What does God have to do with a sinkhole?

When surveying the sinkhole damage at Tanger Outlets Monday, General Manager Monica Trego said, “They’re going underground to determine if it is an act of God from the flooding or if it was something else.”

Translated literally, “act of God” means a natural act beyond human control.

But how did that phrase become part of the insurance industry’s jargon?

“It’s a theological concept that’s been secularized,” Daniel Silliman said in a telephone interview this week.

Silliman has written about acts of God in the past. A history professor at Valparaiso University in Indiana, he focuses on the interaction between markets and religion.

Concept’s roots

Silliman said the legal concept dates to Roman law but took on a new twist under Calvinism — the Protestant theology of John Calvin, which developed Martin Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone and emphasizes the grace of God and the doctrine of predestination.

In a 2016 essay in The Washington Post, Silliman told the story of 17th-century Boston merchant John Hull, who lost a shipment of furs at sea. A second shipment was seized by pirates.

“It was a big loss,” Silliman wrote, “but Hull was a pious man — a Boston Puritan. He comforted himself with the thought his personal economic disaster was part of a larger plan. These were ‘acts of God.’ ”

Today it is a phrase used by insurers to limit liability that often leads to legal disputes — especially when the weather takes a nasty turn.

Silliman said Calvinists saw a storm or a lightning strike not as just bad luck but as something pre-ordained.

Capitalists, on the other hand “didn’t try to make sense of it; they tried to make profit off it,” he said.

Julia M. O’Brien, professor of Old Testament and Hebrew Bible at Lancaster Theological Seminary, said ancient cultures attributed many acts to God or the gods.

“At the time of the Hebrew Bible, it’s a pretty common belief that God controls all things,” she said. The prophets claimed that God caused floods and plagues and blights.

But a big change in thinking occurred during the Enlightenment period.

“By the 1700s, our sense and Western intellectualism determined that not all things are controlled by God,” O’Brien explained. “Some things are acts of nature.”

Today, with our understanding of science and living in a more secular world, she said, “we have a different understanding.”

Or do we?

O’Brien pointed out that while people may not attribute a flood to God, they may still pray to God for rain.

And some people continue to argue that catastrophes are a message from God. In 2005, the Rev. Pat Robertson linked Hurricane Katrina to legalized abortion in this country.

No universal definition

As for the law, there is no universal definition for “acts of God,” explained Elizabeth Rementer, deputy director of communications for the Pennsylvania Insurance Department.

She said the National Association of Insurance Commissioners defines “act of God” as “an unpreventable accident or event that is the result of natural causes; for example, floods, earthquakes or lightning.”

“How an act of God is defined or how it’s applied depends on the type of property, the insurance policy and even state law,” she wrote in an email.

Endorsements, she said, may be purchased as add-on policies for risks such as earthquakes. And some companies will add sinkhole coverage as well.

That leads to another question: Given the climate-change debate — scientists suggest that climate change likely will lead to more severe weather — have human actions exacerbated “natural disasters” and, if so, what does that mean when the phrase “act of God” is invoked?

Credit: EARLE CORNELIUS | Staff Writer