A Sabbatical Report 
Where is God in all this?
Sunday, 12 September 2010
Expanded from a Sunday morning sermon
with additions and footnotes for web publication
©The Reverend Dr Roger Ryan, DPhil.
Vicar of St Mary's Summerstown, London SW17

While I was away for three months (May-July) I felt safe and secure as I travelled to Germany, France and Washington DC by plane and as I drove my car to Devon, North Wales, to the University of Sussex and to the University of Sheffield. I missed the General Election and the World Cup (it appears I did not miss much), however, in June I was horrified to read about the shootings in Cumbria.

At an open air service in Whitehaven on the afternoon of the following Sunday, 6th June to remember the twelve victims, the Bishop of Carlisle, James Newcombe—who I met many years ago when he was a curate in North Watford—used this very title for his sermon. 
   This is a question that I have had in mind for a long time and it was also the subject for some of my sabbatical reading and reflection.
   The Bishop was up front and courageous when applying the question to the shootings, where was God in all this? This was the beginning of his pastoral response

On Wednesday, God was in the touch of those who cradled the wounded and dying victims in their arms, he was in the skills and professional care of paramedics, nurses and doctors, and he was in the sensitivity of police officers who had to take difficult news to relatives.[1]

Now it is not my purpose to criticize Bishop James who is one of the finest bishops we have in the Church of England. What he said on this occasion was sensitive, pastoral, and warm. On a similar occasion I may have said much the same. But we need to take a step back, to think carefully and theologically about what he said.

If God was with the support services looking after the victims, as I and the Bishop believe he was—then God was late. God was needed earlier in the day at the time of the shootings, to step in, to intervene, to prevent the murders in the first place. God arrived late in Cumbria!

We need to go further. Does the Bishop’s pastoral response to the question ‘where was God?’ imply that God was absent when the shootings took place? In my view, yes it does. My provisional conclusion is this: it appears that God is hidden or even absent on many occasions when dreadful things happen.

We may go a little further. I believe with all my heart that God is good and loving, gracious and merciful. These characteristics are what we call God’s attributes.[2] But looking at our world of so much suffering and terror and dread, it appears to me that

God is good, but not always;

God is loving, but not always;

God is merciful, but not always.

What are we to say that is positive, helpful and hopeful that will enable us to live our Christian lives with credibility in this unpredictable harsh world as we find it?

I have spent the past fourteen years or so thinking very deeply about this subject. 
   I began with a long-term study project and research on the Old Testament which I submitted to the University of Oxford on the Book of Judges.[3] This, in my judgment, introduces the pastoral problem about suffering and terror and dread about which clergy and Christians must be honest: where is God in all of this? 
   More recently I have focused on the Holocaust as the most iconic event of evil in modern times because if we can talk honestly and with integrity about God and the Holocaust, then we can talk about God, and anything else that happens, with credibility however grim it might be.

What I propose to do here is this:

1.    To remind you about the Holocaust, its history, and the victims.

2.    To consider some theological responses to the Holocaust and to our question, where was God while millions were shot and gassed in the 1940s?

3.    To suggest ways that the Christian faith and church worship might be reformed in order to be credible to hurting and questioning people.

1

THE HOLOCAUST

The Holocaust[4] has its roots in antisemiticism which is opposition to and hatred of Jews. Jews were hated in Europe and Russia because they were accused of murdering Christ; their religion was different, their appearance was different as was their Yiddish language.[5] They lived in their own communities, sometimes in villages or shatels and ghettoes. They were the ‘other’ who were blamed for plagues and for anything that went wrong such as Germany’s defeat in the Great War (1914-18) and for the country’s economic collapse that followed.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Jews were said by the Germans to be ‘our problem’ and ‘our misfortune’.
   The solution was to make life so uncomfortable for Jews that they would leave the country. The problem here was that many German Jews were not religious but secular and were assimilated into German culture.
   Moreover, other countries would only take small quotas of Jewish refugees. Britain took about 20,000 German-Jewish children.

In 1935 the Nazi Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of their German citizenship, of their rights of employment and of their human rights. Jews were beaten in the street, arrested and put into concentration camps.
   The Nazis developed their own myth about themselves: they were the superior Aryan master race; they did not want to be contaminated by foreign or alien blood. Nazis claimed to be clean, well dressed, cultured and disciplined; Jews were vermin as were homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and gypsies. Now you can see where this is heading…

When the Nazis invaded Poland and Russia they entered countries with about two million Jews.
   Many Jews in the East were religious and poor trades’ people. Jews were rounded up, the young men were selected for work camps, the women, children, those unwell and the elderly were taken into the woods and shot into pits.
   Nazi leaders visited these shooting sites in Poland and were distressed by what they saw—not the shooting of Jewish families—but the emotional effect the shootings were having on German shooters!

