zero.
So it goes from 1 BCE to 1
CE, or you know 1 BC to 1 AD,
there's no year 0 and
so he was off by a year.
So in fact it was going to happen in 1989.
And so it goes.
World without end, amen.
Is there an alternative
perspective to either
the prophetic or the apocalyptic views?
Well there's a lot of different
perspectives in the Bible,
I'm going to end in the
last couple minutes talking
about another view that I
personally relate to much better
than either of the preceding two.
This is a view that's found
in the Hebrew Bible book
Ecclesiastes, one of the
books that I think is much
under read by readers of the Bible.
Ecclesiastes claims to be written by
King Solomon, the wisest man on earth.
In fact it wasn't written by Solomon,
it was written hundreds
of years after Solomon,
but it continues I think
to be a very wise book.
Ecclesiastes' view is more or less
summarized in its very opening lines.
'Vanity of vanities, all is
vanity says the preacher.'
The word vanity in this
book, Ecclesiastes,
is a Hebrew word, hevel.
Hevel is a word that is
used to refer to the mist
that's around for a little
while and then burns off.
So it's here for a little while it's gone,
it's a word that implies
transience, impermanence.
Vanity in the sense that
there's no substance to it.
The author of Ecclesiastes
looked around the world
and he saw that in fact that it was
all a very transient life that we live.
He looked and he saw that there
was no justice in the world.
The righteous suffer
and the wicked prosper.
And the author of Ecclesiastes
did not think that
this problem was going to
be solved in the afterlife.
He does not believe in the
immortality of the soul.
He does not believe that after
you die you continue to live.
For the author of Ecclesiastes,
this life is not a
dress rehearsal for something
that's going to happen later.
This is not a dry run.
This is it.
This life is all we have, and
it is transient and fleeting.
How then should we live this life?
We should live life as fully as we can.
In the present.
This life is not going to be here forever,
it's not going to be here for long,
and so we should enjoy what
we eat, we should enjoy
what we drink, we should enjoy
our work we should enjoy our
spouses, we should enjoy
our friends and families.
We should grab life for all it can give us
because this life is all
that we're going to have.
That's the view of Ecclesiastes,
and it's a view that I
find most acceptable.
The problem of course is that
there are a lot of people
who can't enjoy life to its fullest.
People who are suffering because
of, all sorts of reasons.
Because of natural disaster,
because of poverty,
because of homelessness.
I take as an implication of
grabbing life for all that
we can, that we should work
in order to make life better
for others, so that they too
can grab life for all they can.
My conclusion.
I'm not sure at the end of
the day there's an answer to
suffering, or at least there
are lots of different answers,
sometimes contradictory answers.
But even if we don't have
an answer to why there's
tsunamis, and hurricanes, and earthquakes,
and genocides, and
murder, and homelessness,
and poverty, even though
we don't have an answer,
I think we can have a response.
Our response should be ourselves
personally to live life
to its fullest because
this is all we have.
We should enjoy what we eat,
we should eat good food,
we should drink good wine, we
should drink microbrewed beer.
We should enjoy our families.
We should enjoy our friends.
We should stay up late
drinking single malt scotch
and talking about the big issues.
We should enjoy life as much as we can
for as long as we can.
And we should also work to
make life happy and satisfying
for other people who are less
fortunate than ourselves.
We all can do more, in fact.
We can volunteer more,
we can give more money
to deal with issues of local
poverty and homelessness,
we can give more to
international relief efforts,
we can do more and we should do more,
because this life is all there is,
and we should grab for it all that we can.
Thank you very much.
(applause)
- [Male] I have a
question which is how does
your answer solve the
problem of suffering?
In other words do you believe there is
an omnipotent, wholly benevolent deity?
- Personally I do not.
- [Male] Oh I see, so nothing,
you are not presenting a theodicy, then.
- No.
I am saying, my personal
view, what I do within my book
is to explain how in fact
this problem of suffering
led me away from belief in a personal,
omnipotent, powerful, loving God.
So I don't personally believe
that such a being exists,
I don't believe that
there, I don't subscribe
to the Judeo-Christian
understanding of God.
I think though, so that I don't have,
so I don't, my answer
to suffering is not that
God's involved with it
because I don't think
God is involved with it, I
think suffering comes because
we live in a random and chaotic world
and sometimes we get in the way of it.
