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History in the hands of an angry God

History in the hands of an angry God

Last updated on: July 30, 2026 at 5:26 pm by Fred Clark

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History in the hands of an angry God 2026-07-30T17:26:16-04:00 Fred Clark

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Step into the pulpit and proclaim that “There is none righteous, no not one” and you’ll get an Amen.

That’s scripture after all. The Word of the Lord, thanks be to God. Paul said that in Romans, quoting from the Psalms.*

You can start with that observation and go on to preach a fiery sermon about the pervasive sinfulness of fallen human nature and no one will object. You can cite the prophets and the Gospels and Paul and work your way on through Augustine and the Reformers on up to 20th-century theologians — Reinhold Niebuhr or C.S. Lewis, depending on the audience — and the congregation will nod along, never complaining that the sweeping claims you’re making about all of humanity are unfair or untrue.

“We are all as an unclean thing,” you can intone, “and all our righteousness is as filthy rags” and no one in the congregation will take offense or object or deny the harsh truth you are quoting there from the book of Isaiah.

The complaints and objections only arise if you get more specific. If your next sentence happens to mention that George Washington owned slaves, you’re suddenly in trouble.

That’s … interesting.

Say that the righteousness of every and any mortal human is as filthy rags and you will get an amen. But say that the righteousness of George Washington is as filthy rags and you’ll get booed. Say that the righteousness of George Whitefield is as filthy rags and you’ll get chased out of the church.

I was thinking about all of that when I read this post from Jacob Randolph about the challenge of having to condense his two-semester intro-to-Christian history survey course into a single semester. That’s not going to be easy. (My advice: Hire a cattle auctioneer to record an audio version of Justo Gonzalez’s Story of Christianity and then play that for students at 2x speed.)

Randolph has some insightful thoughts on what he does, and doesn’t, want to include in the syllabus of his reworked class:

If the church history classroom has had any longstanding issue (it’s had many), it’s been confessionalization of one form or another—white hats and black hats. To be honest, students will get plenty of that in their lives of ministry. But I was struck by a comment from Eladio Bobadilla in a now-decade-old Perspectives essay. He writes: “A proper work of history, one that captures the past in all its complexity, must strive to understand why our subjects acted and reacted, thought and believed, as they did. If we are to truly understand the past and change the future, a simplistic, moralistic account will not do.” I couldn’t agree more. So I want books that focus on a) putting actions and beliefs in context, and b) keeping historical contingency front and center.

I agree with Randolph here, and mostly** agree with what he quotes from Bobadilla. But it’s interesting to consider how this discussion would be received if it involved any other class for seminary students.

What would happen if one said: “A proper work of theology, one that captures human nature in all its complexity, must strive to understand why our subjects acted and reacted, thought and believed, as they did. … A simplistic, moralistic account will not do”?

Randolph is trying to be a good, responsible historian. As such he wants to avoid “simplistic, moralistic” constructs like “white hats and black hats” — heroes and villains. It seems like the pessimistic view of human nature conveyed in our hypothetical sermon above — and in mainstream, orthodox Christian theology ecumenically, for centuries — can help with that, somewhat. It can help to arm us against seeking “white hats” and heroes and pure champions of goodness.*** And it can help to remind us of the necessity of grace — a grace that has been freely given to us and that we are therefore obliged to freely extend to others.

And yet when historians consistently apply this Augustinian/Niebuhrian pessimism to history — to historical figures and choices and to historically contingent cultures and institutions — they tend to get dismissed as, well, “simplistic” or “moralistic.” Their theological lens is read, instead, as some trendy form of “critical theory.”

That ought to invite some consideration of why it is that so much critical theory turns out to be so closely congruent with what orthodox Christian theology holds to be true of human nature, but somehow that never happens. Like, the response should be to notice that, oh, right — human sinfulness getting embedded in structures and cultures and law is exactly the sort of thing our theology says we should expect! And history, being about humans, cannot be exempted from confession and repentance.

But, nah, instead it just gets perceived as “identity politics” — an all-purpose meaningless dismissal that serves as a prophylactic against noticing things and thinking about them.

Randolph’s post is from the Anxious Bench, the terrific group-blog produced by an ever-changing cast of Christian historians. Randolph is part of the new cohort there of younger scholars whose work is sometimes met with consternation or even condemnation from the Christian historians who wrote for earlier iterations of the Anxious Bench. A good bit of that tension and conflict comes from the way these younger historians are more receptive to the insights of the critical theorists. While the older generation of Anxious Benchers struggled with a reflexive resistance to feminist and outsider perspectives, the younger historians now writing there seem more inclined to recognize that the insights of these critical views are extremely in line with what an orthodox Christian ought to expect.****

If Isaiah and Paul and Augustine and Niebuhr and Calvin, etc., are right about human nature, then we should expect to see exactly the kind of pervasive, embedded, institutionalized, structural forms of injustice the “critical theorists” tend to highlight.

The clearest examples of this right now may be two of the best-selling Christian historians currently working: Kristin Du Mez and Jemar Tisby. Du Mez gets pigeon-holed and dismissed by some evangelical critics as a “feminist” while Tisby gets the same treatment because he writes about racism. But the paramount truth about both of them is that they are Reformed.

