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January 5, 2005

The Theological Message in the Destructive Tsunami

The earthquake near Sumatra and the resulting tidal wave that have wreaked devastation in many nations on two separate continents was the final major event in the tumultuous year of 2004. The people of the world watched in stunned disbelief as television footage showed us mountains of bodies, some 30 percent of them children, and massive destruction of property caused by gigantic waves that swept over the land far beyond the beaches. Imagine the psychological impact of this event on such nations as Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan. To put this trauma into perspective recall the numbing pain inflicted on the psyche of America on 9/11 when this nation of almost 300,000,000 people lost about 3,000 lives in a terrorist attack. The healing of these wounds is still unfinished. Yet a single town in Indonesia or Sri Lanka lost ten times that many in this Tsunami. The estimate of lives lost has climbed quickly each day until it has now reached a staggering total beyond 150,000. I doubt the exact number of deaths will be known for some time, but surely most of those now listed as missing will ultimately come to rest in the deaths column. This event, like all natural disasters, forces upon the people of the world a new and scary consciousness. Once the trauma has passed that new consciousness will frame new, ultimate and very human questions that will be unavoidable.

This planet, our scientists tell us, is some four and a half billion years old. In its life span it has often not been a safe place for any living thing. During its first billion or so years, no life existed on this planet. Instead a constant barrage of meteorites and other particles of an exploding universe relentlessly pounded the earth’s surface. Nature’s raw violence was visible in the liquefied rock boiling near the center of the earth.

As recently as 200 million years ago, the landmass on this planet formed a single continent. What is now North and South America nestled into Europe and Africa. Australia was the underbelly of India and Antarctica was the southern edge of this single landmass. Over a vast span of time violent earthquakes miles beneath the sea have broken up that landmass into the continents that we identify today. Those calamitous events, however, occurred before there was an inhabitant who could knowingly record or be victimized by them.

No sense of tragedy was associated with the force of nature until some 50,000 to 100,000 years ago when our earliest, self-conscious ancestors finally emerged through the evolutionary process. Only then were there living beings whose minds enabled them to embrace time as a connected flowing whole. They could remember the past and anticipate the future, which meant that the uniquely human dimension of chronic anxiety entered the life of this world. Expanded knowledge enables us to know that yesterday’s violence might well return again tomorrow. The natural forces of storm, hurricane and earthquake were so intense that these creatures trembled in fear before their power and sought to placate whoever or whatever was in control of these forces that appeared to victimize them. Human survival required that we become aware of nature’s power without being immobilized by it. Had we not been able to make that adjustment the evolutionary step that brought us self-consciousness would have been aborted and life would have devolved back to the beasts of the field existing in a world of unknowing.

Finding a way to deal with this trauma was the catalyst that caused primitive religion to be born. Our vulnerable ancestors survived by envisioning a powerful supernatural being, who was big enough to control the forces of nature and who was our ally. That was when human beings assumed that those devastating forces of nature were either expressions of this God’s power or events that occurred at the divine bidding. So, a contract with God, sometimes called a covenant, was formed. Human beings were compelled by their need for security to discern and obey the divine will and to please this supernatural being with respectful liturgies. That is why every human religious system has developed codes of conduct that are said to have been dictated by God. That is also why every human religious system has produced traditions of worship that must be adhered to in the minutest detail. Natural disasters were inevitably understood as to be expressions of divine wrath. Primitive religious leaders devoted their efforts to determining exactly what human beings had done to provoke the divine anger. A consensus would be formed around some conclusions and a reformation would be instituted designed to express both penitence and new resolve to please God in the future. Fortunately, for these human interpreters, natural disasters were widely scattered in time so that the illusion could be preserved, that the adopted changes were successful and God was pleased to be their protector once again.

Our religious traditions still reflect this mindset. God, according to the Bible, controlled the rain, wind, lightning, thunder and all natural disasters, using them to punish sin and to reward righteousness. The psalmists reminded their readers that God set the boundaries for the oceans and rivers. The waters escaped those boundaries only at God’s instigation. Even as our ancestors in faith died in the great disasters of history, their deaths had meaning since God had a divine purpose in each tragedy. It was a comforting thought. Our forebears used the structures of their supernatural religion to keep their debilitating fears in check. This idea no longer works for modern people, which means that when tragedy strikes, our peculiar destiny is to wrestle with the new issue of potential meaninglessness.

