2/8/2025. Extracts from a “conversation” on BSA.
Original Post – Charles Bledsoe
For primarily philosophical and theological reasons I take issue with what I’ll term theological determinism, the vision of God as a micro-managerial shot-calling sovereign, rocking an all-controlling divine plan—a plan that controls the rise and fall of nations, and the rest of history; our birth and death, and everything in between, and beyond; every stroke of good fortune and every tragedy and catastrophe. But in this post my aim is instead just to explore the question is such a controlling God and plan biblically tenable? That is, is it biblically defensible if we read the Bible with our critical biblical scholarship cap on?
I’ll begin at the biblical beginning, Genesis’s story of creation. According to the cosmic temple theory, creation in Genesis is the functional creation of the universe as God’s abode or temple; and we human beings are meant to be the tenders of, and worshippers in God’s cosmic temple. But given what lousy tenders and maintainers of it we’ve turned out to be it could be argued that God’s plan for the universe, and our role in it is not fully, if at all in control. If God in fact has a plan it doesn’t appear to be a controlling-plan. Perhaps from the get-go we have in the Bible an account of the nonexistence God’s will and power to impose a grand scheme on the universe and humankind.
Moving on to the episode of Noah and the global flood, it would appear in that biblical myth that human beings have the freedom to sin and disappoint God, to so depravedly deviate from a wrathful God’s vision for them that “He” visits a mass-exterminating flood upon the earth. Once again, human freedom appears to contradict the belief in a controlling-plan. Moreover, if one insists on believing that even in the story of the flood we have an account of everything going according to God’s plan, well, then we have a genocidal God who is no longer worshipful; a plan that stands in irreconcilable contradiction to what it means for God to be God, to God being a God of love and life. So our choice is between a plan that isn’t controlling, that can be thwarted by humans exercising their autonomy; or, a plan that’s in control but has the drawback of disqualifying God from being God in the best sense of the word.
It’s the same story in Exodus. Was it God’s design for the Hebrews to be enslaved in Egypt, or was their enslavement possible because God’s plan wasn’t really in control of how they fared in land of the pharaohs? If the former is the case then once again God is insufficiently benevolent. If the latter, then God’s program for his people failed to hold sway. In either case, the idea of a controlling divine plan doesn’t fare any better in Exodus than it did in the tale of creation or the flood. (The same point can be made regarding the unfaithfulness of the Hebrews after their escape from Pharaoh—either their infidelity to Yahweh is evidence of genuine human freedom; or, God is one for playing games and it was part of God’s plan for his people to behave in a way that made it illusorily appear that they were straying from “His” plan.)
How about the New Testament? Does a controlling divine plan fare better there? Well, on the one hand Jesus is an apocalypticist who envisions an apocalyptic playing out of a divine plan; but he also attributes freedom to human beings, that he preaches that we need to get right with God (by practicing the higher righteousness of love) to secure admission to God’s eschatological kingdom implies that we enjoy autonomy and can choose to either be in a state of alignment, or misalignment with God’s loving nature. And so yet again we’re faced with the option of either envisioning God planning mass destruction, or reading the Bible as affirming that we possess a freedom that would be inconsistent with an all-controlling divine design.
I haven’t even touched on the other Biblical argument against an all-controlling deity and comprehensive cosmic plan, which is that the fundamental nature of the God of the Bible—despite the passages that contradict it—is love, and a strong theological argument can be made that a love-defined God would be uncontrolling, not of a mind to impose a totalizing plan that would deprive us of autonomy. To sum up, to my mind the conception of God as an omnipotent potentate, with a plan that rules the universe and our lives is one of the most deplorable theological notions that theists have come up with, and it can be argued that it isn’t at all biblically validated or tenable. Whenever I hear (as I often do) believers confidently say “God is in control”, and “God has a plan” it makes me cringe, both because I find it to be such a philosophically awful belief (especially when the belief is theodically invoked regarding some of the more heinous injustices and evils, such as cancer and crimes against humanity), and because from my humble but critical perspective it involves such a grievously uncritical reading of the Bible.
