Four Perspectives on God and the Newtown Massacre

The massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, has been so thoroughly covered in media at all levels that we are not going to repeat the facts of it again here. We are, however, going to describe perspectives about God and this tragedy from four people whose views seem to us worth considering.
Perspective 1
The first is from Stephen Prothero, a Boston University religion scholar. Writing for the CNN Belief blog, he lists and explains six statements that he is "sick of hearing" after mass killings such as the one in Newtown. Five of the six statements relate to God directly. (He made no attempt to tie the sixth one, regarding gun use, to the Deity, so we are not going to summarize that one in this lesson.)
The first statement Prothero doesn't want to hear is "It was God's will." That, according to Prothero, would imply that God encourages people to commit such atrocities. "Much better to say there is no God or, as Abraham Lincoln did, 'The Almighty has his own purposes,' than to flatter ourselves with knowing what those purposes are," said Prothero.
Second on Prothero's list is "Jesus called the children home," which, he said, implies "that Madeleine Hsu (age 6) or Daniel Barden (age 7) were slain because Jesus couldn't wait to see them join his heavenly choir." Prothero pointed out that "even the most fervent Christians ... want to live out their lives on Earth before going 'home'" and added that Madeleine and Daniel "deserved more than 6 or 7 years."
Third, for the moment, Prothero would ban "After death, there is the resurrection." Prothero does not challenge the belief in resurrection, but argues that the Sandy Hook deaths are so unspeakably tragic that "now is the time for grief, not for pat answers to piercing questions."
Fourth, Prothero does not want to hear "This was God's judgment." He said, "I'm not sure what judgment of God would provoke the killing of 27 innocent women and children, but I certainly don't want to entertain any theorizing on the question right now ... Especially if we want to continue to believe God's judgments are 'true and righteous altogether'" (Psalm 19:9).
Fifth, Prothero would likewise ban "This happened because America is too secular." He was especially critical of comments along this line from former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, whose comments on the Newtown tragedy Prothereo summarized as "We don't need fewer guns in the hands of killers ... we need more God in our public schools."
Prothero closed by saying, "Today is a day to shake your fist at heaven and demand answers, and then to shake it harder when no answers are forthcoming. To do anything else is in my view to diminish the idea of God, and to cheapen faith in the process."
Perspective 2
In fairness to Gov. Huckabee, who in the field of ideas is a competitor of Prothero, we have included a link below to a transcript of his remarks. We also point out that Huckabee’s statements were more nuanced and complete than Prothero's summary suggests and reflected upon his experience of another school mass murder (Jonesboro, Arkansas) when he was governor.
Portions of Huckabee’s comments: “[T]here is no human rationale or explanation. ...  But the biggest maybe aftermath of something like this is that people are going to look for, OK, why did it happen? Well, the answer is inexplicable. ...  When someone has an intent to do incredible damage, they will find a way to do it. ... We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we systematically remove God from our schools. Should we be so surprised schools would become a place of carnage? Because we have made it a place where we do not want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability, that we will not just have to be accountable to the police if they catch us, but one day we stand one day before a holy God in judgment. If we don't believe that, then we don't fear that. I sometimes -- when people say, why did God let it happen, God wasn't armed. He didn't go to the school. But God will be there in the form of a lot people with hugs and with therapy and a whole lot of ways in which I think he will be involved in the aftermath.”
Perspective 3
This perspective comes from Rachel Held Evans, author of A Year of Biblical Womanhood. Writing on her blog, she said that the flames of the Advent candles in our churches symbolize "the divine promise that even the smallest light can chase away the shadows lurking in this world, that even in the darkest places, God can't be kept out" -- including out of the tragedy at Newtown.
Evans also referred to comments by former governor Mike Huckabee and others who said that God abandoned the children at Sandy Hook because those schools cannot sponsor prayer events due to religious-freedom requirements. "When asked where God was on that awful Friday morning," said Evans, "these Christians have said that God did not show up at Sandy Hook because 'God is not allowed in public schools,' because 'we have systematically removed God' from that place."
Evans characterized that view with an expletive for bovine excrement, and then said, "God can be wherever God wants to be. God needs no formal invitation. We couldn't 'systematically remove' God if we tried." 
"If the incarnation teaches us anything, it's that God can be found everywhere," Evans said. She concluded by again referring to Advent candles and saying, "May their flames be a reminder to all of us that we don't have to know why God let [the Newtown tragedy] happen to know that God was there."
Perspective 4
The final perspective comes Diana Butler Bass, author of Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. Writing on the Huffington Post's Religion blog, Bass posed the question "Where was God on that dreadful morning?" She said the answers usually fall into one of two "camps."
The first answer, proposed by many members of the clergy, is that God was present in the horror., That group reminds us that Jesus' other birth name was Emmanuel -- "God with us." The second answer, pushed most bluntly by former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, is that God was not there, "'banished' as it were, by human sin," said Bass.
"Thus, the debate continues," said Bass. "The God-was-present people are horrified by Mike Huckabee's remarks; the God-was-absent people are calling for Americans to repent and welcome both God and guns back to public schools."
Bass then goes on to propose a third answer: "God was hidden." She bases that on what she calls "an odd verse" from the Bible, Isaiah 45:15: "Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior."
After mentioning that throughout history, this text has caused theologians to wrestle with the idea of a "hidden God," Bass also cited Jesus' words from the cross --"My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?" -- as possible further evidence of God's hiddenness. She suggests that perhaps certain "aspects of the Divine are purposely not revealed to the world," and asks, "What would the world be like if everyone, everywhere claimed to have full knowledge of God?"
"And that's my answer," Bass said. "God was beyond Newtown, the God of lament, of loss, of anguish, the God hidden away."
Bass said, "As answers go, the hidden God will not completely satisfy and can never get to questions of motive. Isn't that the point? Somewhere, deep in our souls, we know we cannot know. The hidden God, I think, is the only God that makes any sense of Newtown: One neither and both present and absent; One in the hands of rescuers but not the hands that wielded the guns; One in the midst of murdered but not the act of murder. This is the God who is in all places and nowhere."  
 
