On the afternoon of 13 July this 12 months Donald Trump held an election rally on the Butler Farm showgrounds in Pennsylvania. During the course of the rally, a 20 12 months old called Thomas Crooks fired eight shots with a rifle from the roof of a close-by warehouse in an try and assassinate Trump. Although Trump’s ear was grazed by considered one of the bullets, he survived. However, an engineer and volunteer firefighter called Corey Comperatore who was attending the rally was killed by a shot through the top while attempting to shield his family from the gunfire. Two other attendees, James Copenhaver and David Dutch, were critically injured but survived, and a lot of others suffered more minor injuries. Crooks himself was shot dead by a secret service sniper.
These facts are indisputable. What I would like to do in this text is take a look at these events from a theological perspective, asking about what we will and can’t say for certain about God’s involvement in them.
As the American political magazine Politico has noted, very soon after the shooting took place each Trump supporters and Trump himself declared that his survival was an act of God.
To quote the Politico article: ‘Allies of the previous president are embracing divine intervention — ‘the hand of God’ — to assist explain how Donald Trump survived a harrowing assassination attempt during his Saturday rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
‘His daughter, Ivanka, said she believed her late mother was watching over Trump in the course of the assassination attempt. Rep. Carlos Antonio Giménez (R-Fla.) told Fox News that Trump survived by “the grace of God,” while Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) said “divine intervention” and the ‘protective hand’ of God kept the previous president alive.
‘And, House Speaker Mike Johnson stated it plainly: “GOD protected President Trump yesterday.”‘
Trump himself praised God for saving his life, writing that it was ‘God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.’ Pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. reiterated in a note to supporters that ‘the grace of God’ saved Trump from ‘a coward’s bullet.’
As the Politico article further noted, some Trump supporters even used the term ‘miracle’ to explain God’s motion and Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) posted an illustration on X of an angel steering Trump away from the bullet.
‘Yesterday there have been miracles, and I feel the hand of God was there too,’ House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told Fox & Friends Weekend, adding, ‘You can just see one centimeter over and we’re having a really different conversation.’
In considering these claims that God acted to stop Donald Trump being assassinated, we must first be clear about what it means to say that something is a miracle. A helpful definition of what the term ‘miracle’ means is provided by CS Lewis in his book Miracles. He writes that a miracle is ‘an interference with Nature by a supernatural power.’ What Lewis means by interference may be illustrated if we imagine the movement of a snooker ball. If there isn’t a outside interference, the operation of the laws of nature signifies that a snooker ball will move within the direction and for the gap attributable to the impact on it of a snooker cue. However, if someone subsequently intervenes by stopping the ball moving, or pushing it in a special direction, then this interference will prevent the unique operation of the laws of nature attributable to the impact of the cue from happening and can cause something else to occur as an alternative.
In Christian terms a miracle occurs when God performs an act of supernatural power, whether directly or through a human or angelic agent, that similarly causes things to occur which might not normally occur based on the laws of nature. Thus, Jesus’ virgin birth, his feeding of the five thousand, and his resurrection and ascension into heaven, were all miracles because they were acts of God that produced results that the operation of the laws of nature would never have caused to occur.
What this implies is that if we would like to say that the failure of Thomas Crooks’ try and assassinate Donald Trump was a miracle then what we’re claiming is that God interfered with the conventional motion of the laws of nature to stop the assassination happening. Had such interference not taken place then Trump would now be dead.
It seems to me that this isn’t a claim that we’re capable of make. This isn’t because God couldn’t have intervened in this manner. As the Psalmist writes: ‘Our God is within the heavens, he does whatever he pleases’ (Psalm 115:3).
It is, as an alternative, because we lack the obligatory evidence to point out that God did intervene in this manner. As anyone who has watched the shooting events on the Olympics may have seen, it is an element of the conventional course of events that even very highly expert marksmen will, occasionally, miss their goal for some reason, and we don’t normally claim that such misses were miracles.
