The Meaningless Death of a Child: the Moral Challenge to Divine Control - Kenneth Tanner

God is not in control of everything that happens.

Many persons will be murdered this evening, some of them for faith, and many will tonight die excruciating deaths from cancer and avoidable disasters, many of them children.

God does not will these things to happen, does not require any of this evil as part of some grand design to accomplish his good purposes, is not in a partnership with death, and much of history is because of the absence of God meaningless.

As David Bentley Hart says, it’s a very good thing that the death of a child is ultimately meaningless; that what God does with the death of a child, like all the children who died in the chemical showers of the Nazis, is to raise them from death in the world that does not end, wiping every tear from their face, and freeing their hearts from the terrors we imposed. What God does is resurrect. But I digress.

If the God revealed to us as Love, this Love revealed to the world at Golgotha, directly ruled over all things none of these horrors would ever occur.

There are many wills in the cosmos that oppose the will of Love and the Christian must make many prudential discernments (almost every day) and take actions (almost every day) to oppose with love what opposes Love, in ourselves, in other moral agents, and in nature.

The Christian is not given permission in this world to simply “pray and leave it to God,” though on one important hand that is indeed—in the end—all that we can do.

Contemplation of the person of Jesus Christ leads the Christian to proactive engagement with the powers of this world with weapons not known to this world, chiefly humility. Silence and listening and honest responses to what is heard from God in silence leads us to action.

As Martin Luther King Jr said: “The belief that God will do everything for man is as untenable as the belief that man can do everything for himself. It, too, is based on a lack of faith. We must learn that to expect God to do everything while we do nothing is not faith but superstition.”

I would add that the more “privilege” we accumulate the further removed we *can* become from the urgency to engage fallen powers. The temptation is greater to say, in a form of disengagement disallowed to the Christian,” God has this.”

Comments

[Jessica Cotten]

This is excellent and so encouraging, Kenneth. I love how you place humility as one of the chief "weapons not known to this world".