Is God in the Earthquake?

Pat Robertson has done it again. He insists on seeing God as the author of evil. In the aftermath of the horrific and tragic earthquake that struck Haiti this week, he announced that it was their deserved punishment for "making a pact with the devil." Rev. Robertson, pardon my saying so, but your "god" is my devil. I serve a loving God who is not willing that any should perish. I serve a God who is working for the good, who does not require evil and violence as a means to his own end, who wraps children in his loving arms rather than crushes them under brick and mortar.

Jim Wallis has said it well this week: "My God does not cause evil. God is not a vengeful and retributive being, waiting to strike us down; instead, God is in the very midst of this tragedy, suffering with those who are suffering. When evil strikes, it’s easy to ask, where is God? The answer is simple: God is suffering with those who are suffering."

So many Christians are utterly confused on this point. They assume that everything that happens is part of the will of God. "There are no accidents," they faithfully proclaim. "We may not understand, but we do know that God's will is never thwarted." These well meaning people look in the face of tragedy and shrug, "It must have been what God wanted."

But look into the faces of the dead children lining the streets in Port-au-Prince and tell me that God did this. The New York Times reported: "The tiny bodies of children lay in piles next to the ruins of their collapsed school. People with faces covered by white dust and the blood of open wounds roamed the streets. Frantic doctors wrapped heads and stitched up sliced limbs in a hotel parking lot." And you are going to tell me that the God revealed in the suffering love of the cross is behind this?!? If you are right -- if, in fact, God did cause this to happen -- then I will rise up against that God and with everything in me revolt against him. I will join together with others and initiate a revolution to overthrow such a tyrant.

David Bentley Hart stated it better than I ever could in his reflection on the 2004 Tsunami in Southeast Asia:

"Only a moral cretin at [the moment of a child's death] would have attempted to soothe [his parent's] anguish by assuring him that his child had died as a result of God's eternal, inscrutable, and righteous counsels, and that in fact his death had mysteriously served God's purposes in history, and that all of this was completely necessary for God to accomplish his ultimate design in having created the world... Ours is a religion of salvation. Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue his creation from the absurdity of sin, the emptiness and waste of death, the forces -- whether calculating malevolence or imbecile chance -- that shatter living souls; and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred... [In the eschaton] God will not unite all of history's many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history as false and damnable... rather than showing how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, he will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes -- and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain for the former things will have passed away, and he that sits upon the throne will say, 'Behold, I make all things new'" (The Doors of the Sea 99-101, 104).

Genesis 5, Psalm 5, and Matthew 5

Below is a correspondence between myself and a theological inquirer. I thought this dialog worth posting online since it raises a huge number of important issues:

Friend:

Subject: A Bible Question

So, my church is doing a read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year program which seems pretty hip, so I'm doing it, but I ran into some trouble yesterday and thought you two might have some answers/directing thoughts. We were reading Genesis 5, Psalm 5, and Matthew 5, and for whatever reason those three in order and in concert concentrated all my doubts and questions into one 10 minute reading session, a process which was, as you may imagine, somewhat disturbing and depressing. Here are the concerns (you may see them if you read those chapters in order): Genesis 5 is a history of generations of people who lived an improbably long time (Methuselah, etc.); Psalm 5 asks God to strike down the singer's enemies and bless him, and so seems like it could be any pagan hymn; and Matthew 5 is the Sermon on the Mount, which in comparison to the first two is revolutionary but seems unrelated, demonstrates how poorly the church lives up to the ideals of Christianity, and also demonstrates how a good understanding of Jesus' teachings needs pretty considerable learning and reflection, which 99% of humanity does not have the time or opportunity for. So there you have it; worries about reasonableness and coherence, the plausibility of undermining explanations, and the unwillingness and impossibility of current followers actually following all concentrated. Well, the complaints about Matthew are just me being idealistic and a worry-wort probably, but the Genesis question at least seems like it deserves an answer. Am I to really believe in a 900 year old man despite its apparent impossibility, or is there something I am supposed to be learning from this genealogy as allegory?

