Hello my friends!

Today we will be looking at a subscriber's question about how the theology she was given regarding the sovereignty of God doesn't seem to line up with her experience with God, especially in the face of tragedies in our world.

We are going to think on this topic together and look at some different theological starting points, all while considering the possibility that we may be looking for reasons in places where there aren't any.

Before we dive into this complex topic, here are some resources that have helped me think about it more deeply.

RESOURCES TO CONSIDER

-One of the most moving and impactful books on this topic is Kate Bowler's "Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved." It is a book I have not only found helpful myself, but it is one of the books that I hear referenced a lot by others. Kate Bowler is a professor at Duke Divinity School with a modest Christian upbringing, but she specializes in the study of the prosperity gospel, a creed that sees fortune as a blessing from God and misfortune as a mark of God’s disapproval. At thirty-five, everything in her life seems to point toward “blessing.” She is thriving in her job, married to her high school sweetheart, and loves life with her newborn son. Then she is diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. The prospect of her own mortality forces Kate to realize that she has been tacitly subscribing to the prosperity gospel, living with the conviction that she can control the shape of her life with “a surge of determination.” Even as this type of Christianity celebrates the American can-do spirit, it implies that if you “can’t do” and succumb to illness or misfortune, you are a failure. Kate is very sick, and no amount of positive thinking will shrink her tumors. What does it mean to die, she wonders, in a society that insists everything happens for a reason? Kate is stripped of this certainty only to discover that without it, life is hard but beautiful in a way it never has been before.

-A spiritual mentor of mine and the professor of Historical Theology at Northwest Nazarene University recently wrote a powerful book on this topic as well, called "The Back Side of the Cross: An Atonement Theology for the Abused and Abandoned." The cross has always been portrayed as the means of salvation and forgiveness for sinners, but does it have anything to say to those who have been sinned against? This book shows that the atonement of Christ has powerful potential to speak to those who have been wronged, especially those who have been abused and abandoned in countless ways—those who cower at the back side of the cross wondering if they are included.

-A very difficult but deeply important read on this topic is a book called, "The Cross and the Lynching Tree," by James H. Cone. The cross and the lynching tree are the two most emotionally charged symbols in the history of the African American community. In this powerful work, theologian James H. Cone explores these symbols and their interconnection in the history and souls of Black people.

-Lastly, a rather thick, but transformational read on this topic is a book called "The Crucified God" by theologian Jürgen Moltmann. Moltmann's dramatic innovation in this book was to see the cross not as a problem of theodicy but instead as an act of ultimate solidarity between God and humanity. In this, he drew on liberation theology, and he was among the first to bring third-world theologies into a first-world context.

Okay, onto today's content.

Not Everything Happens For A Reason

Sometimes, I wish you all could all see all the heartfelt, deeply sincere, and thoughtful responses I get from my newsletters each week. With how often social media can become such a negative and hostile place, I am so deeply thankful for all of you and the community of authentic and genuine dialogue we are building together. With over 9,000 of you here, it is a testament that when we put our minds to it, we really can have kind, authentic, and civil conversations about hard things. It is such beautiful and important work to be part of every week. So, thank you!

This question in particular really resonated with me last week. It touched on a lot of the other questions I received as well. It speaks to a deep reality that we have all had to wrestle with in one way or another.

Part of her question reads, "One thing I am really struggling with lately is the "Sovereignty of God".  Believing that "all things work together for good" and "everything happens for a reason" has always been a source of comfort. Even in my failures, I could always rest on my Calvinistic crutch that somehow God had a plan and my poor choices and others' poor choices would not derail that plan. I believed if I just prayed, that God would fix everything and that I would be back on the track of his sovereign plan. He would reveal that plan in his time, I just had to have faith, pray, and trust. Everything happens for a reason and all things work together, right? Now, I'm seeing that the formula that has always brought me peace, isn't really congruent with my experience and it is likely not even Biblical, like so much that i had believed for so long. Life is just messy and maybe God is allowing it to be messy. But how much of that mess is just random?"

