Does Trump’s survival prove his Divine Appointment?

My ultimate authority and allegiance is God, and I want to protest what I see as a bastardization of Christian theology in the service of politics. Now, this ranges from the fairly benign. You have people putting memes of guardian angels protecting Trump. Fair enough, you can make a theological case for that to the really extreme. For instance, there’s right now a meme circulating, suggesting that Trump is anointed because in the Bible, in places like Leviticus eight, in Leviticus 14, verse 28, we find the concept of blood on the right ear as a visible mark of consecration. Now, that is an incredible distortion of the biblical evidence. For one, Leviticus eight talks about ordaining Jewish priests, which I think even the most incredible Trump supporter would admit. He is not and Trump does not claim to be. But moreover, for the anointing of priest, you kill a ram and you don’t just put the blood on the right ear, but on the right ear, the right thumb and the right big toe, and then you put the rest of the blood on the altar.

This is only if you squint and look at 20,000 foot view even remotely similar, but even more radical is the fact that they’re quoting Leviticus 1428, which says that the priest shall put some of the oil that is in his hand on the tip of the right ear as well, again as the thumb and the right hand and the big toe of the right foot on the one who is to be cleansed and you might say cleansed. Cleansed from what? Yeah, they took part of a sentence fragment in a passage about the purification of lepers. Now, Donald Trump is no more a leper than he is a high priest, so it stands to reason that we are misusing scripture here in trying to apply these passages to show something that the passages don’t actually show whatsoever. Now, I find that being shared more by Protestants, probably Catholics, I find sharing more a weird AI generated image of the Virgin Mary moving the bullet with her middle finger.

Now, there’s a lot of things wrong with the image. For starters, the bullet is still in the casing. That’s not really how bullets work, but I get nevertheless, the theology behind it, and it probably is meant to evoke the fact that the assassination attempt happened on the 13th, which if you’re familiar, is the feast of our Lady Fatima. And on February 13th, Pope John Paul II was nearly assassinated and it was only by a hare’s width that his life was spared, and he famously is credited as saying that one hand pulled the trigger, another guided the bullet. In other words, he accredited Mary’s intercession with his life being spared. So much so that he even put the assassin’s bullet in the crown of our Lady of Fatima in Fatima Portugal. Fair enough. What’s the problem with using it here? Well, in saying Mary guided the bullets here, what are you actually saying?

That she spared the life of Donald Trump and ended the life of a firefighter named Corey Kapito who’s just there in the crowd like Mary really wanted this random bystander killed not Donald Trump. What theology is really going on here? But we can go even beyond this. Now, I want to be really careful in the next part that I say, because I’m going to make a Hitler comparison and I want to be really clear. I’m not saying Donald Trump is Hitler. I find those comparisons really unhelpful, really problematic. There’s a really famous thing Hitler did, and if you think Donald Trump is like him without him doing that one thing, I think you’re not qualified to talk about politics. Nevertheless, one thing he does have in common when Donald Trump and Hitler is both we’re nearly assassinated and in an odds defying move, avoided getting killed. So in this case, we have what’s called the 20th of July assassination plot.

This is from 1944 and high ranking German military officers, most famous, the Lieutenant Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg, but others as well, made several unsuccessful assassination attempts against Adolf Hitler between 1943 and 1944. And so we mostly remember the July 20th attempt, but there were others and they were often thwarted at the last minute in strange ways. For instance, on July 14th, Salberg shows up for a meeting with Hitler with a bomb in a brief case and wants to take out the three top leaders of the Nazi party, but one of them himler doesn’t show up to the meeting unexpectedly and the plan is forwarded. Meanwhile, the Ss knows there are people trying to kill Hitler because there have been numerous assassination attempts and they’re closing in, and this leads to this ultimate attempt to just go ahead and they put a bomb in the briefcase bringing it to the July 20th meeting, and it would’ve killed Hitler because he places the briefcase next to Adolf Hitler.

But then seemingly randomly, a colonel by the name of Heinz Braun moves the briefcase to one side inadvertently saving Adolf Hitler’s life at the cost of his own life. This then leads to a horrible and brutal crackdown of both those who plotted the assassination of Hitler, but really any critics, particularly throughout the German army, the most famous of those killed in the wake of this is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor and theologian. But it’s worth remembering that after these assassination attempts failed, this is what was called Operation Valkyrie. This was the attempt to overthrow Hitler. Hitler uses this as an excuse to murder even more people in German society. Now, Don Allen Gregory, in his book after Valkyrie military and civilian consequences of the attempt to assassinate Hitler points out that Hitler was believed to have been dead. Von Hoffenberg thought he did the job.

He thought he was actually dead. If you’ve ever seen the movie Valkyrie, you can see this played out in a dramatic sort of way, and Adolf Hitler goes on the radio that night, so it’s really about one in the morning the next day, and he announces to the German people that he’s alive and he says this, he says, my comrades men and women of the German people. By now, I do not know how many times an assassination has been planned and attempted against me. I speak to you today first in order that you should hear my voice and know I am unhurt and well, and secondly, that you should know of a crime unparalleled in German history. So he’s announcing to the world that he’s still alive and he says, a very small click of ambitious, irresponsible, and the same time, senseless and stupid officers concocted a plot to eliminate me and with me.

