God's Providence and the Anointing of Donald Trump
“I rarely look away from the crowd. Had I not done that in that moment, well, we would not be talking today, would we?” - President Donald Trump
“Thank you to everyone for your thoughts and prayers yesterday, as it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.” - President Donald Trump
“One hand fired and another hand guided the bullet.” - Pope
John Paul II
“In the designs of Providence there are no mere coincidences.” - Pope John Paul II
History and God's Providence
Based on Scripture, the Catechism of the Catholic Church asserts:
We
firmly believe that God is master of the world and of its history. But the ways
of his providence are often unknown to us. Only at the end, when our partial
knowledge ceases, when we see God "face to face", will we
fully know the ways by which - even through the dramas of evil and sin - God
has guided his creation to that definitive sabbath rest for which
he created heaven and earth.
There are clearly problems with confident assertions about particular events and "providential history." The Holocaust, for example, has prompted both Christians and Jews to ask how God’s plan can encompass the murder of millions of innocents. The Lisbon earthquake provoked Voltaire to ask how God could allow the impersonal evil of nature to deliver such tragic results. Christian theodicy answers these questions about natural and moral evil that may or may not satisfy anguished hearts. However, singular events raise questions we are not equipped to fruitfully answer from are limited perspective in time and space. If an assassin’s bullet went in a certain direction, we must assume that it was because his aim and the laws of physics pushed it in that direction, notwithstanding remarkable coincidences which from our limited perspective, inevitably provoke speculation about God's direct intervention.
The would-be assassin of Pope St John Paul II, Turkish terrorist Mehmet Ali Ağca, was 20 feet away from him when he fired his semi-automatic pistol. His aim was true. He hit the pope twice, once in the abdomen and once on the elbow. John Paul had been extraordinarily lucky. Ağca’s bullet missed his abdominal artery, his spinal column, and every major nerve cluster when it passed through his body by a millimetre or two. It was probably deflected from its original course by striking the pope’s finger (which it broke), thus missing the vital organs that it otherwise would have been damaged. The result of the bullet’s diversion was that the pope was not killed on the spot, did not bleed to death in the ambulance, and did not suffer serious paralysis - all of which would have happened if the bullet had taken a slightly different course and probably even its original course. Both the pope’s doctors and his secretary agreed that this was ”miraculous.”
A young pilgrim in St. Peter’s Square had held up an image of the Virgin Mary, and the pope, leaning forward to see it better just at the moment Ağca fired, may have ensured that the bullet missed the exact point on his body where it was aimed. Ağca launched his attack, moreover, on the anniversary of Our Lady’s appearance in Fatima, Portugal.
Similar claims are now being made concerning Trump's fortunate turning of his head immediately prior to the bullet striking and the anniversary of Our Lady of Fatima appearances.
It is
legitimate, as Pope St John Paul remarked, to conclude - remembering God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent - that coincidence and design are
one and the same in God's predestined plan. As Isaiah writes: "I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come." Ultimately, for us, these incidents are shrouded in mystery. As St Paul writes: "
“Fear not, for I am with you,”
The Deification of Donald Trump
The Republican Party conference this week has been a time of unalloyed happiness. The flags. The chanting. The weeping. The ecstatic joy. The confidence in their destiny ... and the bandaged ears. God Himself intervened to save the former president’s life. That is how the failed assassination attempt has been interpreted by faithful, followers and Trump alike. No one asked: if God did intervene to save Donald Trump, why not Corey Comperatore, the brave, decent, and tragically self–sacrificial volunteer fire fighter who died saving his family?
Let's be honest, for most of his life Trump has been self-absorbed, self-deluded and wildly self-aggrandising. Never much of a traditional Christian, he grow up in a family that embraced Norman Vincent Peale’s “prosperity gospel” that emphasized the accumulation of personal happiness and wealth. In his adult life, he has aligned himself with churches or ministers touting the same values.
To his followers, Trump is a modern Cyrus, the embodiment of a Persian king who conquered Babylon and allowed the Jewish people to return to Israel from their captivity abroad. Though Cyrus was not Jewish, God worked through him to deliver the Jewish people. According to the Book of Isaiah, Cyrus was anointed by the God for this task as a biblical messiah; he is the only non-Jewish figure to be revered in this capacity. “America’s going to have a challenge either way,” Lance Wallnau, a prominent Evangelical, said in 2016.“With Trump, I believe we have a Cyrus to navigate through the storm.” The story of Cyrus allowed conservative Christian leaders to develop a ‘vessel theology’ around Donald Trump, one that allows them to reconcile his personal history of womanising and alleged sexual assault with what they see as his Divinely ordained purpose to restore a Christian America.
Maybe .... God often uses flawed individuals and great sinners.
Trump is being portrayed as a biblical figure sent by God. Trump’s Evangelical supporters now speak of spiritual warfare, pitting demonic Trump critics against the former president, who represents the power of God. Nebraska preacher Hank Kunneman described criminal charges against Trump as “a battle between good and evil” and added, “There’s something on President Trump that the enemy fears: It’s called the anointing.”
On display this week was a powerful sense of community, and ceremony, sheer euphoria, and elation. There are moments when political rallies tip over into religion. This is where a proper theological perspective is necessary. To his most committed supporters, he is a miracle, a prophet, a warrior, and God’s hand is on him.
Most disappointing for me as a Catholic, is the intemperate and dark speculations of the Ukrainian Catholic priest Father Charron as he recounted his experiences on the Pints With Aquinas podcast. The Trump campaign had asked Father Charron to lead an opening prayer at the rally.
