“God’s Will”
What does it mean when religious people appeal to “God’s will”? What kind of work does this do? Does it always provide the guidance and comfort for life it seems to promise? And what are the dangers of understanding God in terms of “will” in the first place? Dan dives into these and other issues in this episode.
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Hello and welcome to the series, It's in the Code, part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Pleased as always to be with you.
Pleased as always also to be offered in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
And as always, I want to begin by thanking everybody who supports us, whether that's financially through Patreon or some other format.
And just to reassert, we can't do this without you, so thank you so much.
And to thank all of those, all of you rather, who continue to reach out with ideas for this series.
It's been a good chunk of my Labor Day, trying to catch up on some emails to get back to people.
A lot of great insights from folks.
I really appreciate it.
As always, it's Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Really love the feedback, love the kind of conversations I'm able to have in that format sometimes, love the insights.
Our listeners are why we do this, and the insights demonstrate really clearly sort of why that is.
I think we have some of the best listeners we could ask for.
So, I want to dive in today, and for this episode I chose a topic that, you know, I've been thinking about.
And it's a topic a lot of people have reached out about and I was I was reluctant for a while because it's similar to a topic that I tackled in an early episode in this series.
I think if you go back and check in like I think it was probably May.
I looked at the idea of, you know, God having a plan, the language that God has a plan for your life or the church or whatever it is.
And I was reluctant to tackle this.
And it is the idea of people appealing to God's will, telling people that they should do God's will.
Maybe it's a religious community or, you know, church pastor saying that they're doing something because it's God's will.
Maybe it's somebody in your life telling you that they feel it's God's will that they do this or that or the other.
And I was reluctant to tackle this because, you know, there's a lot of overlap between those two ideas.
But the more I realized, as I thought this and as I read some more of these emails this weekend, that for a lot of people who've been listening to this series, you've listened to every episode that we've done, clearly there's some differences.
There are enough differences that it's worth talking about both of those things.
And so I'm going to tackle that.
I'm going to talk a little bit about this notion of doing something because it's God's will, because it clearly matters to listeners and there's a lot going on.
And while there's a lot of overlap, I do think that there are some distinctive pieces.
So I'll try to sort of spell that out here in the next few minutes.
So let's start with the obvious, right?
What is this language of God's will about?
This is another one of those things that if you didn't grow up in the church, you didn't grow up in a certain kind of church, That can be a weird way of talking, right?
When somebody says, you know, and also you ask, wow, it's really interesting you decided to quit your job and start your own business.
That's really, that's huge.
And that's really brave.
And that's really, you know, maybe whatever.
Tell me why you did that.
And somebody says, well, I just, I just believe this is God's will for my life.
And you could, if again, if you didn't grow up with that way of talking, you can be like, what are you talking about?
For a lot of folks that I hear from both here and in my coaching work, this is something they did grow up hearing, and it provokes responses ranging from people who feel like they receive guidance in their life and their life has purpose because of this conception of God's will, All the way to those who feel like they've been manipulated and misled their entire life by people saying that what they want is God's will, and so forth.
So, where does this come from?
And we do this sometimes, kind of start with the obvious.
Well, within a traditional Christian way of thinking, About the world, God is in charge.
God created everything, God has a divine order, and the world is supposed to work the way that God wants it to work.
God is in charge.
And the idea is that reality is as God wills it to be.
Reality itself reflects God's will.
This is what it means in a lot of ways of Christian thinking, going back thousands of years, right?
What it means to say that God is all-powerful, or that God is omnipotent, or that God is the creator, or God is the sustainer, or God is the provider, or whatever.
What it means is to exercise God's will absolutely and totally.
God created all of reality, so God gets to call the shots.
And ideally, we as humans fit within that framework, right?
Within the sort of Christian way of thinking.
Within this Christian way of thinking, we as humans should also live our lives in such a way that our actions accord with God's will.
And I should say, this is not unique to Christians.
Lots of theistic traditions hold this.
Forms of Judaism, Islam, what have you, right?
But again, Christianity is the tradition that I'm sort of most familiar with and most comfortable talking about, especially when I'm being really critical.
But within this, we as humans should also live our lives in such a way that our actions accord with God's will.
When we don't, that's what we call sin, to sin is to act according to, excuse me, opposed to God's will.
Now, Because I know that somebody in Div school or somewhere will email me and point this out.
There is a whole huge theological issue.
I mean, I don't know how many millions of pages have been written dealing with the issue of how, if God is all-powerful, And God is omnipotent, how anything that goes against God's will could happen.
Doesn't the fact that anything can be against God's will mean that God doesn't fully exercise God's will, or that God's not omnipotent, or whatever?
It's a huge, giant theological question.
I'm not going to tackle it here.
That would be an entirely different podcast, and I wouldn't be really the one to do it, okay?
Just registering that I know that it's there.
But let's just leave it with this, that when most Christians talk about sin, what it is for something to be quote-unquote sinful, It is to go against God's will.
We'll even talk this way on a kind of everyday level and people will say that, you know, something is out of God's will or they will talk about living outside of God's will or whatever, right?
That's where this language comes from.
And so part of living the Christian life, as many, probably most Christians understand it, is that one ought to live one's life in accordance with God's will.
One's life ought to be as God wills it to be.
And for many Christians, I would say this is what the Christian life is.
If you ask them, what does it mean to be a Christian?
Like, boil it down for me.
Give me like the one-sentence definition.
Many of them would say being a Christian is to live one's life in accordance with God's will.
Now they'll also go on and say this is something we can't do in our own power.
We need the Holy Spirit.
We need to accept Jesus as our Savior and so on and so forth.
But I think that for lots of Christians, maybe most Christians, that would be the answer to live life according to God's will.
Okay.
And I'll just register this again.
There have historically been some differences between Protestants and Catholics in the sort of relative weight that they put on this notion of divine will.
It really goes back to debates all the way in the medieval period and plays out from there.
It's a fascinating discussion about nominalism and things like that.
But again, this isn't the place for it, right?
Do all Christians—does everybody who professes to be a Christian—emphasize God's will in this way?
No.
Do they all think of God primarily in terms of will and power?
Not necessarily, and we'll get to that in a few minutes.
So again, I know folks will email me about this.
I look forward to what you have to say.
I simply want to register that when I say that most Christians understand this, I think that that's true.
I think most Christians do.
I certainly think it's true of most everyday regular people who go to church and pray and do all of those kinds of things.
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