To plausibly claim that a miracle took place on 13 July we’d should have the option to say for certain that had God in a roundabout way intervened indirectly Crook’s bullet would have hit Trump in the top relatively than grazing his ear. This would appear unimaginable to prove since, to my knowledge, we lack any evidence either that the laws of physics were interfered with by God in order that the bullet modified its trajectory, or that the movement of Trump’s head that meant the bullet hit his ear has no natural explanation.
What I even have just said doesn’t mean that what happened on 13 July was not a miracle. It is, relatively, to say, that in the mean time we lack the obligatory evidence to say that it was. However, this definitely doesn’t mean that what happened was not an act of God. What we will say with absolute confidence is that, to cite Lewis again, ‘there aren’t any accidents’ within the sense of things that just occur by probability, and that consequently all the pieces that happened on 13 July was an act of God within the sense being an event willed by God and happening accordingly.
The reason why, if we’re Christians, we will say it’s because, as Article I of the Church of England’s Thirty Nine Articles tells us, God is ‘the Maker, and Preserver of all things each visible and invisible.’ The undeniable fact that God is the preserver in addition to the maker of all things signifies that he did not only set the world in motion at creation and leave it to run itself. Rather, he continues to uphold and control it in all its points.
In the words of the chapter on God’s windfall within the Reformed Westminster Confession of 1646:
‘ I. God, the nice Creator of all things, doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the best even to the least, by his most clever and holy windfall, based on his infallible foreknowledge and the free and immutable counsel of his own will, to the praise of the glory of his wisdom, power, justice, goodness, and mercy.
‘II. Although in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the primary cause, all things come to pass immutably and infallibly, yet by the identical windfall he ordereth them to fall out, based on the character of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently.’
The point that’s made within the second section of this quotation is that although the primary cause, or primary reason, why all things are as they’re is because God wills that they must be so, nevertheless he also wills that they must be so due to operation of secondary causes, including each the working of the laws of nature and the free decisions and actions of human beings.
Viewing the events of 13 July from this angle, we will see that nothing could have happened without God. God formed the history that caused the election rally to occur, God upheld the physical laws that allowed things to happen, and eventually God allowed the people involved to exercise their free will, knowing that the final result of their doing so would fall throughout the scope of his good purposes.
Most of the time the precise the explanation why God exercises his control over nature and human history in the way in which that he does are unknown to us, and this can be true of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. We simply have no idea why God permitted Thomas Crooks to attempt to kill Donald Trump, why he permitted that the attempt should fail, and why he permitted Corey Comperatore to die protecting his family. All we will say was that he did so. This means, incidentally, that the right statement that Trump’s survival was an act of God cannot rightly be used to suggest that God favours his re-election in November.
God has not told us who he desires to be the following President of the US. Only time will tell.
In summary, we will not be ready to say that the failed assassination of Donald Trump on 13 July involved a miracle. What we must say, nonetheless, is that like all other things it was an act of God. This doesn’t excuse the evil of Thomas Crooks’ actions, or the failure of the authorities to stop those actions, but it surely does mean that the evil and failure of that day won’t have the last word. God will bring something good out of what happened on that day, regardless that this side of eternity we will never fully know what that good was.
The belief that there are ‘no accidents’ which I even have set out in relation to the events of 13 July is a tough belief. It is tough to say with Job, ‘Shall we receive good on the hand of God, and lets not receive evil’ (Job 2:10). Nevertheless, it’s also a liberating belief. It liberates us from the assumption that we’re within the last resort the themes of blind fate, the blind operations of the uncaring forces of nature, or the silly or evil decisions of human beings. Whatever happens to us, we’re within the hands of God and people hands are hands of affection.
Knowing that we’re within the hands of God doesn’t necessarily ease the pain when bad things occur to us, as when our husband or father dies attempting to protect us, but it surely does give us the boldness that pain won’t have the last word. As Paul declared on the idea of his belief in divine windfall, ‘If God is for us, who’s against us?… I’m sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come back, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor the rest in all creation, will have the option to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Romans 8:31, 37-38).
