Waiting With Japan (and T-Square)

Picture by Forget-Yesterday

I know some have already begun discussing the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor crises in Japan and asking theological questions. I don’t feel like I have anything to say that would be remotely useful, and that the best we can do is remain silent, give what we can, do what we can, and hope. Events like this do not cry out for explanation so much as for compassion – or perhaps I should say, they only cry out for explanation if our theology is set up in such a way that they do.

In my Sunday school class last week, the subject came up, and as we were up to Romans 1 in our study of that letter, we discussed what it means to think of God as in some sense plainly visible in the natural world. I emphasized that we cannot help but think differently than people did in bygone ages about these matters, and that theists should not simply have all the gods of polytheism, personifying forces of nature, rolled into one, but must find a way of acknowledging that things happen which simply ought not to be interpreted in terms of divine action or theological significance. If science offers anything helpful to religious thought, it is to free us from needing to interpret meaningless accidents and tragedies as though they are the acts of a malevolent deity who, although supposedly omnipotent, chooses to vent his frutrations using blunt, indiscriminate instruments of harm, fors of nature that seem perfectly capable of doing that on their own. Attributing them to supernatural agency is to make the tragic into something even worse.

And so I offer no thoughts or words that make sense of what is going on. I just hope for the best for the people of Japan.

I have been listening to a Japanese jazz fusion band, T-Square, today while working. Here’s a clip of them live.