acts of God part 1

When the unimaginable happens and your world turns upside-down, where can you find certainty?

In the middle of the Eighteenth Century, Lisbon was perhaps the wealthiest city in Europe, the third busiest port in the World and the centre of the mighty Portuguese empire. It was also one of the most “religious” Catholic cities in the World. Its seven hills were replete with churches, chapels and monasteries, dripping with trappings of wealth and prosperity, their altars adorned with gold, silver and precious gems..

Nearly every home had a personal shrine, with a smattering of dubious relics, such as bones, teeth, hair and other body parts of the saints. All year round there were religious processions dedicated to this or that saint. Shops and businesses closed. People bowed their heads or kneeled, as the colourful, noisy spectacle passed by. There were a lot of priests living and working in Lisbon in those days, one out of every six citizens were members of the clergy. It was a city secure in its place in God’s Universe.

Devastation

All this was to change in the space of a few minutes on November 1st 1755, All Saints Day, one of the most religious days on the Church’s calendar. Just after 9 o’clock that morning, Lisbon was hit by the most devastating earthquake in modern history. In that short time the city was brought to its knees. The death toll in the tens of thousands, included many who had been packed into churches, which collapsed on them. Tremors were felt as far away as Norway and Ireland and the resultant waves of a huge tsunami reached Brazil and the West Indies. This was followed by a city-wide fire which burned for weeks afterwards and completed the work of utter destruction. The city was still in ruins six years later.

This event was hugely significant to the society of the day. A historian noting afterwards that this “shocked western civilisation more than any other event since the fall of Rome in the fifth century”. The biggest question on people’s lips was how could a loving Creator have permitted such a catastrophe … and in religious Lisbon of all places? This question sparked off a debate that swept through Europe and engaged the minds of the greatest intellects of the day, philosophers as well as theologians. It became a defining moment in history and helped to fuel a movement that had already begun but which was now ready to gain momentum. It was the Enlightenment, the demoting of Divine purposes in favour of naturalistic explanations for the World, as figured out from the mind of man. So, along with the question posed of how could God have done such a thing, came the alternative scientific plea ofwhat could have caused this natural occurrence?

There was certainly plenty of fodder for those who saw this as God’s judgement. Gabriel Malagrida, a prominent preacher of the day declared, “Lisbon had become a Babylon of inconsolable confusion, which the Good Lord, in His righteous outrage, had chosen to smash to the ground.” As with much of Catholic Europe of the day, the ostentatious religiosity was just a façade that distracted from the sinful underbelly. Lisbon had been a centre for the Inquisition, when “heretics” were routinely burned at the stake as a public spectacle, dressed up as a religious festival. The king and the clergy were corrupt. Many of the city’s nuns doubled up as prostitutes, with the King an eager customer for their wares. Prostitution was the third busiest profession in a city famous for its amorous excesses. Venereal disease ran rampant.

But was it more sinful than any other comparable city of its day? Did it deserve such a horrific fate, while Rome, London and other places avoided such punishment? The most upsetting fact was that so many of the deaths were of worshippers in church, whereas the redlight district was barely touched by the devastation.Why was this? This is not a question easily answered, as we do not have the Mind of God. Although we, as with Job in the Hebrew Scriptures, are not always able to discern the reasons for His decisions, we can certainly investigate the outcomes. We will return to this in a later article.

Voltaire and the Deists

For now, let us follow the reactions of the prominent thinkers of the day to the Lisbon earthquake. The French philosopher, writer and playwright, Voltaire, was perhaps the most famous. He was certainly no friend to the Christian faith, but he hedged his bets too. As was common in those times, he was a Deist.

On the website of the World Union of Deists1 (WUD), deism is defined as knowledge of God based on the application of our reason on the designs/laws found throughout Nature. The designs presuppose a Designer. Deism is therefore a natural religion and is not a “revealed” religion.

Deism is Christianity-Lite, religion without faith or worship. It follows a God defined by human reason, the best fit for a scientific hypothesis regarding issues of Creation and Life. If a better explanation came along that chimed better with the intellect, one would imagine Deists would slip quite comfortably into all-out atheism.