Father Charron spoke of the Trump shooting as “just the
beginning.”
“Take special note … the leftists, the godless, those who worship power,
raw power, will do anything in order to attain their god, power,” he commented.
“Mark my words, they are not going to allow power to leave their hands.”
Seeing more violence ahead, Father Charron offered this stark assessment
of the political left:
“I believe this with all my heart, that they are going to find someone
to assassinate President Biden, so they can get him off their ticket,” Father
Charron said. “[They will] paint that horrible evil act of assassinating Biden
against someone that they will claim is a Trump supporter, some angry Christian
white male.”
“The Democrats, the left … they will use this and they will find some
way to eliminate Biden through use of violence … for political goals,” the
priest said. “Mark my words. This is just the beginning and they have opened a
horrible, evil, Satanic can of worms. We are in for the spiritual fight of our
lifetime, and it began today.”
Father Charron’s conviction is that Trump is God’s unlikely instrument,
like King Cyrus or Balaam’s ass. He noted
that July 13 was the anniversary of the third apparition at Fatima, just as
John Paul was shot on the anniversary of the first apparition at Fatima, suggesting that the two attempts might be read providentially in the
same way.
Conclusion
Providence is inscrutable, even as we never cease to scrutinise it. But prayer is the proper response to perils, corporal and spiritual.
The implications of the assassination attempt will continue, not least in terms of the impact on the presidential race. Yet there will also be a challenge for Christians who attempt to read the "signs of the times." To detect the finger of God in history is always fraught with the temptation to see our priorities traced by Providence.
I have two issues with these kind of 'miracles'.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, there's survivorship bias and confirmation bias here. If one is shot or otherwise involved in some kind of accident/incident, there are two logical outcomes: one survives, or one does not. By definition, those who survive have had a 'lucky escape'. I remember being told about a military chaplain in WWI, who was nearly hit by a German shell that exploded behind him as he was going out to tend to the wounded on the front line. He avoided serious injuries, because the shrapnel from the explosion got stuck in the chalice and paten he was carrying in his backpack. A miracle, perhaps, but we make no attempt to discern the providence of God in the thousands of other lives that were brutally ended that same day. 'Miracles' are also only seen as miracles when they bring about outcomes we support. Nobody seems to think that Biden pulling through his latest bout of Covid is a miracle - although Covid can be fatal to the elderly. Was it a miracle that an assassination attempt on Hitler was thwarted when the crowd performing Nazi salutes blocked the gunman's view? Or that a defective fuse stopped a bomb that had been placed on his plane from going off?
Secondly, these miracles are always dramatic - a bullet bounces off a finger, gets wedged in a tobacco tin in a shirt pocket, is evaded by the turn of a head. Could God simply not have made the gunman change his mind, or made him miss the bus to the event? Then, at least Corey Comperatore would still be alive. Again, nobody seems to be deifying Biden for not breaking his neck when he fell down the stairs of Air Force One - but couldn't it have been God's hand on him keeping him alive to work his purposes?
Scripture warns us not to seek impressive signs and wonders, and God seems to usually prefer to work in the small things. It may be comforting to attribute surviving one's near brush with death to a higher power, rather than the blind forces of fate, but it's incredibly dangerous to start building a narrative around it. The only miracle that ultimately matters is that of the empty tomb, which gives us all the hope that we need.
Well, Biden is finally being wheeled out to a retirement home. I wonder how Trump will handle the possible replacements. Will he be able to cope with the towering intellect of Kamala Harris? Of if they go for Gavin Newsom, he'll have to deal with his sterling record in California. 😂
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure the link will work on this webslte ... It's that Spectator cover from four years ago, remember?
Deletehttps://tinyurl.com/2yvdrpyc
Charlie Kirk wrote on X: 'What you just witnessed is proof positive that when the most powerful Democrat institutions and oligarchs unite to topple an American regime, they expect to succeed. Biden knew they’d never stop because they did this to Trump. The only difference is President Trump fought back.' It rather reminds me of the installation of Sunak.
DeleteBiden (or whoever is running his Twitter account) and the Clintons have now endorsed Harris as the Democrat's nominee. As DEI zealots, I don't see how the Dems could pass her over without the Party imploding (and I imagine anyone with serious ambitions would rather sit this one out and run for 2028, leaving Harris to take the career-ending loss this time).
Dems Pull Off Successful Insurrection
DeleteU.S. — The Democratic Party in the United States has pulled off a successful insurrection, completing a coup d'etat to remove the current President from power.
"The President has fallen!" cried Democratic party elites joyfully, having seized power. "Yay insurrection!"
According to sources, Democratic party elites have worked tirelessly to overthrow the candidate chosen by voters, using everything from donation boycotts to blackmail. "It took everything we have, but we have deposed the democratically elected candidate of our party," said former President Obama proudly. "Democracy has been saved."
At publishing time, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough had come on TV to explain how some insurrections are actually very good.
https://babylonbee.com/news/dems-pull-off-successful-insurrection
Is the American electorate really ready to elect a woman to be president? We shall see, but I suspect probably not. Not even Hillary Clinton, going back a few years, and even less so Kamala Harris now.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that America is ready to elect those particular women, and rightly so. The Clintons should be nowhere near power, and Harris' record as AG and VP is atrocious (her own achievement - which, in fairness, is not inconsiderable - is making Biden look the more competent of the two).
DeleteThe idea, already being circulated by some on the left, that someone should be elected because of their gender or skin colour is equally as ridiculous as the idea that they shouldn't be elected for the same reasons.