Article
Belief
Comment
Death & life
Politics
Providence
5 min read

Did God save Donald Trump?

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt, Graham Tomlin asks whether or not we can see the hand of God in it

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Red hat with the words Make America Great Again

Given the polarised nature of American politics and the venomous nature of the debates, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump was not entirely a surprise, even if a massive shock to the system. It was both tragic for those who were killed and yet a relief for everyone that Trump survived, not least for the unimaginable consequences across the country if he had not.

It doesn’t take a very deep dive into the maelstrom that is Twitter/X these days, to discover a common theme among Trump supporters - that God shielded him from a certain death. “God protected President Trump,” Senator Marco Rubio posted. “God saved the life of Donald Trump” say a million others, confident that the seemingly miraculous slight head tilt at the moment of the shot that ensured the bullet hit his ear, not going through the back of his temple, was a moment of divine intervention.

Yet look elsewhere on X and you can find vast numbers of people equally certain that this is complete nonsense. God did not save Donald Trump, either because there is no God to save anyone, or because if there is a God, either he doesn’t intervene at all, or even if he did, he certainly wouldn’t want to save the likes of Donald Trump.

If God saved Trump, they say, why did he not save the life of Corey Comperatore, the volunteer fireman who was killed by bullets fired from the gun that was used in the attack?  Trump supporters respond with the claim that Trump has a special calling, justifying divine intervention, to ‘restore the Judaeo-Christian heritage to America’ as one tweet put it.

So, which is it?

Christian thinkers have normally held to the possibility that God can and does, at decisive moments, interrupt the normal flow of history.

Christian thinkers have normally held to the possibility that God can and does, at decisive moments, interrupt the normal flow of history. After all, the central Christian claim is that he did this in remarkable acts of deliverance such as the Exodus, at key moments in the history of Israel and most importantly in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And, they claim, he does it in less prominent ways, as testimonies to prayers answered and apparently miraculous occurrences suggest.

Yet divine interventions like this are by definition rare. In one of Douglas Coupland’s novels, one of the characters ponders a Christian group that expects constant miracles: “They’re always asking for miracles and finding them everywhere. In as much as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God - I think that he created an order for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding him with requests for miracles, we are also asking that he unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon, not a world.” He has a point.

Yet a world without any interventions at all would be a world which God had seemed to abandon to its fate. The idea that God set up his world to run like clockwork with no further intervention is Deism, not Christianity, a theology popular in the C17th and C18th, still found today, but leaves God watching us from a safe and uninvolved distance. It would lead to the conclusion that God did not really care that much about the world, leaving it to its own devices, especially when evil runs riot and nothing seems to prevent it. Such interventions are best seen as signs, special indications that do not ‘unravel the fabric of the world’, yet are tangible reminders that even though it is broken, God has not given up on this world, and will one day redeem it.

Yet if God can and does step in at certain moments to divert the course of history in a fallen and broken world, that doesn’t mean that every claim to divine intervention is genuine. So how can you tell? Who do we believe?

If God can and does step in at certain moments to divert the course of history in a fallen and broken world, that doesn’t mean that every claim to divine intervention is genuine. So how can you tell? Who do we believe?

At several points in the Old Testament, writers wonder how you can tell the true prophet from the false. One of them answers like this: “If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken.”

To be honest, this doesn’t appear to help much. You can tell if a person has got it right if their prediction comes true, but at the time, you have no idea whether it will come true or not, so it still leaves you in the dark as to who to believe.

Yet it does suggest an important insight. You can only tell God’s intervention retrospectively. You can only say with a degree of confidence that God has ‘intervened’ when looking back on events and seeing how they turn out.

If Donald Trump is elected, and somehow brings about harmony and flourishing for as many people in the USA as possible, stabilises the economy, enabling all people to live a decent life, not just the rich and powerful, restores a sense of civility and generosity to public life, resists the forces of harm and evil in the nation and in the world, and brings freedom for Christians and others to practice and promote their faith, then maybe we might look back in future years and say that God did step in on July 14th 2024 to frustrate the purposes of evil in the world.

Yet if none of that happens, and what results from his survival is instead a deeper fracturing of social cohesion, a coarsening of public debate, a siege mentality that divides the world between ‘us’ and ‘them’, an increasing divide between the rich and the poor, the elites and ordinary people, then we might in future say it was mere chance, one of those random things that happen in this created yet fallen world with its mysterious blend of order and chaos.

Which will it be? Time will tell. Until then, we’d better be cautious about claims of divine intervention. Not because God never does it, but because we’re not very good at telling when it happens.

