Last year, Canadian wildfires were in the news. This year the fires blaze in Texas. As I write, the Smokehouse Creek Fire blazes still. It has already carved a path of destruction more than halfway across the Panhandle, consuming more than a million acres of land. That’s much larger than the entire state of Rhode Island.
If you are following real-time news about the fire, you’re likely to encounter stories of three kinds. First there are the strictly empirical updates, filled with place names and placeholders, numbers and stats, sometimes enhanced with live maps. Second there are the updates that go a bit deeper, forays into investigative journalism propelled by the search for answers and, most of all, somewhere to lay the blame. Third, there are the updates that forsake the statistical and investigative impulses in hope of finding some sort of respite. These tend to zero in on philanthropic rescue and reconstructive efforts and can be identified by their attempts to create hometown heroes.
The second and third journalistic productions noted here are the outworking of the first: given that empirical observation provides everything we need to know about this particular wildfire, the search for villains and heroes must also operate on this delimited reductively materialistic plane. As we consume these productions, we are given the promise that if we simply follow the empirical evidence we will be able to comfort ourselves by assigning culpability for the carnage, as well as celebrate those who have bravely worked to overcome it. In the days and weeks ahead, media outlets will of course do much of this dividing work for us, helping us reinforce lines they have generously drawn that separate the good guys of their world from the bad.
Inasmuch as we may find this predictable journalistic trajectory unpalatable, we will be inclined to follow suit by using it to confirm our prejudices about the identity of the world’s villains and heroes. But this is not the most important thing to note about our reception of the media coverage of the great fire. The most important thing is that it will fail to engage our theological appetites. It is this lack that palpably exposes the inability of brute empirical facts to provide the answers we need in the face of real horror, and which sets us adrift on the fool’s errand of moralistic casuistry. Once we have successfully litigated those we deem responsible and given community service awards to the heroes we have created, the meaning and the closure we will have given ourselves will still only be skin deep. The thick meaning we long for in the face of such overwhelming devastation will remain inaccessible to us, but only because it is theological.
We’ve pretty much done away with theological explanations of the news — indeed, this is one of the hallmarks of a modernity restricted, as it is, to Charles Taylor’s famous immanent frame. One reason we’ve done away with them is that we’ve found them distasteful, and this not without reason. We can note, for example, Pat Robertson’s announcement on The 700 Club that Haiti’s 2010 earthquake was divine retribution for having made a pact with the Devil in 1791 in order to enlist his help to expel the French. We don’t want this kind of theological explanation — after all, doesn’t Jesus say that the Tower of Siloam did not kill the 18 because of their sin? (Luke 13:4) — and the alternative we’ve opted for is no theological explanation at all.
But if there are three kinds of news reports, there are two kinds of theological explanation. The first, Robertson’s approach, is didactic. It uses a causal calculus to enforce a providential moral order (Robertson links Hurricane Katrina, the Haiti earthquake, and rampant American abortion). The method it often deploys toward this end, like today’s materialistic journalism, is to divide the world into heroes and villains. And like today’s journalism, it tends to assume that looking at the facts is in itself a dividing work: those who have been blessed are apparently God’s beloved children and those who have suffered expose themselves as his enemies.
Didactic journalism can deploy the Scriptures to reinforce its providentialism. Robertson was quite explicit that his reading of the Haiti earthquake was informed by the reading of Scripture: “I was reading yesterday,” he noted, “a book that was very interesting about what God has to say in the Old Testament about those who shed innocent blood. And he used the term that those who do this, ‘the land will vomit you out.’” Robertson here extracts a principle from the Bible and applies it to the news. His belief in a divine moral order is not to be despised, but he almost certainly commits the Aristotelian fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc (after therefore because of).
Like certain didactic readers, the figural reader is inclined to interpret the Smokehouse Creek Fire in relation to scriptural precedents. But in this case the correspondence would not be based, as it was for Robertson, on the use of a conceptual abstraction, “retribution,” to establish lines of causality. It would rather be the result of a verbal link forged by the word fire. And in this case the figural reader would be free not only to look to scriptural accounts of fiery retribution such as the story of Nadab and Abihu, but also Eden’s angelic sword of fire, the burning bush that remained unconsumed, the various Levitical offerings, the Beloved’s love that burns like a blazing fire, Peter’s warming himself by the fire in his denial or Paul’s notion of work refined by fire.
A sermon preached in the face of the current devastation could turn to any of these Scriptures to prooftext didactic certainties. But as the preacher immerses his subject in the Scriptures, his audience would increasingly find that — to use George Lindbeck’s famous turn of phrase — the Scriptures were absorbing the inferno at Smokehouse Creek. This is not to say that a fully orbed figural approach would avoid the uncomfortable topic of divine judgment. Indeed, any credible biblical theology of fire will have to reckon with the terrifying return of the Righteous Judge, whose eyes blaze as flames of fire. But it is equally true that the search for the scriptural form of any particular fire will be complexified by our multivalent scriptural witness. It is thus that in his City of God, Augustine, having refuted the pagan accusation that the sack of Rome was the result of Christian impiety, does not merely return the favor by proposing another simplistic causal mechanism. His alternative is to unravel a sprawling scriptural history of humankind, beginning with Adam, and ending with the Parousia and the age to come.
Figural engagement with the news generates a chastened providentialism. It chastens the human propensity to speculation by relying on Scripture words all the way down. It proceeds only as far as the Scriptures do when it comes to offering theological explanations for current events, ever mindful that “we see through a glass, darkly.” And as it proceeds with its own creaturely finitude in mind, it longs for the revelation of the Divine and scriptural form of all things: “Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Cor. 13:12).
Since the early church, suffering Christians have been those who have most eagerly anticipated the Parousia. A case in point is the Coptic Christians of Cairo, who secretly dug a church out of the mountain that towers above the Garbage City where they lived. Having built the church, they inscribed the words, “Amen, Come Lord Jesus” in the rock face wall.
But while persecuted Christians feel God’s absence acutely, God cannot be, for them, a God who has left his people to their own devices, only to return at the end of time to clean up the mess. The Copts of Garbage City testify to their belief in God’s abiding presence through their figural engagement with the Scriptures. Thus, the rock faces above and around their Cave Church are alive with carved depictions of scriptural scenes.
When the Copts ascend the mountain to worship in their church, they ascend with Elijah. And with Elijah they call out to their own God even as the nations surrounding them call out to theirs. The terms of this confrontation are the same for them now as they were in Elijah’s day: “The god who answers by fire — he is God” (1 Kgs. 18:24). And the God who does not answer by fire, well, he is not.
As there was fire in the beginning, there is now, and ever shall be, world without end — for God is a consuming fire (Heb. 12:29). As we anticipate our inevitable reckoning with this fiery God we must ask ourselves what we wish for in the meantime, whether we wish to suffer the fires that now threaten us as from his hand. The decision to do without him has been costly, for it has also been a decision to admit to the world that we have nothing to say other than that which it is already saying as it churns out its three favored journalistic productions — empirical, investigative and philanthropic. At stake is not merely whether we will choose to engage the fires theologically by means of the two approaches outlined here, the didactic and the figural. The question that is put to us is the one great question of the age, which comes in the form of atheism’s enticing whisper: for if he does not answer by fire, he is not.
