Does God lead us into temptation?

A cursory glance at the book of Job might suggest that we should answer the title question of this section in the affirmative. ‘The Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job?”’.Footnote ⁷ No doubt a determined exegete could render the significance of this book for God's People in such a way that there is no commitment to God bringing about the temptation of human beings. We are, after all, not fundamentalists, and there are deep traditions of reading biblical narratives as figurative. My point here is not an attempt at proof-texting. Instead I want to draw attention to the fact that Job, which has spoken to suffering humanity over the centuries,Footnote ⁸ articulates something which so many Jews and Christians have found to resonate with their experience, that God can somehow be spoken of testing his People.

Experience, of course, varies. Logic does not. And it is on the terrain of logic that the most immediate objection to the suggestion that God does not bring about temptation is to be found. For God is, so Christians are bound to believe, the ‘creator of all things visible and invisible’. Amongst the things visible and invisible ascribed to God's creative agency have to be included the events of my falling into temptation, not to mention the mental states behind those falls (my noticing that the plate of cakes is unguarded, my hunger, my love of cake), and for that matter the actions whereby I succumb to temptation. God, in other words, cannot be got off the hook for responsibility for evil, and in particular for responsibility for temptation.

A good deal of confusion is at work in pulling us towards the contrary conclusion. There is the type of confusion common amongst philosophers discussing the so-called ‘problem of evil’ which assumes that if we think that God is in any way responsible for evil (as the creator of entities appropriately termed evil, say)Footnote ⁹ then God is morally responsible for evil. Since God cannot be morally responsible for evil, since God is perfectly good (and this goodness is assumed to be moral goodness), and since good beings are not morally responsible for evil, God cannot be in any way responsible for evil. This line of argument has, to my mind, been decisively answered by Brian Davies in a long series of books and articles,Footnote ¹⁰ drawing deeply on Aquinas. God's goodness is not moral goodness, and it is simply a category mistake, arising from the temptation to anthropomorphism, to think that God is like us, a moral agent, subject to rules and assessible by moral criteria. Thus Davies,

Another confusion thinks that the kind of entities I talked about above – the event of my falling into temptation, or those mental states which push me down the path towards that event – cannot be within the intended remit of the creeds statement that God is the creator of all things. For if that were the case, this worry goes, we could not be free. Again, the problem here is anthropomorphism. If you make me run naked down the high street, by holding my best friend hostage at gunpoint unless I do so, say, or by spiking my drink, then my freedom is dimished. It is in the nature of created beings that our agency crowds each other's out: to the extent that my action is caused by you, or by alcohol, it is not my own free action, caused only by my act of will. But God is not an entity in the world who competes for agency with us.Footnote ¹² God isn't in the world at all, God is behind the world and intimately present to it as its creative cause. What goes for the world in general goes in particular for my seemingly innermost thoughts and my actions – as Augustine puts it ‘you are closer to me than I am to myself’. Far from interfering with my freedom, God is the ground of it: even the act of my falling into temptation exists only because God created it, and its antecedents in my mental life. To suppose that God causing (by creating) my action would make it unfree is to be guilty of idolatrously confusing God with part of the universe, with the kind of thing that can interfere with my freedom (a gunman, say, or an alcohol molecule).

Those events which constitute my being tempted are created by God. Sometimes it is clear how they are incorporated into God's providential guiding of the created order towards the fullness of the Kingdom, ‘O happy fault, that gained for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer’.Footnote ¹³ Most of the time things are far less clear. This is part and parcel of the mystery of life. For the time being we trust, without having a clear sense of how our falls might be brought up by God into the story of salvation, and we pray ‘lead us not into temptation’.

‘We dare to say’

It is important that we understand that what we are doing when we say ‘lead us not into temptation’ is praying. Odd though the need to reinforce this might seem, the pressure to forget this (or, which is worse, to forget what we mean by prayer) is real in debates about the liturgy. Although the previous section is, I think, a correct response to somebody who says that it is wrong to say that God brings about temptation, the more fundamental (and more interesting) line of resistance to the revision of the Our Father is to deny that what we are doing when we pray the Our Father is putting forward some kind of theory about God, informing ourselves about how God deals with the world. There is misplaced didactic so-called prayer of this sort. I shudder at the memory of primary school assemblies ‘Lord God we know that you are very good and don't like children telling lies…’. But what we are doing when we say the Our Father is not some kind of collective act of remembrance that God is not only our Father (although we certainly show that, recognising that what we show is expressed metaphorically, paradigmatically when we stand to say the prayer after the sacrificial act of thanksgiving for the Son who makes us children of God), but also that – depending on the translation – God may or may not lead us into temptation. Reciting the Our Father is not an act of catechetical revision; it is prayer.

