Divine Providence and Meaning, Part 2.5 (An Interlude)

Reflections on the Movement of Divine Love in Hosea

Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash

About the author: Dr. Ashish Varma is an Indian American theologian based in Chicago, Illinois. His dissertation work explored theological grounding for virtue ethics. In recent years, his research has sat at the intersection of theological engagement with race and ecology, writing and speaking on both. Additionally, he edited and contributed to A Praying People, a collection of essays on prayer (Wipf & Stock, 2023).

This article is part of a series exploring a constructive theology of divine providence. To follow the arc of the project, you can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, the Interlude here, Part 3 here, and the Epilogue here.

Before moving on to Tolkien to help cast a broad theological vision of providence, I have been reminded of late that we need to pass through another step. It is an in-between step but not an in-between issue—let us call it part 2.5 (or an interlude). In his Way of Love, theologian Norman Wirzba presents a challenge that initially seems remarkably unchallenging. He points out that love is the center of the Christian faith, as argued by so much of Scripture (see Mt. 5:43-46, 22:36-40; Jn. 13:34-35, 15:9-13, 21:15-17; 1 Cor. 13:1-13; 1 Jn. 4:7-12). His seemingly unremarkable challenge is that this simple observation about love must translate to the work of theology itself. So, he takes an otherwise widely accepted claim about the major plot points of Scripture (Creation-Fall-Redemption-Consummation, or some small variation of this construct) and problematizes it. At first, it is too easy to accept these plot points—of course, they cover the biblical narrative. Wirzba’s contention, though, is that in our current form, theologians have a dissonance. The simple construction of Creation-Fall-Redemption-Consummation seems right, but it says nothing, at face value, about love. As Tina Turner wondered, “what’s love got to do with it?” Wirzba’s mission is to join love—the heart of Christianity—with Christianity’s narrative direction.¹ His and our rationale is simple: love “is not simply one of the rooms that you might visit for a while or the outside decoration that might draw you in. Instead, love is the design principle and presence that integrates and powers the whole structure, giving it its appearance and functionality. Without love, the whole house becomes ugly and useless.”²

My goal here falls in line with Wirzba’s. I want to know what love has to do with Providence. My theological development over the last several years has entailed reimagining every inch of Christian confession in light of love. And even then, I sometimes realize that I have not thought adequately about love. My goal in the following paragraphs is to reconsider love at the heart of divine providence, which, I believe, will help make sense of my broader conclusions in part 3 of this series on providence. So, here we are at “part 2.5.”

An unlikely book of the Bible sits at the center of our current question: Hosea. Initially, this claim may seem strange, for it begins with God orchestrating events to make a point. The divine narration appears more parabolic than befitting our journey through providence. If anything, the divine orchestration appears to fit the kind of models of providence that I have previously criticized. God tells Hosea to marry a sex worker for the express purpose of Hosea feeling the sting of infidelity. The parable sets up God’s own sense of betrayal over Israel’s unfaithfulness to their covenant God. The scenario is cruel to Hosea: I get the point, but why put poor Hosea through all of this?

And then, hopefully, something clicks. Initially, it is easy to put oneself in Hosea’s shoes and to feel victimized by the many injustices that afflict us or the people we love. Outrage is not a difficult emotion to come by. But when we continue through Hosea, a stark realization comes upon us, a realization that reinforces the sense that we are reading an extended parable. Hopefully, we realize that we can never fully identify with Hosea. For all of our sense of being wronged, if we are truly honest, we are not blameless like Hosea. For all of the wrongs done to us, we must recognize the planks in our own eyes, as Jesus said (Mt. 7:1-5). The point is not to minimize or ignore the wrong we, or those we love, face. The point is to accept the economy of ourselves, where we are not fully Hosea. In whatever way I may identify with Hosea in one circumstance, I am Hosea’s spouse in another.

Maybe another way we begin to criticize the book of Hosea is because of how flat of a character Hosea himself appears to be. Surely, there is more to say about him—you know, in order to restore my easy identification with him. However, the point is that Hosea really only stands in for God—that is, God is not creating a witless victim to make a point but is rather creating an image that can only fully stand-in for Godself. Some of us can identify with Hosea through different seasons of our lives, but we have to be honest with ourselves the moment we reflect upon the plank in our own eyes. This observation is also instructive for our understanding of providence. The way Hosea begins is not a normative description of the tight manner in which God orchestrates events, creating injustices along the way just to make a point. Rather, the opening of Hosea sets the scene for an object lesson: injustice is already at play before God begins to make the theological points of the book. God enters into an unjust narrative. Hosea is not anyone other than the image of Godself entering misbegotten space.

The present observation is not meant to excuse injustice or relativize real injustices by attacking victims of injustice. Victims are real. My point is to complicate our reading of Hosea and to show how it may be more than a parable. It also shows us something about love and providence. With the scene of injustice set, God can begin to expose the unfaithfulness of his covenant people. Therein, the unfaithful people and the reader may see the depths of God’s love. The opening should evoke strong emotions from both the ancient hearer and the current reader.