Orders were made for ‘cleaner’ methods to be investigated for 'disposing' of Jews. Sealed lorries were made with the exhaust pipe returning inside the lorry in order to gas Jews packed inside which was efficient, but slow. In an experiment, some Russian prisoners of war were gassed in a room using a pesticide called Zyclon B which gave 'satisfactory' results.
   Soon Jews were taken by force in cattle trucks to especially built death camps at Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec and Auschwitz. Between 1942 and 1945 the Nazis killed about six million Jews including one and a half million children by gas and shooting.
   These murders were referred to as "The Final Solution to the Jewish Question".

Hostilities came to an end in the summer of 1945, but for Jews and for many others the questions began to tumble over themselves.
   Where was God in all this?
   Why did he not intervene?
   Germany was a civilized country of music, art and culture; how could mass murder on an industrial scale have happened?
   Europe was composed of religious countries, some were protestant, most were Catholic.  Germans were an educated people; Nazis were among those who were baptized as Christians. The Jews of Eastern Europe were religious; they read the Hebrew Bible and brought up their children in their ancient religious traditions.
   Had God abandoned them?
   Where was he?
   Where was God in all this?

Many survivors gave up their religion; there was no point in religious belief or in praying. They prayed for God’s help in the camps but he did not intervene; heaven was silent.

They were not the only people who gave up their faith; many of our own servicemen could no longer believe in God because of what they saw.

2

SOME THEOLOGICAL RESPONSES TO THE HOLOCAUST[6]

1.    The Jews must have sinned, they deserved to be punished. Still today you may hear that Jews were punished because they did not accept Jesus as the Messiah. Really? One and a half million children, gassed, and beaten to death? What had Jewish children done to deserve such a punishment? What an outrageous suggestion!

2.    Others suggest that just as Nebuchadrezzar destroyed the Jerusalem temple in 686BC and the Romans did the same—as prophesized by Jesus—in 70AD and both catastrophes were considered by Jewish leaders of the time to be 'rods of God’s anger', that Hitler and the Nazis were God’s servants and rod to punish the Jews. Really? Hitler, God’s servant? Another outrageous suggestion!

3.    Others said God was dead, not that there was no God but that the God who created the world and participated in history, this God was no more. This is similar to what in the 1960s used to be locally called ‘South Bank Religion’ at the time of the then Bishop of Woolwich and his book Honest to God. God was to be redefined as the ‘ground’ or ‘focus’ of our being; Sunday worship was the community coming together to hear and answer their own prayers.[7] Many saw the absurdity and decided not to bother. Some fine church buildings were unwanted in the 1960s and 70s and were demolished.

4.    Some protested and complained at God; survivors raged at God for the murder of their families and communities and for what they themselves endured.

5.    Others thought that in the Holocaust God inexplicitly hid his face from his people and abandoned them to their fate. The future could not be any worse.

Since the 1970s the Holocaust has become what some call a ‘big business’ and a thriving ‘industry’.
   Books are written, survivors give testimonies, one or two Holocaust feature films have appeared each year since Shindler’s List. The film for families to look out for on tv is The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas.[8] There are exhibitions and museums in most countries. In June, I spent a week in the archives at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. I recommend that you visit the Holocaust exhibition at the local Imperial War Museum.

This very expensive investment in Holocaust history and memory has three effects:

First, the Holocaust is subtly used  by Israelis and Zionists to reinforce their claim to the land and the State of Israel in the Middle East and to suppress the counter-claims of Palestinians. As I was told by a young representative of the Golan Heights Residence Committee when I visited Israel in 2000, ‘we have a right to the land because we suffered so much in the Holocaust’.

Second, I notice a growing weariness among Jews and others about the Holocaust; too much has been said; leave it in the past, move on.

And third, we are well aware of so much more terror and dread since 1945, in fact I/we become overwhelmed by the volume of accidents, genocide, murder, floods, earthquakes, illness, famine, and much more. Consider the succession of daily reports about suicide bombings from Iraq during 2007, consider 9/11 in New York and locally, 7/7 in London, and so much else.

To sum up so far, I have drawn your attention to the Holocaust and to the attempted genocide of Jews as the most extreme example of suffering and murder on an industrial scale as one group of people claimed superiority over another group of people and attempted to wipe them and their memory off the face of the earth. We are asking the question, where is God in all this?

