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Tsunamis, the Secular Mind, and the Great Controversy
Kevin D. Paulson
Published on GreatControversy.org on January 17, 2005.
This past week an editorial in a leading journal of opinion compared the recent tsunamis in South Asia with the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 (1). The editorial gave a feel for the torment to which the secular mind is doomed in the face of such tragedies, as well as the growing angst in such circles regarding the increase of such disasters and their parallels in history.
Recalling the great cataclysm which Inspiration declares to have been foretold in Revelation 6:12, Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic writes:
On the morning of November 1, 1755, an earthquake destroyed Lisbon. It lasted ten minutes, and concluded with a tsunami at the mouth of the Tagus River. Tens of thousands of people perished, and the philosophical confidence of Europe was forever shaken. When I began to grasp the magnitude of what the Asian ocean wrecked last week, it was to the Lisbon literature that I turned for assistance (2).
Others of late have likewise compared the recent Asian tragedy with the Lisbon earthquake, including reporters on the major television networks. Ellen White, describing the effects of the Lisbon catastrophe, describes scenes not at all dissimilar to recent events in south Asia:
In fulfillment of this prophecy (Rev. 6:12) there occurred in the year 1755, the most terrible earthquake that has ever been recorded. Though commonly known as the earthquake of Lisbon, it extended to the greater part of Europe, Africa, and America. It was felt in Greenland, in the West Indies, in the island of Madeira, in Norway and Sweden, Great Britain and Ireland. It pervaded an extent of not less than four million square miles. In Africa the shock was almost as severe as in Europe. A great part of Algeria was destroyed; and a short distance from Morocco, a village containing eight or ten thousand inhabitants was swallowed up. A vast wave swept over the coast of Spain and Africa engulfing cities and causing great destruction (3).
In the light of these inspired comments, could there be significance to the present interest of thoughtful men and women in the tragedy that befell the world in 1755, and its parallel to the recent earthquake and tsunamis?
Former Adventists and critics of our faith have often voiced disdain at the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century signs of our Lord’s coming. Desmond Ford, writing to then-GC President Neal Wilson in reply to the decision to annul Ford’s ministerial ordination, spoke scornfully of these events, declaring that “our academics who write for scholarly journals practically never write therein on the themes of 19th century historicist interpretation of prophecy such as the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the 18th and 19th century signs in the earth and heaven, the French Revolution, and the papal fulfillment of the Antichrist predictions” (4). Robert Brinsmead, writing earlier of the “under forty” generation in the church which he alleged was disillusioned with our basic theology, observed:
This new generation will not enthusiastically proclaim the Lisbon earthquake or shake the world with the news that Jesus moved from one compartment to another in 1844 (5).
Whatever disillusioned or former Adventists might think, the recent New Republic editorial and other news commentaries bear witness that the world remembers the events of 1755, and finds them a relevant comparison to the disaster whose horrors still pound from the television screen and whose death toll continues to climb.
The Great Controversy and the Problem of Evil
What perhaps was most moving about the editorial in question was the pain of a heart outraged by evil yet incapable—or perhaps unwilling—to accept an explanation for it. At one point the author recounts a time when he himself nearly lost his life, when his boat nearly foundered in a sudden squall near Shelter Island (6). He writes of how terror overtook him amid the winds and waves, and how what he calls the “indifference of nature” was cruelly illustrated by a seagull that landed on his boat, staring at him with eyes that couldn’t care less (7). In his own words:
I had never before been regarded so inhumanly, never before imagined how I might appear exclusively from the standpoint of nature. It was sickening. This was the end of all understanding, of all care. My purposes were as nothing. My life and my death were motions of matter, neutral iterations of an elementary flux (8).
Comparing this experience to the recent loss of life in Asia, he then turns his attention to religionists who believe they can explain such events:
I do not see how a theistic view of the world cannot be embarrassed, or damaged, by such an event. If it is not possible to venerate nature for its goodness, then it is not possible to venerate the alleged author of nature for his goodness (9).
He continues with the claim that those who explain evil by saying there is no explanation, that such horrors are mysteries belonging to the God of the universe, are—in his opinion—“over-ready for tragedy” (10), and are not thus sufficiently shocked by it. Even more intensely does he deplore the notion that such tragedies represent divine punishment for evil deeds, as was alleged at the time of the Lisbon disaster (11). Regarding such a view, Wieseltier writes: “All this is nothing other than a justification of the murder of children” (12).
Believers who haven’t experienced a purely secular world view find it hard, if not impossible, to understand the pain of a mind such as this. Most religious conservatives would very quickly recognize the weakness of some of Wieseltier’s arguments, such as the claim that “it is indecent to move immediately from catastrophe to theodicy” in our explanation of evil (13). Elsewhere he writes: “The universe does not owe us sympathy, but we owe each other sympathy” (14). But why do we owe each other sympathy? Where, if one’s view of ultimate reality is secular, is to be found the standard of decency or the requirement for sympathy? To whom is one ultimately accountable if such virtues are rejected? Without a transcendent measure of right and wrong, established above and apart from the experience and reasoning of mortals, how can human conduct be judged any differently from that of the “winged slave of instinct” whose cold stare so unnerved the author when his boat was lost at sea? (15).
