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My family is from one of the most hurricane-prone places in the United States—our hometown was virtually wiped from the map by Hurricane Katrina. Because of this, we spend hurricane season tracking each tropical depression with dread and then, often, relief, when the storm moves somewhere out of the path of the people we love.
This time, though, with Hurricane Helene, we exhaled too soon. Instead of hitting the coast, the hurricane devastated inland places we never expected to be vulnerable—such as Asheville, North Carolina; Valdosta, Georgia; and countless other communities flooded nearly out of existence, with people stranded without food, electricity, or cell service.
After the storm passed through, I spent some time searching through social media, trying to determine the well-being of people I know and love. As I did, I saw—as we all have—image after image of human suffering and neighborhood devastation.
And, since it was social media, I also saw a lot of the usual types using the disaster to vindicate their own negative polarization. Some posted that the massive disaster befalling Asheville was due to that city’s well-known progressive culture and politics. Others countered by saying that most of the North Carolinians left homeless by the flood were in “red” counties, so maybe this was God’s judgment on MAGA. And on and on it went, as it always does.
In the past, after almost every hurricane, we could usually count the hours until Pat Robertson or some other television evangelist would blame it on God’s judgment on something—sometimes as specific as New Orleans’s annual “Southern Decadence” parade, and sometimes as general as “America’s turn away from God.”
Nor was this limited to the political right. While our families were crawling out of the rubble of Katrina, now almost 20 years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (then on the left and well before his gadfly persona of today) quoted the prophet Hosea to suggest that the storm was retribution for Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s opposition to the Kyoto Protocol for combating climate change: “For they that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind.”
The trivialized venue of modern social media is unique, but the underlying sarcasm about “What did they do to deserve this?” is not. And the much more serious, much more sober fears and questions beneath that are not unique either. What does it tell us about God when human beings have their entire lives wiped away?
Kris Kristofferson, the singer/songwriter who died this week, wrote a song, “The Best of All Possible Worlds,” based off of unbelieving philosopher Voltaire’s book Candide. Kristofferson’s song references police brutality, systemic racism, and unjust treatment of the poor with a tongue-in-cheek praise to living “in this best of all possible worlds.” Kristofferson laughed, but Voltaire mocked, pointing his satire at Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s defense of God’s justice in a cosmos of suffering and evil, that this is “the best of all possible worlds.”
While I believe Voltaire was wrong, Kristofferson was right to point out the kind of fatalism the philosopher saw as coming along with many attempts to justify God. We can yield to a shrugging “that’s the way it is” mentality that sees in every evil a signpost as to what God actually wants. That can lead to a “eat, drink, and be merry” hedonism, with a passive acceptance of all sorts of things that should be, at least, mourned, and, at best, changed.
The way Voltaire points, though, leads to the same form of pessimistic resignation in the long run. If the universe around us is random, chaotic, and meaningless, then we ought to read in it what is most ultimate: suffering, pain, and death.
Christians, Jews, and other theists have wrestled with the so-called “problem of evil,” including the problem of “natural evil,” for millennia. Some give greater emphasis to God’s sovereignty, with good biblical backing. Others emphasize the freedom and responsibility of human beings, along with a rejection of the idea that God could ever be the author of sin—also with very good biblical backing.
The question abides: How could a good and powerful God allow a world such as this one to exist? Why could he not stop the dam from breaking to keep that North Carolinian family’s house from being washed away? Is it because God was angry at them?
This is not just about hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis. Often, even in the quieter, less visible manifestations of very personal suffering, someone will wonder—even if they don’t say it—What has that person done to deserve this?
The Bible doesn’t ignore this question. God does not tell Job why, ultimately, he was allowed to suffer—nor does he give Job an answer as to why the universe is so seemingly filled with chaos and danger. God does, however, reject the easy answers of Job’s counselors, some of whom seek to read backward from the suffering an oracle about what God wants.
Jesus, likewise, condemns the suggestion that those who suffer at the hand of other people’s evil intentions or in the throes of some natural calamity are to blame for their calamity (Luke 13:1–5). He repudiates the religious leaders’ suggestion that a man’s congenital blindness was his or his parents’ fault (John 9:3). The chaotic natural forces around Jesus—whether wild animals or unclean spirits or boat-threatening storms—were calmed and redirected by the presence and voice of Jesus, the one who puts heaven and nature back together again.
When Christians speak of the existence of natural evil as a mystery, some balk that this is a way of evading the question. And yet every attempt—from that of nihilists to hyper-Calvinists to everyone in between—to answer the meaning of suffering bumps upon a mystery of some sort. The question is, what kind of mystery?
The mystery we see in the way of Jesus is one in which we hold together a tension: that of a God for whom not a sparrow falls apart from his awareness (Matt. 10:29–31) and for whom the death of a friend is received with weeping by Jesus himself (John 11:35).
Without a sense of the mystery of the wildness and fallenness of this present universe, the danger is that we come to see it as “normal.” Even worse is the danger that we would see in the bloodiness and violence of nature some picture of the way that God is. As Reinhold Niebuhr warned in the last century, “Our obsession with the physical sciences and with the physical world has enthroned the brute and blind forces of nature, and we follow the God of the earthquake and the fire rather than the God of the still small voice.”
The fact that we view the world around us with simultaneous awe, wonder, terror, and grieving is itself a signpost that there’s something missing from the merely natural. Jesus told us that earthquakes and other natural disasters would happen. He did not picture these as good but as the “birth pains” (Matt. 24:7–8, ESV throughout) of an old order that will be passing away, yielding to a new order beyond imagination.
The Bible itself tells us that these birth pangs are a creation in upheaval, “groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now” (Rom. 8:22). Our response is not to solve that nature-in-crisis the way we would an algebra equation. Our response is to groan right along with it as we wait, with a hope we cannot see, for all things to be where they belong: under the feet of a resurrected Christ and his joint heirs.
In the meantime, we do exactly what numerous people are doing right now: Clearing away the trees in front of people’s homes. Sitting alongside grieving families who have lost the ones they love. Serving food to those whose pantries are empty and whose local grocery stores are under water.
A hurricane doesn’t tell us who to hate. It reminds us who to love.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
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