A Theological and Cultural Essay
I. Introduction: The Myth of the Stable Island
Singapore’s founding mythology is, at its core, a story about the conquest of contingency. The transformation of a malarial swamp into a gleaming city-state within a single generation is routinely narrated as a triumph of human will, governance rationality, and disciplined intelligence over the randomness of geography and history. Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs, the National Education curriculum, and the dominant register of Singaporean public discourse all converge on a single meta-narrative: that what nature gave Singapore was insufficient, and that what Singapore has become is the product of human mastery over natural and historical circumstance.
Central to this narrative is an assumption so foundational that it rarely surfaces for examination: the assumption of physical stability. Unlike the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, or Taiwan, Singapore does not shake. It does not flood catastrophically, does not erupt, does not experience the tectonic violence that periodically reorders life across the region. This geological quiescence has functioned not merely as a geographical fact but as a civilisational premise — the bedrock, literal and metaphorical, upon which the entire edifice of Singaporean modernity has been constructed.
Yet the regional seismic record of the past two decades demands that this premise be examined with fresh seriousness. The Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of December 26, 2004, registering M9.1–9.3, generated a tsunami that killed approximately 227,000 people across fourteen countries and sent perceptible ground motions through Singapore’s tower blocks. The Canterbury earthquake sequence of 2010–2011 devastated Christchurch, a city whose infrastructure and governance were by any measure comparable to Singapore’s in their modernity and technical sophistication. Taiwan’s recurrent seismicity — the 1999 Chi-Chi disaster, the 2016 Tainan earthquake, and the unceasing background of felt tremors including the February 24, 2026 M5.6 Yilan event — demonstrates that tectonic violence is not the province of poorly governed or underdeveloped societies. It is the condition of existence for some of the world’s most technically sophisticated polities.
This essay argues that the theophanic tradition of the Hebrew Bible, properly understood through its contemporary scholarly hermeneutics, offers Singapore a uniquely powerful framework for interrogating the civilisational assumptions that geological quiescence has enabled and concealed. The argument is not that Singapore faces imminent seismic disaster, nor that regional earthquakes are divine messages directed at the city-state. It is rather that the theophanic tradition’s central theological move — the use of cosmic upheaval to reorient a community’s imagination about power, contingency, and the limits of human mastery — is precisely the move that Singapore’s intellectual and theological culture most needs to make.
II. The Theophanic Tradition: A Scholarly Account
Before the tradition can be applied, it must be accurately understood. The theophanic tradition in the Hebrew Bible is not a set of predictive geological prophecies but a sophisticated literary-theological register developed across several centuries and multiple textual traditions to express the encounter between the divine and the human through the medium of cosmic upheaval.
The paradigmatic text is Exodus 19, where Sinai becomes the site of covenant-making accompanied by earthquake, thunder, smoke, and fire. The scholarly consensus, represented by William Propp’s magisterial Anchor Bible commentary and developed by Mark Smith’s work on the divine warrior tradition, is that this imagery draws on a shared ancient Near Eastern stock of theophanic conventions found also in Ugaritic Baal texts and Akkadian storm deity literature. The biblical authors were not recording meteorological observation but deploying a recognised cultural grammar in which cosmic upheaval signals the approach and activity of divine power. The earthquake at Sinai does not merely accompany the covenant — it is the covenant’s physical signature, the imprint of divine presence on the material order.
Psalm 18, duplicated in 2 Samuel 22, extends this grammar into the individual’s experience of divine deliverance: “the earth trembled and quaked, the foundations of the mountains shook; they trembled because he was angry.” Habakkuk 3 deploys the full arsenal of theophanic imagery — earthquake, flood, darkened sun and moon — in a poem that scholars including Francis Andersen read as a deliberate archaising recapitulation of the divine warrior tradition, deployed to address a community in acute crisis under Babylonian threat. The Isaiah Apocalypse of chapters 24–27 universalises the theophanic earthquake into eschatological judgment: “the earth is broken asunder, the earth is split through, the earth is shaken violently.”
What is hermeneutically crucial is the function this tradition performs. As Walter Brueggemann argues throughout his Theology of the Old Testament (1997), the theophanic tradition consistently serves to destabilise the community’s confidence in present power arrangements. Whether those arrangements are the Egyptian imperial order disrupted by Sinai, the Assyrian hegemony addressed by Nahum, or the Babylonian dominance confronted by Habakkuk, the theophanic earthquake announces that the present order is not ultimate, that history is not closed, and that the assumptions on which the dominant power rests are more fragile than they appear. The earthquake is, in Brueggemann’s reading, fundamentally an epistemological event — it shatters the community’s confidence in what it thought it knew about the stability of the world.
