Man, Misery and Mystery

As a member of a family that has been Presbyterian for many centuries, and as one who regularly communicates at Saint Stephen’s Episcopal on George Street, I feel comfortable writing on behalf of orthodox Protestants.

I am just a layman, to be sure, and make no claim to clerical expertise; but in addressing the recent earthquake in Haiti, the raw reaction of the layman may be more indicative of the church at large than the polished statements of the clergy.

It must be kept in mind throughout this discourse that orthodox Protestants are characterized by their practiced moderation, aptly captured in the Anglican Communion’s motto: Via Media (“middle way”). Moderation here does not refer crassly to some supposed “center”—political, moral, or otherwise—but rather to an understanding of the limitations of human knowledge.

While the Roman Catholics and many in the Eastern churches ascribe revelatory might to the traditions of men and invest mere mortals with advocatory powers, and while the low-church evangelicals declare every man an island, we orthodox Protestants properly see man as alone but with hierarchical help.

Hence, the orthodox Protestants—mostly Presbyterians, Anglicans, Lutherans, and some Methodists—have an ecclesiastical structure which strikes an admirable balance between parochial and centralizing tendencies.
Grounded in the teachings of Christ, modeled after the form of the early Church, this power-balancing and authority-sharing intentionally reflects a certain view of man. We are beings capable of understanding, but we do not have certainty of knowledge.

Applying these principles to the case of Haiti, the orthodox Protestant recognizes misfortune and seeks practical remedies. However, he charges the event with no significance divine or “cosmic” (to use a fashionable but vulgar term). God is good, but man is largely blind to the operation of good. He must not be so foolish as to mistake God’s plan with the movement of tectonic plates.

Fundamentalist Protestants can not resist the temptation to spout such asinine drivel. They have read the divine into the Haiti devastation. Reporting on the disaster, Pat Roberston claimed that Haiti had sworn “a pact to the devil” during its revolution against the French in 1791. The earthquake, avowed the preacher, was retribution.

Taking the bait—and mystifyingly projecting one modernist evangelical’s view onto millions of traditionalist Protestants—James Wood penned an editorial in the New York Times lambasting the whole Christian approach to natural disasters.

In concluding, Wood wrote, “For either God is punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or as capricious as nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent (the Obama view). Unfortunately, the Bible, which frequently uses God’s power over earth and seas as the sign of his majesty and intervening power, supports the first view; and the history of humanity’s lonely suffering decisively suggests the second.”
This interpretation of the Scripture is problematic. It might serve as a halfway reasonable reading of the Old Testament, but it misses its mark regarding the New. Christians, even the most wayward, tend to believe that God became incarnate to offer salvation. Yet this was precisely the exception that proved the rule. In all other circumstances, the normal laws of nature apply, especially since Christ’s life, death, and resurrection opened the gates of Heaven and provided a universal path thereto.

The longstanding Calvinist doctrine of the radical separation of God and man is the perfect expression of the empiricist idea that, all things considered, we have but marginal knowledge of reality. The orthodox Protestant may protest against the post-modernist’s denial of universal truth and seeming contempt for logical reasoning, but both share an essential skepticism about man’s capacity for ultimate understanding.

Attempting to better the world through human action can bear genuine fruit, yet the ultimate futility of human grappling makes the orthodox Protestant resigned regarding the fate of man. We seek dominion and control over our circumstances, using all available energy and rationality, but catastrophe like the earthquake in Haiti still occur. Humans still suffer, the ranks of the suffering near incomprehensible.

Heeding the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the orthodox Protestant decides to “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Another sun will come, bearing what creation or destruction we just cannot know.