Around a month ago, my friend Frank Rees (Principal and Professor of Systematic Theology at Whitley College in Melbourne) presented a paper at a conference in South Korea in which he offered a theological reflection on his own experience of disaster. Frank kindly sent me a copy of the paper before he headed off to Korea. I was deeply moved in reading it. And given the events in Christchurch this week, Frank’s clear and accessible words came readily to mind. I asked Frank if I might share his paper with others. I do so with his permission, and in some fear and trembling. For many of those most affected by recent earthquakes in Concepcion or Christchurch, or bushfires and floods across Australia, for example, it will be too soon to engage in the kind of conversation that Frank is inviting us to partake in. For others, such a conversation is already – and always – happening at a number of levels, and to disregard its incessant demands for whatever reason may not only deepen the pain, but also perpetuate the lie that the promise of Emmanuel – God with us – is an empty myth at best. So I share Frank’s paper in hope that these words might contribute to the healing of grieving communities, and to the Church’s witness to the crucified God.

◊◊◊

The story

In September 2009, I went with my wife Merilyn and our daughter Felicity for a holiday in Samoa. On the morning of Tuesday 29th September, we were woken by an earthquake measuring 8.3 on the Richter scale.

Very soon after, a tsunami warning siren sounded. We ran outside and could already see the tsunami wave coming onto the land about 30 metres away. We were all swept by the wave in different direction. Felicity and I were carried along by the wave till we were trapped in a courtyard area and smashed into buildings, which were themselves being broken up by the wave. Merilyn was taken past these buildings and carried several hundred metres inland and ended up on a corrugated iron roof. The wave was moving at about 50–60 km per hour, and was about 3 to 4 metres high so we did not stand a chance of escaping it. Fortunately we have all survived.

Under the wave, I tried to swim as best I could, hoping to come to the surface, trying to get some breath. At the time I did not know that at least 5 of my ribs had been broken and one kidney damaged, plus numerous cuts from head to feet. I had little chance of normal breathing even if I could get my breath. Soon I realized I was about to drown. I thought to myself: ‘So this is the end.’ Merilyn had an almost identical realization, ‘So this is what it is like to drown.’

But we did not drown. After some time, I came to the surface and was able to stand up on a remaining piece of building structure. Amazingly, I could see Felicity in the distance, also standing on a part of a building. It took an excruciating and terrifying effort, but eventually we made our way up a hill to a safer place. All the while there were waves swirling around us, laden with debris of every kind.

Merilyn was eventually washed up onto the roof of a building. Most likely she was unconscious for some of the time under the water. It was about an hour before we eventually found each other. She has had a number of long term lung problems.

After some time, a local man took us and some others in a minivan across the island to a hospital. Merilyn is an anaesthetist and helped identify the worst injured. The hospital was very good to us but they were overwhelmed and the care was basic. Locals from the community came to the hospital to try to help. They were extraordinarily kind, even though many of them also had lost relatives amongst the 163 people who died that morning.

We were left with nothing: no money, no documents and no clothes.

Eventually, we were evacuated back to Australia by a medical recovery team. Then began many weeks of medical treatment and psychological support as we recovered from this experience.

The effect on Samoa was and is devastating. The south coast was ruined; many villages no longer exist and there was been much loss of life, especially of children who did not stand a chance in the water. The people have also lost much of their employment as tourism is the major industry, and the small friendly resorts along the coast are gone.

The wave was a dramatic shock: just to think about it causes me a sense of outrage. It was violence unannounced. At 3 to 4 metres high, no one had a hope in the face of that wave. Children and adults were swept away, buildings just smashed apart. Some villages were inundated and the bodies needed to be dug out from the sand. Death and destruction was so quick, so indiscriminate, so undeserved. There is no rationale about who lived and who died, who suffered and who escaped.

My initial reflections on this experience were provoked in part by a Catholic priest who visited us in hospital, prayed for us and offered us encouragement. He said to us, very directly, that God did not send this tsunami, or cause it to happen. Rather, God is with us in our pain and will strengthen us in the journey ahead. His prayer for us was beautiful. He spoke to God about the situation and need of ‘this, your family’. I liked what he had to say, theologically; but frankly I was not concentrating on that at the time.