We have done some history. We have considered some answers. But the question remains. 
   Allow me to give an up front, no-nonsense, unequivocal, positive and constructive answer for Christian people who love the Lord and who want to follow Christ in this cruel and harsh world.

3

THE CHRISTIAN FAITH REQUIRES SOME REFORMATION IN THE WAY IT IS PRESENTED AND EXPLAINED

We often hear that the church needs to get up to date, to move with the times. For example: conduct gay marriages, clergy should swear and cuss to show they are human; women should not only be ordained but concentrated bishops. All this is taken up in media as flimflam and frippery.

In my view we are to be nothing of the sort. We are to be biblical, to believe in Christ, to preach Christ, and proclaim the gospel. Moreover, we may still talk about God with credibility, this is how:

First, it seems to me that there are occasions—too many occasions—when we are on our own; God appears to be absent.
   Many have found they are so very alone among the shadows of the valley of death feeling anxious and lost: a victim of catastrophe, an accident victim in hospital, the victim of terrorism, flood or earthquake, or caught up in war. Others discover that no ‘good’ comes out of meaningless suffering (Romans 8); you may ask ‘why?’, but no answer is forthcoming, you just have to get on with it.
   Meaningless suffering and suffering without redemption makes some of us angry and confused.
   Where is God?
   Is he hiding?
   We may look for him, but there is no evidence of his presence; we can be left with awful situations that lack any meaning even though we are grateful, as Bishop James says, for the support and the caring professionalism of others. 

It is in times like these that God appears to be absent; we are alone. We in the church need to wake up to these realities. On occasion, this is how it is. Isaiah warned people long ago that God creates both good and evil (Isaiah 45.7). We need to hear the rage and anger of victims.

Part of our modern problem is that theology is generally taught, discussed, preached and written about by those who live and work in comfortable situations. We need also to consider the appropriatness of our God-talk in a cancer ward, on a tesunami beach and at Auschwitz.

Second, in response to all this, we may protest and complain at God about his absence and inactivity if and when it is felt necessary. When God fails to intervene in response to your prayers, ask him: where are you? What have you been doing that is more important than helping the victims of  earthquake and flood? Be abrupt. Call God to account, ‘Come on God, rouse yourself! Do something!’

Such protest is neither crude, rude nor inappropriate; it is right and proper and biblical. Consider for example Psalm 44 and Psalm 22 which Jesus screamed in the face of God as he died. Follow this response closely because to robustly engage with God is a deeply religious and biblical response.
   To complain at God says that you still believe in him; you are holding on. But to take it all with indifference is not a faith response. Indifference is smug apathy. To complain at God is a precious, religious, and creative reaction.[9] Athiests are unable to talk like this, they have no god to complain to.

From time to time, when necessary, we need to modify the way we talk to God. Our prayers—are too polite. Our liturgy—is too cautious. Our hymns—are too triumphal. From time to time, when necessary, we would be wise to adopt the language of victims.

Third, be generous in the way you think of Jews, not necessarily because of the Holocaust and the international complications over the State of Israel, but because modern Jews seem to have become a people without hope. They have been hated through the centuries, their grandparents and great-grandparents were murdered by the Nazis, they do not accept Christ as the Messiah, and have almost given up that there will ever be a Messiah. Israel is a secular country where only 20% of Israelis are religious.

There is also a constant fear in Israel and in Jewish communities around the world of further terrorist attack from suicide bombers and others. Security is tight.

Be kind in the way you think of Jews; they are still God’s chosen people; pray for their conversion to Christ, pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

Fourth, should something dreadful happen to you or to others, do not give up your Christian faith. Hold on in the teeth of pain and anxiety. Hold on even though you stand and tremble on the edge of an abyss. For example, these words were written in a synagogue in Cologne

I believe in the sun even when it is not shining.

I believe in love even when I don’t feel it.

I believe in God even when He is silent.[10]

4

IN SUMMARY

I have asked the question ‘where is God in all this?’ when we look at the vast quantity of human suffering and pain in our harsh unpredictable world.
   I have reminded you about the example of the Holocaust, its history, and its victims.
   We have considered some theological responses to our question, where was God while millions were shot and gassed in the 1940s?
   And I have suggested ways the Christian faith and church worship might be reformed in order to be credible to hurting and questioning people.

That was then.
   This is now.
   Little has changed.
   Hold on. This is our God who at times is present and at other times appears to be absent for reasons known only to him. 
   Come to him.
   Believe in him.
   Follow him.
  Live and walk with Christ in faith and hope in our troubled world as a Christian and a faithful member of this your local church.