Finding God's Judgments in History

In God’s Judgments: Interpreting History and the Christian Faith, Steven J. Keillor lays out the case for a theological interpretation of history and of current events that sees many major catastrophes as divine judgments for collective sins. It is also something of a manifesto against liberal theology, evangelical “worldview” thinkers, post-modernism, the Enlightenment, liberal democracy, and a variety of other intellectual perspectives. In addition to denouncing all the current intellectual trends, Keillor turns one chapter of the book into a platform from which to pontificate about his favorite political issue, bioethics. Another section becomes a prolonged argument for fiscal conservatism. The book is bold, interesting, and fairly well-written, but unfortunately ultimately flawed from first principles to last. Keillor enunciates no really clear criteria for identifying God’s judgments in history; the criteria he does offer are either arbitrary, ambiguous, or both. He therefore falls victim to the very sin he repeatedly denounces: using warnings of judgment as a way of saying, “I’m really opposed” to some alleged object of judgment (121).

The inspiration for Keillor’s book is the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and the controversy that ensued—with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson at its center—over whether the attack represented God’s judgment on the United States. While Keillor feels that the televangelists’ judgmental pronouncements were rash and focused too much on the particular “sins that concerned them the most” (57), he still tentatively sides with them in seeing 9/11 as an act of judgment. In order to circumvent this problem, Keillor sets up some criteria that he thinks will aid in distinguishing acts of judgment from other, less meaningful events.

Keillor feels that judgments occur through normal historical processes (70) by means of “fate-effecting deeds” (74). This means that an “objective, cautious approach” to determining the meaning of the September 11 attack is to “limit our list of judged sins to acts or conditions that clearly played a causal role” (57). With this as a guiding principle, he finds that greed, Hollywood’s sexual exploitation of women for profit, national apostasy, and the creation of Bin Laden are the American sins that angered the Muslims and thus for which America is being judged. There are two problems here. First of all, Keillor’s criterion is arbitrary. Even if we affirm that God effects judgment through historical processes, there’s no reason to think that the historical causes of the judgment-event must be identical with the sins being judged. Secondly, he picks and chooses from among the historical causes according to his own private evaluation of what is good or evil. Although he identifies other causes of Muslim hatred of America—like American support of Israel—he does not include them in his list of sins. “Christians can hardly say God’s judgment rests on the United States for acting to prevent the desired extinction of Israel,” Keillor writes (57-9). Here his claim to be “objective” breaks down. Why is it that arming poor Afghans against the Soviet empire was any less moral than giving the Israelis tanks and guns that are then turned—with little real interference from the United States—against poor Palestinians?

A second criterion Keillor offers for identifying judgments, this time with a little more biblical warrant, is the concept of “irony” or “blowback” (69). This he finds in abundance in the burning of the White House in 1814, which he feels was a judgment on the pride and honor-seeking of America’s elite ruling class (104). Part of the trouble with this criterion, of course, is that one can find irony almost anywhere in history. When Arius died by defecating his internal organs the day before he was to be readmitted to communion in the Catholic Church, it was widely viewed as an ironic judgment on him for his heresy. Keillor would likely agree, even if Gibbons is correct in speculating that Arius was poisoned; God merely used the wicked to punish the wicked. But when a good person dies in his/her moment of triumph—or in a grisly or potentially ironic way—we think of it as a tragedy rather than as an irony. Some historical figures whose deaths are arguably ironic include Tycho Brahe, Horace Wells, and Francis Bacon. Former U.S. vice-president Alben Barkley famously died moments after saying in a speech, “I would rather be a servant in the House of the Lord than to sit in the seats of the mighty.” Is this God’s judgment? Or tragic coincidence? Irony, it seems, does little in the way of providing an objective criterion for identifying God’s judgments in history.

Keillor’s lack of objectivity is also evident in his blanket denunciations of everyone who disagrees with him. The first principle from which the entire book apparently proceeds is the infallibility of the Bible. We are not allowed to ask why a loving God’s judgments are sometimes retributive rather than restorative, because “it is simply stated in Scripture, and we accept that testimony” (57). The Bible trumps theodicy, which—because it is a branch of human philosophy—we should “seek to avoid” (52,61). Keillor’s distaste for theodicy also plays a role in the book’s running tirade against Evangelical “worldview” thinkers, who use philosophy to make the gospel more palatable to a modern secular audience (and who allegedly see the Bible as a worldview rather than as a narrative, though he seems to have some difficulty quoting a worldview thinker who denies the narrative aspect of the Bible; 47-56,94-9). While Keillor pronounces no specific judgments against worldview thinkers, he does complain that Craig M. Gay’s jeremiad against atheists and liberal theologians—the latter of whom he all but blames for the Civil War—contains no warning of judgment, and asserts that God speaks a “judging no” against postmodernism (140,168). To pluralist democracy, too, Keillor issues a warning of judgment (189-90), and he suggests that it was partly Jefferson’s deist arrogance in pruning the Bible of the miraculous that caused the judgment of Washington in 1814 (106-10). (How he arrives at this conclusion is difficult to see, since deism and the Jefferson Bible played no clear role in the series of causes leading up to that event.) Indeed, Keillor seems to think we will all be judged unless we check our brains at the door. His own view is that reason is unnecessary; we should be Christians because the Bible’s testimony assuages our fears and insecurities rather than because reason convinces us (54). In fact, Keillor apparently feels that since the market value of rationality is declining, the Church can be “more relevant” by making shrill and irrational proclamations of judgment (184-5).

While Keillor sets himself apart from Falwell and Robertson by being more eloquent, it is difficult to see how else his way of thinking really differs from theirs. It is at least as arbitrary and judgmental and—despite Keillor’s pretensions to the contrary (182)—just as fundamentalist. While Keillor raises interesting questions about the meaning of historical events, he does not in the final analysis offer any satisfactory answers.