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Tsunami questions our ideas about God, says bishop

-7/02/05

Popular misconceptions about God must change as a result of reflection on the tsunami and similar natural tragedies, according to the Anglican bishop of Bolton, the Rt Rev David Gillett.

The bishop challenges the ‘domesticated’ view of the divine held by many people today, and says that that Christians should fulfil their obligations as co-workers of God in the face of massive human need.

The bishop’s comments echo those of other Christian theologians who have questioned both the sentimentality and judgmentalism of some popular Christian responses to the tsunami.

In an article asking ‘Is God a disaster area?’ Ekklesia associate Simon Barrow says that the tsunami tragedy reminds contemporary society “just how superficial, confused, facile and rootless much of our talk about God is these days.”

“Perhaps our picture of God and the world [God] created was inadequate in the face of such a massive disaster,” says Bishop Gillett. “[T]he tsunami raised in an acute way the question of the sufferings of the innocent. And in some ways, it was more puzzling than when such suffering results from human evil.”

Writing in Crux, the magazine of Manchester Anglican Diocese, the bishop says that the Holocaust was a horrific catastrophe, but was in a different category because it resulted from the cruelty of human against human.

He continues: “With this tsunami we can’t implicate humanity as part of the cause at all. True, global warming is our fault, and some natural disasters are ‘man-made’ – but not this one. God stands alone in the dock!”

“[T]he planet on which we live is a growing, changing and evolving world”, comments Bishop Gillett. “Perhaps, when the tsunami hit, our view of God was too domesticated and tame and our picture of the world too ‘finished’. Perhaps we also forgot that God came into this evolving, challenging world in Christ and drank to the dregs human experience at its grimmest.”

“We are implicated because we are co-workers with God in the ongoing work of creation”, says the bishop. “We are given the task of caring for and subduing the earth. When a similar disaster happens in the Pacific region — Japan, for instance — Japan has all the technology and infrastructure to help it survive much better than Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand.”

“How we help in the medium to long-term so that the poorer parts of the world are as equally well reconstructed and prepared for next time will show the true extent of our ongoing ministry of caring and subduing as co-workers with God in his creation,” he says.

Bishop Gillett concludes: “Part of that ministry will involve such things as our commitment to fair-trade policies and the cancellation of debts to the developing world — and we, as Christians, will surely want to be in the forefront of the drive to eradicate poverty during this year of action. First came our compassionate response in giving. Now, possibly, changes in how we view God and the world… hopefully to be followed by changes in our own lifestyle for the sake of the developing world.”

According to classical Christian theology the transcendent reality of God cannot be reduced “to some super-being who is just a version of ouselves writ large; a god-figure who fulfils our wishes and spares us reality”, says Ekklesiaís Simon Barrow.

“In the biblical tradition God is, rather, the mysterious source and promise of the world”, he adds. “The universe is marked by contingency, but it is this that gifts us the freedom that makes genuine love possible – as well as the pain and vulnerability that follow in its wake.”

“In Christ the wounded healer”, says Barrow, “God promises to meet us in the presence of pain and abandonment, and to be with those excluded and tortured in a way that the comfortable religious mind can barely imagine.”

Archbishop Rowan Williams has also sympathised with those who struggle to understand God in the wake of the tsunami, and has been criticised by some Christian groups for doing so. One British newspaper falsely claimed that the tragedy had made the Archbishop doubt God’s existence, but its editor has since admitted that this was a misrepresentation.

Further tsunami prayers and reflections have been made available in association with Ekklesia.