And they’re not just a little bit Reformed — not just, like, Presbyterian Reformed. They are thoroughly, pervasively, extremely Reformed. They’re, like, Paul Schrader Film Festival Reformed. (Tisby recently posted a rant about the practice of peso-communion, going full Westminster Confession on the subject.)

Reformed theology is where they’re coming from and it’s where they’re going to. And I would suggest that you can’t fully understand their work unless you appreciate that their conclusions about patriarchy and racism are extremely Reformed conclusions.

I don’t think the negativity directed toward them from older white evangelical historians is primarily due to sexism and racism, or that it is mainly due to an envious resentment of their popular success (although these, alas, all seem to be factors). I think it’s mainly due to the way that the Reformed tradition in the United States has always been adjacent to, but still outside of, white evangelicalism. Grand Rapids and Wheaton ain’t the same thing and they don’t always see eye to eye. (A Dutch Reformed theologian once told me he didn’t trust evangelicals because, “You want to take away our beer.” He was only partly joking.)

The knee-jerk rejection of the extremely Reformed historical perspectives of Du Mez and Tisby is what had me revisiting Jonathan Edwards (in)famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

When Edwards’ view of human nature is compartmentalized and bounded so as to apply only to theology and soteriology, it is affirmed and accepted as orthodox truth. cBut when anyone has the audacity to look at history and say “The Corruption of the Heart of Man is a Thing that is immoderate and boundless in its Fury” they’ll inevitably get chastised for “identity politics” or for succumbing to some trendy form of modern critical theory.

Again, that’s … interesting.

* From two Psalms, both of them attributed as Psalms “of David.”

I’m generally skeptical of that attribution, but that’s especially true in this instance, where I think attributing these lines to King David cheapens them. “No one is perfectly just” and “no one does what is good” are keen theological insights in the abstract, but they take on an entirely different meaning when coming from the mouth of a king. You hear a monarch saying something like that and you know something shady and indefensible is going down in the palace.

This gets especially icky in the case of Psalm 53, which comes so close after David’s great Psalm of contrition and repentance, his heartfelt moan of confession following his condemnation by the prophet Nathan. That confession seems undermined if we have the same David, two chapters later, seeming like he’s saying “Hey, nobody’s perfect, amirite? [shrug emoji].”

** “Simplistic” and “moralistic” are negative words and I, too, wish to avoid negative things.

But these are two particularly interesting negative words in that they are based on, and easily confused with, two virtuous words: simple and moral. History should not be simplistic and moralistic, but it cannot avoid morality and it cannot complicate away the simple truths that remain simple and true regardless.

Moral is the more obviously positive word there. To be moral is good, literally by definition. And the distinction between this Good Thing and its deformed offshoot is easier to understand. We respect those who are moral, but not those who are “moralistic.” The latter invites suspicion because scolds who obsess about the morality of others often turn out to be trying to distract us from looking to closely at their own behavior and choices.

“Simple” is less obviously a positive word. It is sometimes used pejoratively to imply a lack of intelligence or perception. No one aspires to be a “simpleton.” But many of the most important things, the biggest, truest things, are simple. “Simple” may not always be good, but goodness is usually simple. Life and history and choice and human nature and whatnot may all be infinitely complex, but none of that complexity alters the simple truths of the most important things.

“It’s not as simple as that,” Oats said to Granny Weatherwax, “It’s a lot more complicated than that.”

“No it ain’t,” she tells him. “No. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

*** The problem with this isn’t so much that these Heroes of History were all fallen and fallible sinners, but that we are and, as such, we are inclined to flatter ourselves by imagining or assuming that we would have done what they did. And then perversely we end up celebrating them as a way of celebrating ourselves, which is how we get things like Eric Metaxas writing a book about Bonhoeffer in which he argues that we should all embrace the politics of Martin Niemöller in 1933.

This is the whole Matthew 23 situation wherein we decorate the tombs of the prophets and flatter ourselves that “If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets” while at the same time killing every prophet God sends us in our own day.

It’s not easy for us to read about people who behaved heroically without instinctively flattering ourselves by assuming that we would have done the same. “I would have been Silas Soule and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Ida Wells and Thaddeus Stevens and …”

One antidote to such sinful foolishness, Matthew 23 suggests, is to seek out those heroes’ present-day heirs and equivalents and ensure that we’re listening to them and not opposing them now. A bit of Pauline/Augustinian/Reformed humility can help us do that, which is why it’s no coincidence that it was the child of a Presbyterian minister who wrote one of my favorite counterpoints to history-as-flattery: “Reasons I Would Not Have Been Burned As A Witch In The Early Modern Era No Matter What I Would Like To Believe About Myself And Would Have In Fact Been Among The Witch-Burners.”

**** I’m using “older” and “younger” here as a rough generalization so I should note the major exception to this generational divide at the Anxious Bench, blogger emeritus Philip Jenkins, who’s been posting over there since the beginning and continues to always just write about whatever strikes his fancy, which might be anything. And I hope he continues doing that, because while other Christian historians may get bogged down in arguments about Matthew Avery Sutton’s historiography, he’s out here posting about Madame Blavatsky and the 1893 World’s Fair and some obscure out-of-print novel that he thinks influenced The Wicker Man and it’s all gloriously interesting and curious and, well, fun.

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