Scientists in Iceland are tracking an earthquake swarm south of Reykjavik, along with other signs and indicators of an impending volcanic eruption. We’re talking days or hours, not a month or two. I’m following the story closely, as the wife and I toured Iceland just a year ago. Right now, magma is flowing just a mile or two below the surface and will likely burst forth very shortly. A state of emergency has been declared. The three thousand residents of the town of Grindavik on the south coast have been ordered to evacuate. The nearby Blue Lagoon, one of the top tourist attractions in Iceland, has been closed. The eruption will likely be vents opening up to pour magma onto the surface, which will then spill across the landscape toward Grindavik and the sea, rather than an explosive eruption like the Mount St. Helens eruption a generation ago. So let’s talk about God and earthquakes and thunder and lightning and volcanoes and Mormonism.
In 1 Nephi 19 we read the following, as Nephi quotes the prophet Zenos (unknown to the Bible) about these catastrophic events that will follow the crucifixion of Jesus in the Old World:
And the rocks of the earth must rend; and because of the groanings of the earth, many of the kings of the isles of the sea shall be wrought upon by the Spirit of God, to exclaim: The God of nature suffers. (1 Ne. 19:12)
It’s hard to nail down that last phrase. On the one hand, it sounds like condescending Western talk about naive, credulous indigenous people with animistic beliefs, who saw God in every natural occurrence, hence “the God of nature.” On the other hand, modern Mormons and lots of other modern-day believers take much the same view, seeing God in earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and epidemics, so “the God of nature” is not an inapt description of how many modern-day Christians and Mormons view God. The preceding verse sheds a little more light on this view of things, commenting again on events that will accompany the crucifixion of Jesus:
For thus spake the prophet: The Lord God surely shall visit all the house of Israel at that day, some with his voice, because of their righteousness, unto their great joy and salvation, and others with the thunderings and the lightnings of his power, by tempest, by fire, and by smoke, and vapor of darkness, and by the opening of the earth, and by mountains which shall be carried up. (1 Ne. 19:11)
Note that enlightened and righteous people get verbal revelation, while unrighteous heathens get the “God of Nature” treatment. It’s worth noting as well that Joseph dictated the Book of Mormon text for 1 Nephi *after* first dictating Mosiah through Mormon, so the dramatic events of 3 Nephi were already familiar to Joseph when he dictated 1 Nephi 19.
The key theological point here is that the Book of Mormon endorses an immanent God who is directly and frequently involved with the world. He doesn’t just watch earthquakes, volcanoes, and the like, He is pulling the strings: “the thunderings and lightnings of his power.” Sounds more like Zeus than Jehovah, but that’s the Book of Mormon depiction. In modern Mormonism, God’s immanence extends to drought (Mormons are always praying for rain, it seems) but also to more domestic concerns: imploring God’s direct action to heal an injury, recover from illness, or find the car keys. But LDS GAs definitely endorse the God of Nature view. Here is then-Elder Oaks from a 1995 BYU devotional:
These huge catastrophes [earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, and the like] are tragedies, but they may have another significance. The Lord uses adversities to send messages to his children. Isaiah prophesied that in the last days the Lord would visit all nations with great natural disasters (see Isaiah 29:6; 2 Nephi 27:1–2). In modern revelation, the Lord speaks of calling upon the nations of the earth by the mouth of his servants and also “by the voice of thunderings, and by the voice of lightnings, and by the voice of tempests, and by the voice of earthquakes, and great hailstorms, and by the voice of famines and pestilences of every kind” (D&C 43:25). … Surely these great adversities are not random or without some eternal purpose or effect. They can turn men’s hearts to God.
