Whether it is the current pandemic or a tsunami or something far more local like a car accident or a fatality from cancer, it seems these are the occasions in which a certain set of usual suspects emerge, whether online or to a downcast auditorium (more the former it seems these days), to tell the world as if comfortingly, “Don’t worry, God has caused this for his glory.” I will commit no ad hominem here: the people that say these things are, as I have known them, and as I was one of them at one point, are sincere, honest, and good people. But it is, as I knew my former self, entirely possible that we all contain in our heads and hearts a kind of cocktail of convictions, some more bitter and others more sweet, and thankfully, for many the sweeter side is what more often prevails practically if only to mask it until an after taste lingers. Still, this leaves others wanting something a bit more distilled. What does “cause” mean in that statement and what does “glory” mean? Can it mean something better and more clear when it comes to these difficult questions of providence? Here I offer ten clarifications.
- Providence is not always readily discernible. I have listened to a creationist apologist argue that bananas show providential design because they are so easy to peel. Helmut Thielicke once said, “History has in it too much sense for us to be able to regard it as a gigantic playground of forces of blind chance. History has in it too much nonsense for us to be able to deduce from it a purposeful providence that guides it.” We need to respect both valences. In the book of 1 Ecclesiastes, the Teacher reflects on life’s vanities. He says “I saw all the work of God. No one can find out what is happening under the sun” (Ecc. 8:17). He goes on to say, “Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favour to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all” (9:11). We sometimes like to think that the Teacher in Ecclesiastes is postulating hypothetical atheism in order to deconstruct himself, or that he is trying to think of things as if he did not know about revelation or God (surely he does and says so), so that is not reading him resolutely. He mentioned providence in the previous passage, which he assuredly does believe in, and moves into saying that "chance happens to us all." Some dismiss what he says as “phenomenal” as he speaks reflecting “under the sun.” But if we dismiss him because of that, we all must ask of ourselves, what makes our perspective any less phenomenal, any less "under the sun”? Just because we know God and know revelation does not stop our knowledge from being any less human. There is nothing about our faith in God that stops us from perceiving anything, including God, from “under the sun.” There is no foundationalist grappling hook by which we can capture the absolute as to grasp it infallibly or any formula by which we can surmount the possibilities of failure. Our knowledge is ever finite, ever fallen, and ever mortal under the sun, and it would be a strange thing if our faith in our Creator somehow was used to bypass those facts to seize upon transcendence. We may want certainty and to make sense of things so fast that we sometimes content in trading in God for an idol, for surely to claim to have seized Helmut Thielicke, Man in God’s World (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 1948), 1 transcendence in some finite thing, whether in a rock or in our ideas, is just that. I have seen pastors comfort parents who have lost a child that "this was all a part of God's plan" or that a tragic death happens so that they could preach the gospel at their funeral. To these, I must say that we should not be so quick to claim to know God’s ways as to ascribe silly or downright tragic things to him.
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