Since then, we have recovered from our physical injuries, though Merilyn has some permanent lung damage. I have continued to reflect upon this experience, theologically and pastorally, and that is what I hope to share with you now.

God and the world: Four ways of relating

There are four ways in which we might think of God in relation to the world in general, but specifically in relation to natural disasters. But before we proceed to those, let me begin with something I am not saying.

It is crucial that we do not pretend that disaster is anything other than disaster. When an earthquake, typhoon or tsunami strikes, it is devastating. There is nothing to be gained by asserting that really, in some mysterious way, it is a good thing. When people die by violent and tragic means, or are injured and their lives become an emotional wreck, when property is destroyed on a grand scale, and when peoples’ livelihoods are shattered, they have no jobs and no means of supporting themselves and their families, that is a disaster.

It is a critical task of theology here to deal in the truth. It is crucial for pastors and relief workers to accept this truth and to help people to find meaning in this truth. That is why it is crucial to ask how God is related to the reality of natural disasters.

I am a Bible believing Christian, and a pastor, and a theologian. It is my job to teach people about God the creator. I tell people that God made everything that is and that God said it is good. What sense, then, do I make of a world in which within minutes a tsunami destroys lives and communities and the whole environment around us?

I wish to propose four ways in which we might conceive of God in relation to natural disasters: God as cause, God as in control, God as companion and God as consummator. With regard to each of these theological constructs, we need to ask a series of critical questions. Where is God, according to this view, and how is God related to the world and us to God? And we need to ask whether this conception of God is consistent with the biblical, Christian understanding of God, especially as made known in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

My argument will be that we need all of these conceptions of God, to arrive at an appropriate Christian understanding of God in relation to natural disasters. Only with this fully nuanced conception of God can we arrive at some proposals for a constructive pastoral response to communities and individuals caught up in such traumas.

God as cause. The basic idea here is that God is the cause of all that is. What happens in the world is the result of cause and effect, but if we go back far enough we come to an uncaused cause, which is God. This conception of God is especially to be associated with the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas posited God as the first cause or the uncaused cause.[1]

God, in this conception, is the ultimate perfect being, in that God did not need any other being, impetus or pre-condition in order to exist. God simply is, from all eternity. Furthermore, God exists independent of all physical and changing phenomena. Here we see the very powerful influence of Hellenistic thought, which conceived of perfection as unchanging and complete self-sufficiency. God, the first cause, is then a pure ‘substance’ or essence.

Much has been written in criticism of this way of thinking of God. Clark Pinnock wrote of ‘the influence of the pagan dogma of the absolute unchangeableness of God’ which comes from ‘the syncretism of biblical and Greek thought’.[2] Broadly speaking, this conception of God emphasizes the difference and distance between God and the world.

It is vital, though, to note Aquinas’ theological intention in his proofs of the existence of God. His purpose as a theologian was to assert the dependence of all things upon God, in the sense that existence is not without ground, meaning and purpose. There is something, indeed Someone, from whom all life derives and this is God. Furthermore, Thomas’ intention was to argue that this foundation is reliable, indeed unchanging.

This theological assertion, immensely important as it is, runs into difficulties when we turn it into a quasi-scientific statement about why specific things happen in the world, as if God is the cause of such events.

Here there is a complex of different issues. On the one hand, if God is the ultimate cause of all subsequent causes, then God is responsible for everything that happens, having initiated it all. God is not only the cause of the flowers but also the thorns, the rivers but also the floods, the cool breezes and the cyclones. Yet according to this idea, God is infinitely distant and uninvolved in the universe. God as first cause or creator is on this view unrelated to us, even though responsible for what happens to us. This conception of God, taken in this way, is alienating and inconsistent with the biblical ideas of a God of compassion, whose loving-kindness endures forever.

