COMMENTARY: The theology of winners ignores the mystery of God

c. 1997 Religion News Service (Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C., an author and a former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(at)interpath.com.) UNDATED _”God smiled on us,”said winning University of Florida football coach Steve Spurrier.”He gave us another chance.” Easy for him to say. I wonder what they were saying […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C., an author and a former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(at)interpath.com.)

UNDATED _”God smiled on us,”said winning University of Florida football coach Steve Spurrier.”He gave us another chance.” Easy for him to say. I wonder what they were saying in the losers’ locker room. Had God frowned on Florida State?


Two days later, a Carolina Panther explained victory over the Dallas Cowboys this way:”God is working on this team. He has a hand on this team from top to bottom.” Shall we conclude, then, that God had abandoned the Cowboys? Punishment for their players’ sexual and narcotic adventures, perhaps, as one Carolina fan suggested. And how does God feel about the Packers and the Patriots?

Not long ago, I was swimming at the YMCA with my 5-year-old son. I was five feet away when he started to flail in the water. He’s a good swimmer, but he had suddenly entered deep water and was scared. He went under. In what felt to me like slow motion, I moved to his side.

The question of God’s agency suddenly had a meaning far beyond the black-and-white morality of big-time athletics.

If I give God the credit for rescuing my son, how do I explain kids who drown? I remember the day Lisa, a 20-year-old nursing student, drowned in a boating accident and her mother asked me,”Where was God?”If God has enough time to pump up a football team, surely he could have saved her.

Survivors, they say, write bad history. They read too much into outcomes that are nine-tenths luck. Likewise, winners tend to write bad theology. In seeing God as their partisan in success, they depict God as loving some more than others and showing his love by conferring worldly largesse.

That is strange theological footwork. It requires one to ignore most of Scripture, where God humbles the proud, rejects the smugness of wealth, hears the cries of those in distress, liberates captives, builds his future on losers and outcasts, and says the path to real life is self-sacrifice.

We seem to engage in that fancy footwork for two reasons. First, we want to win, and we can’t imagine any virtue in losing. Even though Jesus said we should lay down our lives for others, it is more pleasing to think of God as a booster of prosperity.


Second, we portray God as partisan because the alternative _ luck, chaos, unpredictability _ is too frightening. As a nation, we Americans have been extraordinarily lucky. Searching for the Orient, our ancestors stumbled upon fertile soil, abundant water, oceans on two sides, freedom from Europe’s ancient hatreds, and deliverance from an overbearing church allied with royalty and ignorance.

But we rarely see it as luck. We declare it our”manifest destiny”to be a mighty nation, a messianic presence in a darkening world. As such, we don’t see ourselves as bound by normal restraints. To build this new Jerusalem, we give ourselves permission to slaughter Native Americans, enslave Africans, chain children to textile machines, build whatever suits our fancy, and bully whoever gets in our way.

The proof of God’s favor will be our power and wealth. We flock to preachers who say,”Go for the gold! God wants you to have gold!” As individuals, we who have abundance prefer to say we earned it, rather than lucked into it. The mystery of being born, say, white, in a healthy family, on a safe street, with a college nearby, rather than dark, poor and parent-less in Bangladesh, is too much to grasp.

When we misread our luck, however, and decide it’s a sign of divine favor, we are left with a God who is too small and a presence among nations that seems both arrogant and fragile.

Football dynasties are short-lived, even in Florida. Even the brashest victor will face the ambiguities and tragedies of life. How will we explain it when our fortunes turn sour? Has God suddenly turned against us? If so, who is our help in time of need?

I did thank God when I brought my son to the surface. I might well have cursed God if I had been too far away. But, the moment’s emotions aside, I think we must see that God isn’t found in the luck of being near, but in the love that makes rescuing a child matter.


MJP END EHRICH

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