By Neil Earle
The devastating earthquake in Haiti has seen a massive outpouring of support from many nations. It also leads many to ask, once again, where was God in all this? How could a loving God allow such suffering to fall on one of the poorest countries of earth?
Inevitably, Bible believing Christians seek to make some sense out of all this. Across the centuries three or four positions have evolved. The first is what Professor Pam Scalise of Fuller Seminary labels (critically) “the Retribution Doctrine.” This is the motive behind such Old Testament passages as Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26 – God says to ancient Israel, you do this and I’ll do that. Keep my laws and you are blessed, break them and you will be cursed. Even the New Testament seems to buy into this somewhat with the apostle Paul’s dogmatic, “people reap what they sow” (Galatians 6:7). This neat and tidy formula is as far as some Christians are prepared to go in explaining tragedy. It does seem to account for a lot of what goes on in the world but it offers little comfort to victims and has never assuaged grief. It is an especially American teaching as Professor Susan Manning explains, analyzing the Colonial Period: “External disasters which best the colonies were interpreted as God’s chastisement of his chosen people for backsliding; the New England ministry made full capital of Indian attacks, fires and epidemics in a series of ‘Jeremiads’ – fast-day and election-day sermons in which the people were exhorted to repent and reform” (The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, Volume 9, page 11).
The last eruption of the Retribution Doctrine occurred after September 11, 2001 when some in the conservative Christian community saw the attack on that day as God’s punishment for abortion, gay rights and Hollywood movies. Subsequent “clarifications” did little to erase the stigma from Christianity.
However, it must be remembered that even in the Old Testament the infallible workings of the machine-like Retribution Doctrine were in evidence. The Book of Ecclesiastes stated pointedly that: “There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: the righteous who get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked who get what the righteous deserve” (Ecclesiastes 8:14). The rabbis used to joke that Proverbs gave us the rules and Ecclesiastes the exceptions! Whole Psalms in the highly spiritual Book of Psalms seek to answer the seeker’s complaint as to why the wicked seem to escape scot-free so often. Psalm 34:19 is a brisk challenge to the Retribution theory: “many are the afflictions of the righteous?”
The Retribution Teaching was extant in Jesus' day too. When Jesus encountered a blind man his disciples were quick to ask: “Who sinned? This man or his parents?” Again Jesus answered in a way that blunted the rough edges of the Retribution Theory. That’s found in John 9:1-7. Of course, there is a proper time to apply the cause and effect principle, to ask what or whether our human activities or human encroachments are doing to intensify these disasters, such as New Orleans in 2005. (See Time magazine’s “The Flood Next Time” for more – September 15, 2008, pages 32-33). But it is not the whole story by any means.
A second approach was outlined by a Jewish rabbi on KTLA-5 Los Angeles the morning after the Haiti disaster. As he put it, lamenting and calling out to a God of justice and even complaining openly to God is perfectly justified under such conditions. Many of the Psalms are straight-out complaints, pain-filled writings coming out of the depths of broken hearted suffering (Psalm 130:1). These emotional outbursts survive as eloquent testimony that we can “get real” with God. He does not dismiss our human emotions and understands our very human reactions to senseless tragedy. Israel’s painful petitions to God are recorded as a living testimony. It makes many sections of the Bible such as Job, Jonah, Habakkuk – and especially Lamentations – a lot more relevant. All this shows us that we have a Partner in our grief and bereavement, a silent One who suffers along with us and in fact is not far from each one of us (Acts 17:27).
A third answer to where is God in suffering involves a more philosophical answer. It could be called the Broken Creation principle. Saint Paul wrote in Romans 8:22 that the whole creation is groaning in the pangs of childbirth. This is often the way it seems, isn’t it? As early as Genesis 2 and 3 the Bible paints a vivid picture of a world gone dangerously out of whack. Eden grew thorns and thistles as well as every fruit pleasing to the eye. Bringing new life into the world involves much pain. These early incidents can be read as shrewd and insightful biblical parables. Many movies play to this theme of disasters from “Armageddon” to the latest sci-fi disaster flick with comets and tidal waves doing us in. Genesis 1-3 shows a beautiful creation – awe-inspiring as it is— yet often a dangerous place, perhaps not yet fully perfected.
