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My Goth friends Amanda (who is American by birth) and Paul have a small son, Ryan. Amanda had a conversation with him yesterday:
Ryan: Donald Trump is a bad man. I'm going to kill him and his huge army and then I'll get the biggest present and he won't be able to cause trouble.
Amanda: I don't think killing is a good thing to do, Ryan.
It would be better to take him away without hurting him.
Ryan: We could send him to the moon, but then he would make
the aliens leave.
(When Ryan was a baby, he would laugh heartily at the Dementors
in Harry Potter. He's hard to intimidate).
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Yesterday, too, as we all struggled to assimilate the new
world we are suddenly thrust into, the clergy of the Hornington Deanery
gathered over lunch for Deanery Chapter. We gingerly tiptoed around the topic of
nuclear holocaust ('I haven't given the red button any thought for years', said
one priest, 'I'm doing it now') and focused rather on the chocolate cake
brought along by a retiring colleague. One local incumbent pointed out that
there were plenty of instances in the Scriptures of God using unlikely rulers
for his own purposes. 'I really don't like that kind of theology', countered
another. 'I'm not saying Trump was elected because God made it happen,' said the
first, 'only that God can make use of anyone he wants.'
This is of course true, as far as it goes. God brings the
armies of the King of Assyria into Israel because Israel has proved faithless,
then crushes Assyria in turn by the new empire of the Achaemenids. King Cyrus
arranges for the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple and gets
called 'Messiah' by the prophets, no less. The trouble with this simple picture
is that it was painted retrospectively as the Jews analysed their own history to
see where they'd gone wrong and where God's hand had been in the events of
several centuries: whereas we have no such perspective and are just guessing.
We can indeed have confidence that (ultimately) 'in all things God works for
the good of those who love him', as St Paul puts it in Romans, but that doesn't
mean he actively plans particular events. We are still given the capacity to
screw it all up if we choose.
Sadly, in a fallen world necessary qualities are entangled
in a single human soul with facets you would sooner not have. More radically,
those negative aspects of a person's character may actually be the reverse side
of the beneficial ones (think of our discussion of the bloodymindedness of Phil Shiner and his ilk a few
months ago). The times may call for a leader who perceives something nobody
else does, and has enough self-belief to push a response through against
universal scepticism: and only the Lord may know what that is. But alongside
self-belief often go ruthlessness and arrogance, over time if not at first.
Such is the business of the world we have, rather than the one we might choose
to have.
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