Jon Levenson’s Creation and the Persistence of Evil (1988) adds a further dimension of critical importance. Drawing on the ancient Near Eastern cosmological background, Levenson argues that in the Hebrew Bible, creation is not a once-completed achievement but an ongoing divine act that must continually hold chaos at bay. The waters, the earthquake, the void — these are not merely physical phenomena but represent the persistent pressure of chaos against the created order. Creation is always vulnerable; stability is always a gift and never a possession. This insight, Levenson argues, generates a fundamentally different posture toward contingency than the Greek philosophical tradition’s assumption of a stable, rationally ordered cosmos. The Hebrew tradition insists that order is held, not owned.
It is precisely this distinction — between held and owned stability — that Singapore’s civilisational narrative has systematically obscured.
III. Singapore’s Civilisational Wager
To appreciate what the theophanic tradition illuminates about Singapore, one must first understand the specific character of the civilisational wager the city-state has made. Singapore’s modernity is not merely a political or economic project — it is a comprehensive attempt to replace natural contingency with engineered certainty across every domain of life.
Geographically, the island has been literally expanded through land reclamation, adding approximately 25% to its original landmass. The coastline has been reengineered, the rivers cleaned and controlled, the tropical ecosystem largely subordinated to urban function. The Marina Barrage transforms the river mouth into a freshwater reservoir, simultaneously managing flood risk and water security — a single engineering solution to two forms of natural contingency. The deep water port, Changi Airport, and the Mass Rapid Transit system are all monuments to the conviction that technical intelligence can impose reliable order on the unpredictability of movement, weather, and human behaviour.
Economically, Singapore’s extraordinary accumulation of foreign exchange reserves — among the largest per capita in the world — represents a financial hedge against the contingency of commodity cycles, regional instability, and economic shocks. The Government of Singapore Investment Corporation and Temasek Holdings are, among other things, instruments for converting present surplus into future security — an attempt to purchase immunity from economic contingency.
Socially, the Housing Development Board’s provision of public housing to over 80% of the population, the Central Provident Fund’s mandatory savings architecture, and the elaborate meritocratic education system all reflect the same deep logic: that human social outcomes can be engineered toward stability and predictability through sufficiently rational institutional design.
This is not a critique of these achievements, which are genuine and remarkable. It is an identification of their underlying metaphysical assumption: that contingency is a problem to be solved rather than a condition to be inhabited. Singapore has built, with extraordinary skill and discipline, what might be called a civilisation of managed certainty — a society whose self-understanding rests on the conviction that with sufficient intelligence, capital, and governance rationality, the randomness of existence can be progressively reduced toward zero.
The geological fact of Singapore’s stability has been indispensable to this project, not merely practically but symbolically. A city-state that shook would be a city-state confronted daily with the limits of its mastery. Singapore’s stillness has permitted the illusion that mastery is, in principle, complete.
IV. What Regional Seismicity Reveals
The regional seismic record does not threaten Singapore physically in any direct sense. The Sunda Shelf on which Singapore sits is genuinely stable; the city’s engineers and geologists are not wrong to discount direct seismic risk. What regional seismicity threatens is not Singapore’s foundations but its narrative — the story the city tells about itself and the assumptions embedded in that story.
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami is the most instructive case. The earthquake that generated it occurred along the Sunda Megathrust, a fault system that runs along the western coast of Sumatra — a few hundred kilometres from Singapore. The tsunami killed 227,000 people, devastated Aceh, and sent ground motions through Singaporean high-rise buildings whose residents felt their floors move for the first time in memory. The event did not damage Singapore. But it demonstrated, with terrible clarity, that the geological system of which Singapore is a part is not stable — it is dynamically active, and Singapore’s quiescence within it is a local condition, not a universal one.
More significant still is what the tsunami revealed about the limits of technical preparedness in neighbouring societies. Banda Aceh, the Indonesian city closest to the epicentre, was devastated not because Indonesia lacked governance capacity in any absolute sense, but because no governance capacity is adequate to a M9.1 subduction earthquake at 30km depth. The disaster was not a failure of human mastery — it was a demonstration of the category error involved in believing that mastery is the appropriate framework for relating to geological time and scale.
