Musings: The hand of God

 

Donald Trump's followers, and even Trump himself, have been quick to detect the hand of God in his narrow escape from assassination during the election campaign: divine intervention to ensure his survial in order to carry out God's will for America.  This set me thinking about other narrow escapes, and deaths deaths, among our political leaders, and, if we accept that the hand of God was present, how it was manifested in these.

   Winston Churchill, unlike Donald Trump, came under fire on many occasions as a young man, and describes his narrow escapes from death in his autobiography, "My early life". Once he had risen to mythic status after 1940, Churchill's supporters might attribute his survival to divine intervention, but Churchill himself never attributed his survival to any recognisable Christian God. Churchill in any case could hardly be described as a believing Christian. Similarly, Ronald Reagan survived as assassin's bullet early in his presidency, but did not link his good fortune to the hand of the Christian God.

  Obviously, we may, if we wish, detect God's hand, rather than luck, in these episodes, but when we examine other survivals, then the working of divine intervention become more than a little puzzling. If God does intervene to save the lives of famous leaders, then why did He enable Lenin to susrvive in 1918, when the Bolshevik leader was shot and seriously wounded? Why did He allow Hitler to survive many attempts on his life? On the other hand, God singularly failed to intervene to protect Abraham Lincoln and the Kennedy brothers. Presumably God wanted them to die, but why? God also did not interpose His hand to save the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, which presumably means He wanted the First World War to take place. Neither did He save Tsar Alexander II of Russia from the terrorist bomb that killed him in 1881, thereby, as was said at the time, "replacing an intelligent and reforming Tsar with a stupid and reactionary one." If Alexander II had lived, there might never have been a Russian revolution!  What was in God's mind?

  Thomas Hobbes, in the 17th century, argued as follows: Let us suppose an innocent child is dying. If God is unable to intervene to save the child, then He is not omnipotent: if he is able to save the child, but does not do so, then He is perverse. In our time, the Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, whose wife was dying of cancer, was moved to ask whether there was any reason to believe that God was, in any sense that we could understand the term, "good": didn't all the evidence suggest otherwise?  Neither of these arguments is easy to answer. 

  Seen in this light, God's intentions in intervening to spare some people but neglecting to do so in other cases is difficult to explain. As the hymn puts it, "God moves in a mysterious way". Or are there, perhaps, other forces involved? One idea, which had its roots in ancient Persian mythology, is known as Manichaeism, after its prophet, Mani. This postulates that the world is the scene of a titanic struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness; or, if you like, God and Satan. Although God's ultimate triumph is certain, Satan is enormously powerful, and we need always to be on our guard against his influence. This has never been an official Christian doctrine, but elements of Manichaeism have crept into Christianity, and also into Islam. When some good people die, with disastrous historical consequences, should we see some hand other than God's at work?

  So, if some people are spared assassination when others, who are at least as worthy, are not, is something more than blind chance or luck involved?  Andif so, what?