The only people who would seem to have the right to invoke God at the moment are the Haitians themselves, who beseech his help amidst dreadful pain. They, too, alas, appear to wander the wasteland of theodicy. News reports have described some Haitians giving voice to a worldview uncomfortably close to Pat Robertson\u2019s, in which a vengeful God has been meting out justified retribution: \u201cI blame man. God gave us nature, and we Haitians, and our governments, abused the land. You cannot get away without consequences,\u201d\u009d one man told The Times last week.<\/p>\n
Others sound like a more frankly theological President Obama: a 27-year-old survivor, Mond\u00c3\u00a9sir Raymone, was quoted thus: \u201cWe have survived by the grace of God.\u201d\u009d Bishop \u00c3\u2030ric Toussaint, standing near his damaged cathedral, said something similar: \u201cWhy give thanks to God? Because we are here. What happened is the will of God. We are in the hands of God now.\u201d\u009d A survivor\u2019s gratitude is combined with theological fatalism. This response is entirely understandable, uttered in a ruined landscape beyond the experience of most of us, and a likely source of pastoral comfort to the bishop\u2019s desperate flock. But that should not obscure the fact that it is little more than a piece of helpless mystification, a contradictory cry of optimistic despair.<\/p>\n
Terrible catastrophes inevitably encourage appeals to God. We who are, at present, unfairly luckier, whether believers or not, might reflect on the almost invariably uncharitable history of theodicy, and on the reality that in this context no invocation of God beyond a desperate appeal for help makes much theological sense. For either God is punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or as capricious as nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent (the Obama view). Unfortunately, the Bible, which frequently uses God\u2019s power over earth and seas as the sign of his majesty and intervening power, supports the first view; and the history of humanity\u2019s lonely suffering decisively suggests the second.<\/p>\n