So that's why I say
there isn't necessarily
an answer, but there is a response.
- [Male] Right, so that
you've really given kind of
a historical description
of what the Bible says.
- Yes, I'm not affirming --
- [Male] But you haven't attempted
to to provide a theodicy.
- No, the only, I'm not giving a theodicy
because I don't believe in God,
but I am saying that at
least one book of the Bible
seems to me to give a satisfying answer
to the relationship of
humans to suffering,
which is the book of Ecclesiastes.
- [Male] And why is that satisfying,
what are the criteria that make
that a satisfying response?
- It's the least problematic answer.
- [Male] Okay, thanks.
- [Female] I was wondering,
where do you get your morality,
and how do you know
that, or just personally,
how do you know that it's
not good that people suffer,
so where do you get your morality
that tells you that suffering is bad?
- Yes, good, thank you,
it's a good question.
You know, when I was a Christian I thought
that the only way a
person could have morality
is if there was some kind of
authority figure over them
telling them what was right and wrong.
Whether it was the church,
or your parents, or God,
that God was sort of an
ultimate arbiter of morality.
And I was really afraid
when I was thinking,
I only became an agnostic
9 or 10 years ago.
I'd been a Christian for my entire life,
and when I was reflecting
on whether I really wanted
to take that leap or not,
the one thing that held me,
one of the things that held
me back is I thought that
it would lead to a life
of complete immorality.
That in fact I'd become
this complete reprobate
and it would just be one
party after the other,
and I wouldn't be able
to you know (chuckles).
Then I thought well maybe
I wouldn't be so bad.
But no, seriously, I
thought that would happen,
and it didn't happen, and I
think that I had a false belief
that you have to have a divine
figure giving you morality
before you know what's moral.
My own view is that as an agnostic,
without the existence
of God, how do I decide
what's good and what's
bad, I have a fairly
traditional utilitarian view,
whatever is good for
the most people is good.
Why is it that I don't
want people to suffer,
I don't know, I'm made that way,
I mean humans are made that way.
You see somebody suffering and
you don't want them to suffer.
So I don't have deep
philosophical reasons for it,
it's just part of being human.
- [Female] What do you mean
by human I'm made that way?
- Well humans are made that
way, or they evolved that way,
but they are that way.
- Oh yeah, and one other thing
is, do you think that truth
is always based on what
makes sense to people,
or do you think that
truth is there despite
what might not make sense or what
might not be comfortable to people?
- Well I don't believe
in a capital T truth,
I don't believe in some kind
of platonic form of truth
that's sitting up there
that we need to discover.
So, I mean, I think that truth,
I don't look upon truth that way,
as some kind of objective thing
that's out there someplace.
- [Female] Thank you.
- You're welcome.
- [Male] I'm not a
Christian anymore either,
and so the Christians that
I have sympathy for, or some
commonality, are the ones
that seem to read the Bible,
I think the Pope might even
be in this category where
you just, you read it and you
don't understand all of it and
seems like there's contradictions
so you just end up saying
that it's a big mystery that
you don't quite understand.
And I'm thinking, so I'm
curious, more specifically
I'm wondering what you
think of some of the
modern interpreters of the
Bible, modern Christians.
I'm assuming that you
might feel that some people
have sort of the view that
I already said, and then
other people try to explain
away the contradictions.
I'm wondering if CS Lewis
is maybe the type of person
who walks away from
the Bible saying, like,
oh it's very clear to me what
the response to suffering is,
where someone may be like
Gary Wills or Kierkegaard
is more of a, I'm trying
to make sense of this and
maybe this is an answer,
but it's still bigger
than I am and it's more of a mystery.
- Right, well I mean there are a range of,
there are a range of
thinkers who deal with
the problem of suffering, some of them
are more biblically oriented than others.
I mean Kierkegaard wasn't
particularly biblically oriented
in the way that CS Lewis
was, and CS Lewis isn't as
particularly oriented toward
the Bible as as New Testament
interpreters are, and so
there's a whole range,
a whole range and I think,
you know, in my book on this
I'm not really dealing with issues of
philosophical approaches toward suffering.
It's really more dealing with what
the Bible itself actually
has to say about it.
- [Female] I am an atheist
as well as a revolutionary
and a communist, and I
wanted to say that I really
appreciated a lot of what
you said about suffering,
in particular that if
there were such a God,
why is all this suffering happening?