Nothing reveals this modern dilemma more clearly than the way this current tragedy has been interpreted by the public media. God has not been mentioned once as a causative factor of the Tsunami. This means that far more than we recognize consciously, God understood as the supernatural, controlling presence, is no longer a working hypothesis in our increasingly secular world. Richard Norton Smith on PBS did refer to “the almost biblical proportions” of this disaster. He did not tell us to what he was referring by his use of the word “biblical” but I suspect his reference was either to the flood story at the time of Noah or to the destruction that shall accompany the end of the world that the Bible has projected into the future.

Instead of God being discussed as a factor in this disaster the media introduced us to geological explanations. Earthquakes are caused by the collisions of tectonic plates far below the sea. We learned that this particular tragedy occurred when the displacement initiated by the thrusting of the Indian plate beneath the Burma plate created waves so powerful that they devastated nearby nations and sent 30-foot surges to pound the east coast of Africa half a globe away. We were informed that there is today an active fault line under the Canary Islands off West Africa that has the potential to erupt, sending half a trillion tons of rock into the Atlantic Ocean that could create tidal waves capable of pounding America’s shores with water heights larger than the skyscrapers of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Miami. Only human beings are equipped to live with the knowledge of their own potential destruction. The sheep will not worry about this pending tragedy. The cows will continue to chew their cuds and the rabbits will keep on breeding. To be human is to embrace our frightening world and to know that we cannot make it secure. Our assertion that God is in charge is little more than another attempt to keep the delusion of our security in tact.

One cannot appeal to the idea of a supernatural deity who controls our destinies in the face of the raw and indiscriminate power of the Tsunami that hurls bodies into a watery grave without rhyme or reason. The modern conclusion is that there is no sky God directing the affairs of nature. So desperate is our anxiety, so deep is our need to believe that such a protector is there that we say astonishingly naïve things about this God. We talk as if we have actually captured the will of God, through an ‘infallible Pope or an inerrant Bible.’ We know, however, that these relics from the childhood of our humanity do not hold water, that they are nothing but pathetic coping devices to shield us from the terror of being aware that we are at the mercy of forces over which we know that we have no control.

This event, happening west of Sumatra – miles beneath the oceans, makes it very clear that no angry God decided to victimize the world. There is only impersonal, natural power, oblivious to human concerns. This natural disaster reminds us that the military might of a single nation, even one with vast nuclear capacity, is like fools’ gold when it comes to protecting the world from nature’s fury. It also confronts us with the frightening necessity of abandoning the supernatural God of yesterday, who allowed bad things to happen only if we deserved them. Suddenly all of our attempts to build security are revealed as little more than superstitions. All we can finally depend on in this world is our own fragile humanity and human life is inextricably bound together in a common destiny. The theological challenge that rises inevitably in this crisis is the awareness that we alone are our neighbor’s keeper.

Can human life survive without the security of a divine protector? Or will that realization prove to be our Achilles’ heel as we turn out to be like the dinosaurs that bloomed for but a moment in cosmic time and then disappeared when they could not adapt to a new environment? The only alternative to this bleak picture is that this tragedy will drive us into a new consciousness that will produce a radically different way to view both God and our own humanity. Those are the issues posed as Mother Nature sends us reeling into the year 2005. I will seek to address these issues in my column next week.

– John Shelby Spong

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Weeping Over The Grave of God

Part II of a series about the Tsunami

In a 20th century drama entitled, “Conversation at Midnight,” playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay had her character Ricardo speak these words: “Man has never been the same since God died. He has taken it very hard…He gets along pretty well, as long as it’s daylight…but it’s no use. The moment it begins to get dark, as soon as it is night, he goes out and howls over the grave of God.”

Those words have been very poignant for me through the years, rising every time I experience the tragic dimensions of life that in the past were cushioned by the traditional understanding of God. The earthquake in the Indian Ocean, which spawned the Tsunami waves killing more than 150,000 people, was the latest occasion for calling to mind these words.

Had such a tragedy struck our world 500-600 years ago, two things would have been quite different. First, the probability is that most of the people of the Western world would never have known about it. The world was so vast in that period of history. Oceans and language were great barriers. Communication systems were quite primitive. This Tsunami would have made its way only into the remembered history of the affected areas, entering the folklore of the people and producing perhaps another story like the one about Noah.

In the 21st century, however, the press covered this enormous disaster relentlessly. Pictures of its horror invaded our homes via television. The story journeyed with us through our car radios. It dominated the front pages of newspapers across this planet. There was no escape from the searing reality of the carnage, the cries of the victims or those newly bereaved. No one could avoid staring at the mass graves or trying to embrace what it means to lose so many lives so suddenly. People’s emotions were numbed. This was not an attack by a foreign enemy to which people could release the frenzy of their pent up anger. It was the work of an impersonal force tearing up the earth miles beneath the ocean floor and unleashing waves of such height, power and fury that they destroyed everything in their path. Elderly people died. Babies died, sick and crippled people died, mothers died, fathers died. Rich vacationers died, poor peasants died. It had no rhyme, no reason and it lent itself to no rational process of thinking.

