Divine Sovereignty and the Horror in Haiti

No theist can seriously confront the horror of a global tragedy like the Haiti earthquake without feeling the weight of the problem of evil: How could an almighty, wholly good God allow such evil to occur?

It is one of the most significant arguments offered by atheists against belief in a sovereign, loving God. It is also, I think, one of the root causes for some of the most offensive and outrageous religious views. In the effort to explain why God would permit a disaster of such enormity to hit an already impoverished people, killing tens of thousands and shattering the lives of many more, some can be inspired to blame the victims, accusing them of bringing the horror on themselves through crimes real or imagined (a phenomenon we saw vividly on display just after the earthquake, when Pat Robertson offered his now famously insensitive and absurd remarks).

Robertson-esque outrageousness is especially apt to happen when theists attempt to make sense of horrors while maintaining a rigid allegiance to s strong doctrine of divine sovereignty. In the name of such a doctrine they can be inspired not only to blame victims, but to attribute truly horrific motivations to God…and then defend God’s goodness by stripping all meaning from the concept. The result is a God who possesses none of the qualities that might justify devotion.

When we try to solve the problem of evil by sacrificing God’s goodness at the altar of His power, we are left with a deity that can inspire fear but not love. More profoundly, power rather than goodness becomes our God…and our capacity for compassion starts to shrivel. Our life becomes about appeasing the tyrant or blaming those who suffer, rather than about loving more perfectly. And worship, rather than being a joyous expression of devotion to that which embodies all goodness, becomes an act of appeasement masquerading as a gesture of love.

Better, it seems to me, to become an atheist—or, alternatively, to rage against God, shaking one’s fists at the heavens and demanding to know why. Better to deny God or oppose Him than to practice fawning obeisance towards a god one conceives of as a vindictive megalomaniac.

If we look at the theologies that tend to most outrage atheist critics of religion, they seem to share this propensity to confront the tension between divine sovereignty and divine goodness, generated by horrors like the Haiti earthquake—and then resolve that tension in favor of a strong view of sovereignty. To be God, it is assumed, is to be wholly and perfectly in charge of the universe. Anything that happens does so because God has either caused it to happen or chosen to permit it. God is not only a direct agent in history, but an all-powerful micromanager who lets nothing happen without His stamp of approval.

If this strong view of divine sovereignty is embraced, then what are we to make of the horrific images coming out of Port-au-Prince? Can we avoid viewing God as a divine dictator who either signed the order to smite Haiti or, at best, nodded quietly when He saw the impending devastation and, fully capable of preventing it, allowed it to proceed without blinking? What other choices do we have but to recoil in horror at such a God or to become self-serving sycophants (or the religious equivalent of battered spouses)?

What this view of divine sovereignty denies us is the possibility of a God who cries out against the devastation, who suffers at every death, who struggles in empathetic horror along with those caught under the rubble, gasping claustrophobically along with every trapped and dying child. What it denies us, in other words, is a God who would stop the suffering if He could, but who cannot… and so cries out in helpless despair at every new blow that is struck against the creatures He loves.

The God who is crucified with us, who takes on the evils of the world and truly endures them as we do, is not the sovereign master of the forces of destruction but a being radically vulnerable to their power. A God who could sweep away the forces of evil with a thought but decides against it is hardly vulnerable to evil in the way that we are. And even if He suffers, it is a kind of sham, a show that cannot express genuine solidarity with our condition. Because our condition is not merely defined by suffering, but by our inability to escape it.

What a strong view of divine sovereignty rules out, in short, is a portrait of a God who can’t just wave His magic wand to prevent evils like the Haiti earthquake, but who can and does transform such evil by making Himself truly vulnerable to it, sharing our afflictions with us, and thereby turning evil into an avenue for profound solidarity with the divine.

For such a view of God to make sense, we need to see God as truly constrained. He needn’t be viewed as impotent or incompetent. In fact, He might be viewed in the way we view the great artist who does not choose the materials she has to work with but who, with what she is given, creatively and brilliantly turns them into magisterial works of art. Such an artist is hardly impotent. In fact, we might even admire her more than those artists who has all conceivable materials at their disposal, and so never have to find a way to work with resources and tools that don’t suit them.

No humane theology can insist that the horrors in Haiti suit God. As I see it, a humane theology must insist that in the children trapped beneath the rubble, in the child who needed to be amputated without anesthesia, in the hungry and homeless masses, the countless tragedies, God is confronted with something against which He can only recoil in dismay. But can we say that God recoils while also saying that there are no constraints that keep God from preventing these horrors? Is it coherent to say that God abhors what happened, and yet also say that He could have stopped the devastation with a thought but simply decided not to?