One also can’t resist comparing the angst of this author with the peace of our Lord when He too was buffeted by wind and wave, or with Ellen White’s description of the Moravian Christians in similar circumstances, whose calm faith exerted such an impact on John Wesley (16). Most thoughtful men and women, whether Christian or otherwise, would easily prefer such calm, confident ways of facing final reality to the open-ended, uncertain outrage of Leon Wieseltier.
But Wieseltier’s thoughts raise questions that Christians cannot lightly dismiss. The answers often given to these questions, most of them based on the Calvinistic world view and its disdain for free choice, have often provoked the kind of anger and contempt seen in Wieseltier’s editorial. Wieseltier’s reply to varied religious explanations for evil and tragedy considers only two such explanations—that such events are a mystery which only God can explain, or that they represent divine punishment for human sin. While the Bible-believing Christian cannot entirely dismiss either explanation, no thought is given in Wieseltier’s editorial to God’s reverence for free choice as the ultimate explanation for evil, and that the reason such horror is tolerated is due to the outworking of the great controversy between God and Satan.
When Wieseltier writes that the “alleged author of nature” cannot be venerated for His goodness because the natural world itself cannot thus be venerated (17), he fails to consider that due to God’s love of liberty, two powers exist in His universe. These powers must work their ultimate will in both the world of nature and the hearts of humankind, thus demonstrating to intelligent beings the utter contrast between the methods and consequences of surrendering to one or the other of these contending powers.
This is the principle brought to mind by our Lord’s command to let wheat and tares grow together until the end-time harvest (Matt. 13:30, 40-42; Rev. 14:14-20). Until this harvest is ripe, until both good and evil have borne their ultimate fruit, the world cannot end, and Jesus cannot come. Here is the only Biblical, the only logical answer to the age-long agony of thoughtful minds—like Leon Wieseltier’s—who cannot accept the simultaneous existence of a good God and a bad world. The great controversy theme, rooted in Scripture and amplified in the Spirit of Prophecy writings, is the ultimate and most persuasive answer to the problem of evil.
The Parallel Continues
The parallel between the Lisbon earthquake and the recent tsunamis was further explored by Wieseltier in his reference to those clerics in 1755 who blamed the sins of society for the calamity that had befallen them. Wieseltier quotes a prominent Jesuit preacher who declared at the time:
Learn, O Lisbon, that the destroyers of our houses, palaces, churches, and convents, the cause of the death of so many people and of the flames that devoured such vast treasures, are your abominable sins, and not comets, stars, vapors, and exhalations, and similar natural phenomena (18).
Wieseltier then quotes a leading rabbi in Israel who said of the recent disaster in Asia, “This is an expression of God’s great ire with the world” (19).
Wieseltier had best stay tuned. Inspiration describes in the following statement the mounting of natural disasters as the close of time draws near, and how the blame game will grow sinister—and more specific:
Even now he [Satan] is at work. In accidents and calamities by sea and by land, in great conflagrations, in fierce tornadoes and terrific hailstorms, in tempests, floods, cyclones, tidal waves, and earthquakes, in every place and in a thousand forms, Satan is exercising his power. He sweeps away the ripening harvest, and famine and distress follow. He imparts to the air a deadly taint, and thousands perish by the pestilence. These visitations are to become more and more frequent and disastrous.…
And then the great deceiver will persuade men that those who serve God are causing these evils. The class that have provoked the displeasure of Heaven will charge all their troubles upon those whose obedience to God’s commandments is a perpetual reproof to transgressors. It will be declared that men are offending God by the violation of the Sunday sabbath; that this sin has brought calamities which will not cease until Sunday observance shall be strictly enforced; and that those who present the claims of the fourth commandment, thus destroying reverence for Sunday, are troublers of the people, preventing their restoration to divine favor and temporal prosperity (20).
The savage hurt and gnawing doubt afflicting the secular mind is as much—if not more—the consequence of pseudo-Christianity than of the strictly wayward intellect. The great Advent message, with its world view anchored in the great controversy motif, offers the answer. God is not the Author of evil, but of liberty. Without liberty there can be no love, which is why God took the risk of allowing evil by creating beings with free will. But the controversy will not last forever. Sin and righteousness will soon reach critical mass, and the events prefigured in 1755—of which recent natural horrors are but a faint shadow—will signal the climax of this struggle, the death of evil, and the eternal reign of good. GCO
References
- Leon Wieseltier, “The Wake,” The New Republic, January 17, 2005, p. 34.
- Ibid.
- Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy, p. 304.
- Desmond Ford, letter to Neal C. Wilson, February 9, 1983, quoted in Good News for Adventists (Auburn, CA: Good News Unlimited, 1985), p. 55.
- Robert D. Brinsmead, Judged by the Gospel: A Review of Adventism (Fallbrook, CA: Verdict Publications, 1980), p. 314.
- Wieseltier, “The Wake,” The New Republic, January 17, 2005, p. 34.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- White, The Great Controversy, p. 255.
- Wieseltier, “The Wake,” The New Republic, January 17, 2005, p. 34.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- White, The Great Controversy, pp. 589, 590.
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