In which I, against my better judgment, blather more about theodicy

I read with sympathy, and some frustration Halden and his community's exploration of Providence, John Piper-style. Sympathy because I too think that Piper is quite wrong to surmise that God sent a tornado to punish the Lutherans for ordaining gay clergy, or that God ordained that 3,000 innocents be slaughtered on 9/11.

But the frustration is that, sooner or later, Piper's doctrine of providence deserves a more serious response than name-calling (such as condemning Piper's words as demonic, insane, or even worse--liberal!) I realize that at Inhabitatio Dei "liberal" is fightin' words (emancipation of slaves, the germ theory of disease, and all the other good stuff of the last three centuries be damned!) but John Piper is not a liberal, and calling him one is not a cleverly contrarian insult. As I alluded to below, Piper's doctrine of providence does have some support in the tradition, particularly from Augustine, whose doctrine of predestination (being a hop, skip and a jump from providence) certainly appeared deterministic and fatalistic to many of his contemporaries and successors. And, when Augustine tells skeptical pagans in City of God that miracles are not against nature as such, but against nature as known, he pretty much collapses Creation and all its weal and woe into the will of God.

That said, Augustine on balance does not seem to think that evil is necessary to the glory of God, unlike Piper and some of the first generation of Jonathan Edwards' disciples.

Halden's best response to Piper is to link to this blog post about Piper's statement which gets to the heart of the matter, namely that Piper, and some (but by no means all) Reformed theologians wind up in the repugnant straights they're in when a commitment to God's sovereignty in the abstract, untethered to what we know about God's Trinitarian nature as revealed in Christ, governs their whole theological project. In other words, while Piper would certainly affirm the authority of scripture as the source and norm for all theology, his doctrine of providence is all reason and no revelation. And this is a problem for conservative Calvinists generally.

But even better is this from the comment thread:

 My problem with the list of heavies on both sides of this new theological divide (nice links, Drew) is that none of them can draft an ecological equation nor even a fast and frugal heuristic decision-tree for divine agency in the natural world. Independently of the dicta in their respective theologies. It’s all language idling. And camp.

Yup. As fate (or providence) would have it, I found myself in a similar conversation with my older son a week ago as we were watching Hurricane Bill coverage. "Dad, did God or the Devil make the hurricane?" Leave it to the kids to make the theologians stammer. Especially about "divine agency in the natural world."

This is what I said:

Everything dies. Everything wears out. And the world in which we live has a million ingenious ways of killing us. Like hurricanes. That's evil. But the good thing is that God makes those very forces that would destroy us sustain us. Hurricanes can break droughts. When rivers flood and volcanoes erupt, they deposit fertile soil that we can farm. In the here and now, God bends the bad stuff in the world toward good things, and I'm looking forward to the time when there won't be any more bad that God has to bend to the good.

Is that a better answer than Piper's?

The problem with my answer is that God's sovereignty is in the process of being established, and that won't do for some people. It seems taken for granted at Inhabitateo Dei that Piper's doctrine of providence is pastorally ruinous, and it is for most, but if you are the kind of person who fears chaos more than anything, then a God who is in control of everything, and I mean everything, may be comforting, even if he is ominously inscrutable. The schmaltzy flip-side of Piper's dark Calvinism is the jack-legged preacher at the funeral of a child who says, "The Lord looked down and saw a beautiful flower and loved her so much he picked her just to have her at His side." I have heard this more times than you'd think, and its sheer frequency as a pastoral response to the absurd insult of the death of a child indicates that Piper-style determinism must have some currency out there.

Comments

[Jennifer]

I think it is a much better answer than Piper's. It's similar to David Bentley Hart's answer regarding the tsumani in 2005.

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2008/05/tsunami-and-theodicy

"As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes -- and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”

[Marvin]

Yeah, I read Hart's book a couple of years ago, and it must have sunk in.