“I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7, NIV).
“For this is what the Sovereign Lord says: How much worse will it be when I send against Jerusalem my four dreadful judgments—sword and famine and wild beasts and plague—to kill its men and their animals!” (Ezekiel 14:21, NIV).
As a high school math teacher, one of the things I have to teach students is the logic of if-then conditional statements.  An example of such a statement might be, “If it rains, then the sidewalk will be wet.”  The converse of that conditional statement would be that if the sidewalk is wet, then it must have rained.
Now it is clear that a conditional statement and its converse can both be true.  For example, in two-dimensional geometry, if a figure is a circle then every point on the circle is the same distance from the circle’s center.  That’s a true conditional statement.  Its converse is also true:  If every point on a figure is the same distance from the center, then the figure is a circle.
But not every true conditional statement has a converse that is also true.  It is not necessarily true that if the sidewalk is wet, then it must have rained.  Perhaps I was washing my car.  Perhaps my sprinkler head is broken.  Perhaps someone was carrying a jug of water that dropped and broke open.
This distinction between a (true) statement and its (false) converse is important when considering extremist pastor Kevin Swanson’s claim that “God is burning down California in 2017 and 2018 after about twenty-five years of leading the pack to legitimize the sin of homosexuality in that state” (The Huffington Post).
Swanson’s inflammatory statements about the California wildfires were made during a radio broadcast on Aug. 3, and they reflect an extremist tradition that interprets specific natural disasters as acts of divine judgment.
Certainly there is biblical precedent for this.  Isaiah 45:7 affirms in God’s own voice that God creates darkness and disaster.  Ezekiel 14 affirms in God’s own voice that God sent and sends four kinds of disaster (sword, famine, wild beasts, and plague) on Jerusalem and that God has done nothing “without cause” (v 23).  Genesis 6-9 affirms that God sent the flood that destroyed humankind, while Exodus 7-12 affirms that God sent the plagues that liberated the children of Israel from bondage.
This idea that God creates and sends natural catastrophe (Isaiah) as forms of a divine judgment (Genesis, Ezekiel) or salvation (Exodus) is thus a well-established part of the Old Testament’s theological tradition.
However, when the theological claim that “God creates and sends natural disasters” is assumed to be true in its converse, so that “all natural disasters are created and sent by God,” we are on ground much closer to heresy than to truth.
In that case, every natural disaster and every catastrophe would have to be interpreted as the active work of God in creation.
Yet, in Luke 13, when Jesus asks rhetorically about the “eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them – do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem?”  He answers his own question: “I tell you, no!” (Luke 13:4-5, NIV).
Those 18 who died were not “guilty-er” than the others.  They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  The NET Study Bible rightly explains the fall of the tower of Siloam as “an accident of fate.”
Something similar is evident in Ecclesiastes 9:11:  “The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned, but time and chance happen to them all” (NIV).
There is, in other words, an element of randomness in the workings of the created order.     There is also something morally wrong with assuming that the converse of true theological statements is also true and therefore normative for the church.  The converse of theological statements allows true theological norms to be weaponized.
We see this in the #MeToo movement when women young and old are counselled to forgive those who have assaulted them.  “If you’re a Christian, then you should forgive” becomes “If you forgive, then you are a Christian,” which in turn becomes “If you don’t forgive, then you aren’t a Christian after all.”
The theological idea of male headship becomes toxic patriarchy when “Wives, submit to your husbands” becomes “Husbands can do anything they want and wives should put up with it” and gets extended more broadly to the relationships between men and women no matter the social context.
Even the theological idea of unconditional love can become toxic when it is interpreted to mean that boundaries can never exist because boundaries by definition place conditions around love.
Those of us who seek a vibrant faith for the 21st century must resist the idea that the converse of a true statement is always true, and instead distinguish, sharply and clearly, the actual theological claims of Scripture from the false converse claims which are all too often derived from them.  And in doing so, we shall continue the tradition of loving the Lord our God with all our minds.

Rev. Henry Sun (Ph.D., Claremont Graduate School) is the pastor of Heritage Presbyterian Church and a high school math teacher at John Finney High School in Vallejo.

Sharing is caring!