The Texas Floods & Christ

I think of the line from Hopkins’ poem, “No worst, there is none.”  How horrible.  How heart-rending.  The sorrow of the little girl’s parents–and of all of the other parents of the little children who were swept away–is unimaginable.  It was bad enough for those who knew her, for her school, for the congregation, and those of us who didn’t know her but were just in the background.

Of course this disaster raises the old question: Why would God allow such a thing?  That is not just an academic question to be answered with abstractions at  time like this.  The flood struck a Christian camp, drowning 27 little girls.  Their parents and churches were praying desperately, but seemingly to no avail.

I came across a few reflections that I, at least, found helpful.  The Federalist‘s John Daniel Davidson wrote a piece entitled No, The Texas Floods Are Not Some Mysterious Part Of God’s Plan.  He said that we shouldn’t try to rationalize what happened or try to find some larger purpose in it all or say that God has His reasons that we just don’t understand.

We need to realize instead that this world is not the way it is supposed to be.  Our fallen world is cut off from God at the deepest level.  We live in the realm of sin and death.  God, however, has broken into that world in Christ.  Taking sin and death into Himself on the Cross and rising from the dead, He saves us and redeems His creation.  But the final victory is ahead of us.

Davidson explains,

It wasn’t just that man sinned and was therefore alienated from God, but that through sin death entered the world, corrupting and disfiguring creation itself. Christ’s Passion and Resurrection reconciled man to Himself but also pointed to the coming of a new heaven and a new earth, where sin and death would be overcome. In the meantime, all of creation groans and travails in anticipation of that final victory. . . .

There’s simply something monstrous and unnatural about death and suffering. They were not meant to be part of the world God made for His children. As [David] Hart wrote, the reality of the cross “should not obscure that other truth revealed at Easter: that the incarnate God enters ‘this cosmos’ not simply to disclose its immanent rationality, but to break the boundaries of fallen nature asunder, and to refashion creation after its ancient beauty — wherein neither sin nor death had any place.”

Simply put, it’s wrong to look upon the devastation in Texas and say that God allowed it to happen for some inscrutable or mysterious reason, as if the purposes of the Almighty require the drowning of innocent girls. We Christians don’t need — and in truth, are not permitted — to believe that. We believe and proclaim instead something yet more profound: that Christ has conquered sin and death, and they now have no power over us. That’s why, even as we mourn and grieve, we can say with Saint Paul, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”

I also appreciated Kylee Griswold’s essay posted at the Federalist that same day: As Texas Christians Walk Through The Valley, Fear Not The Shadow Of Death.  Drawing on some classic Christian expositions of Psalms 33, she points out that what Christians must endure is not death, so much, which has been defeated, but the “shadow” of death that remains, which is terrifying but can not really hurt us.  And that we are to go “through” that valley of death’s shadow, coming out eventually to God’s mountain on the other side.

Both Davidson and Griswold quote from the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, who wrote Tsunami and Theodicy published by First Things back in 2005 after a tsunami killed thousands in Indonesia and reprinted in 2010 after an earthquake killed more thousands in Haiti.

He begins by excoriating the New Atheists who were exploiting those tragedies as giving final proof that God does not exist, as if they were something new, “as if believers have never until this moment considered the problem of evil or confronted despair or suffering or death. Perhaps we did not notice the Black Death, the Great War, the Holocaust, or every instance of famine, pestilence, flood, fire, or earthquake in the whole of the human past; perhaps every Christian who has ever had to bury a child has somehow remained insensible to the depth of his own bereavement.”  He also criticizes Christians who try to find some grand purpose in its all, as Davidson was saying, and he faces up to what Voltaire said about the Lisbon earthquake and to what the Christian novelist Dostoevsky has his character Ivan Karamazov say about the death of a child.

Read it all, but here is how Hart concludes (my bolds):

Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. For while Christ takes the suffering of his creatures up into his own, it is not because he or they had need of suffering, but because he would not abandon his creatures to the grave. And while we know that the victory over evil and death has been won, we know also that it is a victory yet to come, and that creation therefore, as Paul says, groans in expectation of the glory that will one day be revealed. Until then, the world remains a place of struggle between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death; and, in such a world, our portion is charity.

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes—and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”

 

Photo:  Flooding of the Guadalupe River near Kerrville, Texas in 2025 by Unknown author – https://x.com/USCGHeartland/status/1941569535238340640/photo/2, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=169349794