...For That Which Is Signified

Very recently, I was sitting less than 20 minutes' drive from Moore, OK, discussing the historical reconstruction of Earth's climate system. I'll summarize the discussion by saying that the climate system is complex, our records of it always will be incomplete, and that reconstruction of the past always defies our ideal standards of proof and causality. Nature is impersonal. It has no motivations, only the compulsions of forces and the gradients in mass, composition, and energy that sustain them, which do arise at random. 

When we attempt to understand the co-evolution of life with the climate system, we are tempted to read those compulsions as motivations. One thread of intelligent design is that the historical evolution of the Earth system is motivated to produce human beings or at least some creature, "blessed with memory, reason, and skill," as the Eucharist Prayer puts it. One example is the mass extinction about 250 million years, at the end of Permian and the beginning of Triassic time. At the end of the Permian, there lived a creature called Lystrosaurus , a synapsid (mammal ancestor) who had evolved a rib cage and internal organs somewhat resembling ours so as to live underground like a gopher. Perhaps thanks to this lifestyle, Lystrosaurus survived the mass extinction and passed on its traits to its descendants, who perhaps include us. 

Stephen Jay Gould takes on the idea of teleological evolution in Full House , and for the moment, I'll accept his conclusion that the case for humanity as the telos of evolutionary processes is weak. Intelligent design tries to make a rational, objective case for something that is ultimately subjective: that we are one of the intended results of creation, like light and darkness, the celestial objects, plants, the birds of the air, the fish in the sea, and all the creatures that live on land. That the ultimately random and impersonal forces of nature do somehow harmonize. But we know this from revelation, not from nature. And it is from revelation, we, too, must understand how to read impersonal natural forces on shorter timescales.

I was on Twitter in Detroit Airport on Monday when I saw a debris signature in a radar image someone had posted. I had flown out of Oklahoma City a couple of hours before, and I tried to orient myself in the image with the places I'd been in the previous few days. Already having been delayed in Oklahoma one night, I had been quite enthusiastic about leaving before another round of severe thunderstorms developed, and seeing evidence of a tornado on radar within ten miles of the airport I would have been in, had the random odds of airline re-booking not been in my favor, came with some self-justification. Oh, how good had my judgment been. And then I thought, "That's a sprawling metropolitan area. I've seen those houses clustered here and there on the landscape. People live there. And that's a big tornado." Before I left Detroit, it was clear that a very strong tornado had caused multiple fatalities and severe damage.

It is a tenet of our civil righteousness that most dead people do not deserve to be dead. We make exceptions for murderers, some of those who abuse drugs or children, and people who die by sheer incompetence (if we are unconnected with them), but we draw the line well beyond people who die in natural or anthropogenic disasters. And by disasters, I mean those fatal events of a scale where grief is overwhelming because grief is correlated. And in these cases, we often attribute the escape of survivors to the grace (or visitation, as I sometimes say) of God. At funerals, we are known to say the converse: that the dead are dead, because God wanted them with Him in heaven. Our civil righteousness, however, bristles at the idea that the dead died for their sins or those of society as a whole, though some preacher almost always goes there. 

Mark Joseph Stern has a piece in Slate today about journalists trying to inject divine agency into people's experiences of the Moore tornado, which helpfully re-hashes some Enlightenment ideas about theodicy or atheodicy (justifying the ways of no God to man). (Or as  At one point, Stern quotes Isaiah 45:7 and then remarks, "These are thorny theological questions." As a mesoscale meteorologist (the particular type of scientist who studies tornadoes), I know that tornadoes are the outcome of physics on a planet like ours that has a day and a night, varying climates, seasons, and transports water from the land to the sea. As Callan Bentley points out, meteorologists at the National Weather Service and on broadcast media gave advance and accurate warning of the tornado in Moore as well as the probability for severe weather generally in Oklahoma. As a theologian, I know that tornadoes also are a manifestation of harmony that arises from apparently contradictory natural forces. For Athanasius in Contra Gentes, harmonious structures like tornadoes (not one of his examples) gave him insight into the oneness and goodness of God, which seems remarkably frustrating when the objects of demonstration kill people. 

In such cases, I'd say to people like Callan Bentley or Mark Joseph Stern, I pray, not because I believe it does anything (you'll hear why in a minute), but because if the Church is One Body with Christ, it ought to cry in pain when it is so badly injured. That we cannot cry in pain for all injuries is a measure of our limits, not the futility of prayer in such cases.

Which is not to say that Bentley and Stern don't have a point about divine agency saving people from tornadoes. They do, but I prefer to let Jesus make my argument. When Jesus tells us to love our enemies, He justifies it by giving an example of the holiness of God, "Who lets the Sun shine on the evil and the good, and sends rain upon the just and unjust alike" (Matthew 5:45). One of the solemn and insoluble mysteries of the world is that we can find both sustenance and death from the operations of nature and that what we find can be (but is not always) decoupled from the content of our character. 

Jesus also insists that anthropogenic disasters and even mass murder is subject to the same calculus. See, for instance, Luke 13: 

"1 And there were present, at that very time, some that told him of the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.

2 And he answering, said to them: Think you that these Galileans were sinners above all the men of Galilee, because they suffered such things?

3 I say to you, No: but unless you shall do penance, you shall all likewise perish.

4 Or those eighteen upon whom the tower fell in Siloe, and slew them: think you, that they also were debtors above all the men that dwell in Jerusalem?

5 I tell you: No: but unless you do penance, you shall all likewise perish."    

To paraphrase Peter: we know that Jesus's disciples died and their earthly bodies experienced corruption. Indeed, the tomb of Peter and others is with us to this day. Jesus is not saying that if repent, hide ourselves in Him, or experience whatever form of soteriological unity you prefer, we can escape the mysterious, intractable vulnerabilities of the created order. After all, Jesus couldn't. Or since we know Jesus could, we know that he didn't. Instead, I only can read Luke 13 to mean that death at any scale or random, lucky escapes at any scale signify for us law and grace in the eternal and soteriological context. Dying or not dying in a tornado is not the action of law and grace to individuals, it merely signifies these things for us. An unbelieving scientist need not start a sentence with "A God who is powerful enough to do X" and expect a believing scientist to be convinced of anything, the God we believe is as powerful and necessary as the laws of physics and their consequences thereof. But more.

So why do we confuse the signifier with the signified? Why do we identify the survivors with Grace and used to identify the dead with the punishment of the Law? Jacob Smith, the priest in charge of Calvary St. George in New York City may have reached the heart of this when he spoke at Mockingbird's NYC conference last month on "Ministering to Winners: The Poor, Captive, Blind, Oppressed (and Other People Like You and Me) or perhaps "the theology of the Cross vs. the theology of glory." At one point, he mentions that old Reformation term (familiar to my readers through *Christopher), we are curvatus in se. To paraphrase the Rev. Mr. Smith, the overwhelming action of universally accessible human salvation is reduced by the action of sin in our hearts to the glorification of our own personal story. And it's just the same when we see the miraculous escapes of others from natural disasters.

And I suppose I might have something different to say if I were being burned at the stake and the fire did not harm me or one of the other apparent suspensions of the natural law we hear of in the acts of the martyrs, but until then, I will try desperately to convince myself that the world entire is the proper object for thanksgiving, not just my lucky breaks.