Inklings of a future apocalypse visited our backyard this week.
That’s how Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph saw it.
“Hell in all its fury has visited the good people of Victoria,” Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said, in a startling image that resonated in headlines around the globe.
The scale of the nightmare is sad, horrific, almost imaginable: picturesque holiday villages like Marysville have been almost entirely reduced to ashes.
Local churches, their pastors and flocks have not been spared.
Listening to the tales of those broken by the disaster makes your heart bleed. It all seems beyond words.
For those who are paid to fill the void - what can be said that is helpful? Getting your tone right is tricky.
In my mind this is not the time to be talking of judgement, as Pastor Danny Nalliah is discovering.
In Sydney, our churches will be preparing to tackle the standard apologetic questions around theodicy that are usually raised in natural disasters.
However I wonder if we are missing a dramatic wind shift in the way the public understands the moral issues around this natural disaster.
Are we trying to answer a question nobody’s really asking?
The 'serious' media has quickly turned to investigating the possible causes, including a rethink on the 'stay or go' policy.
By Monday, Victorian Premier John Brumby was already pointing the finger at global warming. A point he has continued to repeat.
For a second, this cynic wondered if he had a vested interest in slipping his Government from the media noose. But I'll heed my sermon from last week about honouring politicians and cut a clearly traumatised Brumby some slack.
No doubt he honestly believes climate change is to blame.
I live in the highly fire-prone area of the Blue Mountains, where shock at the Dresden-like scenes in Victoria has led those I've spoken to own up to soul-searching on what 'climate change' means for their family's wellbeing.
Indeed, the speed in which Time - the doyen of international news analysis - has backed Brumby shows that the tenor of the discussion has shifted dramatically.
Local broadsheet op-eds had similar pieces.
Even Andrew Bolt, who has been leading the climate apocalypse-deniers, said it was more helpful to choose a studied silence on the topic given the circumstances.
No doubt others will say this week's fires are nothing new. Indeed Black Friday in 1939 had a similar fire pattern, striking similar areas, destroying a similar number of homes, and likewise wiping whole towns off the map.
Yet, as Brumby's climate advisor said the difference this year was the fortnight-long unprecedented heatwave that took temperature records to a level previously unthinkable and turned Victoria into a blast furnace.
".Climate change, as I said, has loaded the dice and has increased the probability of these sorts of events occurring. So what we’re seeing is a shift in the climate that allows these sorts of severe fire weather events to occur much more commonly. And unfortunately, the changes that are in train already mean that they’ll become much more common over the next 10 and 20 years," he told Tony Jones on Lateline.
I've been around this website long enough to know the scepticism - even downright antagonism - some conservative evangelicals feel about the idea that human beings are contributing to global warming.
I suspect the main driver is a distrust of a perceived pseudo-religion behind the Green agenda that is infecting the liberal end of the church.
Ecological concern is seen as the new social gospel - a faith that human action can save the planet.
But given that climate change is undoubtedly one of the dominate moral categories for framing discussion of the fires, do Christian leaders need to think more deeply about the language we use to explain the event theologically?
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Want to help?
Donate to the Archbishop’s bushfire Appeal
Michael Kellahan has some great practical tips from his sister’s experience of the Canberra fires.
