Disasters and the Wrath of God

In a short period of time, following the devastating tornado in Oklahoma, online comments about God’s involvement and intentions in that storm appeared in a variety of places (see Rachel Held Evans’s impassioned comments). Michael Brown cautioned against assigning divine wrath to natural disasters, but also insisted that God’s wrath (not specifically defined or described) was on its way to the USA.

I’m with Rachel on this: Declaring God’s intentions in natural events is both presumptive and theologically misguided. While I appreciate Michael Brown’s concerns, I’m not sure that his insistence on the coming of God’s wrath is significantly different than the claims we hear coming from people like John Piper. How is it that people know what God has in mind in these things?

(This must be difficult for Christian groups that enter into these places of devastation to bring help and comfort. So, God brings hurricanes and tornados, and his faithful people come in to clean up his mess. Really?)

I’m not suggesting that the wrath of God doesn’t exist. But is it expressed in Zeus-like bolts of lightning that wipe out young and old, righteous and unrighteous alike? Or does it come in a way that could be even more terrifying?

The first and most likely candidates for a big dose of God’s wrath would be Adam and Eve. For them, wrath came in them getting what they desired—which was something that was not God. Indeed, they suffered the consequences of their actions, but God did not wipe them out. He met them in a new way, met them in their new, broken reality. And, according to the narrative of Scripture, he has never departed.

In describing the ancient Hebrew people’s sojourn in the wilderness and how they often forgot about the God who had rescued them from Egypt, the psalmist writes,

“He gave them what they asked, but sent leanness into their soul.” (Psalm 106:15, Book of Common Prayer)

Imagine getting everything you ever wanted, if everything you ever wanted was a life without God. Imagine a life where God’s care, love, and presence were completely removed. Imagine a life where the source of all goodness has been asked to leave the building. That would make a soul pretty lean, even anorexic.

Maybe the best story to illustrate God’s wrath isn’t like the ones about Moses and the poisonous snakes (Numbers 21) or Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18-19). Maybe it’s found in Luke 15. It starts out this way:

“There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So he divided his property between them.”

The younger son wants a life without his father. He wants all the good things that come from his father’s hand, but he wants to enjoy it on his own terms.

And the father gives him what he desires. And, out on his own, the son’s suffering is overwhelming.

The son drags his sorry self back home, hoping to get hired by his father (who, the boy assumes, will not receive him back as a son) to muck the stalls or forever clean out the septic tank. But that isn’t what happens. The father’s reception of the wandering son is almost scandalous in its generosity:

“. . . while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.”

Israel’s biblical history is summarized in this story. The leaders and the people repeatedly forgot about God and chased after what they really wanted. God let them do that, and they ended up being conquered by foreign invaders and exiled in other lands.

But God never forgot them.

We need to dump our presumptions about God’s role in natural disasters (and maybe quit giving any public attention whatsoever to those who think it’s their calling to do that) and think deeply about God’s heart for the world. But we also need to consider the implications of living as though God is unnecessary to us. And that goes for all of us, especially those of us who claim to follow Jesus.

If you want to live a life based strictly on your own desires, forgetting about God, then you’d do just as well to stick your hand into a bag of scorpions.

And I just totally creeped myself out with that mental image.

Church Chicks and Bible Boys: Time to Play Nice

I’ve been seeing a number of blogs (particularly Rachel Held Evans) and articles (like one in Christianity Today) recently about women’s roles as teachers in the life of the church. It appears that the conversation has been stirred up by a podcast released by John Piper, who feels strongly about restricting or even forbidding women to teach if a man is present (but what if he’s present but dead? Can a woman preach at a man’s funeral? Maybe, if no living men are there).

I tend to not wrestle much with this issue, since I resolved it some time ago for myself. I believe that such restrictions come from a misinterpretation of certain texts of scripture, and I also work for a theological seminary that supports women and men equally in roles of ministry and leadership.

Some claim that Dr. Piper is revealing his own personal hang ups regarding the female body. I can’t really speak to that because I’ve never talked to him about the subject, but I have heard him declare his views about other things, and I suspect it’s more about him wanting to preserve the integrity of scripture—at least, his interpretation of it. While I take different views from his on many subjects related to Christian faith, I have to respect his desire to be true to scripture.

However, there is a problem with this. There is a long history in the church of crashing human lives against our theological interpretations, thinking that we are being faithful to God in the process. Jesus ran into this with the religious leaders of his day, who thought that the very work of God could be limited and restricted by their interpretation of Sabbath Law. Jesus scandalized them when he said, “The Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath.”

