As a Baptist preacher in Waco, Texas, Randall O’Brien knows the Bible says natural disasters can be signs of God’s judgment. But he’s not preaching anything of the sort, not even in a year marked by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes.
Instead, he’s joining other evangelical Protestant leaders in offering an answer that would have been almost unthinkable for a Bible-believing preacher even one generation ago. Despite all he knows from Scripture, O’Brien is proclaiming God to be a mystery, at least when calamity occurs.
“I don’t know why bad things happen to innocent people,” said O’Brien, interim pastor at Columbus Avenue Baptist Church and chair of the religion department at Baylor University in Waco.
“There’s something very worshipful about saying that God is God, and I’m not,” he said.
What O’Brien illustrates is a growing admittance of puzzlement in evangelical circles.
That has prompted some religion scholars to wonder if understandings of God — and religious authority — might be undergoing some subtle but significant revisions among one of this country’s largest and most influential religious groups.
Evangelical leaders nationwide are finding themselves challenged to explain what insurers call “acts of God.”
Sunday sermons reflect on hurricanes hitting the Gulf Coast, mud slides in Guatemala, floods in New England, an epic earthquake in Pakistan and even heavy rains in Washington that scared crowds away from the National Mall during an evangelistic rally.
Evangelicalism “is a movement that vests people with authority when they can convince (others) that they have something strong and powerful and effective to say,” said Joel Carpenter, provost of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., and a historian of American religion.
“So, yeah, you’re giving up something when you say, ‘Look, folks, this is just mysterious. And yes, as a careful student of the Scripture, I search and search, and I find the biblical writer is pointing to mystery as well, pointing to trust as the answer, (rather than) relying on my own understanding.’”
For at least 250 years, Carpenter said, evangelicals have placed a premium on understanding things of God as a crucial sign of an individual’s salvation.
Carpenter said anyone unsure of personal righteousness, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, would likely hear from an evangelist: “If you can’t be more certain than that, then maybe you ought to doubt your salvation, and you can settle that today (by surrendering to Jesus Christ).”
The point, said Carpenter, was that “God really is going to make things clear to you, all kinds of things.”
Through the decades, scholars say, this notion of the saved as knowledgeable in all things godly has allowed little room for divine mystery.
But evangelical leaders today are increasingly admitting a lack of answers.
Evangelist Luis Palau, for instance, offered no explanation for why God allowed heavy rain to hinder his October “DC Festival,” an event that had high expectations after years of planning.
“You either believe that God is sovereign, that He makes no mistakes, that His way is perfect, as the Bible said, or you don’t,” Palau told a drenched and diminished crowd on the National Mall. “And I believe it.”
Palau isn’t the only high-profile evangelical scratching his head over the weather.
On Oct. 21, Jerry Falwell wrote in his newsletter, “What is the biblical significance of all these global disasters which have befallen us recently? The honest answer is, I do not know.”
Falwell’s open befuddlement is a shift for a Southern Baptist preacher who infamously said the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were divine judgment for “throwing God out of the public square.”
Perhaps the days are fading, Carpenter suggests, when evangelicals “think they have power to convince and persuade (only) as long as they have power to explain.”
Meanwhile, hunger for the mysterious seems to be growing, scholars say, especially among young adult evangelicals.
They flock to the simple chanting of Taize-style services and inhale incense in the Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Anglican churches they’ve joined.
And young evangelicals welcome books pondering the mysterious side of God from writers such as Donald Miller and James Emery White, according to Jana Riess, religion book review editor at Publishers Weekly magazine.
“I certainly think,” said Riess, “(that) some of the younger generation (of evangelicals) are interested in letting God be mysterious and are comfortable with that.”
As they ponder life’s uncertainty in a post-Sept. 11, disaster-prone world, evangelical leaders are daring to speak of mystery even beyond the weather.
“All evangelical leaders today are dealing with much more sophisticated clienteles and are themselves theologically more nuanced” than in decades past, said David Edwin Harrell, professor emeritus of history at Auburn University and an expert on evangelical leaders of the 20th century.
“Neither for their own personal theologies nor for their customers are they going to offer the old-time, one-dimensional view of God,” Harrell said.
“There is something afoot, clearly, and that is that these are people who are looking in a broader and different way at God and His working from what many early evangelicals (in the 1940s and ’50s) would have.”
(RNS)
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