Of God, Tornadoes, and Theologians

A couple Facebook friends are going back and forth over Rachel Held Evans posted rebuke of John Piper for his Tweet quoting Job 1.19 with reference to the Moore, OK tornado (following me so far?). In fairness to Piper, Rachel's retort was more a reaction to Piper's derministic modus operandi than it was to his simple Tweet likening the residents of Moore to Job, but her response certainly touched a nerve that led Calvinists and complimentarians to circle the wagons.

Doug Wilson starts in on Evans with a simple either/or:

John Piper lives in a universe where terrible things happen, but he knows that when we come to know the whole story, we will stop our mouths, and bow before a holy God in order to worship Him — and all manner of things shall be well. To acknowledge God’s sovereignty in such things does not keep our hearts from breaking in the midst of such devastation. The sovereignty of God is a hard shell case that carries and protects the tender heart. Rachel Held Evans lives in a world where innocent people just get caught in the machinery, and God is terribly sorry about it.

Wilson is typically derisive in what he writes and this post is no exception, but his snarky triumphalism barely conceals the shell game at work. Wilson thinks that Evans has dethroned God and made him into a "kosmic klutz king" who is incompetent in his handling of the world's destructive powers. That may be so, but Wilson resolves the tension the other way by making God into a cosmic Marie Antoinette, who waxes contemptuous when we rage at his suggestion that we content ourselves with the promise of cake in the sweet by-and-by.

Matt Redmond is a bid more sensible and restrained than Wilson, but he's no less willing to let his theological determinism hold sway: "Do I believe that if disaster comes to a city, God has done it? Yes. Do I believe the penalty for sin is death? Yes. Do I believe we all deserve death because of our sinful rebellion against God? Yes. But there is a mystery as to how all those things fit together."

I wonder, however, if either Wilson or Redmond haven't arbitrarily foreclosed all other options by framing the problem as they have. Both are concerned to defend a notion that all human beings deserve death and destruction and an eternal, nether-worldly water-boarding in the end. They also can't see any other way to preserve this without God as the active agent of the death and destruction and as the proprietor of the cosmic rendition site. Both have a wonderful bag of proof-texts that are alleged to justify this notion, but both run aground on the notion that the purest revelation of God is the self-donating Christ, Crucified and Resurrected. If this is true, even Redmond's restrained determinism is a bridge too far. Not every disaster-plagued city comes to it's plight because "God has done it" and saying that "the wages of sin is death" does not imply that God is the paymaster. Nor is that quote comprehended by saying, "we all deserve death."

As an alternative, why don't we lay blame where blame is due? The world's estrangement from God is consistently laid at our collective feet as humans in Holy Writ. We're the ones who have brought destruction on ourselves in our arrogant conceit that we could master the wind and waves and every other power under heaven. In the heart of each of us lives a tiny Pharaoh entertaining the conceit that we are the divine protectors of our domain. Having banished God in favor of a pantheon of competing idols, we have gone it alone to battle chaos with our own ingenuity and strength. Our pretense at fullness is really a gaping absence. As for our "rendition to perdition" and the retributive violence of God, C.S. Lewis was harmonizing with a rich choir of ancient Christian theologians when he observed that the gates are locked from the inside. The logic of damnation is that we curse the sun that gives us light and warmth and flee to an icy darkness of our own making. Even Dante knew that.

Now this doesn't ultimately solve the problem of theodicy but it places the mystery of evil on a very different temporal axis than Wilson's. For him, evil (and God's implication in evil) is ultimately justified for the goods produced in the "rich tapestry of means and ends." A clearer Augustinian view on things would recognize that both evil and evils represent a privation of divine goodness that God himself longs to fill in a resurrected heavens and earth. We contemplate evil on the redemptive-historical axis of cross and resurrection, not on the axis of means and ends. So, Evans is right to maintain, that we are not worthless, not disposable, not merely the objects of divine wrath, and not deserving of the abuses that we have visited on ourselves. Rather, the summons of grace is a plea to end our self-imposed exile and return to the waiting father who longs to receive us, not as slaves, but as honored sons and daughters.