The second thing that was different was that in the past this tragedy would have been understood in the context of a religious worldview. Theories would abound as to what its meaning was and why God was so displeased that this divine punishment was hurled at the world. That was the way that Europe understood the Bubonic Plague in the 14th century and the way the storm that sank the Spanish armada in 1588 was interpreted. In the Tsunami coverage this religious dimension was totally missing at first, a clear indication that the religious worldview of the past no longer exists. Instead we were given geological lessons about the collision of tectonic plates. No one assumed that the victims were being punished. No one offered a rational explanation implying any purpose. Only after the passage of several days did the religious spokespersons begin to present their explanations on television and radio talk shows, but these voices were singularly lacking in both profundity and credibility. Larry King, interviewing not clergy but former Presidents Bush and Clinton, kept pressing both of them to say what this tragedy had done to their faith. President George W. H. Bush in response referred to the time he had lost a daughter and it “did cause me to wonder why…an innocent child.” President Clinton referred to the unfairness of life at all times and urged Larry King to have on his program representative theologians from the religions practiced by most of the victims, Hindu, Moslem, Buddhist and Christian, to have them discuss how their faith helped them to understand this disaster. This tragedy simply did not lend itself to their pious but threadbare explanations. This was simply nature acting with the fury for which nature is well known.

Perhaps the last gasp of that traditional, pre-modern religious thinking occurred after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, when Jerry Falwell, appearing on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, offered the opinion that God had removed the shield of divine protection from America because its leaders had begun to tolerate “feminists, abortionists, homosexuals and the American Civil Liberties Union.” The nation gasped at this level of religious arrogance and the current Bush administration distanced itself from these remarks, saying it did not want to be associated with that kind of response. Yet, years ago that was the typical and almost universal explanation. It is the common explanation that one encounters in the writing of the biblical prophets.

What has happened in the intervening years to change public perceptions? I think it is fair to say that God, understood as an external, supernatural, miracle-working deity has died. The death of this God was not sudden. The realization of this divine demise has slowly trickled down over the centuries from the intellectuals to the masses. The death of this God has spawned two seemingly opposite responses in our day. One is the development of a radically secular society. The other is in the hysterical rise of fundamentalist, evangelical religion that represents a denial that the death of God has occurred.

How did this death of God occur? It began in the 16th century with Copernicus and his later disciples Kepler and Galileo, who forced us to see that the earth was not the center of the universe and that God did not live just beyond the sky, engaged in the tasks of watching, planning, intervening, keeping record books, punishing and rewarding. This insight posed a mighty challenge to the God we met in the pages of scripture. This God was quite capable of splitting the Red Sea to liberate the Chosen People and of dictating the Ten Commandments to Moses. As the understanding of the universe expanded, we no longer knew where God was and more importantly who God was. The universe seemed very large and we began to feel very lonely. Then Isaac Newton explained how the laws of nature operated in this universe, leaving little room for miracle and magic. Next Charles Darwin challenged our assumption that human life was just a little lower than the angels, suggesting instead that it was just a little higher than the apes. Finally, Albert Einstein took away all certainty, replacing it with relativity. With each new insight, the traditional concept of God faded into the shadows.

The next step in the desacralization of our world came when we could no longer explain evil with our appeals to this supernatural deity. Life seemed more and more governed by chance and less and less by purpose. Analyzing who survived the attack on the World Trade Center, we discovered that it was the chance factor of whether they worked on the upper floors or the lower floors, not whether they were deserving or not. Passengers on the doomed 9/11 airliners prayed fervently but no divine hand reached down to give them aid. They were the chance victims who booked passage on the wrong plane. Then came the earthquake and the Tsunami. It erupted beneath the sea. It killed religious people and non-religious people. It killed Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists. No God stopped it. When people thought about it they concluded that no God could stop it, which posed a provocative theological issue in such a way that it was inescapable. If God has the power to intervene and does not, then surely God is malevolent. If God does not have the power then God is impotent. Either way the traditional God explanation fails. What we had long suspected intellectually we began to embrace emotionally. There is no supernatural divine power that stands at our side to be our protector. Thus the traditional religious worldview died and people began to cope with what it means to be citizens of a lonely and seemingly empty universe. As the days pass and the world begins to return to its normal routines, voices will surely try to respirate artificially the old world view in order to make sense of this disaster, in an effort to preserve the remaining shreds of divinity to which we cling so tenaciously. Their words, however, will inevitably sound empty and hollow because they will be spoken out of a religious context that is no longer believable and is no longer ours.