I wanted to ask you a question.
There's a new book called Away
With All Gods by Bob Avakian,
and one of the question it asks is,
is believing in Gods actually harmful?
And is believing in God and religion,
does it stand in the way
of emancipating humanity?
And it makes the point
that religion is a very
negative role, in particular because it
blinds people to the
way the world really is.
I was wondering if you
could comment on that.
- Yeah, thank you, I
haven't read that book,
somebody earlier gave me a copy,
I think a group of you all are here.
(chuckles) Thank you.
So I don't have anything
directly to say to that
'cause I haven't read the book.
I have read the other neo-atheists,
as they're being called,
Dawkins and Hitchens and
and Sam Harris, and...
I think the thing that is
most disappointing to me
about these authors is that
they know very little about
religion, as a rule, and they
make claims about religion
that simply are sophomoric and silly.
And that I think if there's
going to be a bona fide
attack on religion, it has
to be somebody who actually
understands religion, and doesn't make
claims about religion that aren't true.
I mean Sam Harris acts as
if everything that's evil
that has ever happened in the
world is because of religion.
Well I think that's completely bogus.
I think religion in
fact does a lot of good,
as well as a lot of evil,
and that you can't blame
a religion for everything
wrong that's happened.
But again I haven't read this book,
so I can't really comment on it.
- [Male] One quick comment and a question,
my comments is that if Jesus
said he's coming back soon
or within in this lifetime,
two thousand years later
to him showing up I think there should be
a statue of limitation and
which just says, forget it.
My question, you mentioned
Exodus and Deuteronomic history,
in your opinion how much
of that is really history
and how much is that bunch of herdsmen
sit around fireplace shooting the bull?
(Bart laughs)
- Okay so these are my
two choices (laughing).
I think that the,
I personally am skeptical
about most of the incidents
narrated in Exodus and the
Deuteronomistic history.
I think the later you get in
the Deuteronomistic history
the more you're actually getting history.
But I am closer to those
scholars who call themselves
minimalists when it comes
to things like the Exodus.
I don't really believe that
there was a parting of the
Red Sea and that the entire
Egyptian army got drowned,
and that that were millions of these
Israelites wandering
around the wilderness.
I just, I don't think that happened.
- [Male] I really appreciate
everything you said,
but at the end you talking about kind of
the summation, about suffering.
Maybe there's not an answer,
but at least there should be
a response, which I find
kind of agnostic in itself.
If we look at the world and
the suffering that's happening
in the world, and where
that's coming from,
there is obviously an
answer it seems to me,
I mean you have, you know,
everybody in the world producing
everything, you have a small
group of people that are
in control of that, and
we could take care of all
the starving and the
people dying on thirst
and preventable diseases almost overnight.
- Yes.
- [Male] And to say that,
you know, all we can have
is a response to that, and not an answer,
seems again to go back to this
biblical understanding that
the poor will always be with us,
and this is just human nature
and all of these other things
that the Bible, and other
religions, really put forward.
So it it seems to me that there's still
even within what you're
saying, a kind of a default
back to the sense of morality
which in fact belief in God,
belief in things unseen
and biblical in other
ancient scriptures --
- Yes.
- Have as a substance.
- No I understand how you're
hearing me, and I think
you're not hearing me the
way I mean to be heard.
That that's not what I really mean at all.
Part of our response
to suffering is in fact
to deal with just what
you're talking about.
I mean we are at a moment in history
when there is absolutely no reason
for there to be starvation in the world.
We have more food in the world than is
necessary for everybody to be overweight.
We can solve malaria, we can
solve all sorts of things,
so I don't mean that we
should just be complacent
about that, I think we
in fact really, and,
you know, we lack the political will.
That's the only thing, we lack the
political will to do what's necessary.
So I completely agree with that,
but when I say that there's
no answer, I just mean in kind
of the philosophical sense.
Why is there a tsunami that
kills 300 thousand people?
I mean it just doesn't,
you know for some of us,
it just baffles our minds, or,
a couple years ago there
was this earthquake
in the Himalayas that left,
that killed 50 thousand people
and left three million people
facing winter without shelter.
And I'm not, so when I'm saying
is there an answer to that,
I'm saying there's no, stuff happens.
Thank you very much.
- Thank you.
(applause)
(electronic instrumental music)