What are the theological alternatives? One is that God is transcendent but not immanent, not directly involved with the world except possibly on rare occasions. This is most familiar in classical Deism. I’ll just pull a paragraph from the IEP article “American Enlightenment Thought“:
European Enlightenment thinkers conceived tradition, custom and prejudice (Vorurteil) as barriers to gaining true knowledge of the universal laws of nature. The solution was deism or understanding God’s existence as divorced from holy books, divine providence, revealed religion, prophecy and miracles; instead basing religious belief on reason and observation of the natural world. Deists appreciated God as a reasonable Deity. A reasonable God endowed humans with rationality in order that they might discover the moral instructions of the universe in the natural law. God created the universal laws that govern nature, and afterwards humans realize God’s will through sound judgment and wise action. Deists were typically (though not always) Protestants, sharing a disdain for the religious dogmatism and blind obedience to tradition exemplified by the Catholic Church.
To modern secularists, Deism seems a little quaint. Full-blown materialism (sometimes termed physicalism or naturalism) affirms the natural operation of the cosmos while quietly abandoning any reference to a divine Creator or any divine role for keeping the Universe hanging together, year after year. But for a Deist or a materialist, the key point is that God is not in the whirlwind or the tempest — those are natural phenomena operating according to the natural laws that seem to govern the Universe.
You can probably discern which way I lean when it comes to immanence versus transcendence versus materialism. But you might be wrong. These are open questions, ultimate philosophical questions that do not lend themselves to easy resolution, whether empirically or philosophically. The problem with immanence is that it’s just too easy to point to this or that worldly event and claim God’s behind it when it confirms your own worldview, while conveniently ignoring events that cut the other way. The problem with transcendence is that God is depicted as just a little to unconcerned with human history and human events, as if He doesn’t really care that much about planet Earth and us Earthlings. It’s easy enough to say God doesn’t really care about your neighbor finding her car keys, but if it appears God doesn’t really care about the Holocaust or the Black Plague … well, what good is a God that just doesn’t seem to care?
The problem with full-blown materialism is that it depicts an immensely huge and evolving cosmos, initially full of energy and forces, then particles and molecules and dust, then stars and heavy elements and second-generation stars with planets, then life, and then eventually (and quite recently by our reckoning) consciousness and rationality. That’s us, Conscious Rational Life, which may be a very rare thing in the Universe. Or it may be a fairly widespread thing, that’s another open question. But it just seems like an exceedingly odd thing for a dead material Universe to spawn conscious rational life, the Universe sprung to life looking back upon itself, to just then have it all eventually wither way, all to no purpose, as the Universe continues to expand and cool off, galaxies and stars expending the last of their nuclear and gravitational fuel, slowly winking out one by one. So none of the three alternatives (divine immanence, divine transcendence, cosmic materialism) is really satisfying. Each has its problems and puzzles. You are forgiven if it turns out you embrace Deism on weekdays, materialism on Saturday, and divine immanence on Sunday.
And speaking of the whirlwind and the tempest, let’s wind things up with Elijah and his encounter with God in the cave in the mountains. First, the familiar KJV account from 1 Kings 19:
And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake:
And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.
And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entering in of the cave. And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said, What doest thou here, Elijah?
You can read this various ways, but it sure seems like a clear rejection of the God of Nature. God is not in the earthquake. God might whisper in your ear, but He won’t send a storm or earthquake to wreck your town. Here is the same passage in the NRSV text:
He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind, and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake,
and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire, and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.
When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
With a better translation, there was no still small voice. Instead, there is “a sound of sheer silence.” That is the image of the materialist cosmos, we humans looking out at an immenseley huge and ancient Universe and hearing only “a sound of sheer silence.” So this intriguing passage seems to suggest an immanent God who whispers in your ear, but also a transcendent God who does not truck in storms and earthquakes, while at the same time presenting “a sound of sheer silence” to we questing humans looking up for answers. This is a passage that gives questions, not answers.
So here are some Big Questions. What do the readers think?
- Is God actively involved in the daily life of humans, or at least humans of the right tribe, with a thumb on the scales for our protection and prosperity?
- If not in daily life, is God at least actively involved at a larger scale in getting our attention by way of earthquakes and volcanoes and hurricanes? Repent or be destroyed!
