In the last week, a lot of people have asked me what I think about Haiti and God, or what Pat Robertson said, or how I can believe in a good God when things like this happen, or something along these lines. It boils down to a simple question: How can we think about Haiti theologically? How should persons of faith encounter terrible tragedies?
It’s interesting to me that these questions didn’t really crop up the first or second time Airbear and I went to Haiti. When we came back and told stories about how horrible the conditions were, no one asked us how we could still believe in God, or questioned God’s goodness, or anything like that. I certainly asked those questions in-country. For someone who often struggles with doubt, seeing the devastation firsthand simply italicized my own questions, underlined them, and put them in bold.
And eventually, working there, being with the people, seeing the blessing that is La Maison Des Enfants De Dieu to those kids, eating gut-busting curries and lam-en-sauce, hearing the children praying before and after lunch, I just decided I was asking the wrong questions.
A lot of people assume the Bible is supposed to help us make sense of the world, supposed to explain things. If that’s the case, it’s a really crappy book, because for every story about God punishing sin with disaster and war, there’s a story about innocent suffering. For every story about God angered, frustrated, and vengeful, there’s a story about God moved, merciful, and relentlessly kind. For every prophecy of God turning his face from his people, there is an utterance about God’s gracious, unending, unyielding commitment.
The Bible doesn’t explain life and sort things into neat categories. It rather takes life seriously, in all its messy madness. It doesn’t dole out a prescription for fixing every illness; instead it invites us to live faithfully with our infirmity. If God wants to tell us why this earthquake hit Port-au-Prince, I’m sure God will raise up a prophet to speak to us. Maybe right now there is some Haitian Christian out there with a Word from the Lord we need to take seriously.
Maybe Pat Robertson is sort of right. Maybe vodou really is evil and God really doesn’t like child sacrifice, child prostitution, and child slavery and so he gave those tectonic plates a little nudge on the quantum level.
Or maybe being God is really hard. Maybe God is having a tough time balancing all the crazy going on down here while simultaneously trying to unleash the Spirit and move people into Kingdom life while keeping an eye on human evil and minimizing its effects and giving his natural creation the freedom to be itself. Maybe being God is a little bit like being asked to turn a jungle into a garden. Maybe that’s why he asked us to help.
Maybe this place is just nuts.
But maybe, just maybe, we need to ask these questions from time to time to spur us on in faith. We need to slam our heads against information that simply defies explanation until we, like Paul, are reduced to worship. When we are so exhausted by our inability to comprehend that we can’t help but pray in solidarity with those who suffer and solemnly commit ourselves to alleviating their pain in the name of one crucified. The world cannot understand this sort of incomprehension, though it tries to mimic the response.
Thinking theologically about Haiti means taking scripture seriously, taking God’s work in the world seriously, asking questions seriously, and then seriously shutting up.
It's great to read your voice again, Tom.
ReplyDeleteThis has the makings of a nice sermonette.
ReplyDelete@Mary: Thanks, I found your new blog too, but it's not blogger, so I just bookmarked it.
ReplyDelete@JJ: Well, when I'm not sermonizing, you can usually find me sermonizing or thinking about sermonizing, or possibly sermonizing about thinking about sermonizing...
The thing is this: The alternative view is that the Haitians suffer, die, decompose, are forgotten, and, there being no God, that is the end of that. Period. End of story. There is no meaning, and there will be no day when the dead rise and, in new, perfected bodies, we realize a glory that makes all things right.
ReplyDeleteBoth views are difficult in their own ways, I admit, but most people who cite things like this earthquake as a reason not to believe in God are pretending that the alternative is somehow not terrifying.
This is a different take on the question...
ReplyDeletehttp://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/paula_kirby/2010/01/suffering_and_the_vain_quest_for_significance.html
Not noted is that people voluntarily giving their own wealth to assist total strangers who live, in some cases, on the opposite side of the globe was unheard of before the spread of Judea-Christian morality. Again, the assumption is that, in the absence of God, there is a good reason for me to send money to Haiti. I submit that there is no good reason to do so, and that doing so is at least as irrational as claiming that earthquakes are acts of some dude up in the sky.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, the article's author almost gets there during the discussion of our startling insignificance on the scale of the cosmos, yet she, predictably, lacks the courage to admit that this fact means that a bunch of Haitians dying at the hands of physical forces has the same meaning as me ordering a hamburger. Which is to say: none at all.
