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It was a wonderful image because our marriage was a whole marriage, with a beginning and a middle and an end. It was a very different experience from the friend I have who was married for only seven years before her husband was killed in an automobile accident. They had never imagined that they would have so short a time. That really strikes me as a marriage that goes up, up, up and then it's kind of cut off as it's still getting launched. And ours, even though it was shorter, it had a real sense of fullness to it.

Out of your reflection on your experience, how do you relate to the various ideas about God's providence?

I see God's providence as being very particular and very mysterious. I have realized increasingly as time has gone on how mysterious it all is. That makes me Calvinist, but not the sort of Calvinist that says, God has his plan and let me tell you what it is.

For Calvin, the providence of God is so comforting because it is a dangerous and unpredictable world. You never know what awful thing is going to happen to you except that it's probably going to happen. And what can possibly be a comfort in such a world, if not knowing that the God who is completely loving and completely dependable is also completely in charge, including the things that seem utterly mysterious to us? I really have the sense that in this broken, hurting, and often opaque world, there really are Everlasting Arms underneath us.

I wrote a doctoral exam on Calvin and Wesley, and they have very different understandings of providence—and very different understandings of human knowledge of God and human knowledge of good. Calvin says, God is perfectly good and perfectly wise and perfectly loving and, therefore, whatever God does is just. And we often can't understand that because we don't see fully. Our created frame prohibits it. But we can trust God.

Wesley says, I could name some things that would be blatantly unjust, for example, if God condemned some people not to be saved purely because he decided. That would be evil, and because it's evil, God would not do it. Wesley presumes that he can know the good and therefore put things that are not good on a list of things that God would never do.

Calvin would say, I can know the good if God shows it to me. But God's idea of the good is far deeper and more mysterious than I could ever possibly understand.

The ripples of Wesley's sureness that he can know what is good and therefore what God would and would not do, and of Calvin's thought that God is mysterious and that he cannot know, but he can trust—the ripples of that run throughout Wesleyan and Calvinist theology. I have to say I really am a Calvinist.

For Paul, the providence of God, the mysterious acting of God beforehand, is always good news. And it's really interesting to see my students semester after semester be terribly worried that if they trusted their friend's salvation purely to the providence of God then that would be bad because God might damn them or hurt them or something. They would much rather that their friends had free will and were on their own. And I say, Really? Really? You'd rather trust your friends to themselves than to God?

Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Sing Me to Heaven and My God and I are this month's selections for CT's Editor's Bookshelf. Elsewhere on our site, you can:

Read our review by David Neff.

Read an excerpt from My God and I.

Read an excerpt from Sing Me to Heaven.

Buy Sing Me to Heaven and My God and I online.

Peterson earlier wrote about her husband's death in a 2000 Christianity Today article. She also wrote about depictions of witchcraft in popular culture for our sister publication Books & Culture.

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August (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47