Does God still judge nations?

Regarding the controversial Bible Girl post the other day, in which Julie Lyons explained why she's not voting for Obama, even though she's a Democrat who really likes and admires him, because of his support for abortion, was unusual in one respect: she based her conclusion in large part on her reading of the Bible, and its clear testimony that God intervenes in history to judge nations that fall away from His will. She is withholding her vote from Obama because of her very real conviction that God's judgment will fall on this nation if it fully embraces the legalized extermination of unborn lives (nearly 50 million of whom have died at the hands of abortionists since Roe v. Wade was legalized in 1973).

For non-believers, it is obviously foolishness to make a political decision based on fear of God's judgment. But do believers really have the option not to consider it? Abraham Lincoln didn't think so. His Second Inaugural Address framed the Civil War as God's judgment on America for the sin of slavery. Excerpt:

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

I don't think Lincoln was speaking figuratively. He really believed the Civil War was an act of divine judgment. Anyone who takes the Bible seriously as a record of God's dealing with His people in history cannot escape the testimony in the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) of God withdrawing his protection from Israel in response to its stiff-necked behavior. God sent the Prophets to call Israel back to holiness. And when that didn't work, He allowed chastisement to humble his Chosen Nation.

If we believe that God dealt with Israel that way, why wouldn't he deal with us, and with any other nation, that way?

The issue came up not long ago in an Mars Hill Audio Journal interview with Prof. Steven Keillor, author of a book called "God's Judgment." Here's an excerpt from a critical but largely favorable review of the Keillor book, which appeared in Books & Culture and was written by Prof. Brad Gregory of Notre Dame:

Those of us skeptical of Keillor's aim [to show that it's possible to argue seriously that God intervenes in history -- RD.] need not accept his premises in order to see the force of his arguments. His claim that the Bible offers a divinely revealed understanding of history can be tested (albeit never proved) by its analytical power in interpreting major historical events. Keillor seeks "to correlate known causes of the event with known categories of divine holiness and judgment" as disclosed in Scripture, well aware that such interpretations can be perilous and are often abused:

We must beware of presumption in claiming to know the mind of God. But the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme, where the inability to know for sure morphs into a refusal to ask questions that cannot be known with certainty and then into a dismissal of the category of divine judgment.

In short: if God's purposes are such and such, then certain events are plausibly understood as his judgments in the flow of human history.

I won't get into the details of Keillor's theory of how we can discern God's purposes in historical events -- the B&C review does this nicely. Bible Girl's column, though, was a good reminder as to how rarely many of us serious Christians ever think about God's judgment with regard to national events -- and how unbiblical that is. In the Mars Hill interview, Keillor explicitly discusses the temptation to read divine purposes into the events after the fact, or perhaps to justify wars and other events. But just because it's common for people to do such a thing doesn't mean that we should dismiss entirely the idea that God uses dramatic events to chastise nations and to teach them something about their behavior.

We all remember Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson's pronouncement right after the 9/11 attacks that the event was God's judgment on America brought about because of the actions of the ACLU, gays, and sundry liberal groups. When I heard that, I was apoplectic. Some time later, though, I had to confront the possibility that they were right, that the events of that day were, in some sense, permitted by God as a judgment upon America. I think that given the symbolic power of the attacks, a far stronger case can be made that if -- if -- the God of the Bible intended those attacks as a judgment, the symbolic meaning of the targets would lead us to conclude that He was trying to teach us a lesson about the corrupting power of wealth and materialism (the Twin Towers), and about American militarism (the Pentagon). That interpretation wouldn't suit the political purposes of the Revs. Falwell and Robertson, but it makes a lot more sense to me.

It seems to me no bad thing for American Christians to think more rigorously about how our nation measures up to the Biblical standard, and how God might be speaking to us collectively through historical events to call us back to obedience and fidelity. We so often assume that our national aspirations and intentions are consonant with the Almighty's, and that's a profoundly hubristic assumption. So many US Christians support the idea that spreading liberal democracy is a fulfillment of the Great Commission, a sort of divine mission civilisatrice for the world, that we don't even stop to consider how God might see what we do. Even the Chosen People fell away from the divine will, and suffered for it. Why shouldn't we?

In the Mars Hill interview, Keillor said that one reason we modern Americans are uncomfortable thinking about interpreting history in this way is that we are opposed to the idea of collective guilt. We judge individuals, not groups, in our legal system. We expect God's judgment to conform to that model. But insofar as the Bible is a reliable testimony of God's literal historical dealings with humanity, we are imposing our own model on Him, and it's baseless. He does judge nations. Neither the United States nor righteous Americans are immune.

So: laugh at Bible Girl if you want to, but whether or not you agree with her conclusion, she's standing on firm Biblical ground in asking the right questions.