I only just learned from Richard Beck that one of my other college friends, Matt Ritchie, has been blogging for a long time. The web is a big place, and a small world, all at once.

Anyway Matt recently posted on chance, coincidence, and the providence of God—a post prompted by reading the book of Esther. I commend the whole post to you, but I would like to highlight this paragraph:

Is there also a danger in this line of thought? What about seemingly bad, random things? Is God deserving of equal credit for those as well? If God is responsible for one person getting a great parking space for a day of shopping at the mall, should we also credit God with a fatal tire-failure, which kills an infant and three children on a nearby freeway?

Once upon a time, Rene and I were driving from Dallas to Abilene in a Nissan station wagon that had once been nice but was at that time sorely in need of euthenasia. Along the way, the timing belt snapped, which of course meant that the engine died and we coasted to a stop. Later, as I was telling one of my professors, André Resner, about the experience, I put it this way: “Providentially, we were only a mile from my grandparent’s house” (which, interestingly enough, is in Eastland, only fifteen miles or so from Matt’s childhood home in Cisco). André responded, “How far away would you have to have been for it not to be providential?”

André’s question from long ago, along with Matt’s questions from the other day, are just some of the pertinent questions that swirl around the issue of God’s control over the world, and divine (mis?)management of the cosmos. For some reason that I still find difficult to fathom, Christians of my acquaintance seem to find comfort in the face of misfortune (from minor annoyances to genuine tragedies) by affirming that “God is in control.” Yet if God really is in control, then that means that God “controlled” whatever misfortune prompted the affirmation in the first place. Although it may be bad form, I’ll quote myself, from a post in the wake of the recent Virginia Tech shootings:

On the afternoon of the shooting, I heard a brief snippet of one of those “human interest” interviews with a parent whose son had stayed home from his Virginia Tech classes that day because he was ill. His mother made a comment very close to (though I cannot quote it exactly), “God was protecting him today.” Obviously this is a pious sentiment, and I am undoubtedly a rank fiend for subjecting this woman’s on-camera remark to critical theological scrutiny, yet I cannot let this statement lie without comment. I object to this mother’s sentiment because it clearly implies that God was not protecting the victims of the shooting—which in turn implies that, for some reason, God cared more about this woman’s son than about the other women’s sons and daughters who were gunned down. I cannot disprove this conclusion, but I find it horrifying to think that God selectively protected this one individual and failed or declined to do so for the others involved.

The pious sentiment that “God is in control” is actually a problem for monotheism. The prophetic voice reflected in Isaiah 40–55 (“Deutero-Isaiah,” if you will) has no problem ascribing both weal and woe to the same God:

I form light and create darkness,

I make weal and create woe;

I the LORD do all these things.

Yet many generations of those devoted to Deutero-Isaiah’s God have not felt comfortable affirming Deutero-Isaiah’s radical monotheism. The whole concept of “the devil” may have come into existence (possibly with some influence from Persian dualism) partly as a way to “offload” darkness and woe from a benevolent God onto a maleficent cosmic enemy. (Yes, I realize that this statement is woefully oversimplified.)

Within the Tanakh, I have long been intrigued by Qoheleth’s affirmation of terrestrial, if not cosmic, randomness (which would play some degree of havoc with the idea that “The lot is cast into the lap, but the decision is the LORD’S alone” (Prov 16:33 NRSV; or perhaps you prefer the gamer’s translation, “We throw the dice, but the LORD determines how they fall”):

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all. For no one can anticipate the time of disaster. Like fish taken in a cruel net, and like birds caught in a snare, so mortals are snared at a time of calamity, when it suddenly falls upon them. (Eccl 9:11-12 NRSV)

If I understand Qoheleth rightly (a big “if,” to be sure), Qoheleth infers that, no matter how much he might not like this randomness, that it is part of God’s design for the world: “In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider; God has made the one as well as the other, so that mortals may not find out anything that will come after them” (Eccl 7:14). This really does not take us that far from Deutero-Isaiah, at least in terms of moral comfort. Qoheleth seems to think that God built an “X-factor” (no, not that X-Factor, and not that X-Factor either, and not that X-Factor—okay, so it was a poor word choice) into the very fabric of the universe, and this randomness explains calamities. Deutero-Isaiah seems to envision God as more hands-on in crafting calamities. I’m not sure which is less theologically troubling.

Perhaps there are other ways to think through random calamities. Of course, atheists don’t have this problem, since a purely rationalistic approach to life can accept chance occurrences without having to explain (away) divine beneficence, maleficence, or apathy. Yet I don’t consider atheism a good option, and certainly a desire to solve the “problem of evil” is a poor reason to opt for atheism. Within a broadly theistic frame, process theology can also offer an alternate way of thinking about randomness; to put it in a way that is unfair to process thinkers everywhere, perhaps random calamities happen because God didn’t know they were coming, or anticipated them but couldn’t do anything about it. Open theism (with which I have some significant sympathies) leads to similar thoughts.

I’d like to propose yet another perspective, which no doubt others have thought about previously. Classical theology, process theology, open theism, and Qoheleth could all potentially converge if we were to view divine activity in the world through the lens of kenosis or “self-emptying.” We normally think about kenosis in connection with Christology (see Philippians 2:5-11 for the classic New Testament statement on kenosis; the first line of Phil 2:7, ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν, gives us the term itself) and attempts to explain the ramifications of the classical doctrine of divine incarnation in the person of Jesus Christ, and this is inevitably linked with Trinitarian speculations. Nevertheless, it seems to me possible to leave much of that aside and ask whether kenosis might also help us make sense of random calamities—and, for that matter, random serendipities. I have not read or thought a lot about this, and perhaps it is already a well-established line of inquiry in theology that I just don’t know about (I’m a text guy, after all). Nevertheless, it seems to me that if God approaches “superintendence” of the cosmos from the standpoint of kenosis, then things like natural evil and free will start to make a lot more sense. And, I admit, I am more comfortable (not a good criterion for theological affirmation!) with the idea that God kenotically cedes control over the interaction between nails and tires (to return to Matt’s scenario) than that God maleficently punctures tires.

I know that some readers may find this kenotic notion repugnant because of their high view of divine sovereignty. To these readers I would simply respond that we have only two choices. Either God always gets what God wants—an affirmation that the biblical witness, at least, does not support—or God does not always get what God wants. If the latter choice, with which many biblical writers would agree, is true, then we have before us the theological task of explaining why a “sovereign” God does not always get what God wants. In my (admittedly inchoate) judgment, kenosis may provide a substantial answer to this provocative question.