"God's Will" in Sickness and In Health and the Loss of Faith

Calvinism, blinded by St. Paul's rhetoric to a church in Rome whose greatest theological questions probably had a lot to do with the cult of fate, has made of God's will a sort of inflexible force.

More humane Christians have given the freedom of creation a little more space.

But now and again some loon invokes the will of God to perpetrate some nightmare on the world, anything from shooting abortion doctors to September 11.  Recently on a Qantas flight from Melbourne to Hong Kong some fruit-loop tried to open an emergency exit in mid-flight, exclaiming that it was "God's will."

The exact quotation, according to The Daily Mail (that organ of responsible journalism), was "You are all going to die.... It is God's will."

None of this is new in history, of course, though the digital echo-chambers can make it seem like things are getting worse.   If you read the political correspondence of the Middle Ages or the writings of the colonists to the "New World," you find that no coercive act was ever really complete without its theological appeal to God's will and blessing.

From that perspective lunatics like the 9/11 bombers and the Qantas Theologian of Death are remarkable mainly for being throwbacks.  They're dinosaurs who truly believe that God has a will that intersects in tangible ways with their ability to harm, to kill, to coerce, to affect their own will upon the planet.

Classical Christianity on the other hand submits to the will of violence in the belief that rather it is God's will that none shall perish: that is (translating here from the First Century vernacular), that God will raise the dead.

What a strange journey God's will has come for Christianity: this is an age where you can find churches justifying their concealed weapons permit training classes by saying that it's a God-given right to go armed.  

It's not. 

It's the right of those who give themselves that right, the right of those who want and aim to obtain power.

Religious faith in the post 9/11 world has undergone a shift.  Very properly, it's a crisis of the idea of "God's will."  Who can believe in "God's will" under these circumstances?  Who can tolerate a God whose will is as flexible, malleable, variable as the human race itself? 

When your will is to die for others, you might have a Christian conception of God's will. 

Until then, it's just desire roaming the earth in its god-suit, seeking whom it may devour.