All-powerful?

I’m a member of the Greenbelt Forum mailing list, where we’ve been talking about something that is a huge issue for many people – how we can believe in an all-powerful, all-loving God who nonetheless allows disasters like the recent tsunami. In particular, the idea that if God doesn’t intervene then God must either not care or be unable to do anything. I thought I’d reproduce some of my thoughts here.

First, it is not right or fair that people suffer like this. There is no conflict, however, between God being all-powerful and all-knowing, and wrong, unfair things happening in our world. How, though, are we to deal with a powerful, loving God in an evil world? We have to be very careful when we believe that there were actions that could have prevented harm from occurring. Consider a simple murder – one person kills another in cold blood by shooting them. Now, God could obviously stop this from happening in various ways, including perhaps changing the murderer’s mind, causing the gun to misfire or causing the victim to avoid a lethal wound by rapid evasion. However, once we start down this road, we quickly end up in a world in which nothing bad ever happens – because God directly controls every single action that occurs. In such a universe, we are simply puppets with no self and no free will because it is completely impossible for us to choose wrongly. Given that God doesn’t want that sort of world (and I don’t think many people would, either), it is clear that God cannot simply intervene in this way to stop evil from happening.
The step from this to natural disasters is clear, it seems to me. There is a big difference, in that natural disasters lack the moral dimension of human crimes but they pose the same question of why God allows them to happen. The difference is one of whether we can see someone to blame. In human crimes, there is a person to blame; in natural disasters, there is none and so our need to blame someone fastens on God as the ultimate Cause of everything. However, this is unfair because, as I said above, we don’t live in a world in which everything is directly controlled by God. Shit happens, as the saying goes. This is where Incarnational Christianity (that is, thinking about Christianity from the perspective of a God who literally became a human being) is a huge strength, because it describes a God who is not distant, separate, uninvolved. Rather, God cares so deeply for the world that He gets stuck right in, living as a human being in the first person, and also living in His children in a spiritual sense. That doesn’t mean that God has experienced everything that the world has to offer, but it does mean that God is involved and wants to experience and overcome alongside us.
We also have to question the assumption that victory is the desirable outcome, whether we mean victory over suffering (by removing it) or victory in warfare. The Christian approach is more self-sacrificial than this. It doesn’t (as I understand it) mean that we want to suffer or consider suffering to be good, or even that suffering always produces good results. Rather, it means that we don’t think of suffering as the greatest possible evil – our destiny isn’t to become incapable of suffering (which means simply incapable of feeling) but instead it is to become God’s children.

pax et bonum

Article posted at 10:47am on 07 January 2005
Category: Faith, Musing