When Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt last month, every decent American responded with gratitude for the luck that saw the bullet graze the former president and not kill him. But some Christian supporters of Trump saw something else at work.
According to Al Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, it was “God and God alone” who saved Trump. “For God alone is the sovereign ruler of the cosmos,” he wrote at the time. “The reality of God’s providence” explained why Trump lives.
Mohler didn’t say whether “God and God alone” was responsible for the death of Corey Comperatore, who was hit by a stray bullet at the rally while protecting his wife and two daughters. While Mohler was rejoicing that God had saved Trump, Comperatore’s family was burying the man they loved.
But Mohler was hardly alone in his views. At the Republican National Convention, Trump said that he had survived only “by the grace of almighty God.” “I had God on my side,” he said. Trump would later express his thanks to a fan whose Truth Social post said, among other things, “WE ARE WITNESSING THE POWER OF GOD!” and “GOD CHOSE DONALD J. TRUMP FOR THIS TASK THIS GOES WITHOUT QUESTION!”
During his own speech to the RNC, Reverend Franklin Graham, a devoted Trump supporter, said that God had “spared his life.” Tucker Carlson, who spoke during prime time at the RNC, marveled, “I think a lot of people are wondering, What is this? This doesn’t look like politics. Something bigger is going on here. I think even people who don’t believe in God are beginning to think, Well, maybe there’s something to this, actually.” Steve Scalise, the House majority leader who was himself nearly killed in a political shooting, said, “Yesterday, there were miracles. And I think the hand of God was there too.” Michael Flynn, who briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser, shared an image of Jesus standing behind Trump, with the caption “If there were ever a moment when this photo proved miraculous, this is that moment.”
Steve Bannon, the imprisoned former Trump adviser, said, “Trump wears the armor of God.” The Trump-campaign spokesperson Caroline Sunshine said on Fox News that “the bullet pierced President Trump’s ear at 6:11 p.m. Ephesians 6:11 tells us, ‘Put on the full armor of God. Take your stand against the devil and his schemes.’” (She noted that Trump had survived thanks to “divine intervention,” and after calling the left “godless,” she added, “It’s important to remember that good does defeat evil.”) Kimberly Guilfoyle, a Trump-campaign adviser, said, “God has put an armor of protection over Donald Trump.”
The fact that Trump supporters, many of whom claim to be Christian, would interpret his near assassination as God intervening to show the former president favor, and in some cases even as evidence that God has chosen Trump to lead the United States again, is no surprise. Everything, including their faith, has been subordinated to their devotion to Trump. Many, including Mohler and Graham, have cast aside what was once a core belief—the centrality of moral integrity in politicians, and especially in presidents—because that is what obeisance to the former president requires of them.
Their approach reflects not only that obeisance, but also a larger and more troubling mistake—one that exhibits far too much confidence in their capacity to know the mind of God and that can easily, if unwittingly, impugn the character of God.
SET ASIDE THE CYNICS and Trump worshippers. For those of us of the Christian faith—indeed, for those of any faith—the commentary that followed the assassination attempt raises profound theological issues: What is the role of God in human affairs? How should we understand his providence? Does God intervene to alter the course of events?
If we ascribe to the goodness of God the outcomes of some events, a person’s recovery from severe illness, for example, or narrow avoidance of death or crippling injury, isn’t it only fair to ascribe the outcomes of other events—the death of a child, genocide, a natural disaster that kills tens of thousands—to God as well?
For many Christians, the answer is ineluctably yes, based on their understanding of divine providence. They believe that from the beginning of eternity, God has ordained whatsoever cometh to pass. Everything that happens has been decreed by God. That is true for a bullet grazing Donald Trump, and for a bullet killing Corey Comperatore. It’s true for healing from cancer, and for the Rwandan genocide. It’s true for peace and prosperity in one’s homeland, and for tsunamis and earthquakes, the Black Plague, and the Atlantic slave trade.
Mark Talbott, who specializes in philosophical theology and taught at Wheaton College, has argued that God ordains evil even while repudiating the idea that God does evil. “This includes—as incredible and as unacceptable as it may currently seem—God’s having even brought about the Nazis’ brutality at Birkenau and Auschwitz,” he wrote in 2015.
