AN OPPOSITE EXTREME:
THE WORLD IS NOT IN THE HANDS OF GOD
Did God desire that I would acquire cancer at the age of thirty-nine?
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| 1938 American Society for the Control of Cancer poster. |
It might feel like a solution to counter this fatalistic, monocausal approach would be to say that some events are simply due to chance—that God couldn’t have done anything about them anyway. In the midst of a crisis, does it not damage God’s reputation to say that God intentionally “allowed” the calamity? Did God desire that I would acquire cancer at the age of thirty-nine? Or even worse, does God desire horrible tragedies, such as the abuse of a child? Surely, the reasoning goes, God is opposed to the suffering of the innocent, thus God simply opposes evil and in no way permits or allows it. Why would God allow calamity? It is tempting to give a reason that answers the theodicy question: the calamity took place because of God’s own limitations—God must be simply mourning with the sufferer because he couldn’t do anything about it. The horrific sufferings in the world are evidence that some things are utterly outside of God’s hands of power, for an omnipotent God would never have permitted this.
God didn’t want this! vs. Blaming Almighty God
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| Gottfried Leibniz coined the term "theodicy" in an attempt to justify God's existence in light of the apparent imperfections of the world. |
This may seem faithful—seeking to answer the theodicy question by saying that God is good but not all-powerful. It keeps God’s hands clean, his reputation untarnished. Anyone saying that God is implicated in a tragic event is rebuked: “God didn’t want this!” Yet it’s another extreme that classically rooted theologians from a wide range of Christian traditions have opposed. In my view, its extremism is shown in the fact that it does not take the psalmist’s cry seriously—for the psalmist frequently blames God in the midst of calamity, as demonstrated above. If God is not almighty, there is no impetus to blame or implicate God. Moreover, rather than keeping the theodicy question open as the psalmists and the book of Job do, it seeks to “answer”it by saying that the calamity was out of God’s control anyway.
A six-year-old boy named Oliver dies of cancer
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| Charles Cottet (1863-1925) : Gens d'Ouessant pleurant un enfant mort |
A few weeks before writing this, I attended a funeral for a six-year-old boy named Oliver, who died of cancer. The family had fought this childhood cancer with boldness for several years, using every treatment available. But after countless tests and many chemo treatments, they ran out of options. Oliver entered home hospice care. One day, an ice cream truck came into the neighborhood, and Oliver’s father carried his thin, cancer-ridden son to get an icy treat, passing by our house. Our two-year-old waved happily; our three-year-old stared with wide eyes. That was the last time that we saw Oliver alive.
Priest: “God has chosen to call Oliver to himself at this time.”
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| Woman with Dead Child, 1903 etching by Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) |
The funeral was at a Roman Catholic church, and the priest repeatedly said, “God has called Oliver to himself,”and “God has chosen to call Oliver to himself at this time.” Wow. A part of my heart cried, “Surely not!” We had been praying for Oliver and his family, and all of us were doing everything possible to help fight the cancer, to fight for Oliver’s life. But now the priest was confessing that God is sovereign King even in the suffering and death of Oliver. There was a sting to this—implicating God in the struggle with Oliver’s cancer and his death at a young age—but also a reassurance. The sting is the theodicy question as an open question. It hurts. The death of a child is not the way things are supposed to be—why did God allow this to happen? Yet the reassurance is that Oliver did not just slip through God’s fingers. In life and death, Oliver was in God’s hands. With the psalmist, we confess that God deserves praise for his gifts and the blessing of life, and God is implicated even in the calamity of death as well. Oliver was in God’s hands, even when we don’t understand why this has happened or how this could fit within God’s purposes. Nevertheless we trust in the goodness and power of the Almighty, even though the reasons for the suffering are beyond human wisdom.