- Is God out there somewhere but largely or entirely uninvolved with current events here on planet Earth? Creator of the Universe but not the Daily Manager of the Universe and planet Earth?
- Or does the Universe manage to run itself on a daily basis now, some billions of years after (somehow) flashing into existence, with a vast silence greeting our observation and exploration of the cosmos?
Wheat & Tares 
Despite Oak’s comments in 1995, I think GA’s have moved away from this kind of reasoning, at least in public.
Natural disasters don’t happen very often in the jello-belt, and until very recently, the Chruch’s locus of consciousness has always been in Utah. Natural disasters were things that happened to unbelieving foreigners in far away places. Of course such events could be manifestations of God’s wrath upon a wicked populace. Even something a bit closer to home, like Hurricane Katrina, was still something that happened to “them”. I was a teenager living in Utah at the time, and a comment opinion at the time was that God was punishing people in New Orleans for being gay or other kinds of sexual deviancy.
but as the Church’s focus has become more worldwide, at least in its PR, and as there is now more media coverage of events, I think even Church leaders find this kind of punitive thinking increasingly unpalatable. When natural disasters happen now, we get images and handheld videos destruction and regular people suffering immensely. Surely even some of the more hardliner GA’s must question whether it was it was God’s will that 50,000+ people died in the Turkey-Syria earthquake this year, after seeing images and videos of the destruction and human suffering.
If the earthquake had happened 50 or even 30 years ago, without all of the photos and easily accessible videos, I’m sure at least some of them would’ve just waved their hands and thought it was God punishing some foreign heathens.
Importantly, I think the same effect is at play with human conflicts. Back in the 00’s after 9/11 and during the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Monson was interviewed by the press and they had asked him about what the Church’s position on the conflict was, and he said something along the lines of “we’re loyal Americans, we follow the flag”, which again, betrays the americentric consciousness of the church at the time, and did essentially give the Church’s stamp of approval to the war, despite lamenting the destruction.
Fast-forward to today with the present conflict in Gaza, and the Church has been veeerrry careful in their official statements about the conflict. Even if most the GAs are privately pro-Israel (which I suspect is the case), they’re not going to say so. And this is because the public opinion, even in the USA, isn’t as one-sided anymore about the conflict because people can see, with their own eyes, what’s actually happening on the ground over there. It’s not like decades past in which the default public position in the USA was pro-Israel because we didn’t actually get to see that much of what was actually happening over there.
Anyway, to come back to natural disasters, I think the “natural-disasters-as-God’s-will” will continue to fade, not just because the resulting human suffering is more visible now, but also because it’s starting to hit closer to home (the jello belt). The last wildfire season in the western states was brutal, and lots of people, including church members, lost their homes. People are thinking about whether that was really God’s will or not.
And importantly, as some of us know, that Great Salt Lake is probably going to dry up within the next decade, when it does, it is going to unleash a massive environmental disaster that will directly affect the chruch’s HQ in SLC. Is it God’s will that much of the air in Salt Lake Valley will be poisoned? (more than it already is). Will God be punishing church members by making SLC virtually uninhabitable?
It’s not going to fly, it’s easy to posit that natural disasters are God’s will when they happened a long time or are happening far away to other people, but when they happen to you, you have to choose whether you, are in fact, the wicked one, or else they’re just random natural events that God didn’t instigate.
I went to Iceland this last August to hike the Laugavegur trail. I didn’t complete it because of an impending storm. While taking the bus back to the airport, road construction necessitated a detour to the south, through the little town of Grundavik. So the news out of Iceland is a little more personal for me this year
The Elijah cave story can be seen as a real turning point in the OT understanding of God. Up until this moment God is violent and is quite okay with violence by God’s “chosen people.” Look at the way Elijah murdered all the Baal priests after defeating them in his big bonfire contest. Certainly after the Exile God is perceived by the Jews as interested more in justice, mercy, and enduring love for humankind and creation. It’s fascinating (and more than a little baffling) to me that so many so-called Christians look to God to condone and even initiate violence. They’re often the same ones who want to chisel in stone the Ten Commandments, but never the Beautitudes.
