Many comments have popped up about John Piper's ludicrous proposition that the tornado over Minneapolis was a warning to Lutherans for capitulating to a sinful same sex behavior (Tony Jones, Jenell Williams Paris, iMonk, pomomusings.com, liberal pastor, Missio Dei, Queer Messages, astatum, Greg Boyd, Halden, me, jonathan stegall, and others). The problem that I think founds the disagreement is not just a way of reading the bible, and it's not a sensitive discerning of God's revelation. As I read through Denny Burk's response supportive of Piper's application of a biblical interpretation to a natural event, the disagreement became clear. This is at root a disagreement over determinism.
Baconian science in the late 19th century rejected the emerging hypothetical method because an hypothesis makes a prediction about something that has not yet been directly observed. For the Baconian, this was not science. Rather, science was about the things that one directly observes followed largely by a method of taxonomy and categorization. Darwin, for example, presented a problem to this method because natural selection could not be directly observed and therefore it had to be deduced from hypotheses about evidence.
It is clear, except for a few fringe groups, that the hypothetical method won out. Since the hypothetical method became standard, science has exploded with progress and influence. Biblical studies faced the same challenge at about the same time. It was no longer assumed that what you read was what you got within a given tradition. Rather, a different hypothetical method would critique the bible as a text in its own right outside of the doctrinal requirements of a religious tradition. Approaches to the bible such as inerrancy, infallibilism, and so forth can be traced back to this conception of what knowledge is reliable and true. For that Baconian method, determinism fits well since everything must be realted under an assumed notion of cause and effect. But when we approach reality with hypotheses that do not yet have observable outcomes, it makes determinism a much less easy fit. Karl Barth challenged this Baconian view with respect to election, predestination, and determinism.
Karl Barth had a problem with the Westminster Confession, incidentally the confession to which those of a Calvinist persuasion tend to read the bible. The root problem was that this confession in its legacy from the Synod of Dort is rooted in a decretum absolutum in which God's elective and predestining activity happens outside of Jesus Christ as the elected one who redeems humankind. The Westminster Confession says:
God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass…
Here God is the subject that determines all events great and small in history including the event of Jesus Christ. There is a logic here, but for Barth, the logic has a serious theological problem – the logic precedes the event of Jesus Christ which while revealed to humankind in the person of Jesus, is nonetheless an eternal person in the being of the Triune God. How can it be that God's absolute decree can come before the revelation of God in Jesus Christ who was elected for human redemption – from eternity? Barth's resolution was that God's true determining activity as God is in God's own freedom to elect God's self in Jesus Christ. God is both the subject and object of election. God's omnipotence is not something that determines election, it is God's election that determines the sphere of God's omnipotence. This sphere is revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. As Barth writes:
What makes Him the divine Ruler is the very fact that His rule is determined and limited: self-determined and self-limited, but determined and limited none the less; and not in the sense that His caprice as such constitutes His divine being and therefore the principle of His world government, but in such a way that He has concretely determined and limited Himself after the manner of a true king (and not a tyrant); in such a way, then, that we can never expect any decisions from God except those which rest upon this concrete determination and limitation of His being, upon this primal decision made in His eternal being; decisions, then, which are always in direct line with this primal decision, and not somewhat right or left of it in an infinite sphere (Church Dogmatics II.2, 32.2).
Divine agency is prior to human action and the sphere of human action is delimited or conditioned by this divine agency. As humankind is made in God's image there is a correlation with the freedom of God and the freedom of humankind. Moreover, in order to be truly obedient to God's self revelation one must have the freedom to determine one's obedience to God through a passive reception of grace. Grace is revealed in the self-limitation of God in Christ as the predestined one.
Barth was no fan of natural theology as a result of his irreducible Christocentric focus. Making the deduction from the revelation of God in Jesus Christ to natural events that may or may not point back to that revelation were overly speculative and would do more harm than good in maintaining the distinction between nature and God.
That is what Piper does with his interpretation of the tornado: He makes a speculative conclusion tied back to a general notion of God that is fundamentally rooted not in Christ; but does so with a vague notion of determinism that ultimately regulates the being of God. In other words, he roots his notion of God in an absolute decree which, as Barth argues and I think Barth is right, must somehow be prior to God's self-determination in Christ. What happens here is that caprice through immutable law conditions God's grace in Christ – the event that paradoxically creates a space for human freedom to respond.
Therefore God's revelation conditions historical events and does not determine them. For Piper and others, God's sovereignty must be rooted in determinism. That this is such a necessary condition of God's being is assumed to be indubitable and that is the problem. If Piper and others who share this view would dump the unnecessary condition of determinism for the sphere of God's activity, then absurd divinations of nature would not be necessary.
UPDATE: Blake asked a question from Moltmann's view that Barth seems to address here. Synchronicity at its finest.
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