Atheists who try to argue for moral imperatives would be cute, if they weren't so pathetic.
@Dan: While I totally agree concerning moral imperatives and atheism, good, nuanced atheists (like JJ) will argue for ethics based on the evolution of feelings. As in, I have altruistic feelings that would are hardwired; it would be unnatural for me not to indulge them from time to time.
ReplyDeleteOf course, that says nothing to situations of scarcity and unrest where one's "hardwired feelings" may be less than other-focused. It's not a fluke that sci-fi is relentlessly dystopian.
I don't think of morality as an imperative; indeed, neither do Christians. You could just choose hell, right? And it needn't be rational. I don't eat pho because it's rational to eat pho, I do it because I want to. The same goes for every personal decision I make regarding the course of my life.
ReplyDeleteI want to live in a world where people help each other, and so I try to make that world. I think there is some sense in this (I scratch your back, you scratch mine), and I do think that certain parts of the human brain tend to steer us into these give/take relationships (via evolution), but on the whole, morality is an opt-in enterprise. If you "opt-in" you start the long, tedious process of figuring out whats right and wrong, based on what standards.
I think that most Christians are moral for the same reasons. Really, is the fear of hellfire the only reason to send money to Haiti? You follow the teachings of Jesus because you find something significant in them, because thats the world you want to live in, right? Nothing wrong with that.
Again, Jon, nice sentiments, but if you lived in Haiti, I can pretty much guarantee that you would want to live in a world where you got the food you wanted by any means necessary and you would adopt the corresponding ethical standards to achieve that goal.
ReplyDeleteWhat's fascinating about Christians in Haiti is that they share rather than hoard, forgive rather than retaliate violently, and they accept the negative consequences that inevitably follow these life choices. Simply put, Christianity costs them a great deal of what they want, but they do it anyway because they believe their actions to be based on a true account of the universe.
Ultimately, whatever standard of behavior you adopt as "ethical" is predicated on it being good for you. You have no reason to keep eating Pho if it starts to taste bad; we're stuck with the bowl in front of us. And that's what makes it work. Christian moral efficacy is sourced in its ontological status, not the circumstances (or, at least, in people's belief in its ontological status).
Dawkins weighs in on Theology & Haiti ...
ReplyDeletehttp://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/richard_dawkins/2010/01/haiti_and_the_hypocrisy_of_christian_theology.html
Nothing in Dawkins' take I really disagree with (I mean I think he is saying basically true things about Christianity and what Christians believe). E.g., I do believe in the redemptive power of suffering, I don't disavow God for punishing sin (tho I'm not always sure what's punishment and what isn't), and I do think sin is a real way that human beings fracture their relationships with God and with one another and it needs to be systematically dealt with. I just don't understand why any of that is a bad thing.
ReplyDeleteI just don't understand why Dawkins is so angry all the time. In general, I have a fair deal of contempt for the reasoning abilities of people, but I'm not angry with them. I'm not sure what anger accomplishes, aside from playing to the evangelical atheist crowd. Furthermore, anger just isn't a very good tool for conversion, if that is indeed a goal. People, especially Americans, love a leader who speaks with the conviction of optimism. This is why we elect Obamas and Reagans, and why no one, outside my small circle of friends and family, really cares what I think.
ReplyDeleteThat's one reason I find dialogue with JJ so congenial; his atheism isn't personal or bludgeoning, it's very Christian. He is passionate, yes, but always kind-hearted and, for the most part, humble rather than condescending (atheists are usually SO condescending).
ReplyDeleteI do find it troubling how New Atheists get so upset at how *stupid* we all are. As if there's never been a Christian who has looked right into the abyss, taken it into account, and walked back to the light.
I also never understand why they get so worked up over biblical criticism and evolution. As if there's never been a Christian who read the bible in light of 19th and 20th century critical insights or who carefully (and CRITICALLY) followed scientific evolutionary, neurological, and cosmological research.
You get the feeling that behind every atheist there's some mean old Sunday school teacher who scared the crap out of them for years and then died before they had the chance to really show her all that stuff they learned in college.