I am on sabbatical leave this year from my position at the University of North Carolina but had been asked to be a scholar in residence for a week at nearby High Point University. During the seminar, yesterday, a student asked if I was writing anything now, and I told her yes, I was writing a book on biblical answers to the problem of why there is suffering. As I expected, she was ready and eager to tell me “the” answer: “There’s suffering,” she said, “because we have to have free will; otherwise we would be like robots.” I asked her my standard question: if suffering is entirely about free will, how can you explain hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, and other natural disasters? She wasn’t sure, but she felt pretty confident that it had something to do with free will. As we have seen, the “free will” answer is not nearly the focus of attention for the biblical authors that it is for people today. But there are a lot of things that are not in the Bible (or are not the main point of the biblical writers) that people mistakenly think are in the Bible.