At least I cannot reconcile these things. And so I must view God as constrained. But if so, two questions follow. The first is how. How could God—the vastly powerful creator of the universe—be constrained and yet still be reasonably described as God? The second has to do with hope: How can we put our hope in God to redeem the evils of the world, if God is constrained in ways that keep Him from preventing them?

This latter question might be seen as asking whether it is possible for God to possess a kind of second-order sovereignty even if He is said to lack sovereignty of the more straightforward, first-order kind. Preserving such second-order sovereignty seems essential for preserving what I call, in Is God a Delusion?, the “ethico-religious hope”—the hope that, in Martin Luther King's words, "The universe bends towards justice," such that it is possible to put our trust in God to achieve what we cannot achieve for ourselves.

In answering these questions, one might follow the lead of the Zoroastrians and see God as opposed by an uncreated nemesis, a power of nonbeing and destruction that God cannot simply do away with but has to contend with in the created world. This nemesis needn’t be construed in quite the way that Zoroaster did, as a kind of evil being or devil. In fact, there is reason to take Karl Barth as offering a theology of this broadly Zoroastrian kind, but seeing the uncreated nemesis as an unavoidable by-product of creating a finite reality, one in which there exist being with limits, and who are thus confront with the vastness of a great “I AM NOT.” This is a view I sketched out in an earlier post.

If one opts for such an approach, then God can no longer be called sovereign in the sense of having complete control over everything that happens in the world. But we might still be able to attribute to God a second-order sovereignty, in the sense that God has the resources to prevail over the forces of ruin, and so will ultimately redeem all good things that these dark forces might seek to destroy. While God cannot simply wave aside the terrible I AM NOT, He can oppose it with an even vaster I AM--and so, incrementally, lift every creating thing free from the suction of the Void.

But there may be other ways to conceive of a God who is constrained but still sovereign in some second-order sense. For example, we might take seriously Simone Weil’s view (paralleling the concept of tzimtzum in Kabbalah) that creation is essentially an act of divine withdrawal: the establishment of a space within which the infinite divine reality is not, so that there might be room for a finite reality other than God to exist. We might believe, with Weil, that “were we exposed to the direct radiance of (our creator’s) love, without the protection of space, of time, and of matter, we should evaporate like water in the sun.”

And we might well view a strict observance of this distance between creator and created as a mandate of love, and so view God's constraints as moral ones that metaphorically bind His hands. We might think that love requires respecting the other as a distinct and separate self; but that when the infinite asserts direct sovereignty over the finite, the finite loses any semblance of selfhood it might have had. In short, we might think that love imposes on the infinite an absolute obligation to abdicate any claims of first-order sovereignty over the finite.

Put another way, we might think that the act of creation, if it is to be an act of love, might require that the creator impose profound and unassailable limits on how He can influence the world, so that it is free to evolve on its own terms, according to rules suited to a finite reality (and, if and when it gives rise to beings with wills of their own, then also in accord with their choices). These constraints may apply uniquely to God as creator, insofar as this status poses a threat to the otherness of His creation. His creatures do not pose such a threat to one another, and so are paradoxically less constrained than God in how they can act on one another. And so, by a kind of moral necessity, we might become God's hands in the world.

While God, on such a theology, could not simply do anything whatever to prevent unfolding events that weren’t to His liking, it doesn’t follow that He would be rendered helpless. There is a deep theological tradition which holds that love has a potency very different from that of coercive power but, nevertheless, far greater. If so, then might it not be possible that God could redeem the world simply by radiating it with an unremitting, unflagging outpouring of sustaining love—love that is palpable, that can be felt by those who open themselves to it, that can offer hope, compassion, forgiveness, and comfort? Perhaps a God of love, while constrained from staying the earthquake, has all that it takes to redeem every evil that an earthquake can produce.

In short, we might view the constraints that God faces as metaphysical ones that straightforwardly limit His power; but we might also view them as moral ones, as strict normative requirements that uniquely bind God precisely because He is God, making it such that God has less moral freedom than we enjoy. In either case, however, we must deny that God is sovereign in the naïve way that, for example, Pat Robertson seems to think that God is sovereign.

But given the horrific theologies that seem to flow from such a view of divine sovereignty, that may be a very small theological price to pay.