Once there was a Dutch boy. He was nervous about going out on his first date. So he asks his friend van Hook for advice: "What does one talk about to win the affections of a Dutch girl?" Van Hook says" "I'll tell you a secret. Dutch girls love three topics of conversation: food, family, and philosophy. That's all you need to remember. To ask about a girl's taste in food makes her feel important. To ask about her family shows that your intentions are honorable. And to discuss philosophy with her shows that you respect her intelligence." The Dutch boy was pleased: "Food, family, philosophy. Three f's; that's easy to remember!"
At last the day comes. He meets the girl and blurts out "Do you like noodles?" "Why, no," says the startled girl.
"Do you have a brother?" "No."
The Dutch boy hesitates just a moment: "Well, if you had a brother, would he like noodles?"
The Dutch boy's third question is a bit odd. It's a question that doesn't seem to be about anything. The Dutch girl never had a brother, doesn't have one now, and she never will. (I know because I invented her.) There's no brother to like or to dislike noodles. Asking this kind of question, a question of the "What if things had been different?" variety, seems the stuff of jokes, or of fictional fun. As a boy I was fascinated by an article in Life magazine that aimed to answer the question "What if the South had won the Civil War?" It's the early 1960's and Cuba is a state of the Confederacy and Alaska, never purchased by a victorious Federal government, remains a Russian possession. Reasonable speculation, but who knows what would have happened, if things had gone differently at Gettysburg? A mainstay of this sort of speculative fiction is the story that purports to answer the question "What if the Nazis had won World War Two?" The scenarios, portraying no actual past, present or future, can be plausibly scary: the German physicists cooperate with the Nazi regime, Einstein's letter to Roosevelt is lost in the mail, Hitler has the atomic bomb by 1944 and he uses his V2 rockets to deliver it: London and Washington, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are reduced to radioactive rubble. It's 1997 and a Nazi puppet regime rules in the old United States. I've read books and seen movies based on such "What if things had been different?" premises. The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick, is probably the best, though I hear that Newt Gingrich has co-authored a novel on this theme (though it may soon be revealed he didn't write it, but accidentally put his name to it without reading it!) This sort of thing may be entertaining to those of a particular cast of mind, probably the same people who think my noodle joke is howlingly funny. But it may seem folly to start taking these "What if things had been different?" questions seriously. Shouldn't we restrict our questions to ones that are about something, a bout what actually happened in the past, about what's really going on now, or about what might really happen in the future? To inquire into the food preferences of non-existent siblings sounds like one of those questions philosophers contrive to confuse themselves and anyone else they can trap into listening, like such old standbys as "Can God make a stone bigger than he can lift?" "Do you know that you're not dreaming right now?" "Will your answer to this question be 'No.'? Like these, questions about what would have happened if things had been different might be good for a laugh, but they're not always fun. They can be downright ghoulish. An infamous example comes from the late Middle Ages. It appeared in the context of a theological problem: what happens to unbaptized infants when they die? One side said that God, being just, doesn't condemn to hell babies that never had the chance to sin. But the other side argued that God, being all-knowing, knows what these babies would have done if they had lived. They said God knows of each of the babies he sends to hell that it would have sinned if it had lived long enough to do so. The baby would have sinned if things had been different, so God is just in condemning it. Maybe the nicest thing we can say about that debate is that the Medieval monks, having no (official) babies of their own, entered into it with a degree of enthusiasm that belied a certain lack of pastoral sensitivity. Infant damnation probably isn't a particularly wholesome matter for prolonged speculation.
Even if we weren't inclined to dismiss these "What if things had been different?" questions as silly, it wouldn't be obvious where to look for answers to them. Ordinary questions, ones about what actually happened in the past: "Who poured water on the outside door to the LRC Thursday night?"; about what's actually happening now: "Who's back in Heemstra Hall, sleeping through chapel?", or about what will really happen in the future" "When will it start snowing?" are ones where we generally have a pretty good idea of what would count in favor of, or against, an answer. But where could we possibly look to find out about what would be, if things were different? Where do you look when you're wondering about things that are by definition different from anything that ever happened, is happening, or ever will happen?
As a matter of fact, there is a way to get at answers to these questions. The exotic logical apparatus, something called 'possible worlds semantics,' was discovered by a rabbi's 15-year old son, probably the only bona fide child prodigy in the history of philosophy. It's one of the most useful and beautiful items in the toolbox of late 20th-century philosophy but, wonderful as it is, I do not propose to annoy you by trying to explain it, or even by exhibiting the neat philosophical tricks you can do with it. Instead, I'll just say a few things on behalf of the wondering paying attention to such matters makes possible. The practical significance of this kind of wondering is worth dwelling on, even if we ignore the technical manual that tells us how to navigate through the space of possible worlds.
Asking some of these "What if..." questions invites an ontological dizziness, a momentary vision of the radical contingency of human life. Many of us have had the thought: what if I had had different parents? We can imagine ourselves being raised by persons other than our parents. At times in the throes of adolescence you may have wished for that. But could you really have had different parents? If your mother and your father hadn't combined their genes the way they did the moment you were conceived, you would not exist. If things had been different in that way 20 (or however many) years ago things would be different today: you would not be here. You wouldn't be somewhere else, the child of a different pair of parents. You simply wouldn't exist. What if your parents had never met? What if your mother had married someone else? How would you be different? You wouldn't be different, you just wouldn't be. Possibly, your parents were childhood neighbors, sweethearts from the age of six whose eventual marriage was a sure thing. But much more likely is that you mother and father met one another, fell in love, and got married only as the result of a long, tenuous series of events, any one of which could have gone differently. If any of them had, they'd never have produced you. There are innumerable facts like this: if such and such a woman living in Amsterdam in 1765 had selected the blue, rather than the yellow, bonnet that fine Sunday morning, she wouldn't have caught so and so's eye as it wandered during the singing of the Psalm; he'd wouldn't have looked for her after the service, they'd never have met, married and given birth to your great great grandfather - and there'd have been no you. On such chains of chance your future existence once hung.
