3 Comments

David Nickol
November 7th, 2012 | 11:30 am

Matthew Schmitz,

We had an election novena this year, similar to the one in 2008, with this year’s intention being “that God in his providence will provide us with good leaders who will govern according to God’s Will.” I find the theology of petitionary prayer an extremely difficult topic, but doesn’t praying to God regarding the outcome of an election presume God can actually affect the outcome of the election? And if he can, why can’t he use a hurricane to do so?

Tom Gilson
November 7th, 2012 | 12:05 pm

Matthew, we’re in agreement, except that I think (without hard data) Gov. Christie’s actions must have had at least some effect on voters.

Please see my clarifying comment on this on the prior post for more.

Jonathan
November 7th, 2012 | 4:39 pm

In his rather excellent work(s) on theodicy (Tsunami and Theodicy and the related Doors of the Sea), David Bentley Hart argues that making a case for the Will of God based on destruction, death, and mass suffering is extremely problematic. He notes:

“There is, of course, some comfort to be derived from the thought that everything that occurs at the level of what Aquinas calls secondary causality—in nature or history—is governed not only by a transcendent providence, but by a universal teleology that makes every instance of pain and loss an indispensable moment in a grand scheme whose ultimate synthesis will justify all things. But consider the price at which that comfort is purchased: it requires us to believe in and love a God whose good ends will be realized not only in spite of—but entirely by way of—every cruelty, every fortuitous misery, every catastrophe, every betrayal, every sin the world has ever known; it requires us to believe in the eternal spiritual necessity of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines.”