Is God actively involved in the daily life of humans…? Yes.
Is God seeking to get our attention through natural disasters? Yes, he expects us to take care of the planet and each other.
I don’t do Deism.
Avatar (the movie) glorified at least parts of animism. Which resulted in a Catholic Cardinal warning against the worship of nature. I have a Peruvian friend who is Quechua Indian. He said that 70 percent of his religion is native (a form of animism) and 30 percent is Catholic. A belief in Pachamama (Mother Nature) is very important to his family. This form of syncretism is common throughout much of Latin America.
I think many who enjoy the great outdoors have a reverence for nature. Frequently Christians say that encountering the beauty of nature is an important part of their spiritual well-being. And with many religions ossifying and becoming irrelevant, animist concepts are looking increasingly attractive.
For me, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, droughts, flooding, and other disasters have nothing to do with God stirring the pot. They are natural phenomena, sometimes made worse by human actions. They are not punishment. Rain falls on the just and the unjust. And global disasters are not indictors that the Last Days are near.
I’ve also been following the Iceland events with personal interest since we were there a few years ago. It’s gorgeous. I also remember pretty well the eruption in 2010 that grounded flights in Europe due to the ash cloud since I was working in the travel industry at the time.
I was recently listening to a Bart Ehrmann podcast, and he was talking about the different types of gods the Bible seems to be describing. “Nature gods” have always been the default for non-monolatrous faiths, most of which pre-date monotheism, so I have a hard time (with my modern brain) attributing natural events to God. It seems more likely to me that God is an experimenter who sets things in motion then goes away somewhere and lets things play out, checking in every so often to see what’s up. If there is a God, I can’t really imagine an interventionist God any more than I imagine an interventionist Santa Claus. I can’t get my brain around the logistical issues.
I don’t believe in a transcendent supernatural god. Therefore I do not believe that god is active in people’s lives at all in any supernatural way. I believe only in an immanent god that is synonymous with nature. Granted much of the LDS community believes in a god that is both transcendent and immanent, but I believe in hyper-immanence, with zero transcendence. God is nature. And to understand god is to understand nature, be it material nature or human psychological nature. I think the early polytheists understood the immanent god. They try to ascribe natural phenomena to gods that were living among them and were manifesting themselves to them through natural phenomena. Polytheism then branched into two paths. One branch turned a bunch of natural gods into transcendent gods and made images out of them. Powerful monarchs used these images to leverage power over people and manipulate them. Even though the ancient Israelites didn’t make a statue image out of YHWH, they certainly created a written image out of him and an image of him in the Ark of the Covenant, which they used to create a power structure and coerce a following to obey a large list of mostly nonsensical laws (such as no eating milk and meat together, or shellfish, or pork). The second path of the early polytheists was the philosophical path that emerged in ancient Greece, China, India, and other places. The philosophical path stripped down transcendent understandings of god and actually tried to explore using logic and reason how nature actually worked. The Greek philosopher Anaximander saw even more gods in nature than were listed in Hesiod’s Theogony and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Nature had many, many components that needed to be studied in fine detail to be understood.
On god causing natural disasters, in a sense yes. Natural disasters are nature. But these don’t occur because some invisible anthropomorphic god is trying to communicate or punish humans in some indirect, vague, and even zany way. They simply happen because that is the way nature is. And our failure to understand natural disasters and adapt to them will lead to great human suffering.
Dave, your options for God, at least to my reading, seem to presuppose an omnipotent God, whether or not that God is willing to use that omnipotence for mankind’s benefit/punishment. I honestly find the idea of a non-omnipotent God who makes things right on the back end much more comforting.
