Bart D. Ehrman, chair of the Department of Religious Studies, Univ. of NC, is a leading authority on the early church and the life of Jesus, wrote 20 books. (For his books I've read, click on his name.)

From Ch 1: “This book will neither provide an easy solution nor attack the question philosophically by adopting difficult intellectual concepts and making hard-to-understand claims with sophisticated and esoteric vocabulary. My interest for this book is instead with some of the age-old and traditional reflections on evil found in the foundational documents of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The questions I will be asking are these: What do the biblical authors say about suffering? Do they give one answer or many? Which of their answers contradict one another, and why does it matter? How can we as twenty-first century thinkers evaluate these answers, which were written in different contexts so many centuries ago? My hope is that, by looking at these ancient writings that eventually came to form the Bible, we will be empowered to wrestle more responsibly and thoughtfully with the issues they raise, as we ponder one of the most pressing and wrenching questions of our human existence: why we suffer.”

The way he tackles these issues is given well by his chapter titles. Ch 1 is Suffering and the Crisis of Faith. Ch 2 is Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: The Classical View of Suffering. Ch 3 is More Sin and More Wrath: The Dominance of the Classical View of Suffering. Ch 4 is The Consequences of Sin. Ch 5 is The Mystery of the Greater Good: Redemptive Suffering. Ch 6 is Does Suffering Make Sense? The Books of Job and Ecclesiastes. Ch 7 is God Has the Last Word: Jewish-Christian Apocalypticism. Ch 8 is More Apocalyptic Views: God’s Ultimate Triumph over Evil. Ch 9 is Suffering: The Conclusion, in which he ends with: “In the end, we may not have ultimate solutions to life’s problems. We may not know the why’s and wherefore’s. But just because we don’t have an answer to suffering does not mean that we cannot have a response to it. Our response should be to work to alleviate suffering wherever possible and to live life as well as we can.”

So Bart D. Ehrman’s answer to suffering, based on scripture, is that there is no answer. I had very recently read John Hick’s EGOL book (“Evil and the God of Love”, book 279), in which his lengthy philosophical discussion (which Ehrman disdains) led Hick to consider “Soul Making” (very similar to “Redemptive Suffering”) as the best answer for suffering. So I was very curious to see what conclusion Ehrman would reach – I was quite disappointed when he did not find any satisfactory answer. But Ehrman’s quest in this book, together with his examination of scriptural sources in “Misquoting Jesus” (book 281) mattered so much to him that he no longer considers himself a Christian. So the question of evil (or theodicity) does matter a whole lot to many people. In his EGOL book Hick found “Soul Making” to be a better answer than the “Free Will” answer. But I reach the opposite conclusion, although I agree with Hick in very many other ways. [As I said in my review of Hick’s EGOL (written in 1966) I would like to know how John Hick feels today about the “Soul Making” and the “Free Will” answers to suffering.] I agree with Ehrman that our correct response is to alleviate suffering wherever possible, but so would most anyone, whether atheist, agnostic or a believer in any of the world’s great religions. I can recommend this book by Bart D. Ehrman for the depth he reached in seeking for a biblical answer. But it seems that his effort to do so shows that one must go beyond the Bible, as have many philosophers and theologians, in search of a really satisfactory answer for the all-important answer to the question: Why We Suffer.