Just as some scientists have speculated about a “dark noise” left over from the original Big Bang so some Christian thinkers such as Robert Cook in The Unseen World wonder if there isn’t a dissonant force at loose in the cosmos, a Black Noise that bespeaks a universe headed towards perfection but not yet there. Theologians write that Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons back about 190 AD wrote about disturbances in the natural order as a possible legacy from the original chaos (“tohuwabohu” in Genesis 1:2) out of which creation ensued. This Black Noise is often personalized as Satan the Devil or the avenging Furies in other traditions, an idea which also makes some sense. The weakness here is that ascribing too much power to the demonic undermines the teaching of a supremely omnipotent Creator and Sustainer.
With Saint Augustine (354-430) we can see Christian thinking of a much more mature nature on this theme of senseless tragedy and evils. It seems clear from the overwhelming and spontaneous outpouring to aid Haiti these last days that Saint Augustine was right. Evil does not have the last word. Augustine argued that evil can only feed parasitically off the good, that it is a deformity from good, a ”falling off” from true health much like a mold or spore needs a hoist body to exist. This gives us lots to think about. John Calvin (1509-1564) built on this idea to argue that God delights in bringing good out of evil—an idea that also has solid Scriptural support (Romans 8:28).
This is not to make theological hay out of a stunning tragedy. Rather it shows that alert Christians have been engaged with these puzzling issues for quite some time. We probably get closer to a better Christian answer to the existence of evil through the lens of Martin Luther’s concept of “Deus Absconditus.” This means “the hidden or unknown God.” The apostle Paul did conclude that God’s judgment were unsearchable and his ways ultimately past finding out (Romans 11:33). For God to be really and truly God means that there are always vast areas of unknowing even in our search for him. He is not a God we can manage, as Otto Weber says. What good is a God we can control? Even though he has revealed himself, God is ultimately unknowable to our puny human minds. His revealing is still a concealing, said Luther, just as he hid himself in his revelation to Moses on Mt Sinai.
So it comes to this, at least on one level. Perhaps nothing makes us aware of our creatureliness than our helplessness in the face of senseless tragedy. God is the ultimate mystery and his ways are higher than our ways. But we can have hope. Creation is still not finished and we will one day learn more about this human experience we pass through which the Bible describes as littered with pitfalls, tragedies and temptations. Once a final accounting is made at the end of history, we will indeed know as we are known (1 Corinthians 13:12). A fish does not know it is swimming in water and we humans can only see things from a very limited perspective, as humbling as that is to our human notions of independence. But we do see enough even here now through a glass darkly to know that God does bring good out of evil. The persecution of the Puritans in England led to Massachusetts Bay and the bitter disputes over theology gave us the King James Version of 1611 as a splendid compromise.
There is much wisdom and comfort in the leaving things to God’s final sorting out to encourage us. Even the dying Jesus cried out in his darkness,”My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Before his death Jesus, too, heard reports of towers falling and natural disasters and to those among his disciples who too quickly made the Sin/Tragedy equation it is worth studying his answer in Luke 13:1-6. He used such setbacks as an opportunity to teach about the uncertainly of our physical existence but he did not label victims of tragedy as excessive sinners. This means that the victims of evil and earthquakes are not guilty sinners, else how explain the Cross, the perils of Paul or the experience of Christian martyrs down through time.
Out of evil good can come. Grace is often found in the aftermath of tragedy and that is worth thinking about. We have seen already that great tragedies can stimulate compassion and herculean relief efforts. Paul writes that when one suffers we all suffer. But Christians are not “death watch beetles” waiting longingly for tragedies to strike so as to hasten our Lord’s return. No, the One who gave the parable of the Good Samaritan went about “doing good” (Acts 10:38) and his call still echoes. Let’s be about our Father’s business, in Haiti and in our daily lives.