Thinking out loud toward Sunday

It's not entirely clear that Karl Barth advised ministers to preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.  Still, it's not a bad homiletical strategy.  Applied this week, it seems to cry out for some reflection on a creation God deems "very good," and the bodies of children floating in the storm surge of the Burmese cyclone and crushed in the Chinese earthquake.

I'm not sure where my sermon is going yet.  But in addition to the Bible and the newspaper I'm relying on David Bentley Hart's The Doors of the Sea, a short volume about theodicy in the wake of the 2004 tsunami. 

In response to the book's subtitle, "Where was God in the tsunami?" Hart is surprisingly sympathetic toward atheistic complaints that such disasters must needs overthrow faith in a loving, omnipotent God: 

After all at the heart of all such unbelief lies an undoubtedly authentic moral horror before the sheer extravagance of worldly misery, a kind of rage for justice, a refusal of easy comfort, and an unwillingness to be reconciled to evil that no one who believes this to be a fallen world would want to disparage.  For the secret irony pervading these arguments is that they never would have occurred to such consciences that had not in some profound way been shaped by the moral universe of a Christian culture.

And he is surprisingly harsh in dismissing Christian apologists who (apologizing for what?  Their faith in God?  God's ways in a world of tsunamis?) would justify the calamity by appealing to God's inscrutable plan, or simply chalking it up to rough, divine justice.  I found myself remembering this post from my Ivy Bush days which cites the Calvinist Jesuit John Piper as an example of all Hart finds wanting in Christian discourse in those shocking, waning days of 2004.  Hart uses Ivan Karamazov as a blunt object to smash such apologies to smithereens.

Hart's argument is that we need to reclaim the biblical worldview that the world, though created good by God, is nevertheless in servitude to evil forces.  The world that is is not the world that God intended it to be.  And examining the fossil record or feasting one's eyes on the fauna that rings the Indian Ocean cannot teach us this.  Only when history is seen in light of Revelation do we see it as fallen, yet hoping for redemption.

God's sovereignty, as Hart sees it, cannot be understood in terms of God being the author of all that happens, for even if God's willed it for a greater good, that would still make God the author of evil, and any morally serious person ought to revolt against such a God, as indeed Ivan does.  God is the prime cause of everything, but things can and do run amok in the chain of secondary causes that God's sovereignty permits. 

For Hart, God's sovereignty must be understood as God's ultimate victory over all that has besmirched this world, including the corpses of children buried in rubble and floating in the flood waters.

Hart's argument wraps up with a bracing defense of God's impassibility and a passionate complaint against Calvinist determinism.  You can see the latter quietly developing through this short volume, but when the wave finally breaks, it's rather powerful.  What's interesting is that both God's impassibility and Calvinist determinism are in great disfavor in mainline Presbyterian seminaries these days!

At that old Ivy Bush post, I remarked that Calvin's high doctrine of providence was a pastoral argument.  It was meant to reassure suffering people that their lives weren't in the hands of a capricious fate but of a loving and sovereign Father.  Hart decries how that same argument, in the hands of Piper and his ilk, is used to reassure not the survivors of natural disasters, but those of us who watch from the comfort of our living room Lay-Z-Boys:

(W)ords we would not utter to ease another's grief we ought not to speak to satisfy our own sense of piety...

Only a moral cretin at that moment would have attempted to soothe (a survivor's) anguish by assuring him that his children had died as a result of God's eternal, inscrutable, and righteous counsels, and that in fact their deaths had mysteriously served God's purposes in history, and that all of this was completely necessary for God to accomplish his ultimate design in having created the world.  Most of us would have the good sense to be ashamed to speak such words...

And this should tell us something.  For if we would think it shamelessly foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another's sorrow is most real... then we ought never to say them.

It is often remarked that Job's friends did well when they sat in silence with him for seven days.  Where they went wrong was when they began to open their mouths, for rather than comforting Job, they went about justifying God's ways in the world.  This earned them a sharp rebuke from Job and in the end, an equally sharp rebuke from the very God whose ways they sought to justify.

Hart admits that in the face of such massive suffering, silence might be the best option.  But he ventures to speak nonetheless.  So I have to speak on Sunday.  I still don't know what I'm going to say, but I think that I'd better not say anything unless I can imagine that between the Bible in my right hand and the newspaper in my left, an earthquake survivor stands in my presence waiting to hear what I have to say.

Comments

[Indecisive]

At least you're not planning on giving a sermon holding a headline of what just happened in the California Supreme Court, as I know many preachers our there will be.

[Eric Lee]

I've already read Hart's book, but this is a great helpful summary. Thanks!

[Rhology]

Do you seriously not know what "Christian apologist" means, or were you making some strange, snide remark about them?
Hint: It doesn't mean "one who apologises for the Christian faith."

Tell me you weren't serious. Please.

[Marvin]

Rhology, to clarify, at the beginning of his book, Hart summarizes some of the atheistic arguments against God's existence that rose out of the tsunami as well as Christian apologetic responses to them. Hart is critical of a lot of these apologetics because as he sees it they are not engaging the wrong audience. They're directed not at the suffering survivors, but at people far removed from the tragedy whose beliefs might be troubled by the magnitude of the disaster. So with the question marks I was trying to capture Hart's sense of dissatisfaction with what he was hearing from his co-religionists.

[Rhology]

No, I think you're answering the wrong question here.

You said:
Christian apologists who (apologizing for what? Their faith in God? God's ways in a world of tsunamis?)

The very fact that you ask the question shows that you were either joking or ignorant of what "apologist" means. Would you mind telling us which it is?

[Marvin]

At this point the most helpful thing I think I can say is, Read Hart's book. That will help you understand what I'm trying to convey about his argument.

I'd commend the book regardless. It's short and thoughtful.

And this will be the last comment posted on this particular quibble.