John Piper and the Monstrous Tautology

"It seems worth noting that there is a point at which an explanation becomes so comprehensive that it ceases to explain anything at all, because it has become a mere tautology."
                                           -David Bentley Hart (The Doors of the Sea, 29)

"All thinking about God, apart from Christ, is a bottomless abyss."
                                           -John Calvin (Com. on 1 Peter 1:20)

"What, then, do I love, when I love my God?  Who is He who is above the head of my soul?"
                                          -Augustine, Confessions, X.VII.



John Piper has recently made waves with certain statements, namely that it is "right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases. God gives life and he takes life. Everybody who dies, dies because God wills that they die.”

These sentiments are not original to Piper, but as its his face that is hot off the press it seems prudent to hold him up in example.

Up front there are caveats that must be named.  Cards on the table: I am against this vision Piper has of God.  I do not believe it.  Or better: if his position is true, it is only trivially so.  It lacks nuance, theological depth.  And above all it lacks compassion.  

Piper reminds me of Ockham's infamous statement that, instead of incarnate in Christ, God could have become "an ass or a stone;" the form made no difference to Ockham because God's sovereignty dictated the effect would be identical, unconstrained by factors of character or representation or relation.  God was absolute power--potentia absoluta--constrained by nothing, not even God's own nature--akin, one suspects, to Piper's remark "God owes us nothing."  Or in Ockham's own words: "God is no man's debtor."

This seems to me, incorrect.  But of course we must constantly remind ourselves that the statement, "God is," is "the hardest and at the same time the most extensive task of church dogmatics." (Barth, CD II/1 p.257).  Thus while I mean this as a counter to Piper, I do not thereby present myself as a bastion of clarity.  Rather I pose as a questioner. 

More caveats: I want to focus on a specific question. Peter Enns has offered a series of responses which I will not duplicate (nor do I agree with all of them, even if several are quite apt).

My question here is short, but not simple: what could it possibly mean to say God wills everything?

My claim, to put it simply, is that Piper's God is too abstract.  Ironic, given its supposedly biblical pedigree, Piper's God is actually an illegitimate theological generalization.

Lets start slow.  Piper claims (direct quote): "[God] governs everything.  And everything He does is just and right and good.  God owes us nothing."  There are several parts that need to be unpacked.  Lets go with the second two sentences first, and then we will close with the first.

1.) Euthyphro revisited 

"Everything He does is just and right and good.  God owes us nothing."

A partial step in the argument that Piper's God is an abstraction regards the horn of the Euthyphro dilemma he falls on.  Plato, in his dialogue by the name of Euthyphro has Socrates pose the question: is the pious soul pious because he loves the gods?  Or is he pious because he is loved by the gods?

Or put in the way it often shows up in philosophy courses (as it became transposed into the monotheistic Christian context): Does God will that which is good because it is good?  Or is that which God wills good because God wills it?

This perhaps seems like an esoteric debate, but to answer it one way or the other will radically change the meaning of Piper's statement: "everything [God] does is just and right and good."

The way it seems to play in Piper's theology is that things are good because God wills them.  God is not constrained, even by His nature.  God does what is just, because anything God does is justice; God cannot lie because anything God says becomes true; God is good because goodness is whatever God does.  This is to put words in Piper's mouth a bit however, so let us investigate further to make our point that Piper has chosen the more voluntarist interpretation of the Euthyphro problem.

"God owes us nothing."

But already this doesn't seem to ring completely true, does it?  Perhaps this is somewhat hyperbolic on Piper's part because it comes both from a spoken interview, and one in which atheist objections are being addressed.  If so, so be it.  And certainly God is sovereign.  But as stated, it is untrue, biblically, theologically, and philosophically.

Thus of course God is God; Piper is right on that account.  God is sovereign, all-powerful.  That is not the issue.  The issue is how these are defined, and how they relate to our theology as a whole.  To say that "God owes us nothing" is true, but only trivially so.  And when pressed to proper levels of theological inquiry it becomes patently false.  It becomes an idol, devouring everything concrete.  It constructs a faceless God apart from how God has acted in Christ and the Spirit, and indeed how He has acted at different times throughout Israel's history: "the operation of God is His utterance to all creatures of the Word of God which has all the force and wisdom and goodness of His Holy Spirit.  Or, to put it in another way, the operation of God is His moving of all creatures by the force and wisdom of goodness which are His Holy Spirit, the Spirit of His Word." (Barth, CD III/3 p.105)

"God owes us nothing" is a vapid construct because it sets up a false and abstract problem which creates the framing for Pipers abstract solution.  The issue is not what God owes us, but what God wants for us; what God is doing.  Biblically "God owes us nothing" is not just untrue because God makes covenants and He is faithful to them and all His other promises because "God cannot lie"  (Titus 1:2; Hebrews 6:18). It also fails to really be a meaningful, or at least robust, unit of Christian discourse because the Biblical thought-world just does not seem to be thinking in the terms Piper has set his questions. 

Yes, grace implies God owes us nothing; that is what grace is after all--unmerited.  Yet to think this settles the question is a bit odd.  "For God so loved the world," after all, is the condition for that grace: "He chose us in [Christ] before the foundations of the world ... In love He predestined us" (Eph. 1:4-5); and that love of God--that God is--is not some abstract concept: "God, as love, is communion in action: specifically, the act of willing the good and enjoying union.  In willing the good, God wills not some abstract quality greater than God, but his own being and triune life." (Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology, 258)

This Biblical evidence seems to be backed up theologically and philosophically.  Kevin Hector writes (not on Piper specifically, but it seems apt): "to suggest that God cannot use God's freedom to bind Godself [to covenant] ... would be to make God a servant of God's freedom and thus 'God' a predicate of 'freedom' rather than vice-versa." (IJST 7 (2005):256)

Let's look at someone who, in a manner, chooses the other side of the Euthyphro dilemma than Piper (not consciously of course, the Euthyphro dilemma is merely my heuristic to make a point).  Athanasius, in On the Incarnation, writes that "It would, of course, have been unthinkable that God should go back on His word and that man, having transgressed should not die; but it was equally monstrous that beings which once had shared the nature of the Word should perish and turn back again into non-existence through corruption.  It was unworthy of the goodness of God that creatures made by Him should be brought to nothing..." (On the Incarnation, 32).  Athanasius then a few sentences later remarks: "Was he to let corruption and death have their way with [humanity]?  In that case, what was the use of having made them in the beginning?  Surely it would have been better never to have been created at all than, having been created, to be neglected and perish; and besides that, such indifference to the ruin of His work before His very eyes would argue not goodness in God but limitation, and that far more than if He had never created man at all." (Ibid.)

Thus according to Athanasius God does "owe" us, but only because He owes Himself.  It would be beneath God's love and majesty to let us stew in our own juices, as it were.  This is not a construct or deduction from some "natural theology."  Rather it reflects Athanasius' understanding of who God is as revealed in Christ.  This is the ultimate interpretive key to all other statements.  God is sovereign, yes.  But God's sovereignty is His love and grace (and yes, judgment) expressed in the generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit, and their economy in the history of salvation.  This seems to me to be a contrast to Piper, one sufficiently (if not wholly adequately) expressed by two sides of the Euthyphro dilemma (while noting that Athanasius does not believe God submits to an exterior standard of goodness like Plato's forms, rather the standard of Goodness is God's eternal nature as Triune love and beauty).  Piper's God does what is good and true and just, but these terms ultimately seem to become devoid of any structure, absent from any index, or at least, made prior and apart from God's ultimate revelation in Christ.

2.) Is God just the Great Tautology in the sky?  

What does it mean for God to will everything?

Piper once more: "Everybody who dies, dies because God wills that they die." And: "God governs everything."

I ask this because if God indeed wills everything as Piper fairly explicitly states, then "Can contemporary theologians still affirm that God (literally) does anything?" (Philip Clayton, Adventures in Spirit, ch. 14).  This perhaps appears as an odd reversal.  Of course, it seems to follow that if God does everything, then since anything is part of everything, that is precisely what God does.  

This is where David Hart's quote all the way at the beginning above comes in: there are explanations that become so comprehensive they actually don't explain anything, and are mere tautologies.  Piper's (very serious) view sounds like the joke we learn as church-goers in middle school: to any question, answer Jesus or God and its a pretty safe bet you just covered the spread. Why do plants grow?  God did it.  Why do nuns risk their bodies to serve lepers?  God did it.  Holocaust?  God did it.  The Lisbon earthquake?  God did it.  Infant torture?  God did it.  Sex trafficking?  God did it.  Rwandan genocide?  God.

God did it.

But, sort of like it is put in the Pixar movie The Incredibles: if everyone is special, no one is.  If God does everything, it explains precisely nothing.  Vanhoozer puts it thus: "theology has little that is distinct to offer either the church or the academy if it is able to say nothing reasonable about God or to make only arbitrary judgments about what is said or done in God's name." (Remythologizing Theology, 188).  Ironically Piper's statement, meant to counter the secularists and atheists who have banished God from thought, does just the opposite and in its broadness erases God from the world, precisely because it renders "God" an empty term.

Or to put it another way: if God wills everything (in the way Piper intends) then we learn nothing about God from anything.  This was one of Hume's basic complaints in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.  A God discerned from everything in nature is both good and evil; both merciful and a tyrant.  On this view what on earth could it mean to say that God is "good"?  To say this of course means we need a parameter that names God's goodness (i.e. God declaring Himself before Moses as full of mercy and faithfulness), allows us to parse goodness, from, say, the demonic.  This seems to reconfirm from another angle Piper's view (as we argued briefly in the last section) that literally anything God does is good by definition; thus by extension "good" is an entirely arbitrary category subordinate to volition (and by extension into theological ethics, anything ethical or "good" that we do is merely the byproduct of fiat).  As Hart writes: 

"To assert that every finite contingency is solely an unambiguously the effect of a single will working all things--without any deeper mystery of created freedom--is to assert nothing but that the world is what it is, for any meaningful distinction between the will of God and the simple totality of cosmic eventuality has collapsed.  If all that occurs, in the minutest detail and in the entirety of its design, is only the expression of one infinite volition that makes no real room within its transcendent determinations for other, secondary, subsidiary but free agencies (and so for some element of chance and absurdity), then the world is both arbitrary and necessary, both meaningful in every part and meaningless in its totality, an expression of pure power and nothing else." (Doors of the Sea, 29-30).

But of course this radical view is a straw man.  Piper obviously doesn't believe (or at least, shouldn't) that God wills each persons death in the same way.  In fact laudably Piper notes "it gets difficult when [God] uses others [to kill]."  The Christian tradition is replete with such distinctions: primary and secondary causality; antecedent and consequent will; creation and preservation; categories based on the fourfold of Aristotelian causes; and so on...

Or observe this wonderful quote from Herbert McCabe that has a key and vital difference from Piper's undifferentiated hermeneutic to read God from the world:

“It is true that not everything we see is evidence for the goodness of God (sin is not evidence for the goodness of God), but the point is that it is not evidence for his badness. This odd situation arises because we do not see the goodness of God in itself. The meaning we give to phrases like ‘the goodness of God’, or the word ‘God’ itself, derives not from what we know of the nature of God but from what we know of creatures. It is as though we only had a few fragments of a map of God. Everything we can see on the map points to his goodness, but there are many bits missing. The holes in the map (sin and evil) are places where God is not shown to be good. They are not places where he is shown not to be good. The world is a bad map of God. But it is not the map of a bad God”  (Faith Within Reason p.92)

To read the world as a map of God, however, we have to have a prior discernment of categories as what constitutes the terrain, and what constitutes holes and flaws in the map.  Piper gives us no such differentiation.

Whatever Piper believes, what he expressed in the interview appears (sounds) like he is representing God as the direct, efficient cause of death: "God is taking life every day. He will take 50,000 lives today. Life is in God's hand. God decides when your last heartbeat will be, and whether it ends through cancer or a bullet wound. God governs."  At the end of the day Piper is putting death squarely in God's direct agency.

Of course if we look at it closely, Piper is implicitly invoking secondary agencies: cancer, bullets (elsewhere, terrorists).  But look also at how the construction works: God decides.  This is a fairly depressing supralapsarian vision: from the foundations of the world God decided my grandfather would suffer from Alzheimer's disease which was accelerated by his horrendous grief at my grandmother's sudden passing from colon cancer (also predetermined).  But lets put this issue aside since it is not what we are investigating. 

It is at this point where I am genuinely confused about why Piper thought he was answering a question, because I frankly have no idea what he meant.  How does God decide my death and how is He involved in it?  At an abstract level God is the "cause" insofar as He is the cause of our "to be" (a la Thomas Aquinas) He is "the one in whom we live, move, and have our being."  But of course this seems to be much too minimalist to really fit what Piper is saying.  What then does he mean?  God does a lot of actions in the bible, but does them in different ways.

He speaks and things pop into existence.  He speaks to the earth and deputizes it and the sea to produce of their own accord.  He (somehow directly) divides light from darkness.  He converses with people and, at least prima facie, takes their opinions into account.  He preforms miraculous interventions in which physical effects take place with some sense of what Del Ratzsche calls "counterflow" i.e. the miraculous events bear the mark of immediate divine activity (God might be controlling the Reed sea at all times, but a conceptual distinction still must therefore be made between that general providential agency and the specific splitting of the sea).  The Son becomes Incarnate as Christ, touches, converses, confronts people and nature in that form.  Indwells people as the Holy Spirit in relation to Christ and the Father.  He is likened to a potter.  He uses the Assyrians (unbeknownst to them) for His plans though the Assyrians think they are just looking out for themselves.

In what sense then does Piper mean God wills each person's death?  He does not elaborate and so we can not speculate.  Yet I think it is pertinent to keep questions in mind like: if God is in control of every death, how does one conceptually distinguish those deaths from, say Ananias and Sapphira's more miraculous and immediate death by God?  Are they just an accelerated instance of what occurs generally?  How would one know that, how would one justify that statement or go about investigating it?  Or: when a branch falls in the forest my first inclination is not to think God tore it off and threw it down.  Rather as a first hypothesis some sort of methodological naturalism is in order (tree rot, termites, lightning, whatever...) even if at an ontological level I can affirm that of course God is sustaining the tree, interacting with it, et al.  How does this then fit into an overall picture of providence? (The mind boggles...)

Now, in order to anticipate a possible criticism: what I am not suggesting is that Piper is at fault because he has not created a theologically and philosophically rigorous account of different sorts of "causal joints" between God and the world.  To my mind this is an enormous problem to which no one has (or perhaps even can) provide entirely adequate descriptions.  What I am saying, is that Piper's lack of elaboration is in itself, in a sense, telling in this context.  This is a man who knows.  Why does Piper not hold back?  Why no nuance?  Why the blanket statement that God decides each persons death and He can slaughter at will?  He essentially equates God's general governance with God's specific choices for each individual's life and death, and then again glosses this whole theme with the agent-term "slaughter."  How does Piper know what he knows? (This is an important question we will come back to).  Again it seems that certain preconceived forms of agency have in a sense become an idol, devouring everything concrete.

And perhaps just as importantly why does Piper use the term "slaughter?" at all?  Yes, it is introduced into the conversation because it is the same term used in the question Piper is attempting to answer.  But why not reject the term?  Why not even mention 2 Peter 3:9 ("God desires that none should perish but all should come to repentence.") Or Abraham talking with God in Genesis 18; or...  But no:  "It is right for God to slaughter whomever he pleases."  Whatever nuance Piper might have when writing books is lost as God is portrayed here in the monochrome like a sort of inscrutable titan dolling out misery as he sees fit.

Yet, this seems to just give the game away.  Yes, God does slaughter people--and is a monster--but, well, its God, He's entitled.  Moreover slaughter is a very interesting agent-term.  Why this one?  Slaughter usually refers either to large-scale massacres, or the act of preparing animals for either sacrifice or meals.  Here, I think, we hit upon an interesting crux.  Obviously there are nearly endless technical details and discussions that must be had on exactly how God is involved in events.  I think, these technical issues aside, Piper's choice of terminology is in part what has riled everyone.  Slaughter in this sense seems to be a very dark--and very direct--term for agency.  Which is odd.  On Piper's own view its God's right to kill.  His use of the word "slaughter" then by his own rules seems fairly careless--and callous.  It misrepresents his own vision of God (however much I disagree with it). Slaughter would then seem to be, on Piper's own terms, a very anthropomorphic descriptor.  But the way Piper sets it up in his interview seems to slide easily from the idea of God's general sovereignty and governance to its specific exemplar in "slaughter," so that to question "slaughter" as an agent-term seems to many to pull the whole lynchpin out and attack God's sovereignty.  But this is not the case. 

Moreover, in not clarifying exactly how God is involved in governance and as an agent in death Piper does not help the case against atheism (and creates nightmares pastorally, I think) because he never addresses why God doesn't intervene in cases like the holocaust, or in the torture of babies (his implicit answer: God is intervening because He is the one who has gone a'holocaustin').

We haven't even addressed the issue of sin.  What is it?  God cannot sin, of course.  Can God cause sin?  And what would that mean?  There is, for example, the instance of Pharoah hardening his heart/God hardens Pharoah's heart.  But what does this mean itself?  Did God directly do this, an invisible hand from the sky coming down and twisting the gears of Pharoah's heart just so?  Or is it meant to reference God acting through Moses and Aaron, the plagues, etc... and Pharoah's reaction to them?  This is an important question too because it relates to God's governance and human freedom.  Augustine defined sin as "privation" (following a long tradition going back at least to Origin, and based in Platonic themes) because of the following dilemma of God's agency: God created all things.  Sin exists.  God created sin.  QED.  Augustine (rightly) did not think this possible.  Therefore he defined sin as a "privation" of the good.  It is not a "thing" per se.  This has been largely misunderstood to mean that sin is nothing, as in insubstantial.  "Nothing" for Augustine, however, means something more along the lines of whatever is disordered, not directed to God.  This is because "being" is not a static term but a movement of love.  Thus everything sinful is disordered love: it maintains a vague similarity to the motion and outlines of a properly ordered love, but it is contorted, twisted, damaged.  The upshot is really that this must itself play into the discussion of agency.  God, it seems, cannot directly cause sin, even if he can order it to his own ends (e.g. the Assyrians).

Conclusions?

At then end of the day all of this is meant to say: we need to be more complex in our thinking, less prone to catchphrase theology like Piper is guilty of in this instance (and I'm sure I have been guilty many times).  His picture is too neat; it obviates asking questions that need to be asked.  Especially this: how does Piper know what he knows?  Certainly the immediate answer would be: just read scripture, dummy.  But it is no so simple as all of that.  Piper takes several specific instances (Caananite genocide, e.g.) and then generalizes them  into a systematic framework for God's agency at large (it is right for God to slaughter anyone at any time).  But how is this being true to the biblical text?  It has, in effect, abstracted the story into a principle.  His equation of God's sovereignty and governance with the direct-agent term "slaughter" and "right to kill" is actually establishing a complex theological tool that allows him to connect a variety of texts together and is not "merely reading scripture."  This is not in and of itself bad - we all have to construct systems to read scripture, and we all bring presuppositions to the text.  My complaint is more that Piper does so without speaking about Christology or pneumatology. Of course he cannot include everything in an interview, but his choice to start with the inscrutable decrees of God inevitably shapes the discussion.  But what if (however horrifying it still is) God only did this at this time?  How are we justified, how could it be justified, to claim God is working like this today when we simply do not have the proper tools to discern this?  Or, whats more, if everything is this act of God then we could never discern this because it is a meaningless statement.  Like saying water is wet because its water.  Theology on this account becomes not only utterly simplistic, but disastrously empty of content.

To wit: Only God can reveal God.  And in fact this is why so often God speaks, which Vanhoozer hammers home in all of his works: because events in themselves are ambiguous.  They do not speak.  They do not tell stories.  If even the explicit instances of God's agency in scripture require meticulous and careful parsing and definition, examining the types of agency involved, how much more should we be cautious to extend them as general principles used to interpret the (oh so silent) world at large.

We should close with Calvin's warning quoted above: "All thinking about God, apart from Christ, is a bottomless abyss."; it seems from this interview (let it not be forgotten I said that) that Piper has merely baptized that abyss and given it the attribute "will."

Apart from Christ I can do nothing, and this nothing certainly also involves confident and boisterous proclamations of reading the world-text with such ease to detect traces of God's providence (I am reminded of Piper a few years back proclaiming that a tornado which touched down and destroyed a Lutheran church discussing on how to interact with the gay community as the wrath of God).  We must be cautious to not discard the context of biblical statements as ladders to be climbed into principles and then kicked away.  Because our principles often become too broad, too all encompassing.  This is especially dangerous when our theorizing leads us to tautologize history as God's slaughterbench, rather than the arena whose inner-constitution is God's covenant of salvation (Barth) and the glorious good news of Christ.