God's Providence

“Look what God has done!” Reverend Franklin Graham pronounced at President Trump’s inauguration on Monday, taking in the scene of Trump reentering office with a spirit of awe and reverence as he opened a prayer of gratitude, hope, and petition for the occasion and the years ahead. 

It was a spirit of thanksgiving some may have shared, and some less so. But the comment, regardless, poses a good question for all us to ponder, in terms of who to thank (or to fault) for Monday’s scene: what indeed has God done?

Of course, as Christians we’re firm believers in providence: we know that God cares about the events of human history, and certainly we believe that he has the power to intervene in the midst of them. But if we take Graham’s view at face value, here – which implies that God ordains certain people or events and brings them to pass according to the sole, strong work of his hand – we end up in some murky religious and theological waters. For one, we find that the place and significance of our human freedom has trouble finding stable footing. And, for two, we find that we’ve put God at risk of becoming a much less benevolent figure, in our imaginations: if we’re going to credit just him for when things go right, we’re also going to have to blame just him for when things go wrong. And at best, that’s a fairly awkward position to get ourselves into; at worst, it’s a tragic one, potentially devastating of our faith in God’s care and protection.

So: what has God done? And what does God do, when it comes especially to these hinge events of our nations, communities, and institutions, but also the hinge events of our own lives, our own histories?

Certainly God speaks to human minds and hearts. But we hear him through fragmented faculties, faculties awaiting, though gaining, their perfection. And he then honors our freedom to choose – to respond to and in concert with the promptings heard from him or not. And then, once we’ve chosen, he works with the realities that our decisions present him with, bringing the most he can from them with ready creativity and dogged persistence.

In other words, there are two very real and firm realities at play, and neither can be left out of a true picture of how God’s providence works: first, the events of our societies and personal lives really are in our free hands, and we really are responsible for their consequences and fallout; but second, those events really are also under the Lord’s certain, tangible, and prevailing care, and that care is not ultimately bound or limited by us. But that’s because it’s a care that can’t be outrun, outlived, or outlasted, and not because it’s one that discounts or works in spite of our freedom and choices, which are not infallible, even if infallibly attended to.

To call such points to mind can put us into a more productive stance than Graham’s remarks may otherwise invite, on either side of the issue – whether it be a temptation to share in a kind of Christian triumphalism, or to feel betrayed rather than graced by “what God has done” on Monday. We can cling instead to the truer mode of humble, needy, repentant supplicants before the Lord, supplicants counting on him to speak to us, to help us to hear him, and to straighten the ways we make crooked, his mercy being necessary for everything. “Supreme among the nations, supreme on the earth,” Timothy Cardinal Dolan also prayed at the Inauguration, “in your wisdom you set man to govern your creatures” – and in his wisdom he sets us to govern our own lives, our own relationships, our own choices and interactions. So “send wisdom from Heavens,” Cardinal Dolan went on, in a plea we can take to heart in our own lives, for we are God’s servants, “aware of [our] own weakness and brevity of life,” and “if wisdom, which comes from you, be not with us, we shall be held in no esteem.”