John Piper, one of the most influential pastors and theologians in the evangelical world, has argued for this view. Often identified with the New Calvinist movement, Piper writes that “even in situations where God is permitting, he is permitting by design.” Piper goes so far as to tell people that even something as trivial as whether they have their legs crossed or not is because “God willed it 10 million years ago.” That’s what it means to believe in “the all-pervasive sovereignty of God and his total governance of the world.” (Piper has said, too, that “it’s right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases. God gives life and he takes life. Everybody who dies, dies because God wills that they die.”)
Early in my Christian pilgrimage, this type of certainty made me queasy; the cocksure attitudes I saw around me were unappealing rather than reassuring. As the biblical theologian Tremper Longman III told me, “It sounds to me like Piper is subsuming human agency to divine manipulation.”
The doctrine of the sovereignty of God may reassure some people, but ultimately, in its most extreme form, it can lead them to make claims about God that I believe to be false and deeply problematic. The links in their theological chain of arguments make God the designer of evil acts, despite their protestations to the contrary. Or so it seems to me. Which is one reason I couldn’t accede to their belief system. The explanations I encountered then, and that I still encounter today, strike me as strained, at times contorted, at times unsettling.
It doesn’t help that within the evangelical subculture, many people seem so eager for some explanation to theological conundrums that any explanation will do. (In my experience, Christians sometimes assure one another that weak arguments are strong, because they desperately want reassurance.) If people say that the explanations provided by Church teachers and pastors are unconvincing, often the response is to offer shallow answers and move on—or, if the questions persist, to shut them down. Those struggling with doubt are made to feel that the problem is their lack of faith. In some cases, those asking questions are told to pray more. (One can only imagine how off-putting these teachers and pastors would have found the Psalmists.)
The best-selling author and former evangelical turned Episcopalian Rachel Held Evans, who died in 2019 at the age of 37, wrote about the “dismissive confidence” that her questions were met with in the evangelical world as she struggled to reconcile her intellectual integrity with her faith. She also wrote about the online community she helped develop, which gave people room to speak openly about matters they were wrestling with. What she discovered was that “most of the time, it wasn’t the weight of the questions themselves that burdened their faith but rather the notion that they shouldn’t be asking them, that it wasn’t allowed.” She gave a home to spiritual refugees. She wanted them to know they were not alone.
I LONG AGO rejected the connect-the-dots certitude of Christians who speak in a particular way about God’s providence. But defining myself by what I don’t believe is not enough. So how do I understand God’s involvement in human affairs? After all, I believe in a God who enters history. He is a protagonist in the drama. And among the accounts in the Bible that I find most moving are those that involve Jesus healing people.
I also engage in “petitionary prayer”—making specific requests of God, asking for his intervention to protect and, if necessary, bring healing to family and cherished friends, asking that the Lord bestow peace and comfort to those in grief. Some of my requests are rote, but others are earnest; they are pleas from the heart.
Here’s the thing, though: I pray without anything like absolute confidence that God will answer my prayers, and even without the assurance that when people do recover, when harm is avoided, when good news is received, God is the author of those good things. My strong inclination is to give God the credit, which is why I often give thanks to him. I detect his fingerprints on the affairs of this world. But my level of confidence is sometimes tentative. I believe that God receives my prayers, which are laced with hope. But do I believe I can shape his will and, by my prayers, change the outcome of events? Some days I do; other days I don’t. And I can’t make rhyme or reason out of when God does and doesn’t intervene. People whom I deeply love, in times of anguish and terror, cried out to God, and he didn’t show up. I have no idea why, and neither do they. And at times, neither did Jesus. It was Jesus who, during his crucifixion, cried out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
THE ESTEEMED HEBREW SCHOLAR Robert Alter calls Job “the most mysterious book of the Hebrew Bible.” Job is righteous and greatly blessed, yet God agrees to allow Satan to torment Job by putting him through terrible hardships. Job’s faith in God begins to buckle; he doesn’t understand why he should suffer, because he did no wrong.
Job’s three friends, relying on the theological orthodoxy of their time, assume that he must have done something wrong to be the object of such great suffering. Job, understandably angry, demands an explanation from God. God asks Job to trust in his wisdom and character. God’s message is this: You live in an incredibly complex world that is not yet designed to prevent suffering. God’s response to Job’s indictment is to urge Job to look at this universe, in all its beauty and complexity, and ask Job to have confidence in God. In Alter’s words, “God chooses for His response to Job the arena of creation, not the court of justice.”