God’s Providence: Sustaining and Governing
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| Herbert, John Rogers, RA (c. 1844), The Assertion of Liberty of Conscience by the Independents at the Westminster Assembly of Divines (painting). |
In the ancient, medieval, and Reformation-era church, a set of affirmations and distinctions were utilized in the course of biblical exegesis to avoid extreme responses while guarding the central, guiding mystery of God’s providential care. Positively, these statements affirmed in various ways that the Triune God not only freely created the world but that God the King continues to sustain and govern the world toward his own good ends. The Westminster Shorter Catechism distills this earlier theology well when it exposits God’s works of providence as “His most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all His creatures, and all their actions”. But how exactly can one affirm God’s kingly rule—with his preserving and governing power—without falling into the fatalistic trap of monocausality described above? On the other hand, if one avoids monocausality, how can we avoid a deism that assumes that God takes a “hands off”approach to the world rather than actively preserving and governing his creation?
The workings of God’s providence remain mysterious
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| A 1525 Jacopo Pontormo painting using the Eye of Providence in a triangle as a symbol of the Christian Trinity |
Thus, with the affirmations that God preserves and governs his creation, we need further distinctions—not to vanquish God’s mystery but to help us to confess and adore the mystery of God’s work set forth in Scripture. These terms (described in the next section) were then utilized for centuries in many Protestant confessions and by theologians as well for a range of different positions on providence (Reformed, Arminian, Roman Catholic, etc.). These distinctions do not give us a theodicy explaining God’s reason for allowing evil. And like all extrabiblical distinctions, they can be misconstrued or misused. But used wisely, they give us ways to speak about the complexity of God’s kingly rule in Scripture, even though the workings of God’s providence remain mysterious. God displays active love and care for the whole creation, but in our fallen world this loving action is a mystery that we can confess rather than information we can control.
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| Joseph sold into slavery by his brothers Damiano Mascagni (1579-1636) |
The most basic category is that of concursus, which refers to “the simultaneity of divine and human agency in specific actions and events.” It seeks to come to terms with the way in which one and the same action can be attributed to human beings and to the work of God in Scripture. For example, when Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery, was this a human act or a divine act? On the one hand, the act of the brothers was a free, contingent act in the biblical narrative. Yet God acts to preserve and govern creation through even that act, as Joseph testifies: “God sent me before you to preserve life”(Gen. 45: 5). So, who really sent Joseph into Egypt? A doctrine of concursus provides a way to say that both God and Joseph’s brothers were actors in the event. God is sovereign, and human beings perform responsible, contingent acts. Divine and human agency do not compete with each other—as if God’s action would undermine human agency. To the contrary, God’s power makes human agency possible. Thomas Aquinas says it this way: God is the “first” or primary cause, “who moves causes both natural and voluntary.” Although “free will is the cause of its own movement,”i t does not necessarily follow that “what is free should be the first cause of itself.” A creaturely action can have the providential power of God as a primary cause, yet the creature still has agency that moves freely. Indeed, God “does not deprive their actions of being voluntary: but rather He is the cause of this very thing in them; for He operates in each thing according to its nature.” For Aquinas, in the concursus of divine and human action, God actually empowers secondary agents to act in freedom. Creatures could not act in voluntary, responsible freedom apart from God’s providential power.
God permits the accuser, Satan, to bring suffering to Job, even though we still do not know God’s reasons
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| Job by Léon Bonnat (1833–1922) |
A related distinction that helps to explain the nature of divine-human concursus is the active and permissive will of God. God’s “permission” does not mean that God is a passive spectator but that God (mysteriously) chooses to allow sinners to do the evil that is in their hearts: “God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity” (Rom. 1: 24). God permits the accuser, Satan, to bring suffering to Job, even though we still do not know God’s reasons. As followers of Christ, we pray for the kingdom to come because although the Triune God is King, his kingship is not uncontested, as it will be one day: “at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”(Phil. 2: 10–11). Until the kingship of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, is uncontested, we live in a world in which all things that take place are in the governing hands of God. But not all things are “God’s will” in exactly the same way—some things God works through his permission, and other things God works through his actively bringing about conformity to Christ’s reign by the Spirit’s power.
