Reddit reviews The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?
We found 8 Reddit comments about The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
The Doors of the Sea by David Bentley Hart. There may be essays or lectures by him on this topic for shorter attention span, but I do not have those on hand.
David Bently Hart can come off a bit snarky sometimes but he wrote a nice essay entitled "The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami?". It's worth checking out.
Sorry if I was unclear on that in my first comment! I think suffering for good is the only kind of suffering Christianity accepts; not that all suffering can be explained or justified in terms of bringing some kind of good. So I don't believe or want to believe that everything happens for a reason or whatever. God can bring good out of anything that happens, but a lot of stuff that happens is just plain tragic, meaningless, and/or evil.
Some Christians believe in a less-interventionist God (although if someone believed that God never made interventions in the natural world, I don't see how they could be a Christian). As I understand it, being a Christian means believing that God's one really major intervention... is in the form of Jesus. Everything God is doing in the world, every project he is omnipotently working on, his "method" for accomplishing it is Jesus. Jesus is God's plan to put an end to death.
I wonder if you would enjoy reading David Bentley Hart's The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? I have only read excerpts from it, but folks I know who have read the whole thing really valued it. He is a very sensitive theologian who seeks tough questions and avoids easy answers. I don't agree with him about everything, but I think I do agree with his basic argument in that book.
David Bentley Hart is unparalleled in terms of knowledge, wit, imagination, eloquence, and is perhaps the greatest living Christian thinker today.
He just put out a translation of the New Testament through Yale University Press which is incredible.
His newest book is called The Experience of God and it is mind-boggling.
Atheist Delusions absolutely eviscerates pop atheism.
His theological magum opus, The Beauty of the Infinite has been called the greatest work of theology so far this century.
The Doors of the Sea is required reading for anyone who struggles with the issue of evil.
His work is sublime.
Doors of the Sea by David Bentley Hart
God without Being by Jean-Luc Marion
They don't necessarily have to do with your topics, however you can get some of the answers based on inference. The first one goes over the problem of evil and the second one goes over what one means by the term "God". David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and Jean-Luc Marion is a French Catholic Philosopher.
I would recommend looking into open theism.
http://opentheism.info/
Here's an article from the site:
The Problem of Evil in Process Theism and Classical Free Will Theism
http://opentheism.info/information/problem-evil-process-theism-classical-free-will-theism/
To add to it, I would recommend these books.
The God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence by John Sanders
The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?
God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God
Others here have recommended other Christian approaches to the issue too. Seek the truth. God honors that.
The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? by David Bentley Hart.
Though it is a small book, it is fairly dense. I will come back to it when my theology is stronger, as I did not fully grasp all of the concepts in the book. But from what I did understand, it is a very well written book with very good "explanations".
Have you ever read The Doors of the Sea by David Bentley Hart? It's basically about this question, and while it's hard to summarize it meaningfully, I think it's worth a read, and it isn't very long.