God & the Mississippi

Commented the Christian Century, sophisticated religious weekly, last week: "It is gratifying to be able to state that, so far as we have observed, there have been no efforts to interpret the devastating floods in the Mississippi valley as punishment inflicted by an outraged deity upon the sinful dwellers in the lowlands. If the calamity had been a tornado, a fire, an earthquake or a tidal wave, doubtless there would have been the usual outburst of piously blasphemous explanations that the divine patience was exhausted and that the sufferers were getting what was coming to them for their intolerable iniquities. It was so with Galveston, San Francisco and Florida. It is doubtful whether there has been any notable improvement in theological thinking since those earlier disasters, and the problems of theodicy* are as baffling as ever. But this is a plain case of high water. One can almost see why it happened. At least one can see why it happened where it did. Even those who hold the crudest ideas of divine justice can scarcely conceive it as operating only up to a certain contour line of elevation. It seems so natural for water to run down hill and to seek its level that those who look for manifestations of the power of God only in the wholly inexplicable are hesitant to include this cataclysmic but rather natural event in the category of 'acts of God.' The conception of a God who acts through the orderly operation of laws rather than by arbitrary acts of will in defiance of them is still hard to grasp. One does not have to be a materialist to believe that the reason for the flood in the bottom lands is not that God is angry with Arkansas and Louisiana but that there ir too much water in the river to run off through the normal channel. . . ."

* Theory that God maintains natural and moral evils as contrast and counterbalance to His good.