The alienation inherent in this idea is complete. Either God as first cause is indeed responsible for all that happens – in which case our own lives, choices, capacities and relationships are not really our own but are somehow cosmically predetermined – or in reality this first cause is uninvolved and distant from us, so that we are essentially left to it, to live as best we can but without the assistance and support of the one who set it all up this way.

In either case, God as first cause is back there, back then. This leaves God absent from the world. It may be of some significance to name God as the originating cause, but such a God has no effective presence or power. It is not sufficient to think of God as cause only. This leaves us in an impossible, and deeply alienated situation, which I suggest is the ground of much modern atheism.

God as in control. This way of speaking of God has much in common with the previous idea, except that it asserts positively that God is in fact responsible for what is happening in the present. This conception of God asserts God’s active agency in the present and God’s sovereignty over all that happens.

The strongest advocate for this idea is John Calvin, in his teaching on providence. He offers to the faithful in adversity the solace ‘that everything which they endure is by the ordination and command of God, that they are under his hand.’[3] In the following sections, he goes on to argue that all events happen by ‘the ordination’ of God and contribute to the advantage of the godly, because ‘the world is governed by the secret counsel of God’, who is faithful to the promises throughout Scripture that God’s providence reigns over the entire creation.[4]

This conception of God again needs to be carefully understood. It can very easily be taken to mean that God is the cosmic puppeteer or the one who pulls all the levers, positively controlling everything that happens. This would make God the cause of disasters and responsible for crimes such as murder and rape. This is an absurdity and clearly not Calvin’s intention.

It is also based on an impossible view of the world. The universe is not a mechanical world where everything happens by predictable order, from the smallest movement of an atomic particle to the shifting of tectonic plates. While Calvin did not have the benefit of modern physics and chaos theory, for example, he was aware that calamities happen to people, even if he seems always to have attributed them to evil deeds by sinful men. Nonetheless his emphasis on providence as the secret counsel of God should warn us against any simplistic notion that God is literally causing every event to happen. Rather, Calvin’s purpose is to point us beyond such ideas towards another view of God, whose purpose is infinitely good, but as yet not clear to us. His intention is to call us to trust in God and to journey towards our heavenly home with God, in spite of the sufferings and privations of this world.

This defence of Calvin’s view, however, seems to reduce the meaning and effect of the concept of God’s being in control. The major difficulty I find with this way of thinking of God is its tendency to distance God from believers and from the world. God’s sovereignty is a secret, which we nonetheless have to believe. This seems to give little substance to the promise of Jesus, ‘I will be with you always’ (Matt. 28.20). Either this presence is an entirely interior experience, with no real impact upon the world itself, or we need to find some other way of thinking of God in relation to the world. God may have ordained some ultimate benefit for believers, but in the meantime we are all subject to the unpredictable events of nature and the nasty deeds of fallen humans all around us.

God as companion. Here I wish to draw upon the thought of Jürgen Moltmann, whose work on God as creator has addressed the alienation that contemporary humans experience in many forms. Are we in fact abandoned in the universe, alienated from both God and nature? The following paragraph presents both an important critique of much theological discussion about creation and indicates a vital way forward:

[T]he Christian doctrine of creation came to be narrowed down to creation in the beginning (creatio originalis); and this was further contracted still to the aspect of God’s creative activity. The doctrine of the divine ‘making’, the doctrine of continuous creation (creatio continua) and the doctrine of the new creation still to be consummated (creation nova) all receded into the background and were forgotten.[5]

It is vital that our understanding of God and the world is not focused upon the origins alone, but sees God as continuously engaged with the entire life of the world. One way in which Moltmann develops this is through the idea of God as companion.

Moltmann writes of ‘the accompanying activity of God’, who suffers the contradictions of history, as so many events and movements work against God’s creative and loving purposes. Nonetheless God does not give up on the creation but is continuously creative, even in and through the free activities of humans and other creatures. Moltmann notes here the necessity for a Trinitarian doctrine of creation, in which it is the creative Spirit in particular who is ‘present in the world and in every part of it’, wooing the world towards its eventual consummation in God.[6]

God as companion is with people. This companionship is not conditional upon our invitation, nor the result of our merit or our choice to ‘have faith’. Rather, it is God who chooses to be with us, rather than leave us or forsake us (Heb. 13.5).

