By Neil Earle
It’s happened again. The new century is only a decade old and we see it announced with earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, volcanoes, shooting wars, and now – radiation!
The 9.0 mega-quake in northern Japan and the resultant tsunami has awakened dormant fears that have been with us since 1945 – the wanton spread of the nuclear genie, possibly even to our North American shores. So far this latter is more fear than reality but we have fresh images to absorb from Sendai – that rolling mass of sludge and debris and people (God help us) rolling onto the Japanese northeast coast. This will long stay with us.
When tragedy such as this strikes it is only natural for even religious folk to ask: Where is God in all this? How could a loving God allow intense suffering to fall on a people still scarred with the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is there no justice?
Across the centuries Bible-believing Christians have sought to make sense out of what often looks like senseless tragedy. Three or four positions have evolved. The first is perhaps the least thought-out and damaging. This is what Pam Scalise of Fuller Seminary labels (critically) “the Retribution Doctrine.” This is the animating principle 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.
Now even parts of the New Testament seems to buy into this idea somewhat. There is the apostle Paul’s dogmatic, “people reap what they sow” (Galatians 6:7) statement for example.
But unfortunately, this neat and tidy formula is as far as some Christians are prepared to go in explaining tragedy. In truth, it does seem to account for a lot of what goes on in this uncertain world. Rewards and Punishments theme is often a good way to admonish young children about hot stoves, and crossing busy streets and leaving the medicine cabinet alone. Yes, of course. But to put it in that category is to jog our minds with the truism that this Reward/Punishment motif is an elementary proposition. It offers little comfort to victims and rarely eases grief.
Professor Susan Manning sees the strict Law/Punishment motif as a legacy from America’s Puritan 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).
We remember that some in the conservative Christian community saw the terror attacks of 9/11 as God’s punishment for abortionists, gay rights advocates, and a generally lawless society. As a survivor of the Northridge Earthquake of 1994 I remember well the same argument being leveled against us here in California – our state is a center of the porn industry so “God is mad at us.” Some of the same charges were hurled at New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Curiously they were not heard after last year’s Haitian earthquake. Why would God want to punish “even more” the poor people of Haiti? Christianity’s Quick-Draw McGraw propagandists were silent on that one. Thank God.
The theological problem here is that even inside the Old Testament itself the infallible workings of the machine-like Retribution Doctrine are called into question. The Book of Ecclesiastes states 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). Rabbinical Judaism often joked that the Book of Proverbs – with its neat balancing of “tit for tat” – gave us the rules and Ecclesiastes the exceptions! This is not a bad insight. 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 73). Psalm 34:19 is a brisk challenge to the Retribution theory: “Many are the afflictions of the righteous.”
The Retribution Teaching was alive and well in Jesus' day too. When Jesus encountered a blind man his disciples were quick to ask: “Who sinned? This man or his parents?” 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 are times to apply the cause and effect principle, to ask what or whether our human activities or human encroachments are doing to intensify such disasters as befell New Orleans in 2005…or Japan in 2011. And many helpful lessons will be drawn from this latest tragedy in Japan – especially relating to safety in nuclear power plants.
But already we see from Jesus’ words in John 9 that victims of seemingly senseless tragedy do not have to feel they are the special targets of God’s express anger. Over-simplified applications of selected Scripture to messy human experience may fall short of the full truth.
A second approach to unjust suffering was advanced by a Jewish rabbi on a Los Angeles TV show 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 about our tragedies is actually allowed and encouraged in Scripture. Many of the Psalms are straight-out complaints, laments, grievance documents – pain-filled expressions pouring out of the depths of broken hearted suffering (Psalm 130:1). These emotional outbursts survive, he said, to remind us that we can “be real” with God. At times the only sensible response to grief is to lament. Even some of our television commentators made the same argument: “Analysis must yield right now to prayerful support for the people of Japan.”
God does not callously dismiss our human cries of woe. We see this in books such as Job, Jonah, Habakkuk – and especially Lamentations. These books show 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). Before God sent Moses to lead Israel out of slavery he stated “I have heard tem crying out because of their slave drivers, and I a concerned about their suffering.” Christians believe, of course, that this compassionate One’s heart is revealed more fully in Isaiah 63:7-9 which lays God’s feelings bare: “in all their affliction he was afflicted, in his love and mercy he redeemed them…according to his compassion and many kindnesses.”
The New Testament moves on to promise in the words of the martyred St. Peter: “And the God of all grace…after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast (1 Peter 5:10). This was written by a man who had drunken deeply of his own cup of suffering but who knew the heart of the Suffering God whom became man in Jesus Christ.
A possible third answer to the question of suffering takes Christians down a more philosophical, but insightful path. 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. Earthquakes happen. Early Genesis has been read by many over the centuries as containing shrewd and insightful parables on the origin of our human predicament. Nature can be a Beast as well as the Best. Even bringing new life into the world involves much pain.
The Christian apologist C.S. Lewis wrote of this two-fold aspect of living in a world and a universe streaked by both beauty and chaos. “Because God created the Natural – invented it out of its love and artistry – it demands our reverence,” wrote Lewis, but at the same time “because Nature is fallen it must be corrected and the evil within it must be [put to death].” That seems to be the sense behind such passages as Romans 8:22. Genesis 1-3 shows how a beautiful creation – awe-inspiring as it is – sometimes appears as a dangerous place, a physical realm not yet fully perfected but headed towards eventual harmony.
