Piper: Dear God, Evil God

John Piper is what they call a ‘New Calvinist.’ Someone, I guess, who defends and preaches the Calvinist dogma, which usually (and sadly, might I add) boils down to a strong insistence on the sovereignty of God. The five points of Calvinism, though a simplified scheme, can, according to some, function as a showcase of ‘true’ Calvinism. John Piper sometimes jokingly says that he adheres to the seven points of Calvinism. The sixth point follows naturally from the first five: double predestination. On his website we read, “By definition, the decision to elect some individuals to salvation necessarily implies the decision not to save those that were not chosen. God ordains not only that some will be rescued from his judgment, but that others will undergo that judgment.” At least Piper is consistent. And it is such consistency that gets him in trouble later on.

When trying to answer the question “How can evil have a good purpose,” he is not only presupposing that good could possibly come out of evil, but that, literally, God makes this evil come about. The answer then turns to the event that shocked the world some nine years ago, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Beware, this may be shocking (as well).

“After the planes flew into the Twin Towers in New York, I was interviewed and people would ask me, “Where was God in this?” I said, “Well, God could have very easily blown those planes off course by a little puff of wind, and he didn’t do it. Therefore God was right there ordaining that this happen, because he could have stopped it just like that.” Everybody who believes in God should say that, because that is how powerful he is, as it was said of Jesus, “The winds obey him”. And so just a simple wind by the command of Jesus would have blown those planes away and they would have crashed and 60 people would have died instead of thousands of people. But he didn’t do that. Why is it comforting to believe that?

“The answer is because there are 10,000 orphans who wonder if they have a future. Will they have a future if God isn’t powerful for them? I’m coming to those families and I’m saying when they ask me, “Do you think God ordained the death of my daddy?” I say, “Yes. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. But the very power by which God governs all evils enables him to govern your life. And he has total authority to turn this and every other evil in your life for your everlasting good. And that’s your only hope in this world and in the next. And therefore, if you sacrifice the sovereignty of God in order to get him off the hook in the death of your daddy, you sacrifice everything. You don’t want to go there.”

“The sovereignty of God, while creating problems for his involvement in sin and evil, is the very rock-solid foundation that enables us to carry on in life. Where would we turn if we didn’t have a God to help us deal with the very evils that he has ordained come into our lives? So yes, absolutely, I believe in the sovereignty of God and I believe in its comforting effects.”

So, wait… What? We should be grateful that this God is going to help us ‘deal’ with evils this same God puts into our lives? Now, the word irony does not quite cover what is going on here. Our helping, caring God is simultaneously our greatest enemy. We need God to help protect us from God: we are thrown into a hopeless situation, one of despair, for God’s ways are incomprehensible; they are both evil and good, we know not what to expect. We may only take comfort from the insight that it is God who controls everything, the evil and the good in our lives, the joy and the pain, the laughter and the tears. Only He knows the meaning of all of this, we are left simply to believe and to pray. To pray to God to protect us from Himself, if at all possible. This truly is Calvinist theology gone awfully bad.

Thanks to the Inhabitatio Dei post for calling attention to this passage.