I come to praise determinism, not to bury it

Arni Zachariassen calls John Piper a "theological nihilist" for concluding, "Therefore, God has a good and all-wise purpose for the heart-rending calamity in Japan on March 11, 2011 that appears to have cost tens of thousands of lives." (HT) Arni writes:

One of the most depraved aspects of Reformed theology (see what I did there?), as done by Piper and his Calvinistic comrades, is how it strips theological language completely of its coherence. God is good, says Piper. Most of us theists would agree with that. Most of us, theist or not, would also agree that someone who is in the business of the "unilateral taking of thousands of lives" is not good, but evil. But according to Piper, when God is in that business, it is suddenly good. We're talking about God now. And God is good, no matter how evil he appears to be - and the killing of 25,000 people sure does make him look evil.

Hmm...

I think the word is nominalism, not nihilism. Isn't there an assumption here in Zachariassen's complaint that good and evil are concepts existing independently of God, and God's acts must conform to them in order for God to be good? If that's the case, then is God truly God?

If you posit an omnipotent and omniscient Creator, it's hard for me to see how you aren't but a hop, skip and a jump away from a naturalistic determinism (known as a High Doctrine of Providence), or a personalistic determinism (known as Predestination). Unless you're shrewd, and define sovereign grace as a self-limiting, cooperating  grace, as some have done.

If you aren't into Greek metaphysics, and many people aren't these days, be warned: narrative interpretations of scripture can lead one down the same, deterministic path.

Examples abound, but I'll call your attention to one: In the mouth of the prophet, God admits that his works are sometimes, in some sense, alien to his being. Is God's own testimony to his relationship with the world "theologically incoherent?" Or are we stuck with a good God who nevertheless has blood on his hands?

What say the theologians? Alas, Piper is in better company than we would wish. Augustine maintained that a fallen world is better than a perfect world because a fallen world can manifest goods that a perfect world cannot, such as justice.

Or hope: "The creation was subjected to futility" (by whom? Paul's use of the passive voice here doesn't entirely "protect" the Almighty from being found out)... in the hope that it might be set free." No futility; no hope.

Schleiermacher asserted that since God's omniscience differs from our limited knowledge in kind, not only in degree, it's not as though God "made the best of all possible worlds," (Leibnitz) by sorting through options and choosing the best one (or the least bad one). In fact, this is the only possible world because from beyond the same-time continuum, this world of cause and effect is actualized by God's omnipotent, omniscient causality.

This world of earthquakes and tsunamis.

It is sin that makes our experience of natural disasters evil, Schleiermacher insists. We are finite creatures and would have to exit the world one way or the other (here he departs from conservative Calvinism). Our minds are not well-ordered, to paraphrase Professor Dumbledore, thus a tsunami only can be a thing of terror, not the gateway to "the next great adventure."

If this sounds harsh, and as I said last week, I am against harshness as a test of orthodoxy, then assuring people that God had nothing to do with the tsunami may be equally harsh. For then we live in a world where evils befall us from outside God's will. And that raises a disturbing question: Is God's arm, in fact, too short to save? Are we in fact in a s**t happens world where God wishes us well but can't be counted on to do anything about it?

All that said, I don't approve of Piper's post. While he rightly insists that one must begin with compassion before delving into explanation, without bothering to link to an aid organization he rather quickly moves to theodicy because "sooner or later people want more than empathy and aid—they want answers."

What people? Have the Japanese asked Piper why this has happened to them? In fact, Shinto and Buddhism, by their very nature, tend to preclude questions of theodicy.

So what we're left with is Piper and his readers theologizing from afar on the meaning of other people's suffering. This is unseemly. Imagine if Piper had composed the Parable of the Great Samaritan. In Piper's telling, the Samaritan stopping to aid the wounded traveler, his hoisting him upon his own donkey and depositing him safely at the inn would be hurredly passed over. The real meat of the story would be the narrator's rather heavy-handed post-game commentary about how the Almighty sure is working his purposes out.

And so while Piper has satisfied the curiousity of some about the meaning of the sufferings of others, I am not so sure that he has inspired anybody to love more than they already do.