God and hurricanes pt.1

Recent natural disasters have focused attention on the relationship between evil, pain and suffering, and an all-powerful, loving God. Some Christians say that God is punishing people for their sins and saying it unlovingly and unintelligently (see this Richard Roeper column, for example)

Others, while not going that far, acknowledge that natural calamities are generally related somehow to a sinful, fallen world.

For example, this article quotes Al Mohler:

“According to Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, people who focus on God's loving and powerful qualities have an incomplete understanding of who God is. ‘The one thing that is often missing from that picture, in terms of how people think about God, is that He is also just,’ Reverend Mohler says. ‘That means that we know that one of the reasons the world experiences earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes and tornados is because of sin, and the fact that this is a fallen world. It is not like Eden, as God had intended from the beginning.’ A hurricane happens, in other words, because the balance that God intended for this world has been upset by sin.”

The same article quotes a Catholic theologian:

“Nevertheless, the idea that human sin is responsible for something like a urricane is completely foreign to Catholics, according to Sister Elizabeth Johnson, who teaches Theology at Fordham University, a Jesuit school. She says in Catholic theology, hurricanes and earthquakes are caused not by God and not by sin, but by Natural Law. ‘God is the cause of all causes. God is the primary cause,’ she says. ‘Catholic theology teaches that God set the world up with its own integrity as a creature. It has its own natural laws, it has its own internal ways of working. You have an undersea earthquake, and you get a tsunami,’ Professor Johnson says. ‘God didn't cause that. That's the actual working of the planet that keeps it fertile and refreshed and so on. And hurricanes are in the same boat.’

Now, I agree with Mohler that we live in a fallen world. But is sin the specific reason that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf states, or that the tsunami hit southeast Asia? I prefer the Catholic approach.

Now, there is a difference between the philosophical or theoretical response to evil, and the pastoral or emotional response. What I want to try to present is a very brief summary of the theoretical response. This is important, I think, because even though most people suffering from evil probably don’t give a rip about the intellectual problem in the midst of the ongoing trials and pains, later on, while reflecting on the question, they may want to look for some answer to the question of why God allows suffering.