First, let us look at love. Where is it? It does not feel loving for God to put Hosea through this ordeal. As with the ending of Job, though, where one could easily object that having more children does not make up for losing previous children, one could argue here that an object lesson does not excuse putting Hosea through hell. My counter is merely to agree before affirming that the book of Hosea does not present a God who makes Hoseas of people. The setup is a function of the parable, not the actual, ongoing providence of God. And this setup is, again, supposed to invoke outrage: first, for Hosea; second, against the covenant people in Hosea; third, against one’s own unfaithfulness; and finally, for God. Yet love peaks through at key moments. The first instance comes in 3:1, where God tells Hosea to return to his wife and love her because God still loves covenant Israel.

There is still fallout to covenant unfaithfulness, despite God’s ongoing love. In Hosea 3, God loves Israel, but Israel will still face the hardship of her unfaithfulness. In the providential terms laid out in parts 1 and 2 of our current series, Israel faces the historical fallout that belongs to the grains of social and historical movement. Divine providence does not exactly interrupt the social and historical grains of time. God’s love preserves covenant Israel in spite of unfaithfulness. Divine love brings about provision unto perseverance, but it does not interrupt real fallout. To interrupt, arguably, would be unloving because it would manifest the kind of control reflex that does not belong to love. It would be akin to a proposal while holding one’s significant other in a headlock. Or, in the situation of Hosea, such interruption would undermine covenant Israel’s agency in the name of God’s love. Rather, in Hosea and in our world, working lovingly within the grains of social history means accepting the agency of others, even if that means their rejection of you.

More to the point, love means “over-accepting.” To love is to accept whatever the beloved gives and to respond accordingly, without constraining. In the case of Hosea, covenant Israel turns away from the God of her covenant and to other gods. Her choice is consequential. One consequence is social fallout. The book of Hosea connects injustice and social pain to Israel’s decision to turn away from her God (chs. 4–5, 7–9). Another consequence is actually a loving plea: God calls for covenant Israel to repent and return. Yet God is also angry in this scenario, befitting of a scorned spouse, and speaks out of this anger: “I will attack you” (10:10); “I will put a heavy yoke on her tender neck” (10:11). Frankly, the language is alarming, and there is not enough space here to work through the difficult ramifications of such language. Is the voice of God serious, here? Even if not, does not Jesus teach us in the Sermon on the Mount that even to consider evil choices is an evil itself?

For the present purposes, I believe it is best to read the raw emotions of ch. 10 in light of our own reactions to injustice. It is easy to get caught up in unhealthy, unloving retributive impulses. Perhaps ch. 10 is merely an anthropological gloss on how we feel amid injustice. But Hosea does not stop there. The instructive dynamic comes in ch. 11, where God reaffirms love for covenant Israel and says, “I will not unleash my fierce anger . . . and I will not come to destroy” (11:9). There will be a consequence to unfaithfulness (11:5-6), but apparently the consequence is not God acting in retribution (11:8-9). What is it then? The fallout seems to belong to another movement, specifically what I have called the social grains of history. Indeed, the mighty Egyptians and Assyrians will enslave covenant Israel, a social consequence of not turning to her God to protect her. God’s love is so strong that God will not stop loving and will gladly welcome back the unfaithful. But the demands of true love are not to hold the beloved in a controlling grasp. If God’s covenant partner rejects God, then God lets go, for that is love. God’s love waits, for better or for worse—and naturally, socially speaking, there is no guarantee of a “better.” The narrator calls for covenant Israel to return, appealing to God’s forgiving and healing love (14:1-9). But God’s love does not constrain covenant Israel to return.

How does a look at love in Hosea connect us to providence, then? In short, social structures and relationships move in certain directions, and it is easy to identify these directions with divine providence. In parts 1 and 2, I argued against such identification. I have now also argued against such direction in Hosea. Recognition of our own planks should force us all to begin to identify with Hosea’s spouse. It is easy to revile her, but our own ambitions tied to status, culture, financial success, race, etc., slap us in the face and remind us that our poorly motivated decisions birth complicated realities woven into the social fabrics upon which we depend and within which we move. And we live in the complex story of those ambitions and decisions, even those decisions made by people a world away. To the degree that social histories precede us, we all occupy positions of injustice in history—albeit some more than others.

What Hosea labors to show, though, is both that we also make decisions that belong to those social stories and that God’s loving embrace is at work anyway. Both realities are at work: God’s loving providence and social histories. That God is love (1 Jn 4:8) means that God loves without constraining. But that same resistance to constraining providence means that actions bear the kind of fruit that we might not like. It also means that we might face the collateral effects of others’ decisions and social structures. In part 3, I will explore how God’s loving, providential action might still be at work anyway, without constraining social history.

---

1. He fine-tunes the usual formulation of the main biblical theological plot points of Scripture to reflect “movements” that “are fundamentally movements within the world of love: God’s love for creation, our distortion of this love, God’s training us in the ways of love, and love’s fulfillment in the flowering of all life” (Norman Wirzba, Way of Love: Recovering the Heart of Christianity [HarperOne, 2016], 40).

2. Wirzba, Way of Love, 34.