The testimony of countless Christians supports this idea. People find that through the most difficult times in their lives, God is very close to them and they are sustained, encouraged and given a fresh sense of the value and meaning of their lives because God is with them.

Nonetheless, the idea of God as companion has also to be developed, lest it be taken to mean that God is reduced to the proportions of our own experience. When we say that God accompanies us in our suffering, we do not mean that God is equally powerless as we may be, in the face of disease, disaster and destruction. Rather, when God accompanies us in our suffering God continues to be God. This is the astonishing truth of the Gospel: that God is able to appear amongst us, incarnate as one of us, and yet remains God. To say that God accompanies us without ceasing to be God can only lead, then, to the fourth way of thinking about God in relation to the world.

God as consummator. Here, we draw upon the preceding concepts, to assert that God is at work in the world, even through the medium of accompanying us. God’s purpose in the world is to bring the entire world to the eschatological banquet of peace and joy, to know the grace and love of God, revealed in Jesus. The resurrection of Jesus foreshadows the resurrection of all creation, in that ultimate hope. In the meantime, even in our present sufferings, we are not without hope (1 Peter 1.6–9). Rather, God is lifting us up, so that we are able to rejoice in hope.

Thus Paul is able to write in Romans 8.37 that we are ‘more than conquerors’. He does not deny that dangers, persecution, impoverishment and suffering are part of our situation; rather, in mentioning these things he is recognizing that these things may threaten to separate us from the love of God. But he confidently asserts that they do not, for even as Christ intercedes for us we are able to live into the victory God gives.

My contention, then, is that these four ways of thinking about God need to be held together, in an appropriate balance, for a constructive and meaningful way of speaking of God in relation to natural disasters.

To pursue this further, I would like to comment upon a short and often-quoted statement found in one of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison: ‘Only the suffering God can help.’[7]

There are three crucial elements in this short statement. First is the assertion that only the suffering God can help us. I take this to mean that we should not look to any other way of thinking of God, for these are delusions. In this section of his writing, Bonhoeffer was urging that people should abandon the ideas of a God who manipulates the world as the ‘deus ex machina’, the God who is in control but who remains outside the world, unsurpassed and unable to engage with the suffering of the world. Bonhoeffer was proposing a different way of seeing God, a suffering God. For him, God is a full participant in the life of the world. To suffer, here, means to be subject to the choices of others. To suffer means to be able to receive and to accept what others decide, as well as to have one’s own capacity and wishes and purposes. Australian theologian Denis Edwards has recently expressed this concept very beautifully, proposing a theology in which God is understood as lovingly accepting the limits of creatures and actively waiting upon finite creaturely processes, living with the constraints of these processes, accompanying each creature in love, rejoicing in every emergence, suffering with every suffering creature, and promising to bring all to healing and fullness of life.’[8] The suffering God is not just an active agent but is also a companion agent, one who responds to what others are doing. But it is the third element in this sentence that is critical here. Bonhoeffer says that the suffering God can help. The word ‘can’ means to be able, to have the capacity to help. What is crucial here is that in undergoing suffering, God is not disabled. God does not lose the capacity to respond constructively and creatively. As companion to us, in the midst of our suffering, God is still able. God is still God.

It is the resurrection of Jesus that is crucial to this theological idea. Even death cannot defeat God’s redemptive purpose. Jesus is raised from death and lives as the first-born of the new creation.

Implications for people in disaster situations

What, in the lived experience of women and men undergoing suffering and distress, does all this actually mean? I would like to suggest seven elements, which may be a sequence of experiences or may be a number of things that occur in various combinations. My suggestion is that the Spirit of God, as active companion in our journey, calls forth these elements in our experience.

First is the element of belonging. Many people who have undergone adversity experience a deep and new sense of belonging to each other. Having almost lost my life, I found a fresh and deeper love for life itself, and for my family and also experienced the astonishing care of so many people, some complete strangers to me. The prayer support of the Christian community was almost palpable. God gives to us a new sense of belonging, and if we are able to recognize it as such we realize we belong also, and eternally, to God.