Article
Books
Comment
Language
5 min read

Reading Don Quixote is making me a better person

Learning from Cervantes’ mistakes
Statues of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza point toward a windmill
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza statues, Tandil, Argentina.
Alena Grebneva, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I love reading, but I’m not very well read. As is often the case, a curmudgeonly teacher quashed any interest I had in literature in my last few years of school; the increasing creep of technology and social media into my life means my diminishing attention span often makes reading seem a herculean task. It’s a long time to sit still and not doomscroll.  

It’s only in recent years that I’ve rediscovered a love of reading. As part of this, I’m trying to right some literary wrongs.  

Okay, confession time: I’ve never read anything by Jane Austin, the Bronte sisters, George Elliot, Tolstoy, or Proust. I haven’t read The Lord of the Rings or Moby Dick nor To The Lighthouse or Heart of Darkness. I know. Bad, isn’t it? I could go on, too … 

I love reading, but I’m not very well read.  

And so I’m making an effort to read some of the Great Books of the canon. At the moment, I’m reading Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Crucially, I’m reading Edith Grossman’s 2003 translation of the novel. It is an absolute joy.  

I had heard that it was deeply funny, and a work of genius; neither aspect of the text has been a surprise to me. But there’s something about Grossman’s translation in particular that has caught me off guard: the mistakes.   

Not any mistakes by Grossman. I know nothing whatsoever about Spanish, let alone 17th Century Spanish (another dream crushed by another teacher), but the English text is a marvel. Eminently readable and funny without compromising the occasional complexity of Cervantes’ prose.  

No: I mean the mistakes by Cervantes himself. Early on, a footnote from Grossman points out that Sancho Panza (Don Quixote’s long-suffering squire) refers to his wife using several different names throughout the text. Without Grossman’s footnotes, I’m sure I would have overthought this. What is the author trying to say about Sancho Panza? Is it a comment on his intelligence? Or the character’s view of women, perhaps? Am I just too dense to understand what’s going on here? 

Grossman’s assessment? It’s just “an oversight”. A mistake. And quite a basic one, at that. Later on, Cervantes divides up his chapters, using those brief sentences summarising their contents that are common in this period (“Chapter III, In which …”). But they’re all wrong. Things are said to happen in Chapter X that don’t actually happen until Chapter XV; the chapter summaries are a mess, frankly.  

One of the things that made me reluctant to read Great Books for so long is that they’re intimidating. They are certified Works of Genius and therefore probably a bit much for my little brain to digest. Many of the archetypical Great Books compound this by being incredibly long, too: think Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, or even more recent candidates like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob. Don Quixote itself runs to nearly 1,000 pages long; it carries a literal and literary heft to it. 

But there it is. Full of mistakes. 

It turns out to have been quite an opportune moment for me to read Don Quixote. I’m in the final stages of preparing for my second book to come out. (It’s an academic Christian theology book, so will probably sell slightly less than Don Quixote but will certainly cost much more to buy). This means it’s been quite a stressful season for me, as I try to catch any lingering mistakes that might have somehow slipped through the myriad rounds of copyediting, or find myself wondering if the book isn’t just so bad that I’m going to be forced to return my PhD, leave academia forever, and by sued by my publisher for besmirching their good name by association.  

This has also been a time of being deeply frustrated with my own humanity. Why aren’t I a better writer? Why can’t I spell properly? Why aren’t I more creative? Why aren’t I better at this? Why am I so … limited

As an academic, imposter syndrome never really goes away. You just learn to cope with it. And reading Don Quixote and seeing these mistakes in the text has helped me reframe who I am, and my own limitations. Here is a text that is human; completely and utterly human. And so, naturally, here is a text with mistakes; text that is imperfect and flawed. And therein lies its part of its charm. It is rough and coarse, and I love it for that. The mistakes in Don Quixote haven’t detracted from my enjoyment of the text, they’ve enhanced it. They’ve underscored the beautiful humanity that is so evident in Cervantes’ work.  

The Christian Bible is at pains to tell me that I am “fearfully and wonderfully made,” as the Psalmist puts it. I can be so quick to forget this when I focus all my attention on my limitations, and flaws, and missteps. This is why I’m so grateful for Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote. Above all else, I’m grateful for its mistakes. Like me, it is utterly human. Like me, this means it is utterly flawed. Like me, that makes it a work of utter beauty. 

Don Quixote is helping me to recognise the inherent beauty of my limitations as a creature. In doing so, it’s helping me to recognise the inherent beauty of the One who created me. It’s helping me to fall more in love with the God who sent His Son to Earth to become human like me, to revel in and live alongside me in my humanity. Warts and all. 

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
 
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief