The Doors of the Sea is a small book, divided into two chapters — “Universal Harmony” and “Divine Victory.” Each chapter is divided into sections, and I want to interact with the book section by section. In this book, David Bentley Hart grapples with the Asian tsunami and the problem of natural evil. I don’t believe he meets the problem head on, and the result is uniquely unsatisfying. Let me explain why.
But before doing that, one of the things he says at the end of this section, beautifully, is something I can wholeheartedly endorse.
“Considering the scope of the catastrophe, and of the agonies and sorrows it had visited on so many, we should probably have all remained silent for a while. The claim to discern some greater meaning — or, for that matter, meaninglessness — behind the contingencies of history and nature is both cruel and presumptuous at such times. Pious platitudes and words of comfort seem not only futile and banal, but almost blasphemous; metaphysical disputes come perilously close to mocking the dead. There are moments, simply said, when we probably ought not to speak. But, of course, we must speak” (The Doors of the Sea, pp. 6-7).
There is a sound and healthy instinct here. Even Job’s comforters had the decency to sit with him in his grief for seven days and seven nights before they began offering their suggestions for making things better. And Hart here recognizes one of the dangers of rushing in with our interpretations — not all the comforters have the same interpretation and “metaphysical disputes” are even less seemly than platitudes. That is the case with this book. If Hart had rushed in with his explanation in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, I would have felt pressure to respond with disagreement, and had I rushed in, Hart would have felt the same way. Give it time, and let the initial response simply be one of mercy.
But, as Hart notes, at some point we must speak. Having agreed on the decencies, we must still say something. And coming to that point now, even in this first section, Hart is already evading the problem. This is not a trifle because it is a stark problem. Hart says:
“When this happens, the heavier basalt of the ocean floor can even actually slide beneath and raise the lighter continental shelf. When this occurs, it may be as if the doors of the sea have been flung wide again. The ocean breaks from its confines with annihilating power, and God — it seems — does not stay its waves” (pp. 4-5).
But it does not seem that God did not stay the waves of the tsunami. He did not stay the waves in fact. All our discussions on this subject are all about why God did not stay the waves, not whether He stayed the waves. The waves hit the shore, meaning that they were not prevented from hitting the shore. We begin with the indisputable fact: God did not stop this terrible event. That said, the options are these. 1. He did not stop the waves because He does not exist. 2. He did not stop the waves because the waves did not “exist” — i.e. the waves were non-existent or insignificant. 3. He did not stop the waves because He was incapable of doing so. 4. He did not stop the waves because He had good reasons for not intervening. These options respectively are: 1. Atheism; 2. Panglossianism; 3. Tinygodism; 4. Classical Christian theology. So, what’ll it be?
Calvinism gets in trouble with the other sectors of Christendom because we say out loud what other orthodox Christians are saying sotto voce, and with many of them doing it unbeknownst to themselves. This last point includes Hart because #2 is actually a subset of #4. C.S. Lewis described Calvin’s writing of the Institutio this way: “In it Calvin goes on from the original Protestant experience to build a system, to extrapolate, to raise all the dark questions and give without flinching the dark answers” (English Literature, p. 43). This is the Calvinist sin against ecclesiastical decorum. We state the implications of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, and we speak right into the microphone. I recall that when I was a philosophy undergraduate, the argument I encountered that nonbelievers mount against all Christians is the same argument that most Christians mount against the Calvinists. Should strike us as odd.
Chesterton, no Calvinist himself, at least knew what the basic questions were.
“If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat” (Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 15).
To say things here like “it seems that God did not intervene in the tsunami” is a preliminary step to denying the cat. But confronted with a flayed cat, do we really have the right to say, “It seems that God did not prevent this”? No. He did not prevent it in fact. And for all Christians (who believe He had the power to prevent it), the question before the house is why.