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).
Greg,
ReplyDeleteDid you listen closely enough to Pat Robertson? He never said God was in the earthquake. He said the Haitians swore a pact to the devil, and they've been cursed ever since. He didn't say God was responsible for the curse. Could he have meant that Haiti is suffering at the devil's hands?
I think what Robertson said is quite insensitive and the timing was poor, to say the least. I agree that people have a misinformed view of Christianity because of events like this, and that is regrettable. But what if he had said it last week? And what if, what if it was true?
I've been troubled in the last week or two by the Brit Hume controversy and now this. Christians and nonbelievers seem to be united in their rage against both of these people. But the undertone seems to be that God has no place in today, and believers are far too willing to jump right on board. The accepted belief is that Brit Hume has no place in encouraging Tiger Woods to consider Christianity, and that Pat Robertson doesn't have any insight into the supernatural forces at work in the world today.
But if we are to say that Robertson has no right to declare God's judgment on a people, do we, as believers or even nonbelievers, have any more right to say that this tragedy in Haiti is nothing more than a natural event? That there are no spiritual forces at work?
It's a terrible time for me to be troubled by this stuff, because the people of Haiti need our support (and they have mine), and our prayers (they have mine). But I think that modern, progressive Christians, while working hard to display God to the world in ways the world hasn't always seen, sometimes need to allow for the idea that there are spiritual forces at work in the events of history, as is well documented in the scripture. We sometimes want God to have all the power when it comes to healing the sick, releasing the afflicted from addictions, changing hearts, and guiding our day to day lives, but we aren't willing to give him (or the devil, for that matter), the power to act in great, physical ways.
Please don't call me uncompassionate. I am not willing to declare a curse on Haiti, and I'm not willing to determine whether the devil, or God, or any other being is responsible for this great tragedy. I think job one is to shine the light of Christ into the lives of the people in Haiti, as we come running to their aid (something the Americans, and especially the Christians in the US, always do in events like this). But I'm just saying that I'm troubled that modern believers are so accepting of the worldly belief that spiritual forces have nothing to do with the day to day lives of anyone.
Instead of attacking fellow believers, let's join together to shine the light of Christ on Haiti, eh? Perhaps you could consider posting a list of aid organizations and ways your readers could help rather than damning another Christian's statements to hell.
Thank you for your comment, sir or madame, but I would like to know who I am talking to.
ReplyDeleteIn brief, I think bad theology IS something that needs to be combatted because unfortunatly the world lumps all of us Christians together. And I want the world to know that I abhor what Pat Robertson has said and that there are Christians out there who strongly disagree with him. The way he said it reminded me of Falwell's comments about how 9/11 was God's punishment on America for tolerating homosexuals. When that kind of bigotry surfaces, I will always condemn it in the strongest possible way and make no apology for doing so.
Don't get me wrong. I believe in spiritual warfare. I believe that there are forces at work much larger than naturalistic explanations. But I do not believe that God is the author of evil or that God would kill thousands and thousands of children because some adults in the nation happen to be into voodoo.
I'm all for having this debate, but I want to know who I'm talking to.