This fascinating small book (109 pages) was required reading for a theology course I took recently through Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. It offers "another perspective" for those who may teach that all acts of nature should be seen as coming directly from the hand of God. Even if you don’t agree with all of his theology, I think you may find Professor Hart’s perspective very helpful as you seek to care for those who are going through enormous suffering.

Product description from the publisher’s website:

As news reports of the horrific tsunami in Asia reached the rest of the world, commentators were quick to seize upon the disaster as proof of either God’s power or God’s nonexistence. Expanding on his Wall Street Journal piece, “Tremors of Doubt,” published the last day of 2004, David Bentley Hart here returns to this pressing question: How can the existence of a good and loving God be reconciled with such suffering? Hart clarifies the biblical account of God’s goodness, the nature of evil, and the shape of redemption, incisively revealing where both Christianity’s champions and its critics misrepresent what is most essential to Christian belief.

Though he responds to those skeptical of Christian faith, Hart is at his most perceptive and provocative as he examines Christian attempts to rationalize the tsunami disaster. Many people want a divine plan that will make sense of evil. Hart contends, however, that the history of suffering and death is not willed by God. Rather than appealing to a divine calculus that can account for every instance of suffering, Christians must recognize the ongoing struggle between the rebellious powers that enslave the world and the God who loves it.

This meditation by a brilliant young theologian will deeply challenge serious readers grappling with God’s ways in a suffering world.

Excerpt:

I said at the beginning of this book that silence might have been the wisest response in the days following the Indian Ocean catastrophe. And here, after (at this writing) two months and many thousands of words, I remain uncertain whether what I have said is proper or even remotely adequate. These rather desultory reflections were occasioned by what happened on that day, but I have clearly ventured far from any direct discussion of the sufferings of those who fell victim to that horrendous paroxysm of nature at her most murderous; and I do not know if I ought to have done so. This has not, obviously, been a book of apologetics, in large part because I still find myself less perturbed by the sanctimonious condescension of many of those who do not believe than by either the gelid dispassion or the shapeless sentimentality of certain of those who do. Neither has it been a book of “technical” or “philosophical” theology, though I have at points touched upon “technical” elements of Christian philosophical tradition (too lightly, I fear, to be entirely convincing and too heavily to be entirely lucid). Much less has it been a book of consolations. Rather, my principal aim has simply been to elucidate — as far as in me lies — what I understand to be the true scriptural account of God’s goodness, the shape of redemption, the nature of evil, and the conditions of a fallen world, not to convince anyone of its credibility, but simply to show where many of the arguments of Christianity’s antagonists and champions alike fail to address what is most essential to the gospel.

Clearly, also, I have expended at least as much energy contending against what I take to be defective formulations of Christian faith as I have against skeptical assaults upon that faith, but this is because, generally speaking, the latter have so little relevance to the object of their hostility that they pose no very formidable menace. It may seem, especially at the end of my reflections, that I have made Calvinism into my particular bête noire, though that was never my intention. In part, this merely reflects the reality that, after the appearance of my column, those among its critics who exhibited the most exuberant callousness regarding the dead —l even all those tens of thousands of dead children — and who reacted with the greatest belligerence and most violent vituperation to any suggestion that God might not be the immediate cause of all evil in the world were all Calvinists of a particularly rigorist persuasion. So the shape of the debate was to some degree laid out for me in advance. It also reflects, however, the reality that between Eastern Orthodox and Reformed theology there are some differences so vast that no reconciliation is possible. And I would be lying if I denied that, in many of the broad themes of the theology of Calvin, there is something in my view terribly amiss and extremely remote from the genuine theology of the New Testament (but he was, after all, working within a certain venerable tradition of exegesis). All that said, I do know that there is far more to Calvin’s thought than a pure predestinarianism. I only wish it had been historically possible for him (and for other of his contemporaries) to take the subtleties of high scholastic theology more seriously, and the riches of patristic thought more to heart.

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