Hello, fellow wayfarers … What natural disasters do and do not tell us about God and neighbor … How a Kris Kristofferson song helped me keep going … Why teaching the Bible is like explaining Moby-Dick on a roller coaster … A mathematician’s Desert Island Bookshelf … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.
RDM Note: This newsletter was written before the Iranian attack on Israel. Follow news and analysis on this dangerous and momentous development at ChristianityToday.com.
A Hurricane Is Not God’s Way of Telling You Who to Hate
A hurricane is not God’s way of telling you who to hate.
My family is from one of the most hurricane-prone places in the United States—our hometown was virtually wiped from the map by Hurricane Katrina. Because of this, we spend hurricane season tracking each tropical depression with dread and then, often, relief, when the storm moves somewhere out of the path of the people we love.
This time, though, with Hurricane Helene, we exhaled too soon. Instead of hitting the coast, the hurricane devastated inland places we never expected to be vulnerable—such as Asheville, North Carolina; Valdosta, Georgia; and countless other communities flooded nearly out of existence, with people stranded without food, electricity, or cell service.
After the storm passed through, I spent some time searching through social media, trying to determine the well-being of people I know and love. As I did, I saw—as we all have—image after image of human suffering and neighborhood devastation.
And, since it was social media, I also saw a lot of the usual types using the disaster to vindicate their own negative polarization. Some posted that the massive disaster befalling Asheville was due to that city’s well-known progressive culture and politics. Others countered by saying that most of the North Carolinians left homeless by the flood were in “red” counties, so maybe this was God’s judgment on MAGA. And on and on it went, as it always does.
In the past, after almost every hurricane, we could usually count the hours until Pat Robertson or some other television evangelist would blame it on God’s judgment on something—sometimes as specific as New Orleans’s annual “Southern Decadence” parade, and sometimes as general as “America’s turn away from God.”
Nor was this limited to the political right. While our families were crawling out of the rubble of Katrina, now almost 20 years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (then on the left and well before his gadfly persona of today) quoted the prophet Hosea to suggest that the storm was retribution for Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s opposition to the Kyoto Protocol for combating climate change: “For they that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind.”
The trivialized venue of modern social media is unique, but the underlying sarcasm about “What did they do to deserve this?” is not. And the much more serious, much more sober fears and questions beneath that are not unique either. What does it tell us about God when human beings have their entire lives wiped away?
Kris Kristofferson, the singer/songwriter who died this week, wrote a song, “The Best of All Possible Worlds,” based off of unbelieving philosopher Voltaire’s book Candide. Kristofferson’s song references police brutality, systemic racism, and unjust treatment of the poor with a tongue-in-cheek praise to living “in this best of all possible worlds.” Kristofferson laughed, but Voltaire mocked, pointing his satire at Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s defense of God’s justice in a cosmos of suffering and evil, that this is “the best of all possible worlds.”
While I believe Voltaire was wrong, Kristofferson was right to point out the kind of fatalism the philosopher saw as coming along with many attempts to justify God. We can yield to a shrugging “that’s the way it is” mentality that sees in every evil a signpost as to what God actually wants. That can lead to a “eat, drink, and be merry” hedonism, with a passive acceptance of all sorts of things that should be, at least, mourned, and, at best, changed.
The way Voltaire points, though, leads to the same form of pessimistic resignation in the long run. If the universe around us is random, chaotic, and meaningless, then we ought to read in it what is most ultimate: suffering, pain, and death.
Christians, Jews, and other theists have wrestled with the so-called “problem of evil,” including the problem of “natural evil,” for millennia. Some give greater emphasis to God’s sovereignty, with good biblical backing. Others emphasize the freedom and responsibility of human beings, along with a rejection of the idea that God could ever be the author of sin—also with very good biblical backing.
The question abides: How could a good and powerful God allow a world such as this one to exist? Why could he not stop the dam from breaking to keep that North Carolinian family’s house from being washed away? Is it because God was angry at them?
This is not just about hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis. Often, even in the quieter, less visible manifestations of very personal suffering, someone will wonder—even if they don’t say it—What has that person done to deserve this?
