Regarding Divine Intervention

Recently, the archaic news program 60 Minutes broadcast a story about Christians who are being persecuted in Iraq. At the end of the report, the lathered 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley asked Reverend Canon Andrew White, “Some of your parishioners must ask you, ‘Why is God allowing this to happen to us?”1

It is a question that I have heard before in the context of the Holocaust. How can a just and caring God allow the Holocaust to happen?

Maybe it was the implication - God is allowing Muslims to massacre Christians in Iraq - that angered me.

Had I been asked that question, I would have answered by asking the reporter the following question: Can you give me an example in the last 2,000 years in which God intervened on behalf of a people who were threatened with extinction?

This isn’t a God hating atheist arguing that God does not exist. I believe in God, but I perceive the relationship between God and humanity from the perspective of a deist. God is the creator of the Universe who after setting it in motion, withdrew from the creation, relinquished control over life, and exerts no influence on natural phenomena.

My favorite God metaphor is that of The Watchmaker. “If you found something like a watch in the desert, you would of course suppose it was an artifact of an intelligent watchmaker. Here we find ourselves in an intricate world that we think of as an elaborate mechanism, so there must be an intelligent worldmaker.”2

However, contrary to deist philosophy I do believe in revelation. Revelation is God’s way of restraining “the passions, appetites and sinfulness of human beings.”3

And I also believe God created man with free will. We are not automatons and we are not predestined to live out our lives according to a divine plan. It is not to say that God cannot or is incapable of exerting influence over his creation. God created the universe to be a self-sustaining, self-controlling mechanism. On Earth, man is the x factor, capable of changing this biosphere in numerous ways through his action and inaction.

The reason God does not intervene in our petty affairs is because we were created with the capacity for choosing between right and wrong. It would be ludicrous for me to blame God every time I committed a sin. Frankly, it’s cheap to blame God for the excessive violence of mankind.

“In 1939, both Cuba and the United States refused to admit 937 Jewish refugees who had sailed from Hamburg, Germany, on the transatlantic liner St Louis. The ship was forced to return to Europe where, ultimately, many of the passengers perished in concentration camps or killing centers.”4

It would be easy to blame God for allowing many of the Jewish refugees from the St Louis to die in concentration camps because if God had willed, they would have been saved.

However, the lesson from the Holocaust is not that God did not care, but man’s indifference or hatred towards man doomed the passengers on the St Louis. The Holocaust happened because we, as a species, let it happened. During the 1930's, a group of people was in mortal danger, yet we could not let go of our petty hatred for a moment to save them. Our unproductive political leaders at the time were more concerned about Jews exceeding subjective and arbitrary immigration quotas.

Somehow in our minds, genocide is equated with natural disasters like earthquakes, volcanoes and hurricanes. People die in natural disasters and we take comfort in their deaths by saying it was God’s will. However, genocide is not a natural disaster. It is a preventable catastrophe.

In the United Nations charter is a stipulation that in the event of genocide, the UN would intervene. Since the inception of the overestimated United Nations, there were at least three major incidents that could be classified as genocide - Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia. We did not act to prevent these massacres, but someway this is God’s fault because God let it happen.

The only sign of man’s progress is the amazing ability to euphemize the English language, watering down the word genocide to the popular term “ethnic cleansing,” as if the Tutsis were expunged from Rwanda like a regrettable bowel movement after eating a bad meal at a fast food restaurant.

I also believe we are accountable for our actions. I wonder if on the day of our ultimate judgment, when our morally inept political leaders will have to account for their abominable behavior, they will attempt to rationalize so many massacres. They will look straight onto God and dare say, “Don’t look at me, it was Your fault. You let it happen.”

1 “Vicar: Dire Times for Iraq’s Christians,” 60 Minutes, CBS News (December 2, 2007)
2 Ian Hacking, “Root and Branch,” The Nation (October 8, 2007), p30.
3 David Brooks, “Faith vs. The Faithless,” New York Times (December 7, 2007).
4 “Voyage of the St Louis,” The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.