Lord, thy will is hard
It’s Sunday morning, and I’ve never delivered a sermon, so bear with me as I preach to the blogosphere. One thing that unites us on all sides of the political blogosphere is a belief in our own rationality. This leaves us ill-equipped to discuss matters of faith, even of the Christian faith in our own culture. Add to this a highly-charged political atmosphere where one side is trying desperately to catch McCain backers saying something outrageous, and you’ve got the latest outcry over John Hagee talking about the Holocaust as a part of God’s plan.
This strikes at one of the greatest impediments to faith among people of reason: the problem of evil. Bad things that happen are part of God’s plan in Christian faith. We even have a phrase for some of them: “acts of God”. If you ask most Christians whether everything that happens is part of God’s plan, you’ll likely get a near unanimous yes. If you move to specifics such as Hurricane Katrina or the Holocaust, you’ll find less agreement, even though the question hasn’t really changed.
Paul writes that God “works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will”, and the prophet Amos asks “shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord has not done it?” Evil is part of God’s plan for us. Human rationality can’t conceive of it, but it is Christian faith: everything that happens is God’s will. That is the teaching of every form of Christianity I know of (other than some obscure forms of dualism that postulate both an evil and a good god or that raise Satan to God’s equal).
We don’t get to question God’s plan, we can only accept it. And that’s hard; the problem of evil is one reason people become atheists. They can’t believe in a God who not only lets things like the Holocaust happen, but who calls it to Him as a part of His plan. When bad things happen it is not simply that God let them happen, but that they were and are part of God’s plan.
This doesn’t mean there’s no free will. It doesn’t mean that Hitler wasn’t evil nor does it mean that the Holocaust was good. But it did fulfill God’s plan, or it would not have happened. All good things and all bad things and all things in between are part of God’s plan for us. We are all of us part of His plan. Part of Christian faith is recognizing that all is the will of God, realizing that we cannot understand it, and learning to accept it while at the same time trying to do good ourselves and to oppose evil when it is in our power to do so.
Yes, it’s a paradox. There are many errors we can make in the face of God’s paradox short of becoming atheists or agnostics. We can fall into lethargy and not help others when evil befalls them; after all, it’s all part of God’s plan, right? We can fall into silence, leaving God to his Heaven, assuming that since God already has everything worked out, it isn’t our part to discern his plan for us.
It is also tempting in the face of God’s plan to attribute reasons to the bad parts of it, such as wrath and punishment, or look for a silver lining, such as—in Hagee’s case—the formation and success of the new state of Israel. But that’s just human rationalization in the face of the unknowable will of God, with perhaps an element of pride thrown in. It is our weakness to think that we can know the mind of God.
God is. God has a plan. That’s Christianity.
- Hagee on Hagee
- “The fact is that all people of faith have had to wrestle with the question of why a sovereign God would allow evil in the world. After Auschwitz, this question became more urgent than ever. Many people simply could not explain how a loving God would permit such horrors. After the Holocaust, they abandoned their faith in a sovereign God who intervenes here on earth. While I disagree with this conclusion, I would never denigrate those who arrived at such a conclusion.”
- McCain dumps hagee over holocaust remarks
- “Even as a fourth-grader, I thought this was a repugnant idea, and that anyone who believed it should cease worshiping this particular God immediately, unless they were only doing so out of fear of what nutty, cruel thing He might do next.”
- McCain Backer Hagee Said Hitler Was Fulfilling God’s Will
- “John Hagee, the controversial evangelical leader and endorser of Sen. John McCain, argued in a late 1990s sermon that the Nazis had operated on God's behalf to chase the Jews from Europe and shepherd them to Palestine.”
- Problem of evil at Wikipedia
- “In the philosophy of religion and theology, the problem of evil is the problem of reconciling the existence of evil or suffering in the world with the existence of God, a force for infinite good.[1] The problem is most often discussed in the context of the personal god of the Abrahamic religions, but is also relevant to polytheistic traditions involving many gods. A proposed solution to this dilemma is called a theodicy.”
- Hagee Non-Recants and Issues Non-Apology Apology for Words He Never Said
- “I was intrigued by the selective quotations and strange refusal to quote the letter at length… and I suspected foul play.”
- hurricane thoughts
- “When disaster befalls a city, the prophet Amos tells us, the Lord is the one who has done it.”
- God’s Great Plan
- “The Lord hath made ALL things for Himself, yea, even the wicked for the day of evil.”
- God’s Plan
- “So the plan of God is an utterly comprehensive plan, embracing all things. You say, but where is God’s holiness if God is involved in such wickedness? Isn’t God to blame? Or you say, Where is man’s freedom if God is just manipulating him all the time? Doesn’t this make man a mechanical toy with a big wind-up handle at the back to make him go? One answer given in the Bible is, ‘Who are you to answer against God?’ God is holy. That is taught in the Bible. God is sovereign. That is taught in the Bible. Man is not a puppet; he is a responsible human being who makes his own choices. All of that is taught in the Bible, and how you reconcile all those truths is not taught in the Bible. It is one of the secret things that belong to God. So God’s plan comprehends everything.”
- Why won’t God heal amputees?
- “If God has ‘planned the days of your life in advance, choosing the exact time of your birth and death’, what that means is that you have absolutely no free will. Humans have no control over anything. We are simply puppets executing the plan. It also means that prayer is absolutely pointless. Understand the illusion simply by using your common sense. As soon as you think about it, you will begin to see what is actually going on.”
- The Decrees of God
- “The Bible is clear, that the decree involves all things, and extends to all events, Eph 1:11 ‘…according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will.’ The decree reaches to sparrows, Matt 10:29, to gourds and worms, Jonah 4. In the same way that it doesn’t neglect the little things, it orders the greatest, such as all changes in kingdoms and States, Dan. 4.32. Even the most random of events are ordered by the decree, Prov 16:33 ‘The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD.’”
- Confronting the Holocaust as a Religious and a Historical Phenomenon
- “My God, You have starved me, You have left me naked, You have set me to dwell in the gloom of night; and You have taught me Your strength and Your greatness. If You incinerate me in flame, I will continue only to love You and rejoice in You.”
More free will
- The Adjustment Bureau
- A potentially great movie, The Adjustment Bureau devolves into a chase and a cheap love story in the final third of the film. It’s as if they ended the first Matrix movie with Trinity and Neo settling down in the suburbs of the Matrix.
More hard faith
- Is religious faith a political sin?
- I’d be more afraid of someone who masturbates emotionlessly, than someone who follows Christianity’s teachings on adultery.
More presidential elections
- Nothing to fear but a brokered convention
- The reason someone smart would want a brokered convention is that it’s exciting, and it means media coverage, and even more, it means unfiltered media coverage.
- If I were running for president…
- I’d make heavy use of short videos, and I’d record everything I did with the media.
- Fighting for the American Dream
- Joe the Plumber writes about his experiences at the center of one of the most vicious smear campaigns in recent memory.
- McCain sees the light: campaign finance reform dead
- Now, will he introduce bills to repeal those laws?
- Vote on performance, not promises
- If you’re disappointed that President Obama is the same wheeler-dealer he was when he was a Senator, take it as a lesson for future elections: vote performance and record, not promises.
- 21 more pages with the topic presidential elections, and other related pages