When Peter experienced his dramatic vision and then encountered the group of God-fearing gentiles in Antioch (Acts 10), the falling of the Holy Spirit on the people ran cross-grain to his understanding of scripture. After all, gentiles were unclean, and this new story, for Peter and his friends, was a distinctively Jewish story (after all, Jesus was Jewish). So it didn’t make theological and biblical sense to him that the gentiles would receive the Holy Spirit—just like Peter—without prior incorporation into the life of Israel (including circumcision, etc.).

Yet, Peter reported the story to his fellow Jewish leaders in Jerusalem (Acts 11) and they ended up affirming the inclusion of the gentiles in the emerging church (although they backslid a little later on). But their affirmation didn’t come about on exegetical grounds; it came phenomenologically. In other words, they didn’t base their decision by revisiting scripture. It came on the basis of Peter’s testimony of the experience he had in Antioch. It would be Paul who would come along later and provide the biblical basis for all of this (see Romans and Galatians).

So here we are now, still wondering how it can be that women are claiming to be filled with the Spirit, hungry for knowledge, sensing a call to be teachers, leaders, and even pastors, but are being crashed against a hermeneutic (interpretation) that is claimed to be immoveable.

I know of respected theological seminaries that do not support women in teaching or church leadership roles, but will allow them to enroll in their school and even pursue the Master of Divinity degree. Some women have reported to me that they were frequently reminded by their professors (sometimes in humiliating ways) that their role in the church had to remain limited or they would be immersed in sin and stand outside of God’s favor. I asked these women if their schools gave them a tuition discount since they couldn’t exactly use the degree that was awarded to them. They said no.

I find it difficult to believe that this exclusionary conversation is still going on. Perhaps I’ve been in the opposite world for so long that I forget how relevant the topic is for so many. I’m sad about the pain that this brings to women in the life of the church.

We really need to stop submitting ourselves unquestioningly to biblical interpretations that imprison human lives. Jesus did this quite frequently with his theological opponents. The apostle Paul had to revisit the biblical narrative on a number of topics, and we are all glad that he did. So is the door closed on that process? Yes, I suppose it is, if indeed the Holy Spirit no longer works in the world.

Maybe all that stopped in Antioch. But I don’t think so.

John Piper and the Tornados

I am puzzled by yesterday’s post on John Piper’s blog. He ascribes to the will of God the devastation by the recent tornados in America’s Midwest. Specifically, he says:

“Jesus rules the wind. The tornados were his.”

Then he closes the blog with a call to aid and generosity:

“You can show your partnership in suffering, and help lift the load, at Samaritan’s Purse” (link supplied).

I don’t get it. God unleashes his wrath against sin and we have to clean up his mess? Why help “lift the load” if this was the work of Jesus? If we ease the suffering that Jesus has inflicted, then aren’t we working against him?

Dr. Piper offers his scriptural analysis regarding God’s will and works of judgment. You can read them for yourself and make your own evaluation. I see this in a different way.

The world in which we live is, and always has been, a dangerous one. Gravity alone accounts for all sorts of pain and suffering. The earth is constantly in turmoil, expressed in earthquakes, tsunamis, storms, and extreme weather patterns. The creatures of the earth—including humans—live, suffer, and die in this violent, dynamic environment, and have been for a very long time.

But ancient theologians, moved by the Spirit of God, saw something different in the intentions of God for all of his creation. The biblical narrative of Genesis 1 and 2 portrays a relationship between God and the created order that is unhindered by sin and death. It reveals the human longing for a world—still a dynamic, dangerous one—in which God’s open presence and constant restorative power does not allow the power and violence of the world to have its way.

In Genesis 3, of course, it all crashes down and the entire creation is subject to the unbridled elements of nature and the power of sin and death. That’s the reality that all people experience in life.

Certainly our story includes judgment and the call to repentance. But does it include God’s random and capricious attacks on human beings in order to remind them that they are a mess? Is God really that way? If so, then I wonder why John would say,

God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5b)

Or that Jesus would say,

“God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:17)

Yes, there is Sodom and Gomorrah. Yes, there is Ananias and Sapphira. But do those stories constitute the necessity of a God whose character is such that we can expect him to destroy both the guilty and innocent in a random sweep of his hand? Do no faithful Christians ever die in these natural disasters?

The God revealed to us in Jesus is not dark. Mysterious, yes. But not dark and capricious. Jesus shows us the God who takes evil into himself rather than inflicting it upon the world, leaving the interpretation of his violence to theological speculators who seem to have God’s cosmic playbook in hand.

Yes, we live, suffer, and die in a dangerous world. But our hope still lies in the presence and restorative, healing work of God. I believe that our participation in bringing aid to the suffering, as Dr. Piper has rightly encouraged, is participation in the real work of God. His work is redemptive and hopeful rather than violent and inflictive.

We really need to work on this, for ourselves and for the world that hears our stories and wonders about God. You can worship God because you fear he will kill you, or you can worship God because he invites you into his healing love.

Which story is ours?