(September 12, 2013 at 2:59 pm)apophenia Wrote: From what I understand, Ehrman's change in belief was primarily motivated by the problem of theodicy, not because of his knowledge and experience with higher and lower criticism.
Your right. I just finished the first chapter, and the whole deconstruction of his faith started with the bible, and once he dismissed the bible as the word of God his whole system of faith crumbled because he built a non biblical pro Omni-max picture of God and started to question The existence of God. Because of all the suffering he saw in the world. Unfortunately he did not question the biblically based version of God but the Omni-max version of God he had in his mind.
Wow. How can a guy smart enought to teach this stuff at Princeton, be so blind about the foundations of his own faith?
This guy questions everything about God and the bible, but never once turns that powerful gift of questioning onto his foundational beliefs. If he had he would have seen the picture of God he was holding on to was false. just as false as some of the catholic based doctrines he identified and dismissed.
I could have been this guy, if I had not been lead to tear down my own understanding of God and made to rebuild it from scratch. When I did I based it off of the biblical picture, and when I did that all of the paradoxes and moral conflicts all went away. Not because I have ignored them, but because they have been truly answered.