Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan

 

      There is a wonderful Bach choral – Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan (roughly: Whatever God does, that is well-done). Paul played a version of it at his piano recital.

 

Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan,

What God does, that is done well,

Es bleibt gerecht sein Wille;

his will remains just.

Wie er fängt meine Sachen an,

However he forms my life,

Will ich ihm halten stille.

I want calmly to place my whole trust in him.

Er ist mein Gott,

He is my God,

Der in der Not

who in times of trouble

Mich wohl weiß zu erhalten;

knows well how to maintain me;

Drum laß ich ihn nur walten.

therefore I am content that his will prevails.

 

The hymn, if I had to paraphrase its message, is one of faith in God’s goodness and justice even when we can’t understand it – a calm, peaceful, consoling faith. If I think about it too much, I feel the discomfort I always have with the idea of Providence – of God’s plan, of God allowing evil for the sake of the Good. The specter of an arbitrary God of infinite magical power surfaces, to whom we in fear and awe must simply submit and obey, denying any attempt to think or judge on our own. But that is not the sense I get in this hymn, especially when the words accompany the music. I wouldn’t expect to understand God’s purposes in creating the world and keeping it in spite of evil in being. Intimations we have in our best, deepest joys and loves, and even in our grief and remorse, but only intimations.

        Why did God allow the cross? The collapse of the Roman Empires? The perversions of Christianity during the Middle Ages? The genocide in the Americas in the name of Christ? The 30 Years War? Slavery? The two world wars? The Holocaust? Ted Bundy? The mass murder events after the world war? My uncle Alan’s and Aunt Alice’s MS? Children dying from perverts, war, and famine? The wife beater? The Ukrainian newborn baby killed by Putin’s missiles? (This list would take longer than my lifespan to complete.)  Can I believe such things are done for our good? No. Do I think God planned them in? No. That is both a logical-conceptual and an existential remark. Logically, it’s like asking whether I believe a square might ever be round. What God does, that is by definition good. Or what is not good, that is by definition not from God. How do I know what is good? Well, I am by definition (and existentially) fallible, but if Auschwitz or the African slavery of the American South or the Trail of Tears were not all evil root and branch, then nothing is evil. If the love shown by Mother Theresa for the afflicted and dying of Calcutta was not good, then nothing is good. Some things we can know. We are, after all, created in God’s image and have the teaching and the spirit of Christ to guide our hearts and conscience.

       It is human beings who make history; not God. God’s history, I suppose, would be much different and would not include slavery, the Trail of Tears, or Auschwitz. Or Caesar for that matter. Or the billionaire class. But we human beings exist as the universe exists: through God, whose mind we partly know through Christ. Human beings make history inside of a reality that is of God. Human beings are conditioned to be sure: by genes, family, culture, history, chance, etc. But within that we are free – none of what conditions us determines us. We are the animal that can make promises. We are the animal who must bear finite responsibility for our words and deeds. We are a self-conscious somebody; not just an exemplar of a species.

        What we cannot do: make good evil or evil good. We cannot just legislate what is real, good, or beautiful. We cannot create anything in the strict sense, though they be called on to “sub-create” (Tolkien) – to make of what is, something good (art in the broadest sense; we make communities good or bad). We cannot flourish when we, doing evil, act contrary to our own created being and that of our Creator. There are spiritual currents we are bound to, currents that if opposed lead to disturbances in history. I could try to articulate these currents, but at its most simple we are here to love the good, true, and beautiful, and to develop the virtues and gifts (e.g. music) of our nature. When a human being – perhaps one with the power over the minds of their collective – moves against these currents of our being, then he sets himself up as the Creator and judge of what is real, good, true, or beautiful; sets himself up against his Creator and all of Creation. He can only pervert what is real and sets himself up for a hellish fall, damaging others through history in a vicious chain reaction. To become “autonomous,” like Satan, will put you at odds with your own nature and the Creation:

 

[the autonomous self] seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite. – William Blake

 

        Most all of the hells we must endure are human-caused, directly or indirectly. In a perfectly just, courageous, self-restrained, wise, hopeful, faith-and-trust having, loving community, living in respectful dialog with the nature of the land they inhabit and of which we are the stewards, evil would lose its power over us. (Surely, God appeared to us in Christ to free us from this power, to restart history.) And the misfortunes that we may still be subject to would have a different meaning. The whole cycle of human history when the first human being exercised power unjustly over another and a human collective saw nature as a raw material to be exploited for purposes of greed, power, sex, and vanity, deforming everything that came after. We are all to a greater or lesser extent products of this deforming – though we were given the way to overcome it. We are always measured by the Good, and always fail – to a greater or lesser extent – to measure up. But we can to some extent know how far we fall short.

       Es bleibt gerecht sein Wille. God in his goodness and justice keeps the world in existence. In spite of the mess it has become. And God is good. This gives me hope. Will ich ihm halten stille. I am content to trust God’s wisdom, especially since Christ has taught me that God is indeed loveable. In secular words, I would say that I have faith that the good, the true, and the beautiful will win out and those who have suffered from evil done will somehow be comforted. I think questions like What is God’s purpose in allowing the Holocaust or the horrors of Ruanda? are confused and based on a wrong picture of God. All evil is contrary to God’s will, contrary to God’s being – it seems blasphemous at worst, ignorant at best to think otherwise. I could not consent to the hymn if it meant believing that God was fine with the genocide in the Americas for some inscrutable purpose of His own that is beyond my understanding. If God is good – and it is a truism that God is perfectly good – then God hated that. My consent is that such horrors will be made good and that there is still hope for a good life on earth. That I consent to.

      Thus when my aunt Alice in her dying agony said “God is in control” or when D says my actions were ‘meant to be’ or when someone talks about “God’s plan,” I can accept that not as God’s explicit wish that my aunt was in agony or that I break my oath, but as a faith that everything that happens is contained by the love that God poured into the Creation. Why doesn’t God intervene?! Why doesn’t he put a stop to all the evil?! Well He did intervene. He suffered one of the most excruciating and most demeaning deaths humanity has ever devised. But it couldn’t destroy Him; it couldn’t destroy His love. Thus evil cannot destroy hope. We might want a great magician in the sky that makes life just and happy but that is just not the way it works. Dealing with that is a necessary step toward spiritual maturity.