Does "everything happen for a reason"?
No. I think that's a hang-up from the days when man thought they were the playthings of the gods.
Does God have a will for how events unfold?
Not a temporal will, no, as God is beyond time.
So when God wills a thing to be, He wills its origin and its end as one. Whether the thing willed, if it has the capacity for autonomous activity, works its way towards its true end, or some other end of its own imagining, is another matter.
Many Christians in the U.S. claim to be following "God's will" for their life.
That may well be so ... the point about predestination is that the individual has no choice in the matter. If that's true then the whole Mission of Christ is pointless and silly.
So many may be following God's will as best they can, and be saints in their own right. Others might be reading their own desires as the will of God ... or have decided what God can and cannot will for them ...
There's the story of St Theresa who set off on a journey, and the wheel came off the wagon, leaving them stranded. "If this is your idea," she is said to have prayed aloud, "you've got a funny way of going about things!"
Luke is the great sociologist of Scripture:
"And there were present, at that very time, some that told him of the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answering, said to them: Think you that these Galileans were sinners above all the men of Galilee, because they suffered such things? No, I say to you: but unless you shall do penance, you shall all likewise perish. Or those eighteen upon whom the tower fell in Siloe, and slew them: think you, that they also were debtors above all the men that dwelt in Jerusalem? No, I say to you; but except you do penance, you shall all likewise perish."
Luke 13:1-5
The 18 killed by the tower were not predestined for some special reason, they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Our Lord was countering the common view that bad things happen to bad people (the more considered view of Judaism realised that it was nowhere near as simple as that) ... and therefore if it happens to him and not me, I'm a better person than he is ...
The real question is, did the people who wrote the Scripture believe in predestination? No. It was never taught, because it renders all Scripture illogical and makes God unreasonable if not downright cruel.
The same with reincarnation, it was not 'expunged' from Christianity, it was never an issue.
What generally happens is people bring their agendas and preconceptions to Scripture and look for supporting material, regardless of the actual context, or what was preached at the time by the people who wrote Scripture.
Look at any academic translation of a text, and there will be a commentary on who good or bad the translation is, and that's just the
translation. If you have to translate and interpret, then by golly you're into a piece of work ... So the assumption that whatever happens to pop into my mind when I read a text is what the scribe meant when he wrote it, is patently nonsense.
For example, a common prayer is "God's will be done"...
Indeed it is. And the very fact we pray it tells us that, often, it isn't.
How does "God's will" jive with predestination? And if there is such a thing as "God's will", how do we know if something is "God's will" or not?
God wills love, God wills the good ... beyond that ...
The thing is, if predestination is real, then the idea of 'freedom', 'autonomy' and all religious doctrines — in fact all moral and ethical structures — are a waste of time, aren't they, cos what's gonna happen is gonna happen regardless of what you think, say or do.
I think the question of 'God's will' is in need of serious review. It's coloured our attitude to responsibility, suffering, pain and death for too long ...
... I don't think of God as a micromanager. I think of God as a light, a beacon, and whether we walk towards it, or wander off somewhere else, is down to us.
The predestination bit means that, in the end, there is no other end than in God ... so if one is headed somewhere else, then one's moving towards non-being, as we are not self-sustaining entities.
God bless
Thomas