One of Many Responses
I think Bryan’s point about the diversity of biblical viewpoints is key to making sense of it. The Torah is a bunch of parochial stories from a polytheistic culture, joined together and given a monotheistic rewrite, but it’s still a far cry from the “one God rules all” hyper-monotheism that would come later. You can see this transformation happening in the “hardening of Pharaoh’s heart” bits of the Exodus story. It’s pretty clear that an earlier version of the story has Pharoah responsible for his own decisions, but the implication for the Jewish people is that this Passover we celebrate is because of the Pharoah’s decision… that of he’d been less stubborn, we wouldn’t have this tradition, that it’s due to Pharoah’s choice and not God’s. So these morally problematic lines about God forcing Pharoah’s hand were inserted, but they were clearly shoehorned in.
It was with the Exile, and specifically with Ezekiel, that the idea first arose that even when there are unthinkable tragedies, even when God’s people are conquered by a foreign power, that it should be seen as the will of God. But even then, God is seen as responding to human sin, which still makes history a product of human choices.
The apocalyptism of Jesus’s day imagined that this world was full of sin and evil, not God’s will at all, but that God’s kingdom (or rule, or domain) would soon come in which everything would be done according to God’s will. They read Isaiah’s prophecy about God writing his law on people’s hearts and establishing a new covenant, and they concluded that in God’s kingdom, his people would be transformed so that our will and his will would be identical, that simply doing what came naturally would be doing what the law says, so that there would be no more need for the law. From that point on, the world would unfold exactly as God would have it. (You can see this idea clearly in Paul’s writings, but he wasn’t alone in this.)
So how do we take all these different views and form one coherent “biblical view” out of them? Well, personally, I don’t, I leave that up to the apologists. But I will say, I think it’s one of the real potential strengths of monotheism that one can understand the world as operating under one all-knowing all-loving will. I’ve seen that understanding provide real comfort to real people, and I’d never want to take that away from anyone. The idea of “Whatever happens, that’s what was supposed to happen” is, pragmatically speaking, healthy and beneficial for many people in many situations. It also has the advantage of being unfalsifiable.
Another Response by Michael L Waddell:
One other point. My paraphrase of this post’s central question is “Do the various biblical authors present an understanding of reality in which everything that happens unfolds according to God’s will / God’s divine plan?” In my previous response I’d assumed that the alternative was “Some things just happen for no good reason” or “Some things happen because of Satan”, but many comments present the contraposition as “free will exists”.
Many parts of the Bible describe God as sovereign and almighty, though they don’t go into detail about what this logically implies vis a vis free will. (Some of the strongest statements about God’s sovereignty come from the Psalms, and they sound a lot like the sort of flattering hyperbole that it was customary to give kings, not logically consistent statements.) On the other hand, nearly every Biblical author assumes that we make our own choices, and that those choices have consequences. They may deny or minimize the ability of foreign leaders to make their own choices, but the reader is almost always assumed to have free will (Romans 9 notwithstanding). Logically, that would mean that some things happen because it’s a part of God’s plan, and some things happen as a result of people’s choices when people go against God’s will. But that’s an inference.
Most Biblical authors pre-Deutero-Isaiah seem to not be aware of this tension, or at least to not be bothered by it. You can see the later Hebrew works struggling with the issue. By Jesus’ day, many (most?) Jews had concluded that the world was certainly not unfolding according to God’s will, but that God had a plan to fix that, and it would be implemented soon. After the destruction of the temple most Jews abandoned this view. Ever since, Jews have wrestled in sincere and creative ways with “why bad things happen to good people”, etc., from Ezekiel-style victim-blaming to Job-style acceptance of powerlessness to the under-appreciated Abusive God theology, and many other strategies besides. Christians, too, have applied a number of creative strategies, from “You are completely free to choose, but God can see the future and knows what you will choose” to “Every time you sin God instantly makes a new perfect plan that takes that into account” to “Tornadoes are God’s will; war are man’s will” to “Nothing will happen according to God’s plan, but everything did happen according to God’s plan”, ad nauseam.
The views that “You are free to act against God’s will” and “Everything happens according to God’s plan” do seem contradictory. I think there are ways to reconcile them, but this goes into philosophical territory that goes beyond anything you’ll find stated plainly in the Bible. But I don’t think it’s fair to assume that, just because someone believes both things, they are being incoherent.