Voltaire believed that God was creator, simply because there was no better explanation, but that God does not really interact with mankind. Yet he knew that the idea of God was important for a moral centre to society and it was he who came up with the cynical observation, “if God did not exist, we would have to invent Him”2.

He reacted very negatively to the Lisbon earthquake, with a pessimistic view as to God’s intentions towards mankind, in his view it was an affront to the natural order of things. His whole life now needed to be put into perspective; he was said to have remarked, “I no longer dare to complain about my colic”. His great rival was Jean-Jacques Rousseau,3 another French philosopher. Rousseau was less of a rationalist and far less cynical.

Although he was also a Deist, he believed that God could be reached by the heart. Rousseau’s reaction to the earthquake was to point out man’s folly for living in cities, rather than the simple life, back to nature. He wasn’t so condemning of God’s involvement in the catastrophe, he simply castigated those who knowingly put themselves at risk in Lisbon, as many could have saved their lives if they had fled immediately, rather than hanging around collecting their belongings. For many philosophers, living in this era of optimism and “enlightenment”, the earthquake was a real jarring of their world view.

Immanuel Kant, the Prussian philosopher, however, viewed it purely as a natural process, observing that the earth needed to periodically vent its energy to release pressure. More and more now turned to Science to look for naturalistic reasons for the earthquake, rather than focussing on any Divine involvements. Seismology, the scientific study of earthquakes, was born, with contributions from Kant himself, as well as many scientists from all over Europe. Even more traditional churchmen were getting in on the act.

Charles Chauncy, an American Congregationalist minister declared that while it is “God who maketh the earth to shake it is those gaseous materials that fill the bowels of the earth that are the secondary causes of what we mean by an earthquake”. Predictably the Catholic Church had their own answer to the Lisbon disaster. It was a judgement! It was a Deity fully engaged with His world and pouring out terrible judgements, rather than the blind watchmaker or absentee Landlord promoted by the Deists. Evidently Portugal had been singled out for particularly savage retribution! 

The Early Methodists 

England at that time was enjoying a true revival, the fruits of the ministry of John Wesley, George Whitefield and the Methodists. For them, God was not this lofty uncaring deity who could be proved (or disproved) by the rational mind. Their God was not the God of the philosophers, influenced by the dualism and rationalism of the ancient Greek thinkers, Plato and Aristotle, but rather the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of the Hebrew Scriptures and of the risen Christ. George Whitefield put the whole thing into an eternal perspective. He said, “O that who were lately destroyed in Portugal had known the Divine redeemer!” John Wesley responded to the disaster with a pamphlet entitled, serious thoughts occasioned by the late Earthquake at Lisbon. He pondered over the fact that a supernatural God would often use natural causes to inflict His Will but, as with Whitefield, stressed the need for humanity to struggle for immortality, as the promise of eternal life is a guarantee to all who accept Christ in this life. He added that the only experiences of value in this life, even earthquakes or the possibility of the earth being burned to a cinder by the return of Halley’s comet (due back in 1758), are those that prepare us for immortality.

The Lisbon earthquake was surely a fulcrum of history. It forced everyone to re-evaluate God and His relationship with them. If you were a Deist, just clinging on to a belief in a Creator, then your perfect clockwork world had just been pranged. If you were already teetering towards atheism, then the seeming randomness of natural processes was beginning to be explained by the scientists of the “Enlightenment”, though this did not give you any real hope for the future.

For many Christians, the earthquake was judgement personified, though it did give the impression of a very fickle, selective Judge. The only people who gave meaning as well as hope were the believers such as Wesley and Whitefield, who stressed the importance for each individual to have a right relationship with God, who could take our lives at any time. 

History has shown us that these early Methodists and others who followed in the Evangelical awakenings and revivals at various times and places, were the exception rather than the rule. There were aspects of Deism that never quite went away, matters of historical and natural processes, of the fate of Nations, of the mechanisms that held the world together. All of these were becoming fodder for the commentators, scientists and the ‘chattering classes’. These may have engaged the Almighty in prayer for their own needs. They were increasingly happy to consider Him indifferent to the lofty matters of running the World. He may still be Father God, but was He still the God of the earthquake? The investigation continues … 1 http://deism.com/index.html 2 https://tinyurl.com/hlrbs 3 https://tinyurl.com/zo5a3r4