Reading Providence Like Personal Tea Leaves

I've had my share of unexpected, favorable "providences" in life, and read too much of the Bible, to believe that God is neither interested nor active in my life. However, I've also been tempted, as I know many Christians today are, to identify particular events in my life as what are called a "God-thing": events which are so completely extra-ordinary that they defy "normal" explanations, and that are (curiously) in my favor. But while this kind of "tea-leaves" identification has always bothered me to one degree or another, only recently have I come across a way to articulate the positive sense in which God is present and active without being pressed into identifying this or that event as "of God" (as though he is neither interested nor active in the rest of life, mine or anyone else's).

In The Courage to Be Protestant, David Wells says:

[God's greatness over all of life] is a reminder to us that God cannot be had on our terms. He cannot be manipulated. He cannot be bought. He is never subject to our will. If we know him, it is only on his terms. And the result often is that much of what he does by way of his providential rule is hidden from us. Even God's way of working with and through Israel, Paul says, is "unsearchable," and his ways "inscrutible" (Rom. 11:33).

His apparent absence from our lives, then, may not be a sign of his judgment. It may simply be an indication that his ways are beyond us, that he has not felt obliged to explain himself to us in every detail.

Does this not explain the unsettled feeling that even comes over Christians when someone starts to speak of God "doing this" or "wanting that" for us? Is this not acting and speaking as though God's ways of working (with Israel or anyone else) were not all that difficult to see or understand? Why must the natural expectation that "there must be a reason for this or that" issue in our prognosticating what that reason is or will be? Why is it not enough for us to believe the Scriptures when they say that there is, in fact, a reason for this or that, that it has to do with the cross of Christ, our (eternal) welfare and the glory of God, and then carry on in such confident faith?

It may have to do with the fact that we don't like not being able to justify God to skeptics we know, particularly when they are hostile. Regardless of why, it is instructive to us that Scripture, when it identifies God's purposes in particular events, almost always connects them to God's global purposes of redemption through his Son, Jesus Christ, the Messiah; the fact that our "prophetic utterances" almost never do that should indicate how disconnected our vision of life is from God's, and what vision we can and should strive to adopt for ourselves.

This is, of course, a life-purpose that we who know God in Christ will only begin to do in this life and will continue to do throughout eternity; but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try our hand at it now. It also doesn't mean that we stop looking for God's hand in the world. It simply means that when we find it we will see our employment, our spouse, our health, our team's victory, even the grocery store trip, in connection with the redemption of the world and the glory of God in it. It also means that we'll be more thoughtful in our attempts to "take every thought captive to obey Christ" when we attempt to understand and explain God's providential work in the lives of his people, of which we, individually, are each only one.

BHT

What are you, Deaf?

In the Gospel of John 10:1-6, Jesus speaks about how people come to follow him: they recognize his voice as that of their shepherd. A stranger, he says, they simply will not follow, because they do not recognize his voice. When John says, then, that "they did not understand what he was saying to them", are we not to understand that they, his listeners, are not his sheep? The irony is thick.

This brings up the question of discerning truth, though, for the only criteria for verifying Jesus' truthfulness - at least, the only one that Jesus gives - is that you either hear it or you don't. There's no "demonstration" that the shepherd (or even one of the sheep themselves) are able to, or supposed to, give that will prove "objectively" that, yes indeed, this is our shepherd. His sheep hear his voice.

The First Information Age: the 16th Century

Once again, the naivete of the (post)modern world has been demonstrated, and not surprisingly by Neil Postman. In his enjoyably impressive Technopoly, he writes about the overload of information that the modern book (not computer) created. In so doing, he reminds me that the "crises" of our day do not necessarily warrant the fear or euphoria we are so prone to give them, not unlike the toddler whose scraped knee does not necessarily call for mom or dad to drop everything and call 911 but rather, to give a kind word, a good dusting off, a gentle kiss or hug, and "See? All better, now back to having fun!" In many respects, the internet, with it's ability to exponentially grow information, warrants no more euphoria nor denunciations than the printing press received in its day, growing as it did (exponentially) the amount of information available to people. Here's Postman's analogy (pp. 61-62):

Nothing could be more misleading than the claim that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age in the early sixteenth century. Forty years after Gutenberg converted an old wine press into a printing machine with movable type, there were presses in 110 cities in six different countries. Fifty years after the press was invented, more than eight million books had been printed, almost all of them filled with information that had previously been unavailable to the average person. There were books on law, agriculture, politics, exploration, metallurgy, botany, linguistics, pediatrics, and even good manners. There were also assorted guides and manuals; the world of commerce rapidly became a world of printed paper through the widespread use of contracts, deeds, promissory notes, and maps.

So much new information, of so many diverse types, was generated that printers could no longer use the scribal manuscript as their model of a book. By the mid-sixteenth century, printers began to experiment with new formats, among the most important innovations being the use of Arabic numerals to number pages. Pagination led inevitably to more accurate indexing, annotation, and cross-referencing, which in turn was accompanied by innovations in punctuation marks, section heads, paragraphing, title-paging, and running heads. By the end of the sixteenth century, the machine-made book had a typographic form and a look comparable to books of today.

All of this is worth mentioning because innovations in the format of the machine-made book were an attempt to control the flow of information, to organize it by establishing priorities and by giving it sequence. Very early on, it was understood that the printed book had created an information crisis...

What I find illuminating, from my (post)modern perspective, is that what I (and so many) have thought was an "information overload" problem unique to our age by virtue of the specific electronic technologies we have created is actually not the first time in history such a problem has been created and faced. Once again, we are not quite so unique in history as we might otherwise be tempted to think; it remains to be seen what alterations to the Internet (or any other information medium) might be made to manage the volume (even accuracy) of information that we create.

BHT