This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
When Robert Redford was 18 years old, his mother died—suddenly and young—following complications from delivering twin girls who did not live long. This harrowing loss left young Redford disillusioned with God. “I’d had religion pushed on me since I was a kid,” he would tell Michael Feeney Callan, his biographer. “But after Mom died, I felt betrayed by God.”
I thought about this a lot after Redford’s own passing earlier this month. It’s such a common, sad story. How is it that religion, which can be such a source of hope and comfort for so many during tragedy, can so often end up feeling like a betrayal?
It’s one of the oldest religious questions there is, and one we have struggled to answer satisfactorily. The classic bottled Christian responses—God’s ways are higher than our ways, God had a better plan—are not always up to the scale of suffering. In any case, they didn’t work for Redford. They didn’t work for Brandon Ambrosino either.
Ambrosino is a theologian, journalist, and author of Is It God’s Will?: Making Sense of Tragedy, Luck, and Hope in a World Gone Wrong. In it, he applies his rich theological training to a sudden and shocking personal loss and attempts to come up with some real answers to the honest questions that follow. For some, his answers will be provocative. For others, they will be a source of enormous comfort. We talked about how he arrived at his conclusions and what his framework means for us.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tyler Huckabee, Sojourners: What made you want to write this book?
Brandon Ambrosino: Last August, the 44-year-old father of our goddaughter suddenly died of a heart attack. It was devastating. My husband and I flew down to Florida right away to be with their mom, and we had to explain to a two-year-old that her dad wasn’t coming home. The mom was using Christian vocabulary, and I found myself thinking like a theologian about everything that she was saying. But I realized that sometimes a theologian should just shut up, so I did.
Later, I was thinking about how the ways that we’re doing theology seem to be aimed at comforting us. But are these really comforting thoughts? Can our theology be reformulated to help people deal with grief and tragedy in more productive, life-affirming ways?
What is the language that you’ve seen people using that you find to be either unhelpful or maybe just incorrect, and how does your framework offer a corrective to that?
Growing up, we were always taught to hope in God because God knew the future or God was pulling the strings. So, if somebody unexpectedly died, it was unexpected on our end, but God knew exactly what was going on, and we could trust God.
Intellectually, I suppose maybe it does make sense. If God is the “author” of this whole thing, then I guess he does know the last chapters. But emotionally, that really didn’t satisfy me. Because then why did God write the book in this way?
I had to think: Does my hope for God and God’s future rest on concepts like omniscience? Is there a ground for hoping in God, even if I let go of the doctrine of omniscience? That’s what I wanted to do in this book.
I’m a Christian theologian, so my theology begins and ends with Jesus, especially Jesus on the cross. Rather than use my starting point for the crucifixion as: God is all-knowing and God intended Jesus to be killed so such and such could happen to humans, I wanted to start with the idea that the crucifixion was a devastating tragedy, and it took both Jesus and God by surprise.
Can we do hopeful theology with that as the starting point? I think we can. And that’s what I tried to do in this book.
What do we lose from that idea of God when we start taking some of those omnis away? And what do we gain?
Well, what we lose is a God who is a fortune teller. And what we gain is a God who really is our fellow sufferer.
One of the images I use in the book is, say, I see my four-year-old, Bennett, playing outside in my cul-de-sac. I’ve told him multiple times, do not play on this road. A car could come and hit you.
So, suppose I look out, and I see a garbage truck barreling down. I have the foreknowledge that if I don’t intervene, Bennett is going to die. I’ve told Bennett time and again not to do that. I’ve told him about the consequences. Do I just sit there and let it play out?
No. Anybody would say, if I had knowledge of it happening and just sat back, that would be monstrous. Why do we have different standards for God? If we suddenly transpose that story from me and Bennett to God and some other kid who’s going to die, why do we judge God to be moral in that situation?
And so, I think, no, God can’t do everything. It seems pretty clear, time and again throughout scripture, that God really needs humans to accomplish his vision for the world. God doesn’t free Israel. He seems to need Moses’ help. These are not some crazy whack-job postmodern ideas. These are very, very basic parts of our inherited Jewish and Christian traditions.
