Natural evil, unlike moral evil, genocide and terror remains one of the most intractable of human problems that defy simply solutions or pat answers.
It is not in the same category as when Edmund Burke wrote so succinctly, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing", or Albert Einstein's famous statement, "the world is too dangerous to live in - not because of people who do evil, but because of people who sit and let it happen."
No one did evil on December 29th 2004. No one just sat back and let it happen as in the Sudan or Rwanda. A geological kink in nature threw up a wave that washed away the lives, hopes, homes and aspirations of tens of thousands of ordinary people because they happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. One commentator described it as the day that shook the earth. On Sunday December 26, 2004, a tsunami wave with the power of more than 1,000 atomic bombs hit coastlines around the Indian Ocean.
Some commentators have said that if people saw the sea receding suddenly they should have known what was coming and high-tailed it to higher ground in anything that moved. Perhaps, but that begs the question. A lot of smart, well educated people died including a lot of Europeans and even more poor died for no better reason than that they were at the wrong place when it hit. The truth is a lot of innocent people died.
It tests one's faith in a personal and loving God, said an anguished VirtueOnline reader. What kind of God lets nature strike such a blow, wrote an Eastern Orthodox theologian. The tsunami is an example of how "mother nature" is a child abuser, wrote another. Those who worship nature (The Great Earth Mother) must contend with the fact that nature cares not in the least for human life or human suffering (or animals either).
On hearing the news the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote in the London Telegraph newspaper that the Asian tsunami disaster should make all Christians question the existence of God. In a deeply personal and candid article, he says "it would be wrong" if faith were not "upset" by the catastrophe which has already claimed more than 150,000 lives. Dr Williams said prayer provided no 'magical solutions' and most of the stock Christian answers to human suffering do not "go very far in helping us, one week on, with the intolerable grief and devastation in front of us".
He also said the paralyzing magnitude of a disaster like this naturally makes us feel more deeply outraged - and also more deeply helpless. He added: "The question, 'How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?' is therefore very much around at the moment, and it would be surprising if it weren't - indeed it would be wrong if it weren't."
Williams later berated the Telegraph for putting a headline on his story suggesting that he was questioning God's existence. Lambeth Palace insisted that Dr Williams had merely hypothesised that it would be wrong for Christians not to question what God was up to.
The Telegraph fired back that if Dr Williams was indeed misrepresented by the newspaper's headline, he himself must accept much of the blame. "His prose is so obscure, his thought processes so hard to follow, that his message is often unclear. If Dr Williams was indeed misrepresented by our sister paper's headline, he himself must accept much of the blame. His prose is so obscure, his thought processes so hard to follow, that his message is often unclear. What, for example, is the lay reader to make of the following passage from his article? "They [believers] have learned to see the world and life in the world as a freely given gift; they have learned to be open to a calling or invitation from outside their own resources, a calling to accept God's mercy for themselves and make it real for others; they have learned that there is some reality to which they can only relate in amazement and silence." Dr. Williams, they said, was a victim of his own erudition.
Williams's solution was a "passionate engagement with the lives that are left". Indeed they are doing so, and mostly, one should hastily add, from the Christian West. The Hindus said that it was due to Dharma, the Buddhists said it was due to Karma, and the Muslims said that it was Allah's judgment.
Archbishop Yong Ping Chung, (South East Asia) whose own country got hit by the Tsunami had an entirely different reaction. He wrote, "On behalf of the Province of the Anglican Church in South East Asia, I send our heartfelt condolence and deep sympathy to all those who have lost their loved ones. We deeply grieve with them and we share their pain. With such a devastating tragedy we could no longer keep silent. We turn to our sovereign and merciful God in prayers." He then called on all the church's Intercessors in his Province to have a special day of prayer and fasting.
So one archbishop says he doubts God's existence, and another turns to God in prayer. One tries to make sense of it, when there isn't any, and the other casts himself and his people on the mercy of God
The erudite scholarly Anglican Bishop of Durham N. T. Wright said there is a sense of a very, strange, dark, presence of God, being at the heart of the storm, not to make the world all right for those who happen to say a prayer at the right moment, but to be with us in the mess. "That is precisely what the Gospel writers are getting at when they write of Christ on the cross crying out: 'Why have you forsaken me?' It is the church's job to be there in prayer in order that God himself will be there too. God himself is groaning at the heart of that agony."
The evangelical Anglican Dean of Sydney, Phillip Jensen, triggered a debate after saying disasters were part of God's warning that judgment was imminent, while South Sydney Anglican Bishop Robert Forsyth said Jesus Christ used the example of disasters to bring people to God. "Without explaining the disaster, even Jesus drew peoples' attention to let the disasters be a warning to them of their own mortality and their need to be right with God," Bishop Forsyth said. "So at this point the Dean's point is echoing the point of Jesus," he wrote.
