God, Gaza, and Genocide
Is God to Blame?
I spent the weekend in Houston at the Episcopal Parish Networking Conference. With several hours to kill on Saturday between the last session and our flight home, my friend Tanya and I grabbed an Uber and visited Houston’s Holocaust Museum. Inside, we walked through the history of the Holocaust, beginning with Germany’s debilitating defeat in World War I, and the eventual rise of Adolf Hitler. From there, the museum bore witness to the power of dehumanizing words leading to the state-sanctioned concentration, deportation, and annihilation of European Jewry at the hands of Hitler and his willing executioners.
Unfortunately, it’s a twisted time to visit a museum dedicated to the preservation of the Jewish people as they attempt to wipe their Palestinian neighbors off the face of the earth. Genocide is genocide, no matter who is doing the killing. The language and tactics used by Benjamin Netanyahu and his willing executioners are a mirror image of Nazi ideology and Nazi extermination practices. Hitler called the eradication of the Jewish people his “Final Solution.” Netanyahu is calling his slaughter of Palestinians “total victory.” Same sick song, just a different verse and voice. Hurt people hurt other people, but that is no excuse for the nearly two million people on the brink of starvation and the 29,000 people killed in Palestine since early October.
I do not have the political expertise or historical background on the Holy Land to dive deeper into the conflict, except to say what Israel is doing is pure evil. And whether you come face to face with evil in a museum or face to face with evil in your lifetime, it conjures up all kinds of questions about the problem of evil and God’s role in allowing such evil.
When bad things happen, I often hear people say, "Well, God's still on the throne," as if that is helpful on any level. Here’s a pro tip: God was on the throne during the Holocaust. God was on the throne during the Rwandan genocide. God is on the throne as thousands of innocent Palestinians are being massacred by Israel. If God is really in control, then God is doing a terrible job of being God. Hannah the HappyHeretic recently posted a similar sentiment on her Instagram:
An Open Question to Christians: How are you able to maintain faith in a supposed all loving deity when atrocities like the genocide of Palestinians are happening right now? How the fuck can you explain God getting away with this? Explain to me, with real answers, how your supposedly loving god could allow such atrocities to happen to his apparently beloved children?
Let me start by saying I have great sympathy and solidarity with Hannah, and anyone else for that matter, who is vocalizing these kinds of questions and this kind of rage at man’s inhumanity toward man. But is God really to blame, or are we the guilty party? It’s easy to accuse an omnipotent God for all the evil in this world. I also think it’s a cop-out. It gets us humans off the hook. It deflects the problem and the solution to some higher being instead of focusing on human agency and human culpability. It allows us to sit around hoping for a solution instead of getting to work finding a solution.
Hannah is asking an ancient, serious question about the problem of evil. Theologians call this “theodicy,” or the branch of philosophy seeking to reconcile the existence of evil in light of God’s existence. Basically, if God is good, then why does evil exist? If God is all-powerful, then why doesn’t God end human suffering?
If you are wondering the same thing, you are in good company. Job asked God the same question thousands of years ago. From what we can tell from the biblical story, God vehemently refused to answer. God didn’t say his ways are higher than our ways, or that he has a perfect plan. God flat out didn’t give an answer beyond pointing Job to the miracle that is the natural world. It seems God is perfectly OK sharing how God cares and intervenes for the planets, the creatures in the sea, the raven and the lion, but us humans? That is a bit more complicated.
The first step toward grappling with the problem of evil and why God doesn’t immediately intervene to stop human suffering is to recalibrate what we believe about God’s sovereignty. According to Dr. Thomas Jay Oord, “Because God loves everyone and everything, God never controls anyone or anything.” God’s love requires God to stand down, to allow human beings the full freedom to choose good or evil. Oord’s position is the basis for open and relational theology. Instead of an all-controlling God, the God of open theism believes God is experiencing time in the same way we are. This God isn't forcing His will on the world but working with us to bring about goodness, beauty, and flourishing. God is in this with us, not a bystander in the sky. This God doesn't know what is going to happen tomorrow anymore than we do, and strangely, that is incredibly comforting. As Dr. Oord said on our podcast, “God simply can’t be in control.” Because if God is in complete control of human events, then what is happening right now in Palestine is God’s will, and that is bloody blasphemy.