There’s a famous, complicated Epicurius quote—and I always get it wrong and sound like Michael Scott when I try to recite it—that goes something like, “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent.” Your answer to that framework is, well, God is not all-powerful. God works in collaboration with humanity, not just out of benevolence, but also out of genuine need for cooperation.
Yeah, I think that’s right. I suppose I could prove that it’s not logically impossible for God to both know the future and allow humans to freely choose it. However, I think that’s an emotional impossibility for God. The most important thing about God is that God is absolutely crazy in love with all of us. I just don’t understand how it would be possible for God to know that the Holocaust is going to happen and just sit there and watch it play out.
During my own theological education, I was acquainted with some very fierce critics of what was then called Open Theism. One theologian argued that we cannot diminish the omniscience of God without diminishing the glory of God. How would you respond to that?
In the system that this guy has constructed, you can’t have a glorious God without an omniscient God. That’s just not a theological structure that I’m working with.
It’s not that I want to get rid of the idea of God’s power. I mean, God is God. God can do what God wants. But even when people say that, they still don’t think God can will himself into non-existence or hate a human being. They still think there are plenty of things God can't do.
So, I think God does have a kind of power, but it is a power to always provoke us to hope, no matter what happens in the world. We do see God’s power in the resurrection of Jesus. God does something to Jesus. Pope Benedict says, “Either love is stronger than death, or it is not.” And God shows up at Jesus’s tomb and says, I’m going to settle this. Love is stronger than death.
And that is a power, but it’s not what we typically mean by omnipotence. God doesn’t have that kind of power. If he did, he would have prevented the death from happening. Now, here is where an apologist says, “Yeah, but it was part of his plan.” But then we have to question the kind of omniscience at play here. That was the best plan God could come up with? He’s infinitely wise, but the only thing he can think to do is to redeem the world by having a good guy brutally murdered by the state? That sort of theology, I think, undercuts its own claims of omniscience, because if that was Plan A, this seems to be a very limited creative mind.
READ MORE: Maybe There's No Moral to the Story
I don’t want to get rid of all these attributes. I just want us to wrestle with the way that we’re deploying them. I do think God does know all that can be known. And what can be known is the present, and what can be known is the past. And God does know that, because I do believe that God is closer to us, as Augustine says, than our breath. God is intimately present to all his creation. And in that sense, God knows exactly what’s going on. It’s just that in an open world, the future cannot be known, because it hasn’t yet been decided. And God cannot know what hasn’t yet been decided when it is up to us to make the decision.
How does this framework impact the human discipline of hope? And talking about “hope” is tough, because I don’t think we have a great shared definition of the word, so maybe you can talk about the definition that you’re challenging in the book.
I think of hope the way that [Paul] Tillich talks about “the courage to be.” [Tillich says that hope is a] courage “rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.”
I’m using the word hope the way that he’s using the word courage. Hope is staring into the abyss and saying, I will go on. There’s a reason I will go on. That’s hope. [Jürgen] Moltmann says that when we hope, we bring ourselves into correspondence with the future for which we hope.
When we hope, we become icons of the otherwise. And when enough of us start to hope for the future, that hope is too heavy for the present ruling structures to support. They collapse and give way.
Hope is not optimism. Hope is not naive. Hope is not rose-colored glasses. Hope for Christians starts with the brutal murder of Jesus. Hope begins in hopelessness.
So, to embody this, you mentioned your 44-year-old friend who passed. What do you say to your goddaughter?
Well, I hope she reads the book. I dedicated it to her. And what I said was God is with you, and he is with daddy.
God is defined over and over again in the Bible as the God of the orphans and widows. The very definition of who God is, his essence, somehow, is entangled with my friend Rusty and her two daughters. So that, for me, is hopeful. God has noticed them. Out of everyone on the earth, all of us, God has given a preferential option to the orphans and the widows. God notices who the world forgets about. That gives me hope.
As far as what practices we undertake, the genius of Christianity is that it gives us these practices that are aimed at instigating us to hope. When we gather as Christians, we are gathering in the name of God and encouraging one another to hope because we really believe that we have good reasons to be hopeful. I think the practice is just showing up and doing that.
“The most important thing about God is that God is absolutely crazy in love with all of us. I just don’t understand how it would be possible for God to know that the Holocaust is going to happen and just sit there and watch it play out.” —Brandon Ambrosino
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