The insurance industry refers to ”acts of God”. Does last month’s tsunami qualify? How does the worst natural disaster for half a century square with the ideas of a divine plan and divine providence? How could a merciful and just God allow the tectonic plates under the Indian Ocean to shift so catastrophically? The Mail & Guardian asked local religious leaders for their views.
None saw the tsunami as divine punishment, though some theologians emphasised human ignorance of God’s purposes. Kobus Gerber, Dutch Reformed Church general secretary, noted that ”the Scriptures are not about God’s people being packed in cotton wool; we’re part and parcel of life’s perils. It is not easy to decide if God should or could have intervened. Our knowledge isn’t enough.”
Deputy president of the Muslim Judicial Council Ihsaan Hendricks said God was in control, and that people could not continue living if they assumed otherwise. ”To those who question where God was [during the tsunami], God was there,” he said. ”Let us not question his power.”
The chairperson of the South African Rabbinical Association, Rabbi Yossy Goldman, remarked that all events were meant to be, and that God ”has a plan that humans cannot grasp … How do you reconcile a merciful God with evil, suffering and pain? We don’t know. But it would be arrogant and cruel to put this down to divine punishment.”
Other leaders argued that God should not be seen as the author of every natural occurrence. ”Many things happen in the world; some God leaves to happen,” said the South African Council of Churches’s White Rakuba. ”It doesn’t mean He wants them to happen.”
For the Rhema Church’s Ray McCauley the tsunami was a ”geological issue”. ”I call it random suffering — being at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Buddhists did not assume an all-powerful God, said Louis van Loon of the Buddhist Retreat Centre. ”We need to take things like this on the chin,” he said. ”There are plenty of good things in the world — but terrible things happen too.”
Jehovah’s Witness spokesperson Roy Cox took an apocalyptic view, finding the tsunami and other natural disasters ”part of the evidence that the blessings of God’s Kingdom are near”.
”The Bible foretold great earthquakes and food shortages for our day, but that does not mean Jehovah, God, or Jesus, are responsible for them, any more than a meteorologist is responsible for the weather.”
Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane argued that it was unhelpful to term the tsunami an act of God ”unless we say the same of other wonders of nature, from the awesome power of the Victoria Falls to the miracle of a baby’s first smile”.
Ndungane also underlined human culpability for the tragedy. Richer countries had early warning systems and could build structures that withstood earthquakes.
Poverty, rooted in unjust economic systems, meant natural disasters always seemed to hit the poor hardest.
The Reverend Cedric Mayson, coordinator of the African National Congress’s religious affairs commission, suggested that theological questions around the tsunami were inappropriate in a ”post-religious” time. ”The old debate of religion versus science is no longer valid; the debate has to incorporate religion and science.
”The phrase ‘act of God’ does not come out of Scriptures. It comes from religious teachings and ideas that are being challenged today.”