Just as some scientists have speculated about a “dark noise” left over from the original Big Bang so some Christian thinkers wonder if there isn’t a dissonant force at loose in the cosmos, a Black Noise that haunts a universe headed towards perfection but not yet there. (See Robert Cook’s brief in The Unseen World). As early as 190AD Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons 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 even personalized by many as Satan the Devil. This too explains some aspects of bitter reality even if there are problems with ascribing too much power to Satan, a notion which subtly undermines God's office as Creator and Sustainer.
With Saint Augustine (354-430) Christian thinking on the problem of evil takes on a much more mature cast. Senseless tragedy does not have the last word. If we remember the uber-generous response from hospitable Canadians to stranded American fliers after 9/11, and the overwhelming and spontaneous outpouring of aid to Haiti and even New Zealand a mere few weeks ago then we see that Saint Augustine was on to something. He taught that evil has no existence apart from good. Augustine argued instead that evil is a parasite, it can only feed off the good, that it is “a deformity from good, a falling off from true health” much like a mold or spore which needs a host body to exist.
This makes a lot of sense. The much-misunderstood John Calvin (1509-1564) pushed this idea further, to what we can call a fifth position, that it is God’s great delight to bring good out of evil – an idea that also has solid Scriptural support (Romans 8:28). The Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 became the answer to the powerful paradox of how a Good God can allow evil even temporary sway. The One who took our suffering and sin upon himself became the God/Man Jesus Christ. More on this below.
None of this is to make theological hay out of tragedy. Rather it shows that alert Christians have engaged this mystery of human suffering down through time. Martin Luther’s concept of “the hidden or unknown God” can also come in here. The apostle Paul concluded that on this human plane, the Great God’s judgments were unsearchable and his ways ultimately past finding out (Romans 11:33). Luther followed up that 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 asks: “What good is a God we can control?” Even though he has revealed himself most fully through Christ the compassionate Son of God, the total fullness of God’s purposes is ultimately unknowable to our human minds. His revealing is still a concealing, said Luther, just as he God hid himself in his revelation to Moses on Mt Sinai.
Let’s remember that even the First Century A.D., when Jesus walked and talked, even then there were senseless tragedies and atrocities. Before his own unjust death Jesus, too, heard reports of towers falling and other natural and political atrocities . To those 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 uncertainty of physical existence and the need to take effective action, but he did not label victims of tragedy as excessive sinners. The victims of evil and earthquakes are thus not necessarily guilty sinners and targets of God’s wrath. If so, how explain the Cross of Christ, the perils of Paul or the experience of Christian martyrs down through time?
Jesus said, unless we would turn to God we would all perish – we run our risks in a world with cities and nuclear plants built atop volcanic fault zones. The ground below our feet is not as stable as we sometimes assume amid the busy back-and-forth of our lives. Our cosmic neighbors, the moon, Mercury, Mars are shattered evidences either of former catastrophes or else an unfinished creation. Even so, the Bible offers hope. The Scottish theologian Thomas Torrance showed how senseless suffering reminds us of our predicament, our dependence, our creatureliness, our proper place in the Grand Scheme of the cosmos. But take heart – it is precisely where evil is at its most intense we find God working, says Torrance:
“What vexes and distresses God in Christ is not simply the sickness and pain of humanity but the fact that it is engulfed in an abyss of fearful darkness, too deep for men and women themselves to understand and certainly too deep for them ever to get out of it – a pit of bottomless evil power. Mankind is entangled in sin not wholly of its own making, enmeshed in the toils of a vast evil will quite beyond it…It is evil at its ultimate source, evil at its deepest root, in its stronghold, that God has come to attack and destroy” (The Incarnation, page 241).
Torrance ends with the true good news: “God in Christ acts towards mankind in its helplessness and distress in sheer grace, grace that is utterly free. Nowhere does Jesus accuse the sick of their sins before he stoops to shoulder their weakness…God does not put the responsibility upon them but upon himself…God comes among sinners and makes himself responsible for their condition and even takes their sin and culpability upon himself vicariously [revealing] the ultimate helplessness and hopelessness of man, apart from such stupendous acts of grace.”
No, God is not mad at Japan. Christians know this: God’s ways are still beyond ours even as he tells us they are far better than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9). Creation is not finished. The last chapter in the human saga is not yet written. One day we will learn more about this human experience through which we pass. At the final accounting 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 prideful notions of independence. But we do see enough even here, even through a glass darkly, to trust that there is a purpose in suffering. God can and will bring good out of evil.
The victims in Japan did not live in vain and did not die in vain. God has promised to ultimately set it all right. His promise is that of new life in a restored and grander New Creation where he will wipe away the tears from every eye (Revelation 21:4). There is thus much wisdom and comfort in leaving things to God’s final sorting out. “The just shall live by faith.”
Grace is often found in the aftermath of tragedy. As we see in the efforts of the anti-radiation workers in Japan, great tragedies can summon forth great compassion and heroic self-sacrifice and in all this God once again gets the glory through the men and women made in his image. Christians are not “death watch beetles” waiting longingly for tragedies to strike so as to hasten our Lord’s return. Rather, Jesus’ example of “doing good” (Acts 10:38) echoes the lesson of the Good Samaritan, a call to be about our Father’s business while we trust to God that our lives here can make sense in spite of all that unfolds. The New Creation, that was Peter and Paul’s hope (2 Peter 3:11-13). What was said of old remains true today – “surely there is a future, and your hope will not be cut off” (Proverbs 23:18, RSV).