Even get your parents amorously together the day you were conceived, and your existence still hangs on such a thread. If things had gone just slightly differently, there'd have been no conception, or a sibling, one now in actual fact safely, eternally consigned to the realm of mere possibility, would have started to exist that day instead of you. For if any other of your father's millions of spermatozoa had won the race to fertilize that ovum, there'd be no you today. And which of them won that day was exquisitely sensitive to many highly chancy factors, among others the precise timing of the deed. My mother (who's in the habit of telling me things I'd as soon not have known) once confided to me that I was conceived one afternoon while a baseball game, the Red Sox vs. Cleveland, played on the radio. I imagine that if things had gone just a bit differently in Fenway Park that afternoon, say, if Ted Williams had swung at that high inside pitch that in fact he almost did swing at, both he and I would have struck out. My temporarily distracted father might have gone on to have some other son - or daughter. But I'd have struck out in a game where winners belong to that tiny minority of the possible people that get actually to exist.
We needn't think about it for long before we think of lots of things on which our existence depended, and many of them are things that could easily have been different. We tend implicitly to think of ourselves as necessary beings, as the inevitable outcome toward which past events tended. There's something unsettling in realizing how wildly unlikely, how totally unnecessary, each one of us is. The notion that the world was from all time primed to bring you and me into being is an unfounded, though comforting, illusion. If the tape of the past were rewound and played again, chances are none of us would reappear. The fact that any of us are here, really existing, signifies a vast improbability. This is, I think, a deep and genuine source of gratitude and wonder.
No doubt, to dwell excessively on these "what ifs..." will make you crazy. This is true even when we move from contemplating the cosmic contingencies of our being at all to reflecting on the past events of our daily lives. Wondering "what if things had been different...?" is one of the main ways past possibility persists in the present. It's the medium of regret: "if only I'd studied harder... if only I'd taken van Hook instead....if only I'd asked her out.." If I had done something else then, things would be different now. There's no changing the past, so to pay too much attention to what would have been had I been better or smarter isn't healthy. But never to indulge in this kind of wondering is to neglect a main source of the wisdom of which we are capable. We learn from our mistakes because we see the present as a product, not of inscrutable fate, but of our own choices and actions, which could have been different.
Reflecting on these matters surely makes us wonder about God. Isn't he in control? Don't things happen in accord with his plan? One of the great things about Reformed theology is its robust awareness of God as sovereign over his creation. God is entirely able to make happen whatever he wants to make happen, and so far as his keeping promises, and fulfilling his intentions goes, he is completely trustworthy. This sovereignty penetrates even to the stubborn human heart, where he creates faith there that could not otherwise come about. In this sense, God is in control. Yet the idea of God being in control is sometimes pushed too far, so it turns into the idea of God having a plan, according to which whatever happens happens just because it's part of his plan. God is portrayed not simply as faithfully and effectivley acting in human history to bring about his goals, but as having already decided what will happen before it happens. This, I believe, substitutes ideas borrowed from pagan philosophy, determinism, or even fatalism, for our confession of God's steadfast power, wisdon and character. Those ideas are foreign to a world view grounded in the biblical revelation. It portrays God's creation as 'closed', not as having a future that is in any way open. To the contrary, it looks as though God chose to make a world in which there's real chance and real freedom. A world of characters with whom he lovingly interacts. Characters by whose actions the future is shaped. The God whose human face we see in Jesus is a God who makes himself vulnerable, who takes chances, who acts within a real world, full of real persons, distinct from, but capable of interacting with their Creator.
Wonder about things having been different can enhance our understanding of our Creator and Savior. This kind of wondering can help us know who God is. In a way, we already know what God is like. If someone asks: "What is God really like?" the right answer is the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The true God is not remote and inscrutable. He comes close by and makes himself known. As outrageous as this claim is, it's what we, who put our trust in Jesus, are entitled to say. On the other hand, when it comes to persons, there's no coming to the end of knowing them. To know someone is to know more than the facts about his past, present and future. It requires knowing what he would do in situations that are entirely hypotheitcal. This, especially, is what's involved in knowing a person's character, in knowing him as good and trustworthy. Imagine a student wondering: "What if I had offered Professor Schaefer a round-trip, first class ticket to Florida in exchange for an A in Biblical Faith?" She quickly realizes that it wouldn't have worked: even if the past had been different, and she'd offered the bribe, he wouldn't have accepted it. If she really has to wonder for long that reveals she doesn't really know Professor Schaefer; she's ignorant of his fixed good character. She doesn't know him. To really know him she'd have to know a lot about what he would do, if things were different than the way they actually are. Wondering about what someone would do, given possible situations that will never really come about, is a powerful way to explore a person's character.
We know what God is like by way of the Bible, the record of his actions through history on behalf of human beings. That written record inspires and disciplines a kind of wonder that may help us better grasp his character. What would God have done, if things had gone differently? The Bible tells us about the Fall of Humankind. Whatever we make of the precise nature of the highly stylized story in Genesis, Scripture teaches there that the human condition of estrangement from God isn't the way things always were and it's not the way things have to be. Something went wrong that did not have to go wrong. For me, this is a cause for wonder: What if Eve had said no, rather than yes, when tempted to forsake her trustworthy God for the empty promise of becoming like a god in her own right? Karl Barth, the great Reformed theologian, once speculated that if the Fall had not taken place, Christ would