Christchurch offers a complementary lesson. New Zealand’s South Island city was, before the 2010–2011 earthquake sequence, a model of mid-sized Anglophone urban governance — well-planned, technically sophisticated, institutionally resilient. The Canterbury earthquakes, and particularly the February 2011 M6.3 event, killed 185 people and destroyed the city centre to a degree from which full recovery took over a decade. The destruction was not the product of poor governance but of liquefaction — a geological process in which apparently solid ground behaves as liquid under seismic stress, causing engineered structures built to standard specifications to sink, tilt, and collapse. The ground itself proved to be other than what it appeared. The city’s engineers had built on assumptions about subsurface stability that the earthquake exposed as locally valid but ultimately contingent.
Taiwan’s recurrent seismicity offers perhaps the most pointed lesson for Singapore because Taiwan most closely resembles Singapore in its developmental trajectory — a small, densely populated, technically sophisticated East Asian society that has achieved remarkable prosperity through disciplined governance and export-oriented industrialisation. Taiwan shakes constantly. Its engineers have become world-class at seismic engineering precisely because they cannot avoid the question that Singapore’s geology permits it to evade. Taiwan’s relationship with its geology is one of acknowledged contingency, managed but never mastered. Singapore’s is one of assumed stability — a geological privilege that has become a cognitive habit.
V. The Theophanic Reorientation
What would it mean to read Singapore’s situation through the theophanic tradition? The first and most important move is to distinguish the tradition’s function from the predictive-literalist misreading that popular apocalypticism imposes on it. The theophanic tradition does not predict earthquakes. It uses earthquake as a rhetorical and theological register to perform a specific cognitive operation on its audience: the shattering of false certainty.
Brueggemann’s account of the prophetic tradition as “prophetic imagination” is directly applicable here. In his reading, the prophetic task is twofold — to criticise the dominant consciousness by exposing its false assumptions, and to energise an alternative consciousness by making imaginable a different relationship to reality. The theophanic earthquake performs the critical function: it demonstrates, with visceral immediacy, that the foundations on which the dominant order rests are not ultimate. The ground moves. The walls shake. The confidence of the powerful is exposed as assumption rather than fact.
Applied to Singapore, the theophanic tradition’s critical function is to surface what the city-state’s geological privilege has permitted it to bury: the recognition that the civilisation of managed certainty rests on contingencies it did not create and cannot finally control. Singapore’s stability is not a product of Singaporean governance — it is a gift of the Sunda Shelf’s particular geological history. The meritocracy, the reserves, the HDB flats, the port — all of these extraordinary achievements rest on a foundation that Singaporean intelligence and discipline did not produce and cannot guarantee.
This is not a counsel of despair. Levenson’s distinction between held and owned stability is precisely what is needed here. The Hebrew tradition does not conclude from the vulnerability of creation that human effort is futile — it concludes that human effort must be oriented differently, held within an acknowledgment of dependence rather than an assertion of autonomy. The Psalms that most powerfully deploy theophanic imagery — Psalms 18, 46, 68 — consistently pair cosmic upheaval with trust: the earth may give way, but there is a refuge. The tradition does not romanticise vulnerability; it insists that authentic security can only be found by those who have honestly reckoned with insecurity.
For Singapore, this suggests a specific intellectual and cultural task: the development of what might be called a theology of contingency adequate to the city-state’s situation. This would not be a theology of disaster preparedness, though it would inform such preparedness. It would be a fundamental reorientation of the city-state’s self-understanding — a willingness to narrate Singapore’s achievements not as the products of mastery over contingency but as remarkable human responses to a contingency that remains irreducibly present.
VI. Singapore’s Presbyterian Tradition and the Resources for Such a Theology
Singapore is not without theological resources for this reorientation. The Presbyterian tradition, historically rooted in the work of nineteenth-century Scottish and Irish missionaries and now institutionally represented in congregations across the island, carries within its Reformed theological DNA precisely the resources the theophanic tradition demands.