Does this mean that there is no God? That is a common conclusion of those who today inhabit the ’secular city,’ but I don’t think so. I am convinced, however, that it does mean that the primary way we have thought about God for almost 10,000 years is dying or is dead. Since most people do not or cannot separate God from our traditional definition of God, it feels to many like there is no God or that God has died. God and the human definition of God are, however, not identical.

Perhaps God can be met and experienced in ways beyond the theistic definitions of the past. Perhaps it is still possible to encounter transcendence, otherness, holiness or timelessness without locating these realities in an external supernatural, miracle-working, invasive deity? That is where their inner quest has led many people in the modern world today. I stand with them. This means, I believe, that we stand on the edge of the most profound spiritual revolution in human history. It is dawning with rending power in the human psyche. We will, however, never be able to encounter this reality until we allow the traditional God concept from the days of our childlike humanity to die. For many that is a fearful transition to be avoided by all means including denial, but for me and for others it represents a new chapter in human history for which we yearn with deep anticipation. I will seek to open a door into that scary place next week.

– John Shelby Spong

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January 19, 2005

Re-Imaging God in a Post-Tsunami World

The final part of a three-part series about the Tsunami

“If God is God, he is not good! If God is good, he is not God!” These words, from a 20th century adaptation of the Book of Job entitled “J.B.”, were written by Archibald McLeish.

“God no longer has any work to do.” A quotation from Michael Donald Goulder, Professor of New Testament Studies at the United Kingdom’s University of Birmingham, when he announced in 1981 that he had become a “non-aggressive atheist.”

Both the dramatist McLeish and the biblical theologian Goulder were stating that they no longer find significant meaning in the traditional way of understanding God. If God is a Being, supernatural in power, living somewhere external to this world, who invades this world periodically to answer their prayers, to accomplish the divine will, or to protect them from peril or their enemies, then God has, to these two gentlemen, become inoperative. They will no longer share in this human illusion. If there is nothing more to God than this, then they will choose to be atheists. They have articulated the religious crisis of our time. Unwillingness to believe in this theistic God seems to leave us with but the single option of embracing atheism. The theistic God, because of the great advances in human knowledge, has been rendered unbelievable. A natural catastrophe like the Tsunami brings these issues dramatically and urgently into full view.

The defenders of the traditional understanding of God try to make sense out of this tragedy by postulating a deserving guilt on the part of its victims or by telling us that the will of God in this tragedy will be made clear in time. These arguments are simply not convincing.

Let me, as a believing Christian, say it bluntly: the skies are empty. There is no supernatural parent figure waiting to come to our aid or to answer our prayers. The God, quoted as the final source of all authority, is no more. When we recognize these dimensions of our spiritual crisis, then much of the human behavior observable today becomes comprehensible.

Those in our world who are emotionally capable of laying aside the now outdated religious explanations of antiquity are called ’secular humanists.’ They come in two varieties: some are stoical humanists who work for the common good and who are willing to serve the whole society. In them we see that idealism is not dead. Others, driven by their deep survival instincts, become corrupt, grasping specimens of humanity, looking out for themselves alone. If the judging God is gone, they reason, so is the ethical system that purported to reflect the will of God. They recognize no binding ethic so long as they do not get caught. They give us the Enrons, the WorldComs and the politics of greed that mark our recent history.

Those on the other hand, who are not capable of living without the security of their religious myths of antiquity, become the fundamentalists and the religious fanatics of out time. They vigorously deny their doubts and fears, and cover their insecurity by seeking to impose their particular form of religion on all others. Examples of this mentality abound in acts of terror and in the religious imperialism that we now observe in our own elections. Neither alternative offers much hope for the future. We cannot return to yesterday. We must enter the world that is being born before our eyes and engage the faith crisis of modernity.

It was a Greek philosopher named Xenophanes, who wrote: “If horses had gods, they would look like horses.” This was his way of urging us to recognize that the gods of human beings also and inevitably will look like human beings. Human beings are finite and mortal so we envision God as infinite and immortal. We are limited in knowledge, so God is omniscient. We are bound to a single place but God is omnipresent. We are limited in power, but God is omnipotent. We account for this similarity between God and ourselves by proclaiming that we were created in God’s image. However, the reality is that God has been made in our image. If that is true, as it so obviously is, then perhaps it is not God but our very inadequate image of God that has died. That should be welcomed insight, for any God who can be killed ought to be killed. So the first step in building a new, authentic way to think about God is to cease trying to keep yesterday’s image of God alive. Divine artificial respiration is a waste of time.

