Here's a few excerpts from NT's comment's on the Tsunami and the challenge of squaring it with our theology...Comment: Meanings of Christmas: In the new world there will be no more sea...Does God have a responsibility to stop earthquakes and tidal waves? The story of Jesus raises much subtler questions:
"[the Lisbon earthquake of 1755] caused a sea-change in the Enlightenment itself: before it, Bishop Butler could gaze at the natural world and infer Christian theology, but Lisbon drove a wedge between God and the world, giving fresh impetus to the idea of God as an absentee landlord and then, not long after, a mere absentee. Since then, it has been assumed that "God" has a responsibility to stop things like earthquakes and tidal waves; if He doesn't, they constitute a standing disproof. What's the point in saying "The heavens declare the glory of God", if tidal waves declare His incompetence?
...
"The general view is that the Bible offers an escape from the world into a personal religion. But that view is itself the result of the Enlightenment's reductionism
The Bible itself resists such treatment. It constantly acknowledges evil - "human" and "natural" alike - as a terrible reality. It doesn't try to minimise it, to explain that good will come of it, or to blame someone (reactions which correspond uncomfortably closely to the excuses offered by immoral or warmongering politicians).
....it tells a story about Jesus's own sense of abandonment, and thereby encourages us to embrace the same sense of helpless involvement in the sorrow of the world, as the means by which the world is to be healed. Those who work for justice, reconciliation and peace will know that sense, and perhaps, occasionally, that healing.
This isn't the kind of answer that the Enlightenment wanted. But maybe, as we launch into the deep waters of another new year, it is the kind of vocation we ought to embrace in place of shallow analysis and shrill reaction.
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