Thomas S. Kidd is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University, and the author of books including George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father (Yale University Press, Jonathan Edwards was confident in his ability to discern God’s purposes in earthly events. For example, during a 1736 drought, he explained that God was chastising New Englanders for the “corruption in our hearts.” Similarly, during a plague of crop-destroying worms in the 1740s, he suggested that the people’s neglect of the poor had precipitated the infestation.

This kind of assurance about God’s intentions has become passé among most conservative Christians today. But not everyone across the American religious and political spectrum has given up on such close providential readings. I was reminded of this fact recently when I became a minor player in a kerfuffle with radio host Glenn Beck over presidential politics. Beck is a Mormon, an ardent supporter of Ted Cruz, and an opponent of Donald Trump. He said recently that evangelicals who support Trump are not “listening to their God.” God has made it clear, Beck says, that Cruz is the chosen man for this election.

Asked to comment on this story by Breitbart News, I replied that “the Bible certainly offers principles on how to think about government and politics. The Bible does not, however, tell us which individual candidates to vote for…There are many reasons why devout Christians should hesitate to vote for Donald Trump, but God has not revealed Ted Cruz as the divinely anointed alternative, either.” In reply, Beck said on his radio program “To you, Dr. Kidd. To you. To you God hasn’t revealed Cruz as divinely anointed.” But Beck believes that “Ted Cruz actually was anointed for this time.”

In the midst of this brouhaha, I happened also to read Gerald McDermott’s fascinating book chapter “Jonathan Edwards and the National Covenant: Was He Right?” In that piece, McDermott examines Edwards’ confident readings of worms, droughts, and other instances of how earthly events reflected God’s disciplining hand. Today we associate such prophetic readings with the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and now Beck, who may have a more natural openness to the idea of God’s ongoing revelations because of his Mormonism. Whatever their individual merits or personal beliefs, contemporary figures like these have nothing like the theological or intellectual chops of Edwards. What has changed? Why has the interpretation of God’s purposes in current events become theologically marginal, in a way that it was not in the eighteenth century? Have we lost courage in explaining God’s ways to man?

Over-readings of God’s providence were relatively easy targets of ridicule for the new skeptics and deists of the eighteenth century. For them, Edwards’ kind of interpretation raised obvious questions with no easy answers. Does an absence of drought or worms mean that people are without sin? What did it mean when non-Christians around the world enjoyed abundant harvests, and heavily Christian regions went without? And what of Matthew 5:45’s statement that God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust”? Many traditional Christians abandoned close providential readings of current events because, with all due respect to Edwards, those interpretations are easier to defend when no one is asking difficult questions about them.

Yet Gerald McDermott suggests that we also lost good things when we gave up on providential readings of history. Christians certainly believe that God is the Lord of history, and that all things have meaning and purpose within God’s economy. No ruler comes to power, and no nation falls, without God’s sovereign permission. Providential interpretations of a nation’s suffering and turmoil remind us that we stand under universal moral standards. No matter how powerful and wealthy, no nation (perhaps especially those with high rates of professed Christian faith) can expect to provoke God forever with no consequences. Continue reading →