The staff of the high command of the bear mocked the bomb planted by Colonel Count Stauffenberg exploded two meters to the right of me. It seriously wounded a number of my true and loyal collaborators. I believe he says one of whom died, I believe two end up dying. I myself am entirely unhurt, aside from some minor scratches, bruises and burns. I regard this. He says, as a confirmation of the task imposed upon me by providence, now call a flag on the play. This is not a theology. As a Christian, you want to get behind. Hey, Hitler in an ossifying move survives assassination, and therefore he must be God’s guy for the job, obviously bad theology, right? So don’t use that same bad theology in saying Donald Trump moves and only his ear gets hurt and therefore he’s God’s man on the ground. Hitler goes on to say, probably only a few can imagine what fate would’ve befall in Germany if the plot had succeeded.

I thank Providence and my creator, not because he has preserved me. My life is solely devoted to worry to working for my people. I thank him rather because he has made it possible for me to continue to shoulder these worries and to pursue my work to the best of my abilities and according to my conscience, this should cause you to shudder because he is claiming God spared me so I can continue the Holocaust. That’s the work he’s doing. That’s the stuff he’s worrying about, and that is an abominable misuse of the Christian theology of providence and of the idea that someone nearly escapes death. But we are warned about this in scripture as well. If Hitler isn’t bad enough, let’s talk about the beast from Revelation. In Revelation chapter 13, one of the reasons people start worshiping the beast, this hellacious creature is because it appears to die and doesn’t.

It has an apparently fatal wound and recovers, and so people fall down in adoration and say, who is like the beast and who can fight against it? All of that’s to say if you’re making that kind of argument right now for Donald Trump, the kind of argument that could just as easily be made for Adolf Hitler or the beast, you’re making a bad argument, what then is a Christian way of thinking about these things? Because the truth is there are times where you say, wow, it doesn’t seem like that person should have survived that, and they did. Few things to think about. First, there’s a recurring theme in scripture that you can’t look at success and failure in an earthly sense as a marker of someone’s holiness or un holiness, rather, you see, for instance, in the prophet Jeremiah, in Jeremiah 12, he cries out to God, why does the way of the wicked prosper?

Why do all who are treacherous thrive, right? The fact is here below bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. It doesn’t automatically follow. So there’s this recurring thing Christians fall into where they say, oh, there was an earthquake in Haiti. That’s because Haitians are really bad people. It’s like, no, that’s not how this works, and you live in the most prosperous country in the world. That doesn’t mean you’re a good person or you country is being blessed. Sometimes the wave of wicked prosperous. In fact, this is one of the recurring themes throughout scripture, the psalmist cries out about how he nearly stumbled because he was envious of the arrogant when he saw the prosperity of the wicked, not of the just. Jesus addresses this directly in Luke chapter 13 because he’s confronted with the fact at this point, not the prosperity of the wicked, but the death of innocent people.

There are some Galileans who die in this horrific way and punches. Pilate has their blood mingled with pagan sacrifices, and Jesus says, don’t think that they are worse sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered. Thus, no, unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. And then he gives the example of 18 Other people who die in a tower crash and say, don’t think that they’re worse offenders than those who dwell in Jerusalem. No, but unless you repent, you’ll all likewise perish. So when you look around at a bad thing happening to somebody and you get up on your high horse and say, I must be better than them because a bad thing didn’t befall me, Jesus says, wrong. That’s not how this works. The flip side is if something doesn’t happen to somebody, that doesn’t mean they’re a good person any more than a bad thing.

Befalling them means they’re a bad person. I want to end with looking back at the prophet Jeremiah in which in Jeremiah five, God says, wicked men are found among my people. They lurk like Fowlers lying in Wait, and he says like a basket full of birds. Their houses are full of treachery, therefore, they’ve become great and rich. They’ve grown fat and sleek. They know no bounds and deeds of wickedness. They judge not with justice, the cause of the fatherless to make it prosper, and they do not defend the rights of the needy. That’s the standard. If you want to know, is Donald Trump the person I should be voting for this fall? Don’t be trying to divine signs on whether or not the bullet should have hit him in the head or in the ear, or not at all. Instead say, okay, does he do the deeds of righteousness or the deeds of wickedness?

How does he take care of the fatherless? How does he take care of the unborn, the immigrant, the poor, the weak and defenseless, whoever and wherever they may be? That’s the standard. And if you think Donald Trump does that, well great make that case, but don’t make the case that we all have to vote for Donald Trump because he almost got shot in the head by a bullet, and instead it nicked his right ear and that somehow means he’s a leper high priest in the Judeo-Christian amalgamation you’ve invented for Shameless Pop, I’m Joe. He, God bless you.