“My personal belief is, I have faith in God,” he said. “If God wants me to get Covid, I’ll get Covid. And if God doesn’t want me to get Covid, I won’t.”
This is the statement made by one pastor living in the tension of following public health guidelines vs satisfying church members’ desires to open up worship again. It’s a difficult situation facing churches across America.
But this particular statement underlines a key theological and very practical question: is getting a disease God’s personal choice for me, or you, or someone we know or love?
We might begin by noticing the strong note of fatalism in the statement, which leads to other questions:
- If it is already divinely pre-determined who gets covid, why care about public health? In fact, why do anything to stop it? No human being can subvert the will of God!
- Why make small sacrifices (wear a mask, social distance, follow public health guidelines) to slow the spread of the disease and perhaps literally save the life of someone I’ll never know? In fact, if my health is pre-determined by God, why do anything to stay healthy (eat right, exercise, take medicine)?
- Why care about providing the best medical care possible, requiring enormous expense and huge sacrifices among our health care professionals?
Now take a wider-angle lens:
- Did God personally desire each of the 6 million Jews exterminated by the Nazis to die?
- Does God personally choose each child whose life is cut tragically short by some horrible disease?
- Does God personally decide that millions of individual human beings will die of malnutrition around the world while others live in luxury? And if I happen to live in the rich parts of the world, does this mean that God approves of me more than God approves of those who are poor? (This “prosperity gospel” is a cancer on the worldwide Body of Christ today.)
This view of divine sovereignty paints a picture with implications many contemporary Christians cannot square with the God we know primarily through Jesus Christ, who is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), our final and best authority on knowing how God works.
I would argue that the God of the Bible actually chose to limit his sovereign control by building freedom into creation. Regarding human beings, C.S Lewis writes in his classic, Mere Christianity:
“If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata–of creatures that worked like machines–would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.”
St. Augustine and others also show that just as God built freedom into humanity, God endowed creation itself with “built in” natural orders and processes that also freely operate on their own.
Creation is an intricate fabric of ongoing processes that create great beauty and also great peril.
- Tectonic plates move against each other to thrust up the glories of the mountains and also grate against each other producing earthquakes that destroy entire cities, even entire ancient civilizations.
- DNA produces the beyond-human imagination panoply of human and biological diversity, yet also inexplicably goes wrong to produce myriads of cancers, diseases, and viruses that cause untold suffering.
In short: we humans enjoy the marvelous bodies our DNA provide us, but also suffer the consequences when God’s good creation becomes warped and perverted.
We live in a fallen, imperfect creation that is waiting, just as we are, for God’s final and complete sovereign rule: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” (Rom. 8:22) Yet even as we live in this fallen creation, just a few verses later Paul reminds us that we can continue to trust that God is still in control and is “working all things together for good” (Rom. 8:28).
While this is the good news, we cannot leave this topic without reminding ourselves how God’s will has been manipulated or perverted by Christians to justify their own ends.
- For centuries Christian pastors and entire denominations taught that white people enslaving black people was actually God’s perfect will, because it allowed these heathen Africans to hear about Jesus Christ. Thus, enforcing slavery became God’s work.
- Centuries of history show how church leaders pervert “the will of God” to work hand in hand with repressive regimes to suppress and control their populations. In probably no other way has the Church been more despised in the modern era than when it has justified stealing the human rights of millions of people in the name of “God’s will.” (To take just one example, the belief in “Manifest Destiny” or divine providence that Americans should move west and populate all of North America blessed conquering the Native Americans who stood in their way and acquiring their lands.)
I’m sure the pastor quoted in the beginning had no evil motives. He was expressing his view of reality. Even so, how we think about God matters!
If we believe that God personally chooses who will get covid and who will not, such a view:
- Undermines rallying around the most vulnerable in our communities, as if our actions could have no negative consequences that imperil their lives.
- Undermines holding political leaders accountable for how their leadership (or lack of leadership) exacerbated or contributed to this crisis.
- Opens the door for demagogues to spin the coronavirus as the fault of some undesirable “other,” just as other modern crises, natural or man-made, have been manipulated (e.g. Jerry Falwell blamed the 9/11 attacks as God’s judgement on America for “pagans, abortionists, feminists, “the gays and the lesbians” and the ACLU.”)
All to say, theology is not just the realm of theologians. The paradox that God is at the same time transcendent (beyond creation) and immanent (intimately involved in creation) in ways we cannot completely understand is one we all must discover and embrace. (See chapter 11 of Paradox Lost: Rediscovering the Mystery of God.)
How we think about God shapes our worldview in ways that have profound consequences.
Thank you, Rich. I have been reading MY BONDAGE AND MY FREEDOM by Fredrick Douglass. Inn Chapter VI he describes how as a child he wrestled with the question of why he was a slave? ” ‘Why are some people slaves, and others masters?’ . . . By some means I learned from these inquiries that ‘ God up in the sky,’ made every body, and that he made white people to be masters and mistresses, and black people to be slaves. This did not satisfy me, nor lessen my interest in the subject.”
Later Douglass concluded, “I was not very long in finding out the true solution of the matter. It was not color, but crime, not God, but man that afforded the true explanation of the existence of slavery; nor was I long in finding out another important truth, viz: what man (sic) can make, man can unmake.”
Douglass’s conclusions point out the fallacy that God intends that some are to be slaves, some free, some poor, some rich, some cast out, some included. It is my conclusion that the “Prosperity Gospel” in America, and now spreading throughout the world has it’s origins in the thought processes that brought about the “crime” of slavery, Jim Crow and systemic racism. “All Lives Matter” is an unwitting expression of this crime; “Black Lives Matter” is the antidote to this disease, thee corrective to the disordered crime of racial hatred. Until the life of the slave, the outcast, the persecuted and prosecuted for being black matter, then no life matters.
Thanks, Rich
This was informative and helpful. It is what I have believed for a long time, but you do a better job of underpinning my beliefs than I seem to be able to accomplish on my own.
Sam