The Bible doesn’t ignore this question. God does not tell Job why, ultimately, he was allowed to suffer—nor does he give Job an answer as to why the universe is so seemingly filled with chaos and danger. God does, however, reject the easy answers of Job’s counselors, some of whom seek to read backward from the suffering an oracle about what God wants.
Jesus, likewise, condemns the suggestion that those who suffer at the hand of other people’s evil intentions or in the throes of some natural calamity are to blame for their calamity (Luke 13:1–5). He repudiates the religious leaders’ suggestion that a man’s congenital blindness was his or his parents’ fault (John 9:3). The chaotic natural forces around Jesus—whether wild animals or unclean spirits or boat-threatening storms—were calmed and redirected by the presence and voice of Jesus, the one who puts heaven and nature back together again.
When Christians speak of the existence of natural evil as a mystery, some balk that this is a way of evading the question. And yet every attempt—from that of nihilists to hyper-Calvinists to everyone in between—to answer the meaning of suffering bumps upon a mystery of some sort. The question is, what kind of mystery?
The mystery we see in the way of Jesus is one in which we hold together a tension: that of a God for whom not a sparrow falls apart from his awareness (Matt. 10:29–31) and for whom the death of a friend is received with weeping by Jesus himself (John 11:35).
Without a sense of the mystery of the wildness and fallenness of this present universe, the danger is that we come to see it as “normal.” Even worse is the danger that we would see in the bloodiness and violence of nature some picture of the way that God is. As Reinhold Niebuhr warned in the last century, “Our obsession with the physical sciences and with the physical world has enthroned the brute and blind forces of nature, and we follow the God of the earthquake and the fire rather than the God of the still small voice.”
The fact that we view the world around us with simultaneous awe, wonder, terror, and grieving is itself a signpost that there’s something missing from the merely natural. Jesus told us that earthquakes and other natural disasters would happen. He did not picture these as good but as the “birth pains” (Matt. 24:7–8, ESV throughout) of an old order that will be passing away, yielding to a new order beyond imagination.
The Bible itself tells us that these birth pangs are a creation in upheaval, “groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now” (Rom. 8:22). Our response is not to solve that nature-in-crisis the way we would an algebra equation. Our response is to groan right along with it as we wait, with a hope we cannot see, for all things to be where they belong: under the feet of a resurrected Christ and his joint heirs.
In the meantime, we do exactly what numerous people are doing right now: Clearing away the trees in front of people’s homes. Sitting alongside grieving families who have lost the ones they love. Serving food to those whose pantries are empty and whose local grocery stores are under water.
A hurricane doesn’t tell us who to hate. It reminds us who to love.
How Kris Kristofferson Helped Me Beat the Devil
This week, Kris Kristofferson died at the age of 88.
Some of my earliest memories include listening with my father to Willie Nelson sing the songs of Kris Kristofferson.
With Sunday school as my natural habitat, I assumed that when Kristofferson penned the lyrics, “He’s a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he’s stoned,” he meant the kind of rock-throwing at the righteous that the apostle Paul endured at Lystra. I wondered, then, why the narrator of “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down” would say, “On the Sunday morning sidewalk / Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.” I was way too old when I finally realized the meanings of both of these, and that when Conway Twitty sang, “Darlin’, how I’d love to lay you down,” he wasn’t talking about a nap.
Kris Kristofferson was not, by any measure (including his own), country music’s best singer. One could argue he was not even a good singer. But, apart from Hank Williams, I am hard-pressed to think of a better songwriter in the genre. Those of you who read my book Losing Our Religion know how I believe he revolutionized the Nashville music industry and, with it, American popular culture—though Nashville never loved him back.
In the lead-up to my inauguration as the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, my chief of staff told me, “Kristofferson is coming.” I was elated, only to learn that he was referring to Latter-day Saint apostle D. Todd Christofferson. I was honored to have Elder Christofferson with us and, even as a Mormon at a Southern Baptist event, he was probably less controversial than whatever Kris Kristofferson would have said or done.
I never learned firsthand what it was like to be stoned in the way Kristofferson meant, but I did—at least metaphorically—learn what it was like to be stoned the biblical way. He wasn’t the only one a Nashville institution didn’t love back. And it was in the maelstrom of my realizing this that I paid attention for the first time to a Kristofferson song that had never been one of my favorites.
