Jerry Falwell Was Right
God really does judge the nations, new book argues.
Stephen H. Webb | posted 8/29/2007 08:43AM
Was 9/11 God's judgment against America? Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell said so. They blamed God's wrath on abortion and promiscuity, and they were promptly skewered by the media—as much for raising the uncomfortable topic of divine judgment as for using the occasion to deplore America's sexual excesses. In God's Judgments: Interpreting History and the Christian Faith (IVP Academic), Steven J. Keillor argues they had the right idea but the wrong reasons. His new book is a sophisticated defense of their theological instincts.
Keillor turns Robertson's and Falwell's snap judgments into a measured meditation on why God judges the nations. His method is as simple as it is provocative. He first sifts through the tragedy of 9/11, looking for evidence of what the United States had done to anger radical Islamists. He then asks if any of these items might also have angered God: economic greed, immoral cultural exports, and "use of terrorist guerilla units against the Soviets" in Afghanistan.
Keillor's conclusion—that God used terrorists to punish us for national sins—is a theological spin on "blowback," a word the political Left popularized during the aftermath of 9/11. Blowback suggests that America, by abusing its power abroad, got what it deserved.
For Keillor, however, blowback does not happen of its own accord. God, not Osama bin Laden, ultimately was blowing back at America when the terrorists released their whirlwind that tragic day.
The subject of God's intervention among the nations is drawing increasing interest lately, as books such as Can God Intervene? and Divine Justice, Divine Judgment hit the shelves. Treating God as the cause of specific historical events is, of course, taboo among professional historians. Evangelical historians may advocate for a fairer treatment of faith communities by the academy, but they, too, are committed to the standards of their guild. Keillor is professionally trained (Ph.D., University of Minnesota), but this adjunct professor at Bethel University can get away with violating those taboos because he is an independent scholar.
Alienating EveryoneWhether Keillor can avoid the skewering that Robertson and Falwell endured is another story. He describes himself as "a rural, pro-life independent, a longtime board member for a Christian school, and no Jim Wallis," and he tries to steer a middle path between the political Left and Right. "To analyze God's judgment as falling on both political parties is not to equate them or to measure their respective failings (which only God can do) or to set oneself up as a mediator between them—it is to argue that the fear of the Lord ought to fall on them both and on us all."
Nonetheless, political independents always run the risk of making more foes than friends, and Keillor is no exception. Blaming 9/11 on CIA involvement in Afghanistan will annoy anyone who does not like Noam Chomsky. Blaming it on our refusal "to exempt from judgment all our acts in the market, as if the market scrubbed them clean" will anger the political Right. And blaming it on Hollywood will alienate the political Left.
Holding God responsible for 9/11, however, risks infuriating everyone. Keillor recognizes that 9/11 might be too recent for such analysis, which is why he devotes several chapters to making similar claims about more distant events, such as the burning of Washington in 1814 and the Civil War.
He also deepens his case by retrieving judgments of the Old Testament prophets that scholars call "oracles against the nations." The words of Amos 3:6 are especially poignant: "When disaster comes to a city, has not the Lord caused it?" These oracles, however, generally target nations that have mistreated Israel, something that can hardly be said of America.
August 2007, Vol. 51, No. 8
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