Prayer, which Christians understand to be a sharing in Christ's prayer to the Father, is something which arises out of the depths of human life, out of our brokeness, our falleness, and our fears (as well as our joys, our loves, and our thanksgiving). We cry out ‘lead us not into temptation’ not least because doing this reflects how things are: we are scared, and we so often feel as though we are being dragged towards situations and actions that part of us wants to resist. From this place of being torn, we say ‘lead us not into temptation’, and it makes sense to do so. That Christians, in so many languages, over the centuries have felt it natural to plead with God in this stark way,Footnote ¹⁴ puts me in mind of Wittgenstein's words about Christianity,

We'll return to Wittgenstein, below. First: the current text of the Our Father is the what we have learned to say. For most of us, coming to pray this way is inseparable from learning how to practice Christianity.Footnote ¹⁶ Familiar words come to the tongue: of all liturgical forms of prayer, the Our Father is probably the one first learned by children, last forgotten by dementia patients. These facts alone ought to make ecclesiasitcal authorities intensely wary of change. Nor is the manner in which saying the Our Father unites us with other Christians merely synchronic. In saying these words, we feel, we are sharing in the story of God's people – God's useless, broken, and temptation-prone people, but still loved by God – over the centuries.

Prayer is emotionally and existentially laden, and it is communal, to do with belonging. These features are all too easily forgotten if too distanced and academic an approach is taken towards liturgy. Wittgenstein wrote an influential series of comments on Frazer's Golden Bough. Here he criticised the view, ever present in Frazer, that magic and religion are failed attempts at science,

Later on he insists that the view of even the kind of religion Frazer regarded as ‘primitive’ as a false start at science doesn't stand up to scrutiny,

The practitioner of this rite is not lacking theoretical knowledge or technical expertise. He is simply engaged in something distinct from these things when he performs the rite. There is a parallel with a passage in the Lectures on Religious Belief,

We cannot think so little of the person writing that we take them to be making a catastrophically simple mistake of arithmetic. They must be doing something we don't understand: ‘this is no blunder!’ Somebody who takes Christian prayer to be a matter of informing God of a number of propositions we hold to be true (such as that God can lead us into temptation) and of our desires (such as that we'd rather not be led into temptation) is making a mistake of a similar sort. Prayer is not an inefficient means of communicating calm beliefs and desires – it is a motley of rages, censings, bowings, pleadings, joyful exhortations, recitations, silences; it is a bubbling up of fear, a reminder that I am, in spite of it all, a baptised child of God – all of this, and so on, in a list that could not even in principle be completed. Prayer is a sui generis, irreducible phenomenon, which we, as Christians, believe somehow, incredibly, is a participation in the triune life of God through the Incarnation of the Word as one-who-prays.

‘I will teach you differences’Footnote ²⁰

Forgetfulness of prayer's nature as prayer, particularly in the case of liturgical prayer, has been a feature of parts of the Church since the Second Vatican Council. Didacticism has both liberal and conservative forms, and no reader of this journal is likely to require anything by way of example. In conclusion, however, it is worth emphasising that nothing in the foregoing implies that it is not interesting or potentially worthwhile for the Christian life to enquire into the meaning for the evangelists of peirasmon or the roots of this expression in the historical Jesus.

Pegola, for example, follows the NRSV in translating periasmon ‘time of trial’, adding in a footnote that this ‘is not [a plea] to be free from temptation or testing, but for help to avoid falling into the trap’. He offers this exegesis,

Speaking for myself, I find this immensely useful for understanding the mission of Jesus and Christian life. Reflection on this sort of material is likely to inform my reading of scripture and my prayer. But this ought not to lull us into forgetting that study and liturgy are radically different types of activities. Whilst both can be orientated towards the Kingdom of God, the nature of that relationship is different in each case. And whilst each can have a bearing on the other, that bearing needs to be recognised as complex and multiply mediated. My point in the previous section was not, then, an anti-intellectual one, or a side-sweep at biblical criticism, but rather a request that we recognise the distinctive character of two human activities: prayer and study.

We all know people who don't recognise the distinction. The well-read lay-person who inflicts his extensive reading of Hans Kung on what was supposed to be a parish prayer group is one example; the parish priest who prefaces every reading at mass with a commentary culled from the shelves of the presbytery is another. Many of us have been a version of one of these characters at some point. Were other regions to follow Italy in re-translating the Our Father we would be in the odd situation of the Church corporately failing in this way. Well might we pray, ‘lead us not into temptation’.