These last several years, especially since 2020, has been a time that has left us all asking for the reasons behind everything that has happened. When big things like global pandemics, a reckoning with injustice, civil unrest, and feeling the loss of trust in so many institutions of authority, our desire for meaning has become so intensified.

While this is so important, it can also lead us to something called “proportionality bias,” which is the tendency to assume that big events have equally big causes. It is a type of cognitive bias and it plays an important role our tendency to accept certain theological conclusions and even conspiracy theories to fill the void of meaning. When something big happens, we tend to assume that something big, like God, or a massive evil group of shadowy satan worshipers must have caused it. Big cause, big effect. This can cause us to miss the reality that something like a global pandemic was caused by a microscopic virus.

While big events are sometimes cause by big causes, what if this constant search for meaning causes us to miss something really important theologically? What if looking for meaning makes us miss when something is actually meaningless? Wouldn’t that cause us to misread God and the world around us?

As always, I’m not here to “tell you what to think,” but rather, I really want to think with you. So I’ll simply start by saying how I as a Christian in the Wesleyan tradition see God’s sovereignty and how it contrasts to other Christian traditions. This is just for the sake of showing different perspectives for you to be able to process your own. It is not an attempt to disparage those different perspectives.

Many different theological traditions have very different answers the theological question, “what is God’s nature?” Or put another way, “what is God’s primary characteristic?”

Many Protestant Christian traditions, like Calvinism or Reformed movements, begin with God’s primary nature being “sovereignty” (or power). In this framework, everything about God, even God’s love, is dictated by God’s power. God is sovereign.

Other Protestant Christian traditions, like Wesleyan, Arminian, and Holiness movements, begin with God’s primary nature being love. In this framework, everything about God, even God’s power, is dictated by God’s love. God is love.

It isn't that God's love doesn't matter to Calvinists or that God's power doesn't matter to Wesleyans, it just means that they see God's primary nature being more reflected by one and dictating the other.

These traditions agree THAT God is powerful and loving, they just disagree on HOW.

As you can imagine, these are vastly different starting points and produce vastly different theological conclusions about God and the nature of the world. At the risk of being too generalized here, the former theology will naturally be concerned with looking for God’s power over all things, while the latter theological perspectives will naturally be concerned with looking for God’s love for all things.

Power and love and the relationship they have within God’s nature will be interpreted very differently by both theologies.

One of the things theologies centered on God’s primary nature being power is the notion that God has predestined or orchestrated all things from the beginning of time. God is seen as continuously orchestrating every detail of the cosmos, including our lives, which will ultimately culminate in God’s divine plan at the end of time. So even though a horrible tragedy happens, God must have had a plan for it from the beginning. Even if we don’t understand why right now, it has to fit in God's plan somehow. Because if all things aren’t caused by God then God would not be all powerful (sovereign). Therefore, “Everything happens for a reason.”

One of the things theologies centered on God’s primary nature being love tries to keep in focus is God’s gift of freedom to humanity and even to creation itself. The gift of freedom is a central fruit of love and while love is powerful, it is not controlling. This gift of freedom has been used by humanity for so much good, but also for so much evil in the world. Even a free and wild creation has produced incredible natural triumphs but also terrible natural disasters. This is a dynamic that our entire Bible begins with in fact. The misuse of freedom for our own selfish gain. The Bible continues to wrestle with that theme all throughout.

With love being God’s primary characteristic in this theological framework, God does not force or impose God’s will onto free beings. For control isn’t the goal, love is the goal, and as Paul says, “love doesn’t insist on its own way.” (1 Cor 13:4-5 ESV). Love instead seeks to partner with and work together towards edification, harmony, peace, and dignity for all creation, as we see in the garden of Eden before “the fall.” The ultimate display of this love of course is the cross of Christ.

Yet, there is still this problem, the problem of evil. How does a theology of “God is love” help us in tragedy?

