The Doors of the Sea

I’ve just finished David Bentley Hart’s very difficult (i.e. lots of words I had to look up) but very compelling examination of the question of evil entitled The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? Hart essentially asks the two questions that he feels are most relevant for Christians who are trying to address this issue. He summarizes these two questions through two historical works: Voltaire’s “Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon” and Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov.

1) Is evil and suffering morally intelligible alongside belief in God? This is the classic question of theodicy. Voltaire saw the destruction of the catastrophic earthquake that struck Lisbon on All Saints Day in 1755 and asked the natural question that we would all ask had we been there. How could a good God allow this? The fairness of it all is a question that raises itself inevitably in all times of suffering whether on a personal or societal scale. The tsunami is an obvious example from the recent past but (tragically) case studies are not hard to find.

This question should be intelligible to all but, for Hart, it is not a terribly threatening. It is based on a notion of God that is alien to the Christian gospel, a view that presents God as the one who sets the world in motion, controls (even decrees) everything that happens under heaven and whose actions can subsequently be judged based on their morality. This, says Hart, is not the Christian vision of God because it does not take seriously the idea that the world as it is is somehow estranged from God, that evil and suffering are not ordained by God but are in the most fundamental way, enemies of God’s true intentions for the world.

2) Is ultimate redemption worth the cost if it somehow requires suffering?
Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov asks what is a far more dangerous question than the one above. Ivan surveys the wreckage of human suffering and asks the question: Would eventual salvation be worth the price if it required the tears of just one child? Is there any ‘ultimate justice’ that will justify suffering of this kind? Ivan rejects any kind of ultimate solution that would make the suffering of children either meaningful or necessary for God’s overall purpose.

For Hart this is the far more disturbing question. Ivan freely admits that God will likely ’save’ those who have suffered innocently. He admits that there may be a time when some kind of ultimate justice will prevail. He simply rejects any kind of truth or justice that would necessitate the kind of suffering that we see here and now (even the tears of one child).

Hart concludes that Ivan’s is a profoundly Christian question and a profoundly prophetic question because it forces us to deal with the temptation to rationalize evil on the grounds that temporary suffering will be understandable in light of the final solution. It forces us to disown any theodicy that tries to persuade us that God utilizes evil as some part of his master plan. This is not good enough for Ivan and it’s not good enough for Hart. He summarizes the two questions in what I find to be a very memorable quote.

“Voltaire sees only the terrible truth that the history of suffering and death is not morally intelligible. Dostoevsky sees - and this bespeaks both his moral genius and his irreducibly Christian view of reality - that it would be far more terrible if it were.”