The song was “To Beat the Devil.” It’s about a failing musician who walks into a bar in Nashville, where he meets an old man who buys him a beer. The old man—seeing the musician’s failure—offers to sing him a song. The words are:
If you waste your time a-talkin’ to the people who don’t listen,
To the things that you are sayin’, who do you think’s gonna hear?
If you should die explainin’ how the things that they complain about,
Are things they could be changin’, who do you think’s gonna care?
There were other lonely singers in a world turned deaf and blind,
Who were crucified for what they tried to show.
And their voices have been scattered by the swirling winds of time
’Cause the truth remains that no one wants to know.
Kristofferson would later introduce the song at concerts by saying he was inspired to write the song by his running into Johnny Cash, then strung out on drugs. As Cash recited some poetry he’d written, Kristofferson wondered if Cash would live much longer. “I’m happy to say that he’s no longer wasted and he’s got him a good woman,” Kristofferson said in his spoken introduction to the song. “And I’d like to dedicate this to John and June, who helped show me how to beat the devil.”
The metaphorical devil in the lyrics was the voice of futility and defeat. If no one heard the message burning inside of you, you should give up. The “beating” of the devil here was not by ignoring what he had to say but by turning it upside down, by stealing his song and then contradicting it.
The song concludes:
And you still can hear me singin’ to the people who don’t listen,
To the things that I am sayin’, prayin’ someone’s gonna hear.
And I guess I’ll die explaining how the things that they complain about,
Are things they could be changin’, hopin’ someone’s gonna care.
I was born a lonely singer, and I’m bound to die the same,
But I’ve got to feed the hunger in my soul.
And if I never have a nickel, I won’t ever die ashamed,
’Cause I don’t believe that no one wants to know.
Kristofferson was a New Age-y sort, not an evangelical Christian, but he spent a lot of time in the Bible. I could hear in these lyrics some echoes from Ezekiel, who was called to speak whether or not anyone hears, even if that meant prophesying over a valley filled with skeletons. What I heard in addition to that was something like the discouragement I was feeling, the sense of being on the brink of giving up. I could hear in the “devil” of the song the call to cynicism and quitting.
Of course, the song tracks with Kristofferson’s own life. Music Row never received him, but as an “outlaw” in Texas, he found that there were people who wanted to hear something other than the same old market-tested “Nashville Sound.” They didn’t even mind hearing songs about Voltaire’s Candide now and then.
The epiphany I had while listening to that song, sometime in the dark of 2020, was that the way to beat the devil was just to refuse to become like him. One could say no to internalizing all that cynicism and resignation, and just tell the truth one was called to tell, sing the song one was made to sing. The things I complained about were things I could be changing—just not on the terms I thought. I needed to hear that right then.
The only life worth living is the one that’s lost (Matt. 16:25). You might even say: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” I hope that Kris Kristofferson found what he was looking for on his lonely way back home, that by the grace of God he now knows what he once sang: “From the rockin’ of the cradle to the rollin’ of the hearse / The goin’ up was worth the comin’ down.” I don’t know. But I do know that he helped me beat the devil, or at least to steal his song.
Moby-Dick on a Roller Coaster
Last week I was on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts at an event featuring speakers and attendees from a dizzying number of areas of expertise. One was Andrew Delbanco, a professor at Columbia University and a world-renowned scholar on Herman Melville. Before he spoke, a video clip played of the scholar with comic Stephen Colbert, in which Colbert challenged the professor to explain Moby-Dick in two minutes while the two of them rode a theme-park roller coaster.
Delbanco did it—summing up the major plot points and themes by the time they rolled to a stop. I would have liked more discussion of the many theological aspects driving the book from start to finish, but I suppose that could wait for the Ferris wheel.
As I thought about it, I kept seeing a metaphor. Granted, the metaphor was not as powerful as the horror Ishmael described as “the whiteness of the whale,” but enough to keep me occupied for a while in the damp, drizzly November in my soul.
After over 30 years of teaching the Bible, I think that task is just like explaining a massive story while circling at top speed upside-down on a roller coaster. Life is short—a vapor, as the Bible puts it. Like a roller coaster, the drops and turns are often filled with terror, and it’s easy to get distracted by all the screaming with fright and the laughing with delight from the story one is telling.