This element expresses itself as hope. ‘We will get through this.’ Such statements are often made through gritted teeth, in the anguish of physical and emotional pain. Hope is an inexplicable gift. It has nothing to do with wishful thinking. Hope is the gift of openness to a future as yet undisclosed. It draws us forward, even when we have no capacity to walk.

A third and crucial element in God’s enabling is patience. It is hope that enables endurance, patient waiting for what is yet to be. Those of us who live active lives and who are accustomed to being generally competent in all our activities find this patient waiting very difficult. Pain is a great teacher. Patience is the slow but definite practice of hope. It is an active and loving holding on, perhaps without any other purpose than simply remaining, ‘being’ in the now.

With time, however, God also gives healing. It is remarkable how there is such a close relationship between time and healing. My doctors assured me that it would be six weeks till the bones healed and the pain would begin to ease. It is necessary to wait, but they were right. With time we discover that in fact all along healing has been taking place. There is healing in the very nature of things and there is also the active work of healers. I thank God every day for the medical care I received and indeed for our health services. They are agents of God.

In addition, experiences of suffering and distress are often times of learning. Many people report that it was at such times they learned the most valuable lessons of life. In particular, we learn the value of things. That is, we learn that the things for which we spend so much time, money and effort, are worth almost nothing. I lost all my clothes and possessions in the tsunami, but what remained was my life, my family, and my relationship with God. Nothing else matters to me, ultimately. In times of pain and patient waiting, I found myself able to reflect on my life, my work and my priorities.

Flowing from these elements, I found within myself a deep and very rich sense of caring for others. My pastoral life was renewed, with great acuity and depth. Many times, as a pastor, I have known people in deep grief or pain reach out in concern for others. They want to be assured that some other person is being cared for. We may marvel at that, but it seems to me a gift of God. Our pain does not destroy our better selves, but rather brings it to the surface. Even as he suffered, Jesus prayed for those who were crucifying him. From the cross, he urges John to care for his mother. These are examples of the loving care of God the companion in the midst of suffering.

Finally, then, the suffering God enables faith. I place this element last, in order to emphasize that it is not a precondition of the gifts that I have named already. Rather, faith may be implied in those other elements, but it may not be recognized or acknowledged. Many people in their anguish call out to God, sometimes in accusing ways. Sometimes people who say they do not believe in God call out to God, and many who have said they believed are unable to call out to God. They imagined that their faith in God would mean that nothing like this could ever happen to them. Not so!

Faith emerges as the quiet, sometimes unrecognized element that simply keeps us going. Faith is not the absence of struggle and doubt. Faith insists on dealing with the truth, with reality, with life and relationship: and through that keeping-on, faith emerges in new forms. It may be a new quality of prayer, or a new dimension of care, or a new commitment to reaching out to those less fortunate. And such faith will eventually find its voice, to speak the truth in the face of convenient or cheap piety. It will speak of God, the suffering God who can and does help.

The Church in response to disasters

In this final section, I want to offer just a few basic pointers that arise from the preceding reflections.

I begin with something we should not do. There is nothing at all to be gained when the church takes a high moral stand at the time of peoples’ suffering, even if we may believe that people have contributed to their own plight. In Australia, people do build their homes in areas that are seriously fire-prone. In Samoa, people build their villages close to the sea. Millions of people live on the sides of volcanoes and along fault-lines in earthquake zones. Even if we imagine that they could avoid doing so, it is not constructive or helpful to say this at the time of a disaster.

The first positive thing that the church can do, in response to natural disasters, is to believe that God is with us. This is why it is important to have an adequate theology of how God relates to the world. God is not only the originating cause of the world and its machinations, somehow outside the world, causing things to happen. God is with us, as companion, actively with us and working towards a healing and constructive outcome. When we know this, we can hold on, with patient hope.

