Today a bit of reflection and theology.

Whenever something really terrible happens, either personally or in life, Christians often console each other and explain it by saying, “God is in control”. 

I must say I often wonder whether that is so helpful or even, taken literally, quite as true as it sounds.

For a start, of course, the phrase as such is not in the Bible.  The language of control is a modern phrase, of a mechanical or managerial connotation. 

But the real question is, do the gospel and the Scriptures permit us to believe that everything that happens that is bad is in some real sense willed by God with a purpose behind it?

Of course, there are very clear instances when this is the case, or at least where God plainly takes up or even plans a thing to happen which humans mean for evil but God means for good.  The most obvious case is the story of Joseph “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.”. (Genesis 50.20): 

The supreme example is none other than the death of our Lord Jesus Christ who was handed over “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” Acts 2.23 The greatest good out of, in one sense, the greatest evil.

But can we extrapolate from these special cases, if they are indeed to be taken as special cases, to all suffering and evil?  Or are the statements of Peter about the Cross and Joseph about his own story intended to be understood as remarkable providences?

I was awoken to these questions from my theological slumbers by reading David Bentley Hart’s work reflecting upon the 2004 tsunami.  He wrote a column in the New York Times and then an article in First Things (“Tsunami and Theology”, First Things March 2005).  He then turned these thoughts into a very impressive short book, The Doors of the Sea (2005).  I recommend you actually look at it yourself and see what you think.  It certainly got me thinking. 

In his article, I stopped at this astounding sentence in “Tsunami and Theodicy”:

Simply said, there is no more liberating knowledge given us by the gospel — and none in which we should find more comfort — than the knowledge that suffering and death, considered in themselves, have no ultimate meaning at all.

So, implies Hart, stop trying to give a meaning to suffering and death to those suffering or a critical world demanding to know “why?”
One reason I stopped and thought hard was that I realised that for us typically the first thing we want to say about suffering and death is “God is in control” and then try to explain, at least to ourselves what he is doing. But Hart says that this is not the way the New Testament thinks about such matters.

Christians often find it hard to adopt the spiritual idiom of the New Testament — to think in terms, that is, of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, of Christ’s triumph over the principalities of this world, of the overthrow of hell. All Christians know, of course, that it is through God’s self-outpouring upon the cross that we are saved, and that we are made able by grace to participate in Christ’s suffering; but this should not obscure that other truth revealed at Easter: that the incarnate God enters “this cosmos” not simply to disclose its immanent rationality, but to break the boundaries of fallen nature asunder, and to refashion creation after its ancient beauty — wherein neither sin nor death had any place. Christian thought has traditionally, of necessity, defined evil as a privation of the good, possessing no essence or nature of its own, a purely parasitic corruption of reality; hence it can have no positive role to play in God’s determination of Himself or purpose for His creatures (even if by economy God can bring good from evil); it can in no way supply any imagined deficiency in God’s or creation’s goodness.

His conclusion about the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and terrors like is that there is no ultimate meaning or purpose in them.  But there hope, meaning and purpose is in the gospel.

I do not believe we Christians are obliged — or even allowed — to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. For while Christ takes the suffering of his creatures up into his own, it is not because he or they had need of suffering, but because he would not abandon his creatures to the grave. And while we know that the victory over evil and death has been won, we know also that it is a victory yet to come, and that creation therefore, as Paul says, groans in expectation of the glory that will one day be revealed. Until then, the world remains a place of struggle between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death; and, in such a world, our portion is charity.

Why I found him so liberating is that rather than trying to find a unitary explanation of evil, he enabled me again to call evil evil and not pretend that it really is a good thing if only we understood its purpose. 

You may remember the analogy of our lives and all the life of the world looking like a mess, but it’s really only the back of a tapestry.  Turn it around and you will see that everything fits in in a perfect plan.  I’m not sure that that makes sense of prayers like the one which Jesus told us to say, “Your will be done on earth as in heaven”.  Not yet, but it will be. 

Hart is strongly critical of those (like Calvin apparently) who say that what God permits to happen he wills to happen. In The Doors of the Sea, he goes straight to the question in John 9 about the man born blind and draws attention to what it is we do know certainly about Christ, God’s attitude to suffering: 

One might read Christ’s answer to his disciples’ question regarding why a man had been born blind – “that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (John 9:3) – either as a refutation or as a confirmation of the distinction between divine will and permission. When all is said and done, however, not only is the distinction neither illogical nor slight; it is an absolute necessity if – setting aside, as we should, all other judgments as suppositious, stochastic, and secondary – we are to be guided by the full character of what is revealed of God in Christ. For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God. (Doors of the Sea p.86-7)

So I am not sure whether “God is in control” is quite the way I want to put it any more.  I don’t want to or cannot deny that God is God and that in a real sense nothing happens outside of God’s oversight. Or that he can and does providentially bring good out of evil. And yet I think I should abandon any kind of simple or unitary calling whatever happens “God’s will.” Announce the gospel instead.