Earthquake theology 3

As I indicated here, I have a few other thoughts I want to lay out on (broadly) theological issues - therefore this developing series. I should perhaps make it clear, before I go further, that I have no expertise in the area, as will be obvious to anyone who does have. I've read a little post-Holocaust Jewish theology, as part of the more general reading I did in researching that catastrophe, and I've read even less than a little post-Holocaust Christian theology. Of course, the Holocaust was not a natural, but a humanly-caused, catastrophe; nonetheless, the questions about God that have been raised in the wake of the South Asian disaster are similar to questions posed in the Holocaust literature.

To begin with what one might call the 'common' theology, welling up, so to say, out of the experience of the victims, there were some of them who felt that only in a godless world could such things as were done to them and others occur. They have a famous representative: Primo Levi. He spoke for many others when he said:

There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.

He said the same thing more indirectly in connection with an episode I posted about early last year at A Fistful of Euros:

After a 'selection' in their block [at Auschwitz], a prisoner nearby Levi is praying, thanking God that he isn't one of those who has been selected. Levi writes:

Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking any more?... Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again.

Nothing can redeem the crime, make good the wrong, remove the moral stain. What God could possibly preside over this? The question relates to a vast humanly-committed evil. But it is, for all that, similar to the question posed during the last week after the tens of thousands of deaths around the Indian Ocean.

In what I'm calling the 'common' theology coming out of the Holocaust, there is also, however, an opposite impulse. To give just one instance, it is here in the words of a Jewish survivor of the notorious Pawiak prison (Warsaw), who ends the account of his own experiences at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators thus:

He [the murderer] forgets the God of Psalms, 96:13, "Before God, for He cometh to judge the earth. He will judge the world with justice, and the nations with His faith." That verse also reveals the order by which the world is governed. Crimes against humanity will not go unpunished and the criminal will be prosecuted until the account is settled.

For this man the question posed by his own and the wider sufferings in Nazi Europe was not how to believe in God, it was how not to believe in God, in such a world. For him - and for how many others? - God is a principle and source of hope, standing between humankind and fear of the abyss.