In my day job I am an earthquake geologist working in an academic setting.  As part of my religious and spiritual life I obviously spend a lot of time thinking about Reformed theology.  So, in a week like this with a major deadly earthquake in China, how do the two halves of my life inform each other?

I have laid this all out, at least to my preliminary satisfaction, in a longer theological discourse that I have presented in multi-week adult education classes at churches.  Here is the executive summary:

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.  [Genesis 1:31]

At the beginning of the Bible we are presented with the situation that when God looked at “all that he had made” he found it to be “very good.”  So if we now have a “created order” that has the potential for natural disasters that can cause the loss of tens of thousands of human lives is that still “very good” or did something go wrong?  As Christians we believe that within human nature something did go wrong and that is the Fall in Genesis 3.  But when humans fell did the created order fall with it?  It seems clear to me that the created order was corrupted as well.  This is not in the sense that the creation is sinful the way humans are, but in the Fall and humans becoming sinful they had to leave the garden and the world we live in now is not the ideal that God originally created.  In the New Testament Paul writes in Romans 8:21 “that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay” and we see that release from bondage in Revelation 21 with a New Heaven and a New Earth, and the New Earth will be the dwelling place of humans with God.  Just as we have the image of humans being raised in a perfected form, this echoes the redemption of creation that Paul talks of with the earth being made new for the perfected humans to live in.  In a more controversial reading of the Greek, the argument could be made that John 3:16, “For God so loved the world…” could foreshadow this as well since for the word we translate “world” John uses the Greek word kosmos, which can mean the “created order,”  rather than using some term specific to human beings such as ethnos.

That is the first part, that the world we live in is corrupted just like us humans are.  So are earthquakes a curse in this corrupted world?  I’m not sure that they are.  While they have been viewed as God’s judgment or His hand upon the world at times through history, in the Bible they sometimes clearly are, and sometimes they are not, sometimes even being neutral phenomenon.  In this present world earthquakes are the mechanism by which mountains are built.  Mountains are important for providing new fertile soil in their erosion, for producing rain clouds, for renewing the surface of the earth, for providing many important mineral deposits.  The argument could probably be made that in a “perfect” world we don’t need mountains, or if we did need them that they could rise and fall aseismically without earthquakes.  But in this world it seems to me that we need mountains, and mountains and earthquakes are inseparably linked.

Therefore earthquakes as a class are not a curse or punishment from God, but a functioning part of a created order that was corrupted in the fall.  This means that when a large devastating earthquake happens, like the one that just hit southeast China, we are not looking for God’s punishment in it, or for a sign of the end times, but rather as a part of the renewing of the earth, the created order, that can have the unfortunate side effect of causing this destruction and loss of life because the created order is fallen and corrupt.

That is the approach from a natural history perspective.  This can also be considered from a human perspective which does more integration of the scriptures and a consideration of modern civilization.  That is for another time, but I would note that in times of devastation like this faith-based humanitarian organizations can have more access to otherwise controlled areas to bring in the Gospel, at least the Gospel enacted if not spoken.

I don’t know if this makes sense in an executive summary form.  When I do the six hour version people seem to follow me and it holds together.  As I said at the onset, this was a necessary formulation for me so that I would be able to understand my profession in the context of my faith.  Being in a field where I can work to reduce human suffering is important to me.  But at times like this my academic theological explanation only helps slightly when I see the death and destruction in the area of the earthquake and still ask God “why?” or “for how long?”  And I think that because of my professional ties to these events my heart aches a bit more for the victims of an earthquake than for any other natural disaster.