My response:

These are great questions. And here is how I would (very, very briefly) respond to them:

1. The first 11 chapters of Genesis are not meant to be read literally. To read them literally is to misunderstand their genre and import our own expectations of what modernist historians have led us to believe true history is. Genesis 1-11 should be read theologically rather than scientifically or historically. What theological point might the author be making by claiming that the early humans lived for hundreds of years? A good book on this is "The Lost World of Genesis One" by John Walton. I highly recommend it.

2. The impreccatory Psalms are always disturbing to the Christians that take the Sermon on the Mount seriously. Suffice it to say, that I believe in progressive revelation. I.e. Jesus was the fullest revelation of God and his will for humanity -- before Christ only a partial picture as available. David or the psalmnist who wrote Psalm 5 did not have full revelation and was operating under the theological rhubric of his own day. Today we can read these Psalms in reference to our spiritual enemies (Satan and his demons) OR as cries for justice coming from oppressed people groups. Try reading Psalm 5 again through the eyes of the Darfuri woman who was gang raped by the Janjaweed militia and it will make lots more sense!

3. I think your critiques about the church not following the words of Jesus in Matthew 5-7 are dead on. The church has mostly lost the radical nature of this message! What I conclude from that is that theological education is incredibly important among the clergy -- because we have had years and years of clergy misinterpreting what I would argue is the most crucial passage in all of the Bible. As for myself, I am being drawn to a new movement of Christians that call themselves "red letter Christians." They unapologetically argue that the most important parts of the Bible are the words of Jesus and that all other Scripture must be read through them. But beware! Walking down this path might end up making you a pacifist like myself and might cause you to rework much of your evangelical theology. Personally, I think the anabaptists have been among the very few to have read Matthew 5-7 correctly for centuries. We're all just catching up to them.

Obviously, books have been written about the topics I raise here. I recommend C. S. Lewis' "Reflection on the Psalms" for question #2 and John Howard Yoder's "The Politics of Jesus" for question #3. There -- I recommended further reading for all of the questions. Sound like a professor, huh?

Snow

A fresh blanket of snow is falling in my neighborhood today. I'm seeing something I rarely seen in the inner city: beauty. I am convinced that humans were made for beauty. It gives us reason to live and enjoy life. Fine music, quality artwork, innovative architecture, an exquisite cup of coffee, a well manicured garden -- these can be sources of great inner peace and contentment.

A part of me wonders if one of the causes of systemic poverty in America is simply the lack of beauty in the poor man's world. Seeing half of the houses boarded up and abandoned with yards untouched in years, noticing the piles of litter -- rusted beer cans, smashed glass bottles that once held cheap vodka, cigarette butts, even ammunition shells -- scattered in ever conceivable place. This is a world of concrete where everything is grey. Life does not thrive here. Green is a rarity. We in the city have paved paradise and put up a parking lot, as the songwriter says. I have friends who have never seen a lake or a farm or a mountain. And it makes me wonder what kind of person I would be had spent ever waking moment of my life trapped within the concrete jungle.

But today the ugliness is covered by pure white. Mounds of trash have become pristine and untouched knolls of soft clouds. Even the ugly abandoned houses next door have a sort of romantic, mysterious aura to them as they hide beneath a white blanket. It is almost as if the near Eastside has been made new -- even if only for a few hours. For a moment our cracked and weed-ridden sidewalks are as smooth as those of the suburbs. Our potholes disappear. And our collective poverty subsides for a moment as people gather around their cracked windows to catch a rare glimpse of beauty coming down from the sky.

Thank you, God, for snow. Thank you for beauty. And thank you for saying, "Behold, I make all things new." Come, Lord Jesus, come.

Romans 12:19

Tonight it is very hard to follow Romans 12:19. Deep within me I want to lash out. But I will chose the better way.