Did God choose Trump? What it means to believe in divine intervention
US rabbi rewrites prayer - to avoid blessing Trump
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Orthodox rabbi and founder of religious 'social justice' movement says
he can't recite prayer for success of president after Trump win.
Members of the clergy lay hands and
pray over Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at the New Spirit
Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, on Sept. 21, 2016. Photo
courtesy of Reuters/Jonathan Ernst
WASHINGTON (RNS) Democracy may be based on the principle of “one person, one vote,” but some people who supported Donald Trump believe the Master of the Universe cast the master ballot.
“God raised up, I believe, Donald Trump,” said former U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann after he won the GOP nomination. “God showed up,” the Rev. Franklin Graham said to cheers at a post-election rally. “God came to me in a dream last night and said that Trump is his chosen candidate,” said the televangelist Creflo Dollar.
For those who share this view, Trump’s victory was nothing short of miraculous, especially given that he beat out 16 other in the Republican primaries — some of them evangelical Christians with long political resumes.
“For me, that has to be providence. That has to be the hand of God,” said Paula White, an evangelical pastor Trump has tapped to pray at his inauguration.
While it is unclear how many people accept this version of events, conservative Christians appear most likely to embrace it.
But taken to its logical conclusion, the belief that God is in control of earthly events leads to noxious moral positions and bad public policy, warns William Schweiker, an ordained Methodist minister and professor of theological ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
William
Schweiker is the Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of
Theological Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School,
a former president of the Society of Christian Ethics and an ordained
minister in the United Methodist Church. Photo courtesy of William
Schweiker
“We don’t need to worry about the nations going under water because of climate change.”
For those who see Trump’s inauguration on Friday (Jan. 20) as disastrous, the idea that God endorsed him is easy to dismiss as wishful thinking on the part of conservative Christians who came out for the winner in such overwhelming numbers.
But theologians across faith traditions have taken the question of God’s role in human affairs quite seriously for millennia.
Among those who study religion and politics — even among those who don’t believe in God or reject the notion that he puts his thumbs on the electoral scales — the belief remains relevant if only because so many people hold it.
And while many scholars of divinity deem it theologically problematic, they still invite study of the issue. It’s an unsettled question in many minds, and complicated: Not everyone who believes God intercedes in human affairs believes so in the same way. Not everyone who believes God put Trump in office likes Trump.
The question of God and the election begs bigger questions — about the nature of God, and if and how God becomes involved in earthly affairs. It is also a question of comfort. For some believers a God who picks the president is a God close at hand.
“At bottom, it is connected to the belief that God cares about our lives, which is a great thing,” says Wheaton College theologian Vincent Bacote, who nevertheless subjects to close scrutiny any claim that God intercedes in American elections.
The divine ballot
Popular evangelical speaker Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum, blogged about Trump during the campaign: “I doubt he truly understands what real Christianity is.”
Photo courtesy of Creation Museum
Ken
Ham, president of a creation science apologetics ministry, operates the
Creation Museum and Ark Encounter. Photo courtesy of Creation Museum
“God is in total control,” Ham says. “He makes that very clear in the Bible where he tells us that he raises up kings and destroys kingdoms. He even calls a pagan king, Cyrus, his anointed, or his servant to do the things that he wants him to do.”
It’s an idea that sits well with many evangelicals who voted for Trump. The bragging and often crass president-elect, like the Persian King Cyrus in the book of Isaiah, may not behave as a God-fearing man should. But isn’t that just like God to use a far-from-perfect person to fulfill God’s grand plan?
Still, belief in God’s sovereignty and the Bible’s flawed prophets does not make the case for God choosing Trump for many mainline Protestant and Catholic theologians.
It’s a problem of theodicy – the tension between an all-powerful God and the fact of evil in the world — says Schweiker, who teaches that theology subjects religious belief to debate and rational argument.
“If you say God’s in control of everything then you’ve got to say that God is a really God-damned bastard,” he says.
A God in total control is not a problem for Ham in light of any tragedy, from the Holocaust to a tsunami. “People single out particular events and say, ‘Where was your God?’” says Ham, who is not disclosing his choice in the presidential election.
“But we’ve got to stand back and looks at the big picture,” Ham continues. “That was their turn to die. You’re going to die. The important thing is to look at yourself and ask, ‘Am I ready to face death, am I reconciled with my savior so when I die I’ll spend eternity with him?’”