More on this story can be found at these links:

My Take: Six Things I Don't Want to Hear After the Sandy Hook Massacre. CNN
President Obama's Speech at Prayer Vigil for Newtown Shooting Victims (Full transcript). Washington Post
God Can't Be Kept Out. Rachel Held Evans
Where Was God in Newtown? Huff Post
Huckabee: Laws Don't Change This Kind of Thing. Fox News
The Big Questions
In summary, the four perspectives about God and the Newtown tragedy are:
God is not going to provide answers: "Today is a day to shake your fist at heaven and demand answers, and then to shake it harder when no answers are forthcoming," said Prothero.
God was there, but people ignoring and pushing him out means that they don’t let him act. "We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we systematically remove God from our schools," said Huckabee.
God was there: "If the incarnation teaches us anything, it's that God can be found everywhere," said Evans.
God was hidden: "[God] neither and both present and absent; One in the hands of rescuers but not the hands that wielded the guns; One in the midst of murdered but not the act of murder. This is the God who is in all places and nowhere," said Bass.
1. Which of these four is the most like your own perspective on God and the tragedies of life?
2. What is missing that is not covered by any of these four?
3. Does the Bible present more than one view of God? If so, how are those views different?
4. Does a single death, in whatever manner, matter less than a killing of many people in a single rampage?
 
5. What sort of hope does the Messiah bring to a world that includes such tragedies as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings? 
Confronting the News With Scripture and Hope
Here are some Bible verses to guide your discussion:
Psalm 139:7-10
"Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast." (For context, read 139:1-12.)
Verses about God's hiddenness notwithstanding, these verses from Psalm 139 voice a central biblical theme about God's presence. In fact, in some settings, the issue is not that we cannot find God, but that God refuses to leave us alone.

Questions: What in your experience of God is like that of this psalmist? When have you been acutely aware of God's presence? When have you felt unable to find God? What, if anything, helped? If we believe that God is present everywhere, how do we respond when people tell us that certain tragic events did not happen to someone because God was looking out for them, or still had something for them to do in life? (For example, a plane crashes, but someone was late for the flight and was not on board.) Does this mean God was not looking out for the children of Sandy Hook Elementary, or that God had nothing for them to do in their lives? How do we balance thankfulness for God's providence on the one hand and, on the other hand, sorrow when God stands with us but does not seem to have acted for us?

Matthew 2:16-18
"When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:
'A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.'"
(For context, read 2:13-18.)
Forty times in his gospel, Matthew quotes from the Old Testament, linking those verses to events in Jesus' life. And often, he makes the point that a particular incident involving Jesus happened for the purpose of fulfilling scriptural prophecy. For example, the first time Matthew does this is in 1:21-23, where, after an angel tells Joseph that Mary is to bear a son and that Joseph is to name him Jesus -- because "he will save his people from their sins" -- Matthew adds, "All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: 'Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,' which means, 'God is with us.'" The Greek term rendered in English as "to fulfill" is hina plerothe, which are the words Matthew uses to say that the event regarding Jesus happened for the purpose of fulfilling Scripture.
But when Matthew reports Herod's massacre of the children in and around Bethlehem, he drops the hina. That's not obvious in the English translation, but by doing so, Matthew avoids saying that the murders happened for the purpose of fulfilling Scripture. Instead, Matthew uses the equivalent of the passive voice (“was fulfilled”: tote plerothe). Matthew sees the slaughter of children as a reflection of Jeremiah 31:15, which spoke poetically about "Rachel" as a "mother" of Israel, weeping inconsolably for her "children" lost during the Babylonian conquest of Judah, but by dropping the hina, he makes it clear that the killing of the Bethlehem children was not God's will.
TWW team member Frank Ramirez comments, "That little Greek word hina does not appear in the story of the slaughter of the innocents. The slaughter happens, and Scripture anticipates or describes the bitterness of the evil, but it does not occur in order to fulfill the scripture. This is all part of God's great risk, the willingness to include free will as part of the bargain."
 
Ramirez continues, "God's great plan continues in spite of Herod's atrocity. And the atrocity is not forgotten. If Matthew had chosen to ignore it, we would never have known about it. But it would not have been a true account. 'Rachel' weeps, according to Jeremiah, because her children are taken away from her. 'Rachel' weeps again this day [in light of the Sandy Hook tragedy], and so do we. God is cherishing these children. Can we do any less, not only for those who have been taken away from us [in Newtown], but also for those who live and suffer in poverty, want and neglect, who suffer abuse and terror?"
Questions: Can there be any true love of God and neighbor without free will? To what degree is free will at the root of evil? Matthew carves out a spot in the midst of his holy history of the birth of Jesus to memorialize the senseless slaughter of the innocents. In some places, the typical response to a massacre or slaughter is to create a park or some other memorial on that site. What sort of memorial or sacred or public place would be an appropriate response in order to memorialize these happenings?
 
Luke 1:39-40
"In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth." (For context, read 1:39-45.)
Mary and Elizabeth came together while both were pregnant under unusual circumstances and formed a little community of support for one another as they both faced the uncertainty ahead. That's also one purpose of the church and other groups -- to be community for one another not only in times of joy but also in times of sorrow.
Questions: In what ways can you be part of the community of support for the families of the Newtown tragedy victims, or for the people in your own community who are struggling with this tragedy? When Mary found herself in crisis, the person she turned to immediately was an elderly cousin. Imagine what Elizabeth might have said or done for Mary at some earlier time that made her the "go-to" person. Have you ever been the "go-to" person for a troubled teen or young person? What did you do to assure that person you could be trusted? Did anyone ever say or do anything that made you turn to them in such a time? How important are support systems for people in crisis, whether those on the verge of committing a terrible act, or those who have suffered from a terrible act?
John 1:5
"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." (For context, read 1:1-5.)
If you want to know what happened at Christmas, we suggest you read Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2. But if you want to know what Christmas means, read John 1.
In John 1 and elsewhere in that gospel, "light" is a major metaphor for the divine power present in Jesus. At present, it functions to illuminate but not eliminate "darkness," which is a metaphor for the drive within us that urges us to disregard or ignore God.
Neither the darkness nor the light is a passive thing. Darkness, as John's gospel pictures it, is not just the absence of light. Rather it is active hostility to the light of God. But if darkness is an active, hostile force, light is an active, benevolent force. In this world, darkness is here, but so is light.
If we look carefully at the Christmas story, we see that the Star of the East did not light up the whole night and drive the darkness away. Instead, it gave enough light to guide the Magi through the darkness to the place where Jesus lay. As John said, "The light shines IN the darkness." It does not eradicate it, at least not yet. But neither can the darkness overcome the light.
It is important that we do not translate the message of Christmas into some future promise. Normally, when things are dark, we can look forward to the dawn eventually coming. But Christmas focuses on the light of God present tthrough Christ right now, when darkness is still also present.
Questions: In what ways does this light shine in and through Newtown right now? Given that the King James Version reads "the darkness comprehended it not," what keeps people from comprehending the light? Do you think there is (or have you ever experienced) a darkness so deep that the light cannot shine in it? How have you shone a light after a tragedy? What has your church done to shine a real light in dark places? (For example, a woman we know serving in the National Guard in Kosovo and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia organized youth get-togethers among kids of various ethnic backgrounds, encouraging them to play loud American music. At one point, a U.S. church shipped hundreds of books in English to her, because reading and speaking English was a goal of youth from the various warring backgrounds. That was her way of shining a light where there had been mass slaughter.)
In addition to the text quoted, a little further on John uses the word SKENE from which we get the words "skin" (for tents) and "scene" (a theatrical term derived from the skins that were used as theatrical backdrops), and says that the word was made flesh and "tented" or "roughed it" among us. Jesus is roughing it, tenting it, in this very dark world, and is not a distant spectator. That is part of the Christmas story as well.
Romans 8:38-39
"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (For context, read 8:31-39.)
This statement is part of Paul's great testimony of faith to the Christians in Rome about all the forces that threaten people in this life. Paul begins that list in verse 35: "hardship ... distress ... persecution ... famine ...." In verse 36, he interrupts the list to quote Psalm 44:22 to show that hardships and other difficulties have always pursued the faithful. In verse 37, he makes an affirmative statement about the way Christ's love enables the faithful afflicted ones to hold on. Then, in verse 38, Paul resumes the list of threats: "death ... life ... angels ... rulers ...." Not one of these alone, nor all together, can separate us from God's love in Christ Jesus.
Questions: How can you help someone whose grief prevents them from finding comfort in these words of Scripture? Therapy dogs have been dispatched to Newtown to provide love and comfort. Obviously these dogs cannot fix anything, nor can they say anything to make life better. Yet they have an impact. Is presence with someone in a dark time as important as the words you say? Have there been times when you have found it more important to simply be present after a death or tragedy, and not to say anything at all. (Don't forget, the friends of Job sat silently with him for seven days before they made the mistake of opening their mouths.)
For Further Discussion
 
1. Respond to this, from Rev. Charles Alkula, who is a chaplain at a VA hospital in San Antonio and a member of The Wired Word team: "I preached at the VA Hospital here yesterday, and like many others, touched on the shootings in Newtown. I did so in relation to the joy that the third [Advent] candle [pink in some Advent wreaths] represents for some. But I also mentioned the over 200 deaths in San Antonio since the beginning of December. Some of those deaths were violent, some the result of sudden causes, some after lengthy illness, some simply of age. The point was that while 28 died in a single event in Connecticut, in this community, there were hundreds of people being mourned." Alkula said that the effort to find meaning in the massacre at Newtown was a worthy pursuit, but added, "I hope we don't forget the other families [facing their] first Christmas without their loved ones."
2. It is unlikely that Christmas will ever be the same for the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims. How should we minister to those in our communities for whom Christmas will always be a reminder of grief?
3. In 1247, a Catholic priory named St. Mary of Bethlehem was founded in London. A century later, it became a hospital, and later still, under King Henry VIII, with the suppression of religious orders, it became exclusively a hospital for the insane. The noise and confusion of the place was known all over England. In time, "St. Mary" was dropped from the name, and it became just Bethlehem, which in turn, through contraction and mispronunciation, became "Bedlam." Thus, semantically, Bethlehem and bedlam are intimately related. In what ways can the light that is Christ illuminate both the quiet streets of Bethlehem and the chaotic byways of bedlam?
Responding to the News
At this time, praying for those who suffered loss in the Newtown shooting is still an appropriate response.
Eventually, there may be contributions we can make to policy discussions aimed at reducing or preventing such tragedies as this one.
This is also a good time to offer support to members of your own congregation who are facing their first Christmas without a particular loved one.
You may want to use the following words in your worship service this Sunday. They were written by TWW team member Frank Ramirez following the Newtown events, and are intended to be sung to the Christmas tune "Greensleeves" ("What Child Is This"):
Whose children these, who laid to rest,
Tear every heart in weeping?
Whose children these, God, tell us please?
Uphold them in your keeping,
Each reaching above the fray
To heaven's border where angels pray,
Love, moving past hate and fear,
To save and cherish our children.
 
The wind blows cold. These ills behold,
As rage and evil come feeding.
We see, we hear, Oh God, we fear
That none can staunch the bleeding.
You are greater than evil's reign.
Stand in our midst, we pray, remain.
Comfort hearts, we'll play our parts,
So nothing loving impeding.
 
May every name with us remain,
These sorrows sharing with those who weep
Whose loss is great, against this hate
Your love abiding be done.
Reign! Rein in insanity,
Install in all your divinity!
So then may we, one humanity,
See your will as in heaven be won.
Another option is Psalm 130.
Closing Prayer
 
Be present, O Lord, with comfort to those who have suffered the loss of loved ones over the last few days. Help us as a nation to find ways to prevent such tragedies from happening. May all of us who are shaken and hurting find comfort and healing. In Jesus' name. Amen.