When thinking about this, I have found the most important thing to remember about evil, death, and the tragedies they create is not to look for what they “mean” but to understand that they are incredibly destructive precisely because they are meaningless. Evil and death are simply not the way the world should work. All they do is create pain, sorrow, and chaos to things that mean so much to us and to God. They do this without compassion or remorse and they don't need a reason. They are absolutely absurd, and insist on their own way, which is why they cause so much damage and hurt.

From Genesis to Revelation, one of the most prevailing narratives is how meaningless and senseless death and evil are and how broken the world remains when evil and death are allowed to dominate our lives. Selfishness, violence, evil, and death don’t need a reason to be selfish, violent, evil, and death dealing (think the book of Job). I think this is what confounds our rational thinking minds so much. We are constantly looking for meaning and these horrible forces are all just so senseless and so meaningless. This lack of meaning where we want meaning to be produces so much despair.

Let me give you a recent example of this in my own life.

Last weekend, a young special ed teacher here in Boise, who was connected to the downtown campus of our church, died unexpectedly from a brain aneurysm. She was in her thirties, like me. She was doing so much good for her students, their families and our community. She was also a wife and a mother. Her husband is now a single dad with a two year old.

This wrecked me. I’m moved to tears every time I think about it. Even now as I write. I can’t understand why this happened. My heart broke for her, her students, her husband and her child. I went home later that night and picked up my 10 month old son, held my wife close, and wept.

It just doesn’t make any sense. It hurts so deeply and it hurts even more that it feels so meaningless. How could a loving God allow this to happen?

I heard these same questions being screamed by children and mothers on the news in Turkey after so many thousands of lives lost in the earth quakes there.

A mother told NPR, "my children asked if we were in hell now. 'Is this the after life?' they asked. 'What have we done that God would do this to us?"

In my experience, having long believed in a theology that insists that God’s primary characteristic is absolute power and control (Christian fundamentalism), the absurdity of tragedies like this quickly made me theologically stuck between two “either/or” options.

I either had to conclude that everything happened for a reason and God caused this young woman to pass away and the earth quakes in Turkey for reasons we will only know in time or that this woman died and those quakes happened because of someone's unrepentant.

After holding beliefs like this for a long time, I soon realized that I didn’t actually agree with what this theology was saying about God or human beings. Namely that God uses death as a tool of power and that humanity is inherently sinful (or totally depraved to use a Calvinist term).

I didn’t agree with this theology primarily because of what I was seeing in the Bible and in the life and teachings of Jesus.

To be sure, sin impacts these tragedies. The inequality towards the poor in Turkey has created horrible building codes and infrastructure discrepancies. This sin certainly made this natural disaster much, much worse.

And we would be unwise to think that the poor healthcare and educational standards here in Idaho, which not only severely under compensates teachers and prevents them from accessing quality health care didn't somehow play a role in the loss of this sweet special ed teacher. Especially on top of the major stress educators have been under these past few years.

Yet, acknowledging the impact of these sins of injustice on these tragedies is far different than saying "these tragedies happened because of God's judgment on the sin of those it happened to." That would be such a Biblically inaccurate and unloving conclusion to make.

Throughout the entire Bible we see God pursuing humanity and all creation out of a deep and abiding love and a desire to end the tyranny of death. God even created humanity in God’s own image and said that humanity was “very good.” That is the first thing God says over humanity. The theology of my upbringing contradicted both those narratives of scripture.

All while God is pursing humanity in love, humanity is harmed by and even participates with evil and death in the world. Scripture tells us that “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” It doesn’t tell us that God created “the heavens and the earth and hell.” Whatever hell is, God didn’t create it. Hell was unleashed into the world by our misuse and abuse of God’s gift of freedom.

The Bible uses many words to describe this kind of hell, like “sin” and “evil” and it illustrates it first by selfishness (Adam and Eve) and then by murder (Kain and Abel). Hell is what we unleash on each other and upon ourselves when we reject God’s way of love.

Even creation itself suffers under this tyranny of hell. To use Paul’s description of it, he says, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” (Romans 8:22).