This perspective riles Schweiker, who did not vote for Trump and asks of Ham: “He thinks there is no moral difference between natural death and murder?”
If God chose Trump, did God choose Obama?
On the first day of this year’s spring semester at evangelical Wheaton College, Bacote asked his students about the role of God in the recent election. One said his relatives believe God works through imperfect individuals.
Vincent Bacote, professor of theology at Wheaton College. Photo courtesy of Vincent Bacote
Bacote himself doesn’t rule out God’s involvement in politics.
But the professor questions how anyone could be so sure about God favoring any particular candidate, how anyone could be “so dialed into how providence operates.” He points to the Bible.
“If one is taking Scripture seriously you have to ask, ‘Where do you find the United States in the Bible?’ Well, you don’t.”
And, Bacote continues, if God had a hand in one contest, then did he have a hand in them all?
“Was God involved in gubernatorial races? Mayoral races?”
Ham, by contrast, believes Trump, even before he takes the oath of office, is already working in harmony with God.
Trump has appointed Christians to important positions in the new administration.
And around his Kentucky home this year, Ham says, more people said “Merry Christmas,” as opposed to the “Happy Holidays” they had offered in previous years.
Ham’s certitude might draw challenges from theologians like Bacote. But he might get points for consistency.
“If Hillary Clinton would have won,” Ham adds, “we would need to accept that God had put her there for whatever reasons.”God’s to-do list
Talking about God and the 2016 election, the discussion often turns to parking.Schweiker, the Methodist theologian, arguing against those who see God’s hand in even mundane human affairs, offers the example of the “little old man who prays for parking places and then gets a parking place and says it’s God’s act for him.”
But in attributing a prime parking spot or cash found on the sidewalk to God, people tend to point to their own specific experiences without considering the negative effects on others, Schweiker says.
“That little old man may have kept a very sick person from getting a parking place and getting to the hospital on time,” he says. “Since Christians are supposed to love their neighbors, that’s a bit of a problem.”
Carmen Fowler LaBerge, host of the Christian radio program “The Reconnect.” Photo courtesy of Carmen Fowler LaBerge
“The fun part about this conversation,” says LaBerge, “is that it ranges from ‘what is God’s will for all of known history, and then there’s like, ‘God’s will that I get a particular parking space.’
”
Many Christians believe God intercedes in mortal lives in grand terms: his plan that the human story have a particular ending, for example, as described in the New Testament.
LaBerge, a board member of the National Association of Evangelicals, says she knows God’s will because she has “read to the end of the book.”
When it comes down to the way a sovereign God works on a smaller scale, as she and all human beings go about their days, LaBerge sees it this way: “God made me a free person … in the way I live my life, the choices I make, the words I use.”
She applies this view to her thinking on God and whoever wins an election.
“If God’s hand is on the scales, what I can tell you is the way it is happening is through human agency. It’s the way the Holy Spirit is leading individuals to discern and then to act,” LaBerge says.
She says “if” God’s hand is on the scales. What about Christians who are sure about God choosing Trump?
Even those who share Schweiker’s objections to the idea of God steering humans to parking may understand this year’s election as a sharp turn in the course of history, with the stakes high enough to explain God’s direct intervention.
The Rev. James Bretzke. Photo courtesy of Boston College/Lee Pellegrini
The Jesuit and Boston College professor of moral theology also invokes the concept of free will and agrees that God has chosen flawed people to work his will in the past … but not Trump in 2016.
Those God chose in the Bible were flawed because they were unassuming and unexpected, he says. Gideon was an ordinary shepherd. David was the last of his brothers. And David was a flawed leader. “But ultimately what sets him apart is when confronted with his sins he acknowledged them” and repented.
“I don’t think that’s the Donald J. Trump life story,” Bretzke says. “I don’t think that’s where I would put the smart biblical money.”
http://religionnews.com/2017/01/17/did-god-choose-trump-what-belief-in-divine-intervention-really-means/
3 comments:
More proof that pro-toyava & seemingly anti-Semitic Amazon.com is in fact anti-Semitic.
British newspapers are reporting that an Amazon employee in England who is probably an Arab has been placing anti-Semitic notes in packages of Jewish customers. Amazon tried to ignore complaints & cover it up but were finally forced to fire the employee after a campaign on Facebook exposed them.
Scotland Yard's hate crimes division is now investigating.