The difference is that the gospel is not a story on the level of Moby-Dick. The Bible doesn’t simply reflect on or explain the human condition (although it certainly does that). The gospel is a story, but it’s one that delivers news, and the news is good. The gospel tells us who wake up mid-ride that this is, in fact, a roller coaster. And it points us the way to go when the ride slows to a stop, when the seatbelts are unbuckled and it’s time to find the exit sign.
That’s mission enough for one lifetime. Hold on, and enjoy it. This ride is scary, but the story is good and true.
Desert island bookshelf
Every other week, I share a list of books that one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a deserted island. This week’s submission comes from reader Dr. Ken Smith, a professional mathematician who lives in Huntsville, Texas. Here’s his list:
- Abstract Algebra by David S. Dummit and Richard M. Foote: Professionally, I’ve taught from this book, but it is encyclopedic with lots of fascinating sections and exercises. I could work on it for years and still not finish it.
- The Theory of Error-Correcting Codes by F. J. MacWilliams and N. J. A. Sloane: Although almost fifty years old, this book is also an encyclopedic work in a special research area, and I could spend hours, indeed days, working through each chapter, playing with the ideas.
- The Book of Psalms by Robert Alter: Alter’s translations of Old Testament Hebrew are both deep and beautiful. Here, he translates each of the psalms, with commentary.
- The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis: This entry is a cheat, in two ways. I’ve deliberately grabbed a book that is really seven books in one, so that I don’t have to choose between the seven. Also, I’ve apparently given away my English copy, and so the one in the picture is in Spanish—and my Spanish is lousy.
- Algebraic Graph Theory by Chris Godsil and Gordon Royle: In my research area. One more magical, encyclopedic book, with creative surprises on every page.
- Symmetric Designs: An Algebraic Approach by Eric Lander: Long before Eric Lander became famous as a geneticist and a leader of the Human Genome Project, he was a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Oxford. He wrote this after completing his PhD thesis, and I’ve worked through it for 50 years—and there is still stuff to learn!! And, yes, this is my fourth math book! If you don’t love math books, make your own list!
- Genesis by Robert Alter: I was first introduced to this book by Dr. Tim Hall when we taught a class on Genesis together in our youth. It was my first introduction to Robert Alter. (Thanks, Tim!)
- Watership Down by Richard Adams: The remaining five books are deep, intricate fiction books, with lots of substories. This remarkable book is about a warren of rabbits—who, along their journey to a new home, tell each other stories. Jan and I so thoroughly enjoyed this (back when we were dating!) that we began to call each other “buck” and “doe” … and still do!
- Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson: Another intricate story that really makes one believe we humans could colonize Mars, and that it would be a grand adventure!
- Dune by Frank Herbert: The ultimate book in world-building. Like Red Mars, it is the first of a trilogy. And like Red Mars, the sequels are not worth it—the book stands alone as a giant creative work, worth reading and rereading.
- Doomsday Book by Connie Willis: Connie Willis may be my favorite sci-fi author. A graduate student leaves modern Oxford to travel back in time to 14th-century England … and gets stuck in the past. The young woman’s work and care for those in the village is heartwarming, while the reader, like the woman, longs for a return to the present.
- That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis: This is my favorite book of Lewis’s sci-fi trilogy. Lewis really understands the university life but adds to it a dark and supernatural atmosphere, in an ordinary English village.
Thank you, Dr. Smith!
Readers, what do y’all think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?
- For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list between 5 and 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)
- For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books, along with a photo of all the books together.
Send your list (or both lists) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like, along with the city and state from which you’re writing.
Quote of the Moment
“Everything today is at the same time sad and full of irony: one can be humorous because behind it all is the mercy of God, and the ponderous cruelties and stupidities of men are not the last word about anything.”
—Thomas Merton
Currently Reading (or Re-Reading)
- Ben Lansing and D. J. Marotta, Our Church Speaks: An Illustrated Devotional of Saints from Every Era and Place (InterVarsity)
- Tom Jones, George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life (Princeton University)
- Andrew Delblanco, Melville: His World and Work (Vintage)
- Dean G. Stroud, ed., Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich (Eerdmans)
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Russell Moore
Editor in Chief, Christianity Today
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