Where Was God in the Tsunami?

I initially read this book with practical rather than theological motivations—I wanted to learn more about Myanmar (Burma), so I bought whatever I could get my hands on. Although this book has virtually nothing to do with Myanmar as a nation, it discusses the horrific tsunami of December 26, 2004 which killed 230,000 people throughout the Bay of Bengal and beyond—including many in the Ayeyarwady District—and uses it as a springboard to discuss how a good God could allow such evil.

The author, David Bentley Hart, is an Eastern Orthodox theologian whose scholarly prose might not be the most accessible to average readers, yet his topic is so important that I think it’s a book worth exploring. In fact, I think he’d be a great author to participate in a Counterpoints-style book on theodicy.

Theodicy: A Good God, an Evil World

Hart quotes another author to define theodicy as “The attempt to reconcile the idea of an all-powerful, just and loving God who intervenes in history…with the recurrence of catastrophic slaughter from ‘natural’ causes such as tsunamis and man-made evils such as genocides.” (12) Ultimately, Hart argues that evil and death are a wasting disease not part of God’s will (73), that God does not use evil to bring about His will, and that God will ultimately defeat evil and in fact has already done so through the resurrection of Jesus. By attacking false conclusions that both atheists and Christians come to when they accept a twisted theodicy, he reveals a clear view of a God fully invested in this world, in full control of this world, yet not responsible for the evil in this world.

Response to Atheists

Regarding the atheistic view that evil in the world disproves God’s very existence, Hart offers this logical response to “a somewhat famous article by J. L. Mackie from 1955 that argues that we must conclude from the evidences of history and nature that if God is indeed omnipotent, he manifestly is not good, and that if he is good, he manifestly is not omnipotent.”

It is an argument, says Rosenbaum, that so far no one has succeeded in refuting. In point of fact, though, there is no argument here to refute; the entire case is premised upon an inane anthropomorphism — abstracted from any living system of belief — that reduces God to a finite ethical agent, a limited psychological personality, whose purposes are measurable upon the same scale as ours, and whose ultimate ends for his creatures do not transcend the cosmos as we perceive it. This is not to say that it is an argument without considerable emotional and even moral force; but of logical force there is none. Unless one can see the beginning and end of all things, unless one possesses a divine, eternal vantage upon all of time, unless one knows the precise nature of the relation between divine and created freedom, unless indeed one can fathom infinite wisdom, one can draw no conclusions from finite experience regarding the coincidence in God of omnipotence and perfect goodness. One may still hate God for worldly suffering, if one chooses, or deny him, but one cannot in this way “disprove” him. (13-14)

Hart later gives kudos to the atheist who struggles with theodicy:

The atheist who cannot believe for moral reasons does honor, in an elliptical way, to the Christian God, and so must not be ignored. He demands of us not the surrender of our beliefs but a meticulous recollection on our parts of what those beliefs are, and a definition of divine love that has at least the moral rigor of principled unbelief… Sometimes atheism seems to retain elements of “Christianity” within itself that Christians have all too frequently forgotten. (25)

Response to Christians

Hart also challenges those Christians who respond to a tragedy like the tsunami with statements like “Everything happens for reason” or “God’s ways aren’t our ways” or “All things work together for good.” While these statements sound biblical (and in fact, the last two are biblical quotations), their use usually stems from either ignorance or a failure to understand biblical context. These statements used in this way suggest that God had always planned for 230,000 people to perish that day, and the he did so for his own glory, suggesting that this in effect is a good thing—only we can’t understand it. Hart writes:

“Whether one believes in the Christian God or not, one must acknowledge that the solicitude shown by some Christians for total and direct divine sovereignty in all the eventualities of the fallen world is not shared by the authors of the New Testament canon. Much less is there anything to be found in Scripture remotely resembling theodicy’s attempted moral justification of the present cosmic order. At the heart of the gospel, of course, is an ineradicable triumphalism, a conviction that the will of God cannot ultimately be defeated and that the victory over evil and death has already been won.” (66)

He later adds:

As God did not will the fall, and yet always wills all things toward himself, the entire history of sin and death is in an ultimate sense a pure contingency, one that is not as such desired by God, but that is nevertheless constrained by providence to serve his transcendent purpose. God does not will evil in the sinner. Neither does he will that the sinner should perish (2Peter 3:9; Ezek. 33:11). He does not place evil in the heart. He does not desire the convulsive reign of death in nature. But neither will be suffer defeat in these things. (83)

Hatred of Sin

As I worked through these pages, I admittedly struggled with this concept that anything could happen apart from God’s will, but then it struck me—of course things happen that aren’t God’s will! It’s never God’s will that people sin, yet every human everyday lives in the slough of sin.

In discussions like these, my mind drifts to the most heinous of sins, those committed against children. I recall a story of three adults caught at the ferry on my island with a fainted child they claimed was just sick but was in fact kidnapped, drugged, and on his way to likely sexual oblivion. I regretfully wish damnation on anyone involved in such abuse—or the ped*philia that’s apparently rampant in our world. I say “regretfully,” because where’s the Christian love for my enemies? But then I remember Jesus’ words in Matthew 18:5-6 (recall the “millstone”), and while I know it’s not a perfect application, it’s close enough and I feel justified. Hart write about this righteous hatred:

“However — fortunately, I think — we Christians are not obliged (and perhaps are not even allowed) to look upon the devastation of that day — to look, that is, upon the entire littoral rim of the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal and upper Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children — and to attempt to console ourselves or others with vacuous cant about the ultimate meaning or purpose residing in all that misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation. Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue his creation from the absurdity of sin, the emptiness and waste of death, the forces — whether calculating malevolence or imbecile chance — that shatter living souls; and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred.”  (101)

I take this minor tangent simply to emphasize that plenty in this world occurs that is not God’s will. He can turn anything to His own glory, but that does not mean He planned it, wanted it, or approved of it. But He’s God, and ultimately all things will be placed under His feet. He will get the glory. As Hart puts it:

Regarding God’s relation “to sin, suffering, evil, and death…he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purpose of God.” (87)

Conclusion

There’s plenty more to be said about this book—like the lengthy discussion about Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky—but I’m not smart enough to dissect it all. Suffice it to say, this is a book that challenged my understanding of how God displays His goodness in this evil world. It’s an engaging book—if you don’t my the high-falutin writing—on a topic well worth exploring.

©2025 E.T.