The Book of Job, then, is fundamentally about the limits of human knowledge. No answer for his suffering is ever given to Job; what is conveyed to him is that God’s ways are beyond what we human beings can comprehend. Still, God never silences Job; he approves of his wrestling with God, his raw emotions, his honesty.
At the conclusion of the story, the Lord speaks to Job “out of the whirlwind.” It’s after Job’s encounter with God that contextualization and a reframing occurs. We find at the end of the book not an answer but an encounter—and Job, after the encounter, is willing to receive. Having seen the Lord, Job declares, “I retract and repent in dust and ashes.” God restores Job’s losses; he defends his character to his friends. God is ultimately pleased with Job’s humility, with his honesty and his determination to seek answers and to seek truth. But the reasons are not for us to know. They remain hidden in shadows.
Many Christians today seem unnerved by the mysteries of God and the limits of human knowledge. It’s very important for them to believe, like Job’s friends, that they can discern the will and the ways of God.
I understand the appeal; it helps them make sense of the apparent randomness of the world. In that respect, it can be reassuring. But the problem is that they have convinced themselves they know much more than they actually do. They ascribe to God things that are not necessarily orchestrated by God.
We saw this in 2001, when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blamed the 9/11 attacks on God’s anger against “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America.” For people of a certain sensibility, faith can become a cudgel. The Bible is used to proof-text some very ungodly attitudes, including vengeance and hatred for social outcasts.
The confidence to declare that one has divined God’s intentions was on display again last month, following the attempted assassination of Trump—and those who expressed it reflected the same basic error. They assumed they knew precisely what God was up to.
What is lost in this world of certainty is epistemic humility, the awareness that our knowledge is provisional and incomplete. Wisdom requires us to acknowledge that what we believe to be true needs to be filtered through our own experiences and desires. (“Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical,” the theologian Frederick Buechner said.) The apostle Paul recognized this when he wrote that “we see through a glass darkly,” that we know only in part.
For people of a certain theological cast of mind, then, ambiguity is viewed as antithetical to faith; certitude is evidence of it. They seem oblivious, at least in practice, to the noetic effects of sin. Their self-assurance is ironic because one of the core tenets of Calvinism is the “total depravity” of human beings: the belief that every part of us—our emotions, our will, our intellect—has been corrupted by sin. Many Christians appear to believe that the noetic effects of sin apply to the rest of humanity, but not so much to themselves.
FOR MY PART, I have come to believe that the lessons from Job are, for people of Abrahamic faiths, the best we can hope for. I wish we were given more; there are too many unsettling questions left unanswered. And I’ve never understood why, if we are made in the image of God and deeply loved by God, he wouldn’t provide us with answers, or at least partial answers, to impenetrably difficult and profoundly personal questions.
Not having the answers to these questions isn’t enough to unravel my faith, which as a Christian is built on who I came to believe Jesus to be—and through Jesus, who I came to believe God to be. Nor would I deny that God can, as the apostle Paul argued, redeem our pain. Out of ashes, beauty can emerge. I can’t prove God’s role in repairing shattered lives, of course, but I would say I have seen it, and having seen it, I have been profoundly moved by it.
I once asked the author Philip Yancey why he thought God allows suffering, especially for the young and the innocent. “I don’t know why God allows for suffering,” he replied. “All I know is that God is on the side of the sufferer.” Still, there are times in life when not having access to the answer, not being provided a road map to greater understanding, is difficult and disorienting. It is a mystery, and God seems content to keep it that way.
Our most beloved relationships can’t be reduced to propositional logic; they are based on trust and faith in the integrity of others, the quality of their heart, the beauty of intimacy. “All good relationships are bound together by love,” Craig Barnes, the former president of Princeton Theological Seminary, once told me. “And love is always an expression of faith.” What is significant to us may also be significant to the Almighty.
Jesus’s sacrificial agony and his tears of grief don’t explain why God hasn’t yet put an end to injustice, to trauma and abuse, to sorrow. But they do offer us a glimpse into the heart of God. For now, we have to live with that tension. There are things we know, and there is so much we can’t know.
