Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
The Will of God: How to Know It?

The Will of God: How to Know It?

Last updated on: March 20, 2022 at 6:23 am by Vance Morgan

The Will of God: How to Know It? 2022-03-20T06:23:42-04:00 Vance Morgan

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Midterm grades are due on my campus by midnight Wednesday; last Wednesday was the official midpoint of the semester. In my “Faith and Doubt” colloquium, we are starting two weeks on the work of Simone Weil after spending the first half of the semester, in order of appearance, with Anne Lamott, Job, Michel de Montaigne, Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, with Ludwig van Beethoven thrown in for musical relief four weeks or so ago.

Although they have been game and have (usually) met the high bar set by their professors, it is clear that the journey so far has been a challenging and heavy slog for the students. But what did they expect at 8:30 in the morning from a colloquium called “Faith and Doubt” co-taught by a philosopher and a political scientist who is also a Dominican Catholic priest? It’s one of the most intense courses I’ve ever been involved with, even though the authors I am responsible for working into the syllabus are ones whom I have taught many times over the years.

But I’ve never taught them together in one course with this unifying thread. It is turning out to be a Master Class in how to subject one’s faith to the acid test of reality—for me. And that makes sense. One of my mentors in my early years of teaching often said, only half-joking, that what we do in the classroom is for the professors more than the students—we just need the students there to pay for what we are doing.

Last week’s work on Dietrich Bonhoeffer brought the text of the previous authors considered into vivid focus. There is nothing more likely to put all of a person’s assumptions and expectations at risk than seeing them all fall apart and become irrelevant in the face of pressing current events. Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor and theologian from a conservative, stable, and privileged family background, concluded that the rising totalitarian power of Hitler and Nazi party could not be addressed within the theological and academic framework with which he had been raised in in which he was trained. The majority of theologians and pastors in Germany led millions of professing Christians into either actively supporting the Nazis’ nationalist and racist ideology or at least turning a blind eye to policies and actions that violated any recognizable definition of Christian faith.

Bonhoeffer soon concluded that words were insufficient; action was necessary. Although his Protestant tradition and the influence of the great theologian Karl Barth taught him to respect the Bible as the authoritative Word of God, Bonhoeffer came to believe that determining what God wanted him to do was not a matter of principles, rules, or texts. He wrote that

The will of God is not a system of rules established from the outset. It is something new and different in each situation in life. And for this reason, a man must forever reexamine what the will of God may be. The will of God may lie deeply concealed beneath a great number of possibilities.

How does a person of faith determine the will of God? Bonhoeffer concluded that ethical behavior is rooted not in a set of principles, but in the willingness to open oneself to the will of God and do God’s command.

But how is the will of God to be discovered? I reminded my students in seminar of a text we studied a few weeks ago, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. The centerpiece of this work is Abraham, whom Kierkegaard uses as an illustration of both the uncertainty and danger of committing oneself wholly to faith. “How did Abraham know with certainty that God had commanded him to sacrifice his son Isaac?” “He didn’t know,” several responded, remembering our conversation. Neither can Bonhoeffer be sure of what the will of God is. As recently departed Archbishop Desmond Tutu comments at a relevant point in a documentary about Bonhoeffer’s life concerning the will of God:

There is no shaft of light that comes from heaven that says “Okay, my son or my daughter, you are right.” You have to hold on to it by the skin of your teeth, and hope that there is going to be vindication on the other side.

Commit, act, then hold on by the skin of your teeth. Hardly the traditional description of following the will of God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer evolved over the course of a couple of years from a dedicated pacifist and respected academic to the leader of an underground (and illegal) seminary and a member of the resistance movement against Hitler and the Nazis, a movement that in time fashioned several unsuccessful attempts to assassinate the Fuhrer. The vast majority of the conspirators, including Bonhoeffer, were found out and arrested. Bonhoeffer spent the last two-plus years of his life in prison. In one of his letters to his friend Eberhard Bethge, letters that have become classics in twentieth-century Christian theology and thought, Bonhoeffer wrote that

Later on, I discovered, and am still discovering to this day, that one only learns to have faith by living in the full this-worldliness of life . . .One throws oneself completely into the arms of God, and this is what I call this-worldliness: living fully in the midst of life’s tasks, questions, successes and failures, experiences, and perplexities.

Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison sketched a “religionless Christianity,” a commitment to faith that is uncertain, provisional, and dangerous. Bonhoeffer was executed, as were virtually all of his co-conspirators, just weeks before the end of World War II.

Simone Weil, whose dates are virtually the same as Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s, has the following to say about determining the will of God.

The will of God. How to know it? If we make a quietness within ourselves, if we silence all desires and opinions and if with love, without formulating any words, we bind our whole soul to think “Thy will be done,” the thing which after that we feel sure we should do (even though in certain respects we may be mistaken) is the will of God. For if we ask him for bread, he will not give us a stone.

Depending on one’s assumptions, this statement from Weil is either radically provisional or distinctly empowering. There is nothing of the certainty and confidence that persons of faith would appreciate and often seek when determining the divine will. But there is a confidence expressed that, to me at least, is entirely in keeping with the Incarnation, the central truth of Christianity that God gets into the world through human beings. As the Jewish scriptures say, “the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, that you may obey it” (Deut. 30:14).

Previous Post

March 19, 2022

Hanging Out with the World's Most Interesting Man

Next Post

March 23, 2022 Have Yourself an Introspective Day

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abortion Advent AI Angels Artificial intelligence atheism attention baptism Baptists beauty belief Benedictines Bible bicycling Big Bird books Bovina Camaldoli hermitage Canada Catholicism cats certainty change Christianity Christmas Collegeville Covid-19 creativity Development of Western Civilization dogs doubt Easter Enneagram Epiphany Episcopal ethics Eucharist evil extroverts Facebook faith family fear flowers forgiveness freedom friends God goodness grace happiness heaven hell history Holy Spirit Holy Week hope human nature humility humor idolatry incarnation introverts irreverence Islam Jeanne Jesus Joe Biden joy Judaism justice Kamala Harris knowledge Lent listen literature liturgy love Marsue Memorial Day miracles movies music mystery mythology NPR Old Testament optimism paradox peace Penguins philosophy piano podcast politics power prayer Protestantism Providence College Religion Rhode Island sabbatical sacrament science seeing silence Simone Weil Socrates soul sports St. John's College stories suffering tattoo teaching technology television theology thinking time tolerance transcendence travel trees trust truth Uncategorized Vermont wisdom wonder writing

Select a Month May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz