Faith can be deepened, not destroyed, by strife, even when the suffering is unspeakable, says Rupert Shortt.
When the renowned Jewish thinker Jonathan Sacks was asked where God had been at Auschwitz, he effectively reversed the terms of the question by asking, “Where was man?”
God, he said, was there in the words “You shall not murder”. He was there in the words “Do not oppress the stranger”, in the words “Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground”. Rabbi Sacks immediately added that the Holocaust was not in and of itself a new challenge to faith. Exactly the same question could have been asked about Cain and Abel, among innumerable other disasters. “Why did God let Cain kill his brother? And the truth is, that is the Jewish equation. We believe that God gave us freedom. It is the most fateful decision he made in the entire universe. Freedom means that if we do well, we are little lower than the angels. But if we do bad, we are lower even than the beasts. That is our world. God teaches what’s good and what’s evil, what we should do and what we should not do. But God does not intervene to force us to do good, or to prevent us from doing evil.”
You may wonder why I’ve started an article on the earthquakes that have devastated parts of Turkey and Syria by focusing on moral depravity, rather than the suffering caused by natural disasters. My main reason is that the two cannot be easily disentangled.
As well as working in a university, I volunteer teaching English to asylum-seekers. One of my students is a Turkish scientist forced to flee his country for opposing the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. When we spoke about the disaster, one point he made was that endemic corruption in Turkey had led building contractors to flout laws supposedly mandating safer construction in earthquake-prone areas.
My student added that Erdogan’s government and local officials had turned a blind eye to rule-breaking in a bid to promote a housing boom. Since wickedness on this scale forms a clear case of what Christianity terms “structural” sin, it seems fair to ask why God rather than man should be held responsible for it.
Now let me turn to where you may have expected me to begin. Where is God to be found in an arena where people die in pain and apparently pointlessly through disease or poverty or violence, as well as earthquakes? Classical Church teaching maintains that pain cannot be avoided where physical laws have their own integrity. A material world involves inbuilt constraints. St Thomas Aquinas observes that things exist by surviving – namely winning the favour of their environments – but there is no chance of harvesting all that benefit at once without any associated rupture. In Aquinas’s view, the universe as a whole is better for including some things that cease to survive. Fire must consume air in order to burn, deer must eat saplings, a tiger’s good is a buffalo’s evil. There are ways of improving the situation so as to be more even-handed, but to have a physical environment without any of this destruction is impossible. Aquinas adds candidly that as a result of bringing about world order and harmony, God indirectly causes natural evils and afflictions. Not even divine omnipotence can generate a finite cosmos in which natural evils will not be a concomitant of good.
Knowing this, God chose to create, so can be held responsible for natural evils. Suppose we had the omnipotence, though. Would we decide to destroy life because of those concomitant evils? The answer for Aquinas is no. Therefore blaming God is not viable. The true course for us is to accept our physical surroundings and assume our own share of the responsibility for them. We could try taking on one of the main tasks for which Genesis suggests Adam and Eve were made: to tend and cherish the earth as good stewards.
I do not wish for a moment to play down the agonies of the dead and bereaved. Their suffering is unspeakable. But does a disaster such as that afflicting Syria and Turkey license us to conclude either that life as a whole is meaningless and therefore that there is no God, or, alternatively, that our Creator is indifferent to us?
Both of these options strike me as mistaken. Many Christians, Muslims and others have had their faith deepened, not destroyed, by strife. Their message as I understand it is not “Well, it’s all OK, there’s a reason for my suffering”, but rather, “Here is something which for all its utter, unqualified horror, I can by God’s grace give a future to, open up to God.” And in that sense, I think, Christians and others looking back over a life containing suffering and tragedy and trauma can say that it has all been drawn together by grace, rather than that it’s all vindicated or justified.
Rupert Shortt’s latest book is The Hardest Problem (Hodder, £14.99).
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