The tsunami that struck Japan in 2011, had people once again asking the age-old question, "Why?"By Neil Earle
The tsunami that struck Japan in 2011, had people once again asking the age-old question, "Why?"Mass shootings and public murders in the United States are coming at us like the waves of the sea. The mass media tries to grapple with the “why’ question while millions ask “Where is God in all this?” “What’s going on?”
The spiritual writer Eugene Peterson has said, “We underestimate God and overestimate evil. We don’t see what God is doing and conclude that he is doing nothing.” But Christians have a long history of wrestling with this quandary.
Four or five positions have evolved. The first is perhaps the most common and perhaps the most misleading. Professor Pam Scalise of Fuller Seminary labels (critically) this “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. This synopsis was aired right after 9/11 and most Christians were embarrassed by the approach.
Aftermath of Haiti earthquake, 2010.Yes, there is something to the Rewards and Punishments theme. It makes up a part of household dynamics – admonishing young children about hot stoves, or about crossing busy streets and leaving the medicine cabinet alone. Yes, of course. But the more we think about it this is an elementary proposition. It doesn’t cover all the bases. Innocent people at a movie theater don’t deserve violent deaths.
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 the Haitian earthquake. Why would God want to punish “even more” the poor people of Haiti? Christianity’s Quick-Draw McGraws were silent on that one. Thank God.
The book of Job offers this dramatic picture of a being named “the Satan” or adversary who was allowed to deliver devastating attacks on the righteous man Job and his family (Job 1, 2). Demonic forces seemed to be harassing Jesus in his ministry but mainly through poor pitiful human agents rather than overt attacks (Mark 5:1-13). But this is because most Bible students know Satan is a defeated being who can exercise harassing attacks on people who allow him to get too close to them – Judas, for example (John 13:27). Yet this overt Satanism is rare considering the Bible’s overall witness that there is something indeed mysterious and inexplicable about evil (2 Thessalonians 2:7, KJV).
One Bible writer says, “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). Some rabbis opined 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 Book of Psalms seek to answer the seeker’s complaint as to why the wicked seem to escape scot-free so often (Psalm 73). But Psalm 34:19 is a brisk challenge to any who make the too neat equation that evil is somehow “our fault” – “Many are the afflictions of the righteous.”
Jesus, too, heard reports of towers falling and other natural and political freak events. To those who too quickly made the Sin/Tragedy equation Luke 13:1-6 shows him using such tragedies to teach about the uncertainty of physical existence and the need for everyone to walk humbly before God. But he did not label victims of tragedy as excessive sinners. If so, how explain the Cross of Christ, the perils of Paul or the experience of Christian martyrs down through time?
In John 9:1-7 Jesus’ healing of a blind man was used to show that victims of seemingly accidental evil do not have to feel they are the special targets of God’s express anger or neglect. The Gospels are clear – we cannot easily apply “one-off” over-simplified applications of selected Scriptures to our messy human experience.
A third approach used to explain unjust suffering was advanced by a Jewish rabbi on a Los Angeles TV show the morning after a natural disaster. As he put it, 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 a broken heart (Psalm 130:1). These emotional outbursts survive, he said, to remind us that we can “be real” with God.
Truly, at times the only sensible response to grief is to lament. Even some of our television commentators made the same argument after the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster: “Analysis must yield right now to prayerful support for the people of Japan.”
God is not deaf to our grief. We see this in books such as Job, Jonah, Habakkuk – and especially Lamentations. Bible students know we have a Partner in our grief and bereavement, a Gracious One who entered into our grief, suffers along with us and 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 them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering.” This compassionate One’s heart is revealed more fully in Isaiah 63:7-9 which lays God’s feelings bare saying “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 promise from the eventually martyred St. Peter is: “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).
C.S. LewisA possible fourth answer to the question of suffering takes Christians down a more philosophical path. It could be called the Unfinished 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 describes Eden gone dangerously out of whack. Thorns and thistles appear along with fruit pleasing to the eye. Cain killed his brother in a spirit of anger. Early Genesis has been read by many across the centuries as containing piercing instruction 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 pain.
Both the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis and the Edinburg theologian Tom Torrance wrote eloquently 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 1-4 shows how a beautiful creation and a God-ordained human family can yet be a disturbing place, a physical realm not yet fully perfected on its way to eventual harmony. T.H. Torrance labels this “contingency.” God has allowed creation the freedom to be simultaneously turned away from him and towards him. Beautiful sunsets and Hurricane Sandy. This lays much more stress on the human freedom in a precarious cosmos than we are used to considering.
Saint Augustine (354-430 AD)With Saint Augustine (354-430) Christian thinking on the problem of evil took on a much more mature cast. Senseless tragedy does not have the last word. If we remember the overwhelming outpouring of aid offered whenever people get a chance to respond, we see that Saint Augustine was on to something. He taught that evil has no existence apart from good. Borrowing from Plato, Augustine argued 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.
But even though Evil can strike anywhere in a fallen world, the stark fact is that most Americans pull together and act like a community in times of senseless tragedy. We saw it on the news regularly. In Joplin, MO people noticed how New York foremen came all that way to help their stricken communities. Even Abraham Lincoln mulled this over in his Second Inaugural, that the wisdom of God often brings good out of evil – an idea that has solid Scriptural support (Romans 8:28).
Christians teach that The Good God unabashedly took our suffering upon himself as the Man Jesus Christ. In the words of Thomas Torrance, Jesus, as God in the flesh, destroyed evil at its command center by drawing undeserved suffering upon himself and breaking its irresistible grip. Evil was decisively defeated at the cross by the One who “brought life and immortality to light.” But Evil, Brokenness, or “Fate “ as the Greeks called it – this surd element, personalized or not, still has a power to lash back at us and will do so until Jesus returns to set everything right. It is through much tribulation we enter God’s Kingdom (Acts 14:22 AV).
Paul also taught that here on this human plane, the Great God’s judgments were ultimately unsearchable and his ways ultimately past finding out (Romans 11:33). Martin Luther argued for “Deus Absconditus,” that for God to be really above us 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 total fullness of God’s purposes is ultimately unknowable to our human minds. At least in this present existence.
Christian theology teaches that so-called senseless suffering reminds us of our predicament, our dependence, our creatureliness, as part of our place in the Grand Scheme of things. But take heart. It is precisely where evil is at its most intense that we often 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 (humanity) 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 good news: “God in Christ acts towards mankind in its helplessness and distress in sheer grace…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.”
Christians know this: God’s ways are not only beyond ours, they are far better than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9). One day we will learn more about this human experience through which we are passing, we will know as we are known (1 Corinthians 13:12). A fish does not know it is swimming in water and our human perspective is ultimately limited, as humbling as that is to our 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.
Earth’s victims do not live in vain nor die in vain. God has promised to ultimately set things right in a New Creation where he will wipe away the tears from every eye (Revelation 21:4). Then we will know what we need to know and rejoice calmly in God’s marvelous plan of salvation. “Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vine, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior” (Habakkuk 3:17-18).