It is essential that pastors and teachers work on developing this fundamental conviction amongst our people. The most helpful way to do this is through telling stories. This form of teaching, Jesus’ own preferred form of instruction, can address the false impressions people gain about God. We have to confront directly the idea that having faith in God means nothing bad can happen to Christians. We have to challenge the idea that God causes disasters to happen. Most people do not believe such things anyway, but they need positive teaching to replace such unchristian ideas. And that positive teaching can come from the stories of God’s sustaining and healing presence through the valley of the shadow, God’s presence as companion and healing Spirit. The stories of Jesus and the stories of ordinary people who have known God’s presence with them will actually unlock other stories. People will begin to recognize the truth and reality of their faith. God is with them. This will make their faith more real and their witness more authentic. And when the tough times come, they will be more able to endure and to support others in need.

From this positive assurance, the church must also develop ways to be actively caring for people. Some women from a local church came to the hospital in Samoa to do what they could to help. They brought clothing and simple things such as a toothbrush to help the victims of the tsunami. These were invaluable gifts in the situation.

Simple and practical help, offered but not imposed – Christians can learn to be helpful in these ways.

When I say that help must be offered but not imposed, I mean to suggest that there is a crucial strength necessary to be present, simply present with someone in need, in pain or grief, when there is nothing we can give them, perhaps nothing much we can say. The ministry of presence is the most important gift in many such situations. We do not always have to have the solution. Sometimes there is no solution. We need to be able simply to trust God and to be present, perhaps even in silence.

But for all that, we must also maintain an openness to God, who is present and able to do surprising things, in people and situations we may not have expected. A tsunami of water may be followed by a tsunami of care. An earthquake may tear down our home and God may give us a new home and a new community. We may discover, amongst the rubble of our lives, that faith is blossoming all over the place. God can do this.

Finally, then, there is a critical theological task for the church in the world today. As Charles Taylor has urged, we must learn to understand what it means to have faith in a world which has long since lost the pre-modern and even the modern conception of things.[9] The world is not a machine, controlled by a master manipulator of the levers. The earth is not like a watch, created by a master watchmaker long ago, who has set it up and just let it run. No, our task is to understand what it means to be with God and God with us, in a far less controlled, less predictable, but nonetheless created world.

In such a world, we must learn again the meaning of belonging. We must learn to respect the earth, as many indigenous cultures have done since time immemorial. We must learn also that the world is not ‘our environment’, but is rather the context in which we live with God. In so doing, we must learn see what God is doing in the world, and learn to live with and work with that, towards the consummation God seeks: the fulfillment of creation, in which all things come to their rest, in peace and harmony with God. Our task, then, is to learn to see what God is doing towards that redemption and to join with God in that. That is our theological and practical task – and what a privilege it is to be involved with God and God’s people in this way.

[1] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a,2.3, London: Blackfriars, 1963 edition. At page 15 we read: ‘One is bound to arrive at some first cause of change not itself being caused by anything, and this is what everybody understands by God.’

[2] Clark H. Pinnock, Most Moved Mover: A theology of God’s openness, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2001, p. 71.

[3] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Translated by Henry Beveridge, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1983, Book 1, Chapters XVI and XVII particularly p. 174.

[4] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Translated by Henry Beveridge, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1983, Book 1, Chapter XVII, pp. 182f, p. 189.

[5] Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: An ecological doctrine of creation. The Gifford Lectures , 1984–1985. London: SCM Press, 1985, p. 193.

[6] Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: An ecological doctrine of creation. The Gifford Lectures , 1984–1985. London: SCM Press, 1985, pp. 211–213.

[7] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison, Enlarged Edition, Edited by Eberhard Bethge, London: SCM Press, 1971. Letter to Bethge, July 16, 1944, p. 361.

[8] Denis Edwards, How God Acts: Creation, Redemption and Special Divine Action. Hindmarsh, South Australia: ATF Press, 2010, p. xviii.

[9] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007. In this large and incisive work, Taylor addresses the loss of the world-views inherent in the modern era, and argues for the need and possibility of ‘conversions’ to a religious response, the possibilities of belief within a secular world.

Advertisement