What's the story with molester Rabbi Shmuel Vogel? He slipped under the public radar despite Jewish Week finding out about him through court filings. And whose playgroup was shut down?
http://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/in-lakewood-abuse-cases-a-parallel-justice-system/
According to court papers and interviews with people close to the family of the boy allegedly abused by Kolko, a 34-year-old former teacher at Yeshiva Orchos Chaim in Lakewood who also worked as a camp counselor, the family decided to go to the authorities only after they had exhausted the options within the community and found no relief. Before doing so, they sought assistance from a community activist, Doniel Bernstein, and several prominent Lakewood rabbis, including Rabbi Mattisyahu Salomon, the “mashgiach,” or spiritual adviser, at BMG, and the “go-to” rabbi for all manner of communal issues in Lakewood, sources say.
Rabbi Salomon, along with Rabbi Shmuel Blech, served for a time on a formal beit din, created by Salomon several years ago specifically to hear sexual abuse allegations.
In addition to information directly relevant to the Kolko case, testimony from the hearings indicates that there have been other abuse allegations apparently deemed credible by rabbis, but that nonetheless went unreported to the police.
In testimony in New Jersey Superior Court given in May of this year, Lakewood rabbi and activist Micky Rottenberg alludes to such a case, which The Jewish Week has learned involved allegations against the husband of a woman who ran a local children’s playgroup. The beit din found the allegations to be credible and publicized them, effectively shutting down the playgroup. However, the authorities were never notified and the accused remains in the community today.
In his testimony, Rabbi Rottenberg also sheds light on the beit din’s inner workings.
According to him, “[The Secretary] of the beis din [would contact] the victims … [and the] alleged perpetrator, discuss with them … beg them to do certain things. And if they don’t do it, [the secretary would say] ‘I’m going to report [to the beit din] that you don’t listen to us, and then we are going to … Take away your job. Send away your kids from schools.’ Whatever measures they would feel they have power to be able for the person to submit and accept the verdict of the beis din.”
Rabbi Rottenberg also testified that he felt the beit din favored the accusers and was in fact involved in disbanding it at the behest of Rabbi Malkiel Kotler for this reason. Rabbi Kotler, through his brother, denied making any such request.
In arguments at a court hearing, Kolko’s attorney, Michael Wilbert, refers to a Rabbi Shmuel Vogel who, he claims, was “charged with a violation” by Bernstein and “required to go to a social worker in New York … Mr. Sternstein.” Sternstein is Hillel Sternstein, coordinator of trauma services at OHEL, and a social worker with a private practice in Long Island.
A source close to Rabbi Salomon’s beit din who consulted with its members on behalf of this reporter told The Jewish Week that they would not speak to the paper out of concern that “the ‘forces’ that led to the disbanding [of the beit din] are still ever present. They expressed fear that speaking about these forces will lead to personal reprisal.” The source acknowledged Rottenberg as one of these so-called “forces.”
rav meir kahane said it is totally irrelevant who is elected president of the united states... (or made king or becomes prime minister what have you) it is solely a matter of what G-d wishes to do with His chosen people and yes with the entire world during the course of that upcoming four yr period or set to unfold over the reign of that monarchy et al...
he said u could get the worst kind of jew hating king like achashverosh who was in league with haman to wipe out the entire jewish people... and if we were worthy and did tshuvah for our sins etc then nothing bad would occur and the jew hater would not be able to harm us... so fill in obama here... he hated us but so what...? Hashem did not permit him to destroy us during his two terms in office...
why not...? because of the maxim... "lev melachim b'yad Hashem..." "the hearts of kings are in the hand of G-d..." He controls them... chazal teach us that because these kinds of leaders possess such awesome amounts of power and hold sway over such vast amounts of the world population so G-d removes some of their freewill and free choice and limit their ability to effect the whole earth against the will of G-d...
take the opposite example... if Hashem wishes to punish His people for their sins He can take even the supposedly "greatest friend we ever had in the white house" and make him cause us grief... as happened when dubya reigned and he made israel unilaterally uproot itself from gush katif to the tune of great subsequent dire straits occurring for am yisroel... a peril that is still felt by us and is still reverberating down to this very day... ala all the wars we've had to wage to keep our enemies at bay there and with all the missiles raining down on us constantly from gaza by hamas ever since we tucked tail and left...
so that's the story... the real story on elections... it all depends what we His people deserve over the next 4-8 yrs and as a result also what the world is deservant of experiencing in conjunction with us... truth.out...
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