If! Where are the believers who say if? In my own adventures in the religious life, nothing has disaffected me more than the certainty with which believers speak about occult entities and forces. The clarity is arrogant. But there is not an echo of the intellectual vanity of the devout [Abraham] Lincoln’s formulation of his faith. He is sure and he is unsure; which is to say, he is, in the most exemplary way, human. Nor does the mention of God fill him with good cheer, or with a complacent assurances of perfect understanding. There is too much that he does not know. He respects the opacity of God even as he affirms the activity of God. The war is theologically obscure to him: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered–that of neither has been answered fully.” And then, most exquisitely of all: “The Almighty has his own purposes.”
Leon Wieseltier, “Three Republican Fallacies,” Liberties, Fall 2024, 297-298.