“Listen kid. Yeah, I’m sorry y’all have to go through all this crap. Some of it is my fault, some of it isn’t. And, yeah, despite what everyone suggests, I can’t fix it. Turns out some of the fanfic written about me got a little carried away. What I can promise is that heaven will be awesome. I mean way, way better than anything you and everyone else down there has ever dreamed of. And not just for some of you. Everyone’s going to have a good time. What? Yeah, I know some folks simply won’t get along with each other, but I have crap ton of mansions up here with plenty of room to stretch your legs. I’m sure we can make the arrangements work out.”
That’s a way more understandable and relatable God than one I was taught about in church or read about in any scripture.
I believe in Elijah’s God. I believe God made the earth through natural material processes, and it still runs that way without any intervention. The wind and the earth quake and my son’s extensive list of birth defects are just part of the natural order of how weather and land and human cells function. They aren’t any of them something personal to reward or punish me or him or anyone else.
I believe we can develop a personal relationship with God through prayer and receive personal direction from Them. But I don’t believe They will do favors for me over other people or protect me from the horrors and difficulties of life. It feels prideful to me to believe such a thing. People suffer so much all the time. Why would I imagine my life would be any different? What makes me more special and deserving of protection than my precious son who suffers so much? Nothing. I don’t believe in a transactional God.
I believe I can learn and grow and do good in any and every good or horrible situation I am in. I believe this beautiful, unpredictable and tragic world is here just for each of us to have these experiences. I believe in following Jesus Christ and becoming more Christ like. The rest of religion is fairly irrelevant and trivial in my opinion.
OP: You are forgiven if it turns out you embrace Deism on weekdays, materialism on Saturday, and divine immanence on Sunday
Apparently God him/herself can’t figure it out either. Christ asks God to forgive his crucifiers right before he dies and then buries entire cities and presumably millions of people in the Americas hours later. Yay for flexibility!
I lean towards a giant cosmic joke. Hopefully once we figure out what dark energy and dark matter are we’ll have a better idea. Until then I think our knowledge of physics and cosmology duly impresses us but will seem unimaginably backwards to people 2000 years from now, assuming we don’t kill ourselves off by then.
Not a Cougar,
I love what you wrote. Every time I read it I cry. Did you write the quote piece yourself?
Not a Cougar,
I love your comment. Every time I read it I cry. Is the quote part from someone else or did you write it yourself?
LWS, those are my own words. I’m sure the sentiment is far from original and for all I know many people have written something similar, but these particular words came straight from my brain and keyboard.
All I can muster at this moment is deep, desperate hope that there is a God who can read my silent prayers and help me deal with my fears for the world, my children, my own death. I used to believe God intervenes in important moments. I struggle to believe that now after not finding an answer to what I consider the most important, difficult, and worthy-of-intervention problem of my life. But the teaching and concept of Jesus and atonement I continue to find the most powerful and beautiful thing I can imagine, so I hold onto this hope. If he is there, he does not appear to be intervening in a way that I can discern. I also find the emergence of consciousness and the arc of human morality to be strong arguments for some kind of deity.
lws329, yours is a thoughtful response. I need to think more about the implications. I wrestle with whom God is, the God of lost keys, or something much deeper.
There are some really thoughtful comments on this thread.
Just a thought: I’ve wondered if Elijah’s experience in the cave can be viewed as a ritualistic ceremony of identification. The Lord has promised that he will reveal himself to those who seek him. In fact, he commands us to seek him so that he can reveal himself to us. And so, as we consistently seek him we ascend through a process of refinement and learn how to receive, little by little, more and more of his presence–until one day we, like Elijah, have a sure understanding of who God is.
There’s been some concern shared on this thread about the seemingly inconsistent dealings of God — in Latter-day Saint theology — with people in any number of different situations. And I understand that concern. Who am I that God should condescend to little me and help me through my little problems whilst millions are suffering with much greater problems than I’ll ever know? Even so, I think the key is to remember that God is no respecter of persons–in that he wishes to dwell with all of his children. And so he will come make his abode with each one of us as fast as we are able to receive him.