The Right Rev Alan Smith, Bishop of Shrewsbury, England told his congregation that the wave was the stuff of nightmares and cited the Old Testament prophet Job, who lost his family in an earthquake.
At Sandringham, the Queen and the royal family prayed for the victims of the disaster and heard the Right Rev Graham James, Bishop of Norwich, confess that a week before he would not have known what a tsunami was: "We all now understand the terrifying power of a wall of water 30 feet or more high travelling at several hundred miles an hour. Words seem cheap when the cost of lives has been so expensive... God has given us an Earth that lives and moves. It is not inert, it is alive - that is why we can live. Last week's events were the starkest possible reminder that what gives life also takes it away."
"As scientists tell us, randomness is something that is built into the fabric of creation and is the mainspring of the Earth's capacity to change itself and develop," he said. "This reality is something each generation has to come to terms with as we try to make sense of life... God does not prevent suffering but instead promises to redeem it. And it is this promise that we see fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ."
He continued: "In response to the question 'Where is God in all this?' I have two things to say... that God is the crucified one, the one who is in the midst of the pain not separate from it, secondly, God is to be found in the hands of those who are helping to bury the dead, to bring clean water to the living, to administer medicine to the ill and counsel to those in darkness. This is the faith of the church."
Faith helps in times of disaster, said Pope John Paul II from the Vatican. "Faith can be helpful during catastrophes like the Indian Ocean tidal waves by reminding sufferers of God's continued presence. Faith teaches us that even in the most difficult and painful trials, as in the disasters which struck in these days southeast Asia, God never abandons us." The pontiff has made repeated appeals for assistance for the victims of the tidal waves.
Other Christians stressed God's presence with the suffering; Hindus resigned themselves to fate, while Iqbal Sacranie, the secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain said the tsunami "is the will of God almighty. It is this aspect that is beyond us. Allah knows best. None of us is going to live for an indefinite period. Death always takes place but what form it takes is always beyond us. People of faith need to have a very firm belief in God almighty. It is for God's will. It is for the betterment of mankind at large." A British rabbi said Judaism is an attempt not to ask why but then, what should I do? How can I help?
But the origin of natural evil, like moral evil, resides in The Fall. Such horrendous acts of nature did not exist prior to the sin of our first parents, it came as a result. The universe groans and has been in travail since then. The record of Jesus' words seem not to take in unimaginable suffering, he simply calls his followers to repent.
Orthodox Episcopal theologian the Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner touches a nerve when he writes, "No persons of "faith", who have not themselves been a part of a social conflagration - now well-studied in recent memory, from World War II to Rwanda, with many human and "natural" disasters in between -- dare dismiss the depth of woundedness, sometimes unto mental death, that is bound up with going through and surviving these events. Christmas can indeed seem "bitter", as a priest I know in Haiti wrote us this year, even for believing Christians, who have been through and perhaps are still mired in a place of unrelenting and all-extending loss. We pray, as Christians, that we be sparred such a dangerous challenge to our hearts (cf. the Great Litany in the Prayer Book)."
The Rt. Rev. Dr. C. FitzSimons Allison (SC ret.) told VirtueOnline that "natural disasters always provoke questions of God's goodness in the face of excruciating tragedy. It has always been so and disasters will always continue. It has not been given to Christians to dispel the mystery of evil. The cynic in us is tempted to resolve the issue by removing God from all consideration and doing what Job refused to do: curse (consign to oblivion) his own hope. Yet this choice saves no one from the terrible waves of water and leaves us with no hope or meaning beyond the devastation."
"Jesus does not attempt to explain why the tower of Siloam (Lk. 13) fell on those 18 people but he carefully and adamantly denies that it was because they were worse sinners than others in Jerusalem. He acknowledges therefore, that there is innocent suffering but he goes on to say what seems at first unpastoral "...but unless you repent you shall likewise perish."
"Is He saying to us, as we watch scenes of such sudden and unimaginable suffering and death, that unless we repent we shall likewise perish? It is difficult to make sense of the text short of saying "yes" to this question. The key to the sustaining hope in these conditions is Thomas Cranmer's wisdom about repentance, what he called 'renewing the power to love'."
"Leaving God in the arena of such disasters with Jesus' admonition to repent does not resolve the mystery of evil but clearly it does not identify God with tsunamis as in the current pantheism and panentheism. Instead, it affirms a personal love above, beyond and amidst any disaster as we repent, "renewing the power to love."
BY David W. Virtue
[Source: VirtueOnline]
VirtueOnline (the new name for Virtuosity) is the Anglican Communion's largest Biblically Orthodox Online News Service, read by more than 1,000,000 readers in 45 countries each year. Challenging, controversial, never dull, VirtueOnline exists to keep its readers informed about the worldwide Anglican Communion and to preach the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.
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