We understand this rationally, but the uniqueness of self-conscious humanity is to tremble at the vastness of space and our smallness in the scheme of things. That is why we invented the parent God in the first place. We needed a sense of divine security. We would rather be ‘born again’ into a continued child-like dependency than to be forced to grow up and take responsibility for ourselves. It was the theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who urged us to separate God from religion. “God would have us know,” he said, “that we must live as those who manage our lives without God.” That is quite a challenge but that is where we are today.

Much of western religion has been predicated on a definition of human weakness. We have portrayed ourselves religiously as broken, inadequate and fallen. Our angst has created in us a need to denigrate ourselves. For centuries the church taught us that God’s greatness could best be seen in response to human depravity, exhorting us to gratitude for the “amazing grace that saved a wretch like me.” We are told “there is no health in us” and “we are not worthy to gather up the crumbs” from the divine table. The first step in the quest to build an authentic spirituality is to banish this negativity and recognize how incredible human life really is or can be.

When human life first emerged into self-consciousness, a creature had finally evolved who was not bound by time and space. Our minds can soar beyond our boundaries. We live inside the flow of time remembering a past that is no more, and anticipating the future that is not yet. We know something about the life force that surges within us. We recognize the power of love that enhances our life. We are aware that we can receive love, and once received we can give love away, but none of us can originate love. Love is a power that flows into us from beyond ourselves. We contemplate what it means to be unique. We have both a sense of who we are and a vision of who we want to be, which is the source of our discontent. These are the authentic parts of a God experience, which no other creature can share. Yes, we have created our image of God, that miracle working supernatural one, but we are not the authors of our experience of God. God is the name of the life within us that opens us to the miracle of transcendence. God is the name of love that comes to us from beyond ourselves. God is the ground or source of being out of which our own sense of being has emerged. Those are the moments when we discover oneness, embrace eternity and know why it is that we call ourselves spiritual beings.

What a difference this new angle of vision makes. Instead of seeing God as our judge eliciting our guilt, we begin to see God as the source of our empowerment. Instead of seeing Jesus as a divine visitor who came to rescue sinful humanity, we see him as the fully human one inviting us into his divinity, which is nothing but humanity transformed by wholeness. Instead of seeing the Holy Spirit as the source of our piety, we see Spirit as the source of expanding life. Instead of blaming God for tragedy and pain, or seeking to exonerate God from blame in an unjust universe; we accept our responsibility for building a world where every person has a better chance to live, to love and to be all that each of us is capable of being. We will use our intelligence and our ingenuity not to defend our dying God images, but to understand our world so deeply that we, not some distant mythical God, can be the needed bulwark against the natural fury of earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and drought. Instead of being angry when we are victimized by evil or destruction that we cannot control, we will work together to build a safer world. Instead of seeing ethics as following some divinely established rules to please a parent God and avoid punishing wrath, we will learn to see goodness as those actions that enhance life making all of us more fully human. This means that we will also see evil as those actions which diminish our humanity making us more willing to hate than to love, more able to destroy than to build up. Instead of seeing life after death as a time to receive divine reward or punishment we will see it as humanity merging into divinity, and finitude entering into eternity.

This coming new spirituality will not promise us security, but it will give us the ability to live in a radically insecure world with hope and meaning. It will not promise reward to entice our self-centeredness, but it will invite us to risk discovering both life’s heights and depths. It will not mean that our lives are safe, but it will mean that we do not die without meaning, without communing with that which is finally real. That is where God is found for me. Someday we will recognize that the God of our past could only be God for the weak and the lost, one who could only win our loyalty by keeping us in a state of emotional childishness. Perhaps the crisis in faith through which we are going today is nothing but the adolescent pangs of a new maturity being born. Surely the God of the past must die if this new day is to arrive.

Is this enough to make us capable of living in this frightening world? Do we not still need a supernatural protective Being out there somewhere? That is the question that each of us must answer. If we are still emotional children who need a protective parent, we will continue to create whatever illusions we require to survive and we will try to force all people into our religious mold. If on the other hand we are ready to grasp a new maturity and become a new creation, then we will find in this moment in history a freeing and awesome call to be the God bearers in this world, the co-creators of life; and we will eagerly enter the next stage of our human development. It is my hope that this will be the conclusion and the vocation to which the tragic earthquake and the terrifying tsunami will finally drive our world.

– John Shelby Spong

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