A Scandalous Providence
In 1995, professor E. Frank Tupper published a book called A Scandalous Providence. It was an effort to weave together the mid-life deaths of two people: of his first and only wife Betty, who died of cancer in 1983; and of the one who died at unknown age on a cross outside Jerusalem. Thus, the subtitle: The Jesus Story of the Compassion of God. I read it when it first came out, while a pastor in Kentucky dealing with all the traumas of congregational and personal life. Like all the others, I was captured by its single, simple thesis: “In all circumstances, God does all that God can do.” It is hard to capture a more elegant, elastic phrase for what the theologians call the ...