This reframing of God’s ability to intervene in world history also places the onus on us. Human beings have agency, and our task from the very beginning of Creation is to live incarnational lives where we put flesh on the God we say we believe in. As image bearers of a God who’s only skin in this game is ours, we are the ones who are culpable. God isn't going to just fix the shit we refuse to fix ourselves. War is a human invention. Hate is a human invention. Racism is a human invention. Therefore, human beings have the power and ability to end war, end hate, end racism, and end genocide. If human beings have the power to bring about God’s kingdom on earth, we also can create hell on earth.
My gentle plea to anyone wondering just where God is in this atrocity is this: don't blame God. That’s just a cop-out. I am the problem. You are the problem. The same hatred, the same fear, the same motivations leading Israel to murder their neighbors’ exists in every human heart. God didn't step in to stop the Holocaust and God will not step in to stop the genocide of Palestinians. Why? Because God is in the gas chambers. God is in the bomb shelters. God is currently starving in Gaza, awaiting his next meal. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison, shortly before his execution at the hands of the Nazis:
God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us…Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering. Only the suffering God can help.
I am not a theologian, but I believe our understanding of God is incorrect. What if God isn’t the omnipotent eye in the sky but the powerless, eternal victim of violence? Institutional, white, privileged Christianity venerates God the Pantocrator, or the victorious Christ enthroned on high. But, the “God of the poor, the peasant, and the slave has always been the poor, suffering, unprotected Christ,” writes former Hitler Youth and German soldier turned theologian Jurgen Moltmann. The center of our faith isn’t the omnipotent, all-powerful God in heaven, but the God most known as a defenseless man on a cross crying in agony and abandonment. As Moltmann continues:
The death of Jesus on the cross is the center of all Christian theology. It is not the only theme of theology, but it is in effect the entry to its problems and answers on earth. All Christian statements about God, about creation, about sin and death and suffering have their focal point in the crucified Christ.
We follow a God who doesn’t cause human suffering, but feels and understands human suffering. We follow a God who became incarnate in you and me. God doesn’t exist out there somewhere, but right here in every human heart. “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours…Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours,” warns Teresa of Avila.
We are the Body of Christ sent out in peace to love and serve the world. That is God’s plan. We are God’s plan. Evil will be eradicated when we, the Body of Christ, are willing to suffer and die for the sake of justice, just as God is doing right now in Gaza. Until then, we have no business blaming God for the evil we not only create, but refuse to correct.
If you would like additional resources on the problem of evil, as well as open and relational theology, listen to Dr. Thomas Jay Oord’s podcast interview with Holy Heretics and check out his books God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love After Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils as well as his recent work Open and Relational Theology: An Introduction to Life-Changing Ideas. Dr. Oord’s work in this area is a paradigm-changing approach, and is must reading for anyone interested in the problem of evil.
Gary Alan Taylor
This is a great essay! I'll add it to the Center for Open and Relational Theology newsletter.
Tom
“The first step toward grappling with the problem of evil and why God doesn’t immediately intervene to stop human suffering is to recalibrate what we believe about God’s sovereignty.” Wrong. The first step towards grappling with this question is to ask whether or not “God” as described, depicted, and declared in the Bible exists and is real. If you accept that “He” is not, the entire issue of the “problem of evil” goes away or becomes entirely a problem of “humanity.” As a former christian who once bought into the biblical God hook, line, and sinker, I can now see how the belief in the “God” of the Bible actually perpetuates the “problem of evil” in various problematic ways, some which you mention. The idea of Him having a Heaven for us also means that all the crap that happens here is less important, so who cares? There is a way to continue to engage with the mysterious elements of our existence without personifying some celestial deity whose attitudes and values seem to change with every cultural whim, but continuing to try and rationalize the existence of the Biblical God and “his sovereignty” is not it.