Calvin’s theology of providentia — divine providence as the continuous sustaining of creation against the pressure of chaos — is structurally identical to Levenson’s account of creation as ongoing divine act. For Calvin, writing in Institutes I.16–17, the stability of the natural order is not a mechanical given but a continuous divine gift. Storms, earthquakes, and floods are not interruptions of the normal order — they are moments when the normally concealed contingency of the natural order becomes visible. Calvin’s response is not anxiety but what he calls acquiescentia — a settled trust that is possible precisely because it does not rest on the permanence of earthly foundations.
The Westminster Confession of Faith, the doctrinal standard of Singapore’s Presbyterian churches, opens its chapter on providence with the assertion that God “upholds, directs, disposes, and governs all creatures, actions, and things.” The theological implication is radical: stability is not a geological given but a providential gift, and the appropriate response is not the confidence of the engineer but the gratitude of the dependent creature. This is not anti-intellectual or anti-technical — Calvin was a lawyer, and the Reformed tradition has consistently affirmed the value of human technical achievement. It is rather a question of the posture in which technical achievement is pursued and the narrative within which it is embedded.
Beyond the Presbyterian tradition, Singapore’s remarkable religious pluralism — encompassing Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Hinduism, and various Christian traditions — offers further resources. Buddhist teaching on anicca (impermanence) is structurally convergent with the theophanic tradition’s insistence that stability is not ultimate. The Islamic theology of tawakkul (trust in God amid uncertainty) addresses precisely the question of how to act responsibly while acknowledging that outcomes are not finally within human control. These are not merely private religious convictions — they are intellectual resources for a public theology adequate to Singapore’s situation.
VII. Practical Implications
The reorientation proposed here is not without practical consequences. A Singapore that narrated its achievements within a framework of acknowledged contingency rather than claimed mastery would make different decisions in several domains.
In urban planning and infrastructure, it would invest not merely in optimising performance under normal conditions but in resilience under abnormal ones — a distinction that Singapore’s engineers already make at the technical level, but that has not penetrated the dominant public narrative. The acknowledgment that the ground might, under some regional scenario, behave differently than it has is not alarmism but intellectual honesty.
In economic policy, the reserves and sovereign wealth funds would be understood not as the products of Singaporean genius — which they partly are — but as responses to a contingency that Singaporean genius did not create and cannot eliminate. This reframing would not diminish them; it would embed them in a more honest account of their purpose and limitations.
In social policy, the acknowledgment of contingency would generate greater solidarity with those for whom the meritocratic system’s assumptions — that outcomes track effort and intelligence — have proven false. The earthquake does not distinguish between the diligent and the careless. Neither, entirely, does economic disruption, illness, or the other forms of contingency that the managed-certainty narrative tends to attribute to individual failure.
Most importantly, a Singapore that had honestly reckoned with contingency would be better positioned to respond to the regional crises that seismicity and other natural disasters will continue to generate. The 2004 tsunami response demonstrated Singapore’s considerable capacity for humanitarian assistance. A theologically and philosophically deepened understanding of shared human vulnerability to geological contingency would provide a stronger motivational and intellectual foundation for that response than the current narrative of Singaporean exceptionalism can supply.
VIII. Conclusion: The Epistemology of the Moving Ground
The theophanic tradition’s deepest contribution to Singapore’s self-understanding is epistemological. The earthquake in the Hebrew Bible does not merely threaten structures — it threatens the knowledge claims on which those structures rest. When the ground moves, what was assumed to be solid is revealed as contingent. The Sinai earthquake does not destroy Israel — it reorients Israel’s understanding of where it stands and on what it depends.
Singapore has been extraordinarily fortunate that its ground has not moved. But the regional seismic record — Sumatra 2004, Christchurch 2011, Taiwan recurrently — demonstrates with quiet persistence that the system of which Singapore is a part is not static. The Sunda Shelf is stable; the Sunda Megathrust is not. The distinction is real but the boundary is not infinite.
The theophanic tradition does not ask Singapore to be afraid. It asks Singapore to be honest — to narrate its remarkable achievements within a framework that acknowledges the contingency on which they rest, to cultivate what Brueggemann calls the prophetic imagination that can hold together human creativity and human dependence, technical achievement and creaturely humility. It asks, in Levenson’s terms, that Singapore understand its stability as held rather than owned.
That is a reorientation that neither diminishes Singapore’s achievements nor demands the abandonment of its civilisational ambitions. It asks only that those ambitions be pursued with the intellectual honesty that the moving ground of the region, read through the theophanic tradition’s long wisdom, persistently and quietly demands.