NY Times Op-Ed: Does God Control History?

New York Times Op-Ed:  Does God Control History?, by Ross Douthat:

After last week’s newsletter made the case for the wickedness of Stalinism and the virtues of early Cold War anti-Communism, I thought I might get dragged into a weekend social media debate about Marxism-Leninism. Not so. Instead, I managed to entangle myself in an argument about a different totalitarianism-related question: whether the destruction of Hitler’s Germany was a true and righteous judgment of Almighty God. ...

[W]hile allowing for the complexity of debates about what God wills as opposed to what God merely permits, providentialism is basically inescapable once you posit a divinity who made the world and acts in history. Which is why providentialist interpretations endure among the most liberal Christians as well as the most traditional, with both progressive and conservative theologies justifying themselves through readings of the “signs of the times,” the seasons of history, the action of the Holy Spirit and the like. (And, of course, many theoretically secular worldviews are possessed of the same providentialism in disguise.)

The more absolutely certain these interpretations, the more dubious. Discerning God’s intentions across an individual lifetime is hard enough; discerning them across the arc of history should be done with maximal humility. ...

[W]hat was broken in the 17th century was a certain idea of Christendom, a certain kind of political-religious unity — and I think a serious Christian has to see in that breakage some kind of divine judgment on the Christians fighting to sustain that order.

Not necessarily a judgment on the idea of such an order, which would be the liberal-providentialist position — that Christendom had to die so a superior and more secular civilization could replace it. But certainly a judgment on the fratricidal and ruthless ways that both Catholics and Protestants tried to sustain their competing visions of a Christian order. I obviously think the Catholics had the better theological arguments, but God in his wisdom permitted neither side to claim a certain victory, ensuring that any future Christendom would have to be rebuilt along very different lines. ...

[F]or Christianity, the modern era is actually two stories intertwined: a story of conflict and failure and disappointment for many Christian institutions, their division and their weakness in the face of other powers, woven together with the story of the Christian religion’s resilience and global spread. Whether or not liberal modernity represents a “metaphysical catastrophe” (to pluck a phrase from one of its eloquent religious critics), it has created a world civilization in which the Gospel has been preached in the far corners of the planet; in which there are today, according to one study, 2.6 billion Christians. ...

At the very least, insofar as the core commandment of the risen Jesus — go and make disciples of all nations — has been fulfilled by and through our high-tech and pluralist modernity, any providentialist reading of that history cannot be simply negative. And the fact that so much that’s negative has also befallen the Christian churches in that time suggests the nuanced Christian response to Bronze Age Pervert’s challenge: Christianity’s claim to enjoy more divine favor than 20th-century fascism rests not on the absence of justified chastisements or purifying defeats, but on the faith’s spread both in spite of and through these experiences, its resilience in spite of what its leaders often seem to deserve.

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