God and Haiti
David Boulton offers a Quakers view on 'the oldest and thorniest theological problem'
It’s the oldest and thorniest theological problem: how can God be both all-powerful and all-loving, since if he cannot prevent a natural disaster like Haiti he can’t be all-powerful, and if he can but chooses not to he can’t be all-loving. Theologians call this ‘theodicy’. Friends, traditionally impatient of theological conundrums, have not paid much attention to theodicy. There is good reason for this. Friends do not have a single, simple, dogmatic understanding of God. If belief in God requires belief in an ‘Old Man in the Sky’ who spends much of his time pondering who to smite and who to spare, then Friends are atheists. We just don’t believe in such a God. Our Quaker understandings of what we may call ‘the divine’ are varied, complex, open, contingent, personal, indeterminate. We seem to prefer to speak and think of God as Spirit rather than Person, within rather than without, here rather than there, a human concept rather than a superhuman entity.