Then the Bible shows us that God’s pursuit of humanity and all of creation culminates in God refusing to allow creation to be subjected to futility and death any longer. God becomes a human being and lives among us. God in Christ Jesus then went around proclaiming that “the kingdom of heaven has come,” that all of heaven and earth would be made one again, like it was in the garden. Hell and all those that participate with its ways will be no more.

Jesus started embodying this reality through bringing good news to the poor, forgiving sins, healing the broken, releasing the captives, and liberating the oppressed. Yet, how did we respond to this lavish love of God? We responded with a cross. We put to death the very God who was trying to release the world from death. The cross is not only a symbol of God’s love for us, but it is a symbol of how we responded to God’s love.

Yet, even in light of the cross, how did this God respond? With love.

Jesus took all the love he had for the world and even through the cross, invaded the absurd and meaningless reality death and all the things that cause it, and stole its power. He stole this power not by force, but by love.

Then, just as God created out of nothing but love, Jesus rose from the nothingness of death. He now rules as our crucified messiah, with a promise of eternal life, because he refused to allow evil and death to have the last word over creation, and over our loved ones, and over sweet special ed teachers and the families they leave behind.

In the face of the meaninglessness of death, we can find hope in the reality that Jesus defeated death and will have the last word over us.

So, instead of looking for “a reason,” which is so difficult for an inquisitive mind like mine, I try hard to remember that evil and death are reasonless. They have nothing to do with love and are not supposed to be part of creation, which is why they don’t make any sense.

Instead of seeing God as either causing tragedy or tragedy happening because of an individual’s sin, I now try to focus more on how God loves us so much that God hates the absurdity of evil and death and the harm it causes just as much as we do.

Instead of thinking that death is a tool that God sometimes uses for a divine plan, I now try to focus on how God came to actually conquer death for the world so that futility and evil wouldn’t have the last word over us. Jesus would have the last word over us.

Instead of looking at humanity as “totally depraved,” as being to blame for a tragedy, I remember how God said that humanity is “very good.” It helps me measure the meaninglessness of death my the value of humanity rather than the other way around. When life is lost, especially those who’s goodness is so visible, it encourages me to hold even more onto the hope Christ’s resurrection for us all.

As a pastor, death has a constant presence in my work. I am often at the bedside of those who are dying. I then care for their families spiritual wellbeing after they do pass on. I am then tasked with the responsibility of saying the final words over them as they are buried in the ground. This is one of the most difficult yet sacred parts of my work.

As I grieve with those who grieve and mourn with those who mourn, I try my best to look for and point to signs of the “kingdom of heaven” and continue to work with those around me to bring heaven and earth together again with all the life I am given. All while encouraging others to hold onto the hope of the resurrection with me.

For me, this is why the truth of the gospel matters so deeply. In the face of all the meaningless tragedies that happen in life, the gospel shows us that instead of being the one who caused such tragedies, our God is the one who enters into the midst of them in order to bring resurrection and life. The gospel shows us that in the face of the absurdity of evil, our God is still tirelessly working to bring healing and justice, which will culminate with Christ’s return.

In the face of suffering and death, Christ invites us to partner with him in this work, and respond by coming alongside others in mourning as they despair over the meaninglessness of it all and offer them comfort and support. All will faithfully committing to the daily work of transforming our world into a place where evil and death are not allowed to flourish among us or define us.

Everything doesn’t happen for a reason, but in all that happens, we who follow Jesus are called to see tragedy as all the more reason to embody God’s love in the world.

That’s a bit of my approach to this complex topic. Now I want to hear from you. Did you find this helpful or encouraging? What other things would you have added? Send me your thoughts.

If you find this weekly newsletter helpful and would like to support my work, consider making a donation here.

If you're looking for a way to invite others to join this community we are building, you can simply send them this link: https://benjamin-cremer.ck.page/​

As always, thank you so much for reading and dialoguing with me. I look forward to hearing from you.

-Ben

PREVIOUS NEWSLETTERS

​What Does It Even Mean To Be Christian Anymore?​

​When Absolute Truth Becomes An Idol​

​Why don’t Christians look to Jesus as a model for masculinity?​