It seems like I’m constantly trying to come to an understanding or at least a settled position on how God involves himself in human affairs. The Trump shooting brought that to the surface again, simply because it couldn’t be scripted — it felt beyond consequence. Also, many people of faith, including people that I see as nuanced and intelligent began claiming that it was almost beyond question, an act of God (Ben Shapiro, for instance).
I’ve been all over the board over the years from “there’s no understanding God’s involvement” to determinism (more early in my Christian life), to compatibility, meaning that paradoxically God’s sovereignty and free will aren’t mutually exclusive. And I’ve also thought, maybe more now than ever before, that free creatures make the moves and God occasionally involves himself to direct history to his ends.
One other thing to think about is the ramifications behind saying that God is not involved, or that you can never interpret or intuit God’s actions in the world. These assumptions leave our relationship with God very impersonal and knowing or interpreting his involvement in our lives almost impossible. As people of faith, even the most skeptical of us, can attest to some event or some experience of the transcendent that to deny that it was personal contact with a loving God might completely shipwreck any faith we have. I also believe that there is some connection between meaning and the personal. To deny that God acts in the world or is acting in the individual’s life, in a sense is to deny that life has a direction and that life therefore has personal meaning. No human really lives that way. So that brings us back to the conundrum, does God involve himself in human affairs and can we intuit that involvement and even “interpret” it at times?
Let me lay out what I believe are the four options at hand for understanding God’s involvement:
- Option 1. God determines every event and all of history.
- Option 2. A deistic view in which God creates the world and then simply lets human free will play out. (These two representt he extremes.)
- Option 3: any type of compatibility view in which God’s sovereignty and free will are not mutually exclusive. The most popular of these is likely the “middle knowledge” explanation.
- Option 4: Let’s call this the “God as a highly informed chess player” view. In this view God will determine by a series of limited actions on his part (who knows how often he intervenes?) that all things work to good and to his ultimate ends but at some level he submits himself to human free will and to the physical laws of nature. (Somewhere on this scale is where I’ve personally landed. Whether or not it philosophically holds water I don’t know, but it makes the most sense of real life and of the narrative of Scripture for me.)
This is how I see things given everything I’ve said above. It is possible that we Cima da Conegliano
Comments are closed.