David Bernstein notes differences in how we attribute success or failure:
I’ve noticed that Americans have a tendency to publicly attribute any success they have had–anything ranging from winning a Little League playoff game to winning the lottery–to God’s intervention on their behalf. But I haven’t noticed a countervailing tendency to blame God when things go wrong, an especially annoying defect in the sports world, where victories are freely attributed to Jesus’s blessings. If God wanted the Marlins to win the World Series, doesn’t that mean he wanted the Yankees to lose? Just once, I’d like to see the losing Super Bowl quarterback tell the media “Guess Jesus really had it in for me today.”
It may be an overgeneralization, but there’s some truth to it. A couple ideas of why.
- It’s prideful to attribute success to one’s own merits. It comes across as bragging. That said, there are plenty of people who say, “Yeah, we really all played hard today, and that’s why we won.”
- It’s nice to think that God is blessing you materially and with success. It’s scary to think that God is punishing you materially or with failure. On the other hand, while I’ve found folks who thank Jesus (etc.) for the good things in their life to often be pleasant and, well, thankful, folks who attribute their failures to God’s displeasure usually react by becoming puritanical and fundamentalist (very OT), which is often not all that good a thing.
- Blaming God, especially over something like a football game or the lottery, seems improper and/or asking for further trouble. If we are going to lament, Job-like, we tend to do so in private, in the dark of night.
- Some folks do say things like, “I guess it just wasn’t meant to be,” or, “I guess God had other plans in mind.” But, particularly in the arena of sports, that sort of attitude would sound fatalistic; sports is a “can-do” field, and while it’s nice to appreciate God doing something nice for you, “God helps he who makes TDs himself,” so to speak.
While not being willing to discount by any means divine intervention in human affairs, reading it into fortune (or failure) is an iffy proposition at best. It gets into a very tangled thicket of free will vs predestination, why God lets bad things happen to good people, and other thorny conundra that are uncomfortable to examine, let alone assert.
Still, an interesting observation.
(On a related topic, pre- rather than post-event, consider Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer,” too.)
An interesting perspective can be found in the writings of psychologist and Colorado Christian University professor, Dr. Larry Crabb. In his book, Shattered Dreams, he disabuses us of the concept of a “useful” God.
Evangelical theology posits that a relationship with God is our summum bonum. Dr. Crabb explores this to its logical conclusion. What this means is that God works more in denying our dreams rather than granting them. That is because even for good dreams (health, good family relations, ministry and church goals) these can be a substitute for a relationship with God.
That being said, God encourages the public expression of our pain. Contrast the complaints found in the Psalms with the American practice of Stoic suffering. It is a great disservice to unbelievers to pretend that Christians are immune to pain. In fact, my experience is that Christians experience more pain than those who are not. 2 Cor. 1 tells us this is so that we can relate with the World and their pain and struggles and provide them true comfort.
Interesting. Not terribly comforting, of course — but, then, that’s the point.
There’s comfort here. The comfort is the realization that even in our pain we have fellowship with God. The Apostle Paul put it that as we have fellowship with our Lord’s suffering we will also have fellowship with our Lord’s glory (Phil. 3:10-11).
The next time you have Communion note how it looks back and looks forward. Looking back you see the pain and sacrifice of our Lord. Looking forward you will note our Lord’s words of the next time he will have this meal with us it will be at the fulfillment of His Kingdom (Luke 22:15). By taking the Lord’s Supper we share in (that is, have communion with) both His pain and His glory.