Here is the newspaper article I was talking about last night. It is actually a review of a book about suffering.
Mysterious Ways
How do Christians explain a tsunami?
BY PAUL J. GRIFFITHS
Wednesday, August 3, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT The tsunami that swept over southeast Asia in December left in its wake not only death and destruction but a profound and vexing puzzle. What kind of a God would allow such a thing to happen? In the weeks and months that followed, skeptical commentators posed this question with irritated insistence, as if discovering for the first time–thanks to the sheer scale of the tsunami’s devastation–that we live in a world that may inflict grave harm with seeming randomness.In “The Doors of the Sea,” David Bentley Hart, an Orthodox theologian, tries to provide an answer. His book is, among much else, a rhetorically powerful and conceptually dense restatement of what Christianity has to say, over the centuries, about the suffering and death produced by nature itself–that is, by events outside human agency.
From a Christian point of view, Mr. Hart notes, such events are quite easy to explain, if difficult to accept. They are dramatic instances of the fact that the world is profoundly out of joint, damaged in deep ways by the fall of Adam and Eve and the rebellion of man. This fall, brought about by the exercise of human freedom, has altered the very physical order of the cosmos so that what God had intended to be a world of harmony and peace, free from suffering and death, is now a world running red with blood.
Much of this blood is shed by human ingenuity, in holocausts and genocides and gulags. But much of it is shed by earthquakes and storms and tidal waves and plagues, catastrophes independent of human will. This was the case for the quarter-million people who died in December but of course it is the case as well every time, for instance, a stray pathogen robs a single child of life.
Indeed, such tragedies are common. For Christians, they are horrors, evils opposed in every way to God’s loving intentions. (Mr. Hart notes, by the way, that the post-tsunami skeptics, in their what-kind-of-God question, posited a Christian and loving god and not a version of the cruel or indifferent gods that are a part of some other religious traditions.) More important, God can achieve victory over such tragedies and in fact has already begun to do so in the victory over death won by Jesus on the cross. There will be a time, too, when comfort is provided to those who have suffered and died, when the world will be irrevocably returned to the harmony intended for it.
But until then the only fully Christian response to events like the tsunami, argues Mr. Hart, is mourning and lament. The effects that natural disasters have on us are privations, absences, negative images of what God’s love intends for us and for the world. There is nothing good to say about them because, precisely, there is nothing good in them. By arguing in such a way, Mr. Hart draws upon and restates, with verve and ornament, the classical Christian view that all evil is an absence, a privation of good.
Thus to the claim that the tsunami provides evidence against the existence of a benevolent and omnipotent God Mr. Hart responds: The disordered world in which we live isn’t as God intended and created it. God did order the world in such a way that natural disasters don’t happen. The only disaster he permitted was the one that we ourselves succeeded in bringing about, the one that disordered the world in the direction of chaos. God will finally overcome even this, Christian faith teaches. But until that victory is complete the damage wrought by chaos provides no evidence against God. Or, as Mr. Hart likes to put it: The God against whom natural disasters might provide evidence isn’t the one in whom Christians believe.
Mr. Hart also addresses what he takes to be a confused explanation of natural disaster offered by well-meaning Christians themselves, who claim that the sufferings and deaths produced by tsunamis and their like are part of God’s plan, God’s providential will. Those who say this, and they are many, are likely to offer bromides like “it’s all for the best” or “we can’t understand what God means by such things” to those bereaved by catastrophe. But if the classical Christian view is right, this is nonsense. It is not for the best. God doesn’t mean anything by it. Suffering and death and evil are meaningless horrors, privations that produce nothing. The best response for the bereaved, apart from lament, is to direct their gaze to a time when all tears will be wiped away.
This does not mean, Mr. Hart observes, that redemptive qualities do not ever accompany suffering. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-97), for example, welcomed the blood coughed up on her pillow as evidence that she would die a painful death from tuberculosis; she delighted in the suffering to come as a partial recapitulation of the redemptive suffering of Jesus. To most moderns, Christian or not, this idea sounds almost pathological, but it need not be judged that way. Mr. Hart’s account can be extended to embrace this view of suffering, and he begins to do so toward the end of the book. What’s needed is a clearer distinction than he yet offers among kinds of suffering, between what is redeemable in suffering and what is not.
But this is a minor criticism of an altogether outstanding book. Mr. Hart is learned in philosophy and theology, widely read in literature and moved by strong intellectual passions. “The Doors of the Sea” stands a good chance of becoming a classic and deserves to be widely read, by Christians and by anyone else concerned with the agonizing subject it addresses.
Mr. Griffiths holds the Schmitt Chair of Catholic Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