God brought redemption through the evil act of the soldiers’ crucifixion of Jesus Christ
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| Christ on the Cross, by Carl Heinrich Bloch |
Thus we trust that even though God is not the author of evil, God’s governance will bring what was intended as evil to good ends, even as God did with the evil intended by Joseph’s brothers; more significantly, God brought redemption through the evil act of the soldiers’ crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In contrast, as when Jesus replies to Nicodemus, God’s active will is demonstrated in bringing new life that gives eyes to see and ears to hear, for “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above”(John 3: 3). God’s loving desire is for creatures to experience the freedom of life in Christ’s kingdom, and the Spirit actively gives eyes and ears to sinners to make this possible. But why do not all believe the gospel when they hear it? Why does God permit ongoing rebellion? As Roman Catholic theologian Matthew Levering suggests, only God knows. Yet “the central aim of the doctrine of permission is to affirm God’s love: as it befits infinite Love, God wills only good to his rational creatures.” The doctrine of permission holds together the paradox of God’s power and God’s loving beneficence, even as we are left with the same mystery that Job and the psalmists encountered. Or, in the words of one Reformed confession about the “ordaining”or “willing” of God, “God does not ordain evil in the same way that God ordains good—that is, as something pleasing to God—but as something God hates.” Yet God freely permits the evil of creatures, “and in a wonderful way uses [it] for good.” God hates evil, yet the world is in God’s governing hands to such an extent that we can lament and blame God when he wills to permit evil. We don’t know why God permits evil—in general or in our particular circumstances. Yet with the psalmist we can come before a God who is good and trustworthy, powerful and loving, with lament, petition, and praise until Christ’s kingdom has fully come.
Caring for the Suffering in Light of a Gracious yet Mysterious Providence
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| The Scream is the popular name given to each of four versions of a composition, created as both paintings and pastels, by the Expressionist artist Edvard Munch between 1893 and 1910. The works show a figure with an agonized expression against a landscape with a tumultuous orange sky. |
On a practical level, wisely utilizing these distinctions can help Christians who are providing care to the suffering: it gives testimony to God’s promise and his providential care without falling into mechanistic views of God’s providence, as with Job’s “friends” who claimed to calculate what God was doing based on what happened to Job. In giving this kind of testimony to God’s providence, we should not rush in and victoriously shout “This is God’s will!” in a way that suggests that this calamity was what God intended at the foundations of creation. The Triune God is King, but Christ’s kingdom is not yet uncontested. On the other hand, one is not left with the impotent response of saying, “God understands your pain, but couldn’t do anything about it.” With the psalmist, this approach thanks God for blessing, and also puts the lack of blessing at the door of the Almighty. Suffering and calamity are still under the rule of God, the sovereign King. The sufferer is not subject simply to whims of “chance,” yet on the other hand God is not capricious or the author of evil. Instead the sufferer is in the hands of a good and powerful God. A Christian shaped by the Belgic Confession could point the sufferer to the promises in God’s Word and assure the sufferer that even in the crisis God is worthy of trust. And in order to truly place God’s promises at the center of one’s trust, a caretaker would pray psalms of lament as well as psalms of thanksgiving with the sufferer.
Yet as followers of Jesus Christ, the crucified Lord, we can have confidence that God works in and through the most calamitous events. In Peter’s sermon in Acts 2, he says, “This man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law” (v. 23). Yet “this Jesus God raised up,” and “God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified” (2:32, 36). Was the crucifixion of Christ the work of God or the work of the soldiers? It was both. The crucifixion of Christ was not simply a horrific event that happened to slip through God’s hands (chance) or an event that completely bypassed human agency (fatalism). A doctrine of concursus helps us articulate the “yes” to both possibilities to which Peter’s sermon testifies: it was in “the definite plan and foreknowledge of God,” and yet “you” (Peter’s hearers), in your own free, contingent act, “crucified” Jesus Christ. It was the will of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—because all three persons desired to save fallen and sinful creatures through the sending of the Son, even to death on a cross, and the sending of the Spirit to unite the Father’s adopted people to Christ and one another.
Source: Billings, J. Todd. Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer & Life in Christ. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2015, location 1154 to location 1304.
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