In “Does God punish people through natural disasters?” I considered Pat Robertson’s claim that the 2010 Haiti earthquake was a divine punishment on Haiti for the nation’s past sins. While condemnation of Robertson was universal, his critics seemed to miss an important point. In short, even if Robertson lacked evidence to support his claim, there seemed […]
Haiti
A third blushing attempt to rationalize babies being punished
Let’s recap. Our story began in the smoking ruins of Haiti in January 2010, with one weak cry winding out from deep within the concrete rubble of a collapsed hospital. The cry was from six week old Landina, severely wounded in the devastating quake that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands. The horror naturally prompts the question […]
A second blushing attempt to rationalize babies being punished
Our second attempt appeals to the concept of imputation. To impute means to assign or ascribe a value to something. In classic reformed theology there are three senses of imputation. The one most Christians like to talk about is that of God imputing our sin to the sinless Christ. Somehow God assigns or ascribes the culpability […]
Does God punish people through natural disasters?
By some counts more than three hundred thousand people were killed in the 2010 Haiti earthquake while an additional three hundred thousand were injured and one million rendered homeless. The scale of human suffering is truly unimaginable. And then, even as people were still struggling for their next breath while buried in ten tonnes of concrete, along came […]
