Tsunami revives question: 'Where was God?'

Why?

The age-old question was posed in starkest form by the Indian Ocean tsunami. Believers from all faiths united on their duty to help victims but wondered, where was God in this unimaginable suffering?

Skeptics perennially argue: If God is all-powerful, he isn't all-loving since he commands or allows devastation, or if he's all-loving, he isn't all-powerful.

The Bible insists on both qualities in God while openly acknowledging the agony of mortals pondering calamity, and it provides human history's greatest meditation on this problem, the Book of Job.

Skepticism surged in many tsunami commentaries. Even Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said "this has made me question God's existence."

Well, no, it didn't. But London's Sunday Telegraph slapped that erroneous headline on Williams' January article. When the archbishop's people protested, the Telegraph lamely said Williams himself "must accept much of the blame" for its mistake because his thinking was "so hard to follow."

Rather, Williams treated the question as difficult and acknowledged there are no snappy solutions. Even a "single, random, accidental death is something that should upset a faith bound up with comfort and ready answers," he wrote, and "it would be wrong" for believers not to raise questions.

Unlike Williams, some adherents of Christianity, Judaism and Islam provided cocksure explanations that the tsunami was divine punishment. Certain Hindus and Buddhists saw the outworkings of reincarnation and the law of karma, which teaches that misdeeds in previous lives cause justified sufferings in this life.

Jewish-Buddhist writer Rodger Kamenetz rejected the belief "that whatever happens to a group is somehow the result of a previous action of that group, either in this life or in a previous life."

In the New Testament, Jesus rebuked those who thought a man was blind because of his or his parents' sin (John 9:1-3). And after a tsunami-type disaster, Jesus denied that the 18 people who died in the Siloam tower collapse did so because they were more sinful than others (Luke 13:1-5).

In the Book of Job, Yeshiva University's Rabbi Benjamin Blech commented, the hero's friends were convinced he must have sinned and deserved God's wrath. But in actuality Job suffered because his holiness was being tested and God condemned the friends.

New York Times columnist William Safire said Job shows that "questioning God's inscrutable ways has its exemplar in the Bible and need not undermine faith."

The upshot of Job, British evangelical Derek Kidner has written, is that human arguments exhaust themselves, we can never know all the factors involved and God is "not accountable to us."

Standard Christian attempts to explain the inexplicable:

-God did not originate suffering and will eventually vanquish it.

-God himself suffered for us, in Christ.

-God works for good amid all suffering.

-Temporary suffering is inconsequential compared with eternity that will right all wrongs.

Liberal Rabbi Michael Lerner proposed trimming omnipotence so that God is not "the one responsible for everything that happens" and becomes "an emerging voice of compassion and love in the midst of a world not totally under His/Her control."

That was akin to Rabbi Harold Kushner's 1981 best seller "When Bad Things Happen to Good People," which cynical columnist Ron Rosenbaum called a "cop-out" that made "God a weakling."

President R. Albert Mohler Jr. of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary agreed, criticizing liberal theology in which "God's goodness is affirmed while his greatness is denied."

Mohler championed the traditional Christian belief that in the broad sweep of things "all suffering is ultimately caused by sin." But he urged great caution in explaining this. True, all people and all nature were tainted by the biblical fall into sin, he said, but we're in no position to blame calamity on a specific person or culture - unless God directly reveals this.

Mohler cited the Apostle Paul's teaching in Romans 11:33-34: "How unsearchable are (God's) judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord?"