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The December 26 tsunami in the Indian Ocean triggered a tidal wave of commentaries on the relationship of God to disasters. Most of them redrew in cartoonish strokes Voltaire's famous response to the Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of All Saints' Day, 1755, which claimed an estimated 100,000 lives. That natural disaster destroyed the famous philosopher's optimistic faith in a benevolent though generic Providence. With at least 140,000 souls lost to the 2004 tsunami, it is not surprising to find secularists repeating old challenges to belief in God.

But it is disconcerting to find Christian leaders offering something less than a fully Christian response to the disaster. One case in point: Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. In a commentary for The Telegraph, he wrote dismissively of "vacuous words pouring out about the nature of God's power or control, or about the consolations of belief in an afterlife or whatever." He then asserted that "every single random, accidental death … should upset a faith bound up with comfort and ready answers."

Whenever the archbishop mentioned traditional Christian teaching on natural evil, he acknowledged only its defective forms. Otherwise, he devoted himself to desultory comments on the value of human life and the persistence of religious faith in the face of disaster.

Williams wasn't alone. In The Wall Street Journal, Orthodox theologian David Hart described talk of God's inscrutable counsels as "odious" and the suggestion that such disasters serve God's good ends as "blasphemous."

When people take any traditional Christian line of comment by itself, they can paint a devilish picture of God. But each traditional line of thought has some basis in revelation and gives us an important piece of the picture.

Here's a list: God allows evil events in order to bring greater good; God allows evil in order to challenge us to spiritual growth and maturity; God may allow tragedy, but he rewards us with greater blessings in heaven; God is in control of whatever happens, and his ways are inscrutable; God punishes the wicked with disasters. Each of these has an important element of truth, but when isolated from the Bible's big picture, the statements distort our understanding of God.

A truly biblical and Christian response to disasters begins with the seriousness of the problem and proceeds to the radical nature of God's solution. Natural evil is a part of the problem to which God's plan of salvation is the answer. Both the contemporary followers of Voltaire and the sub-Christian reflections of some church leaders mistakenly isolate the problem of natural evil from the biblical story of sin and redemption.

Formulated outside its biblical context, the conundrum of evil casts God in the role of a mechanical engineer who is responsible for designing a system and keeping it functional. But the God of the Bible does not merely keep things in working order. If that were his primary role, the infidels and unbelievers would have a point. The dynamic God of the Bible is a savior, not a mechanic. And through the Incarnation, he is a participant in our suffering, not the distant observer posited by the deists. This is certainly one of the key differences between Christian approaches to evil and those of the world's other major religions.

Christian faith knows that both natural disaster and human sin are part of the interim between the Fall that corrupted God's very good creation and the glorious goal toward which history is moving. God is not only the Creator and Sustainer of the world, but he is the Savior, the one who has put it right and continues to put it right. His ultimate goal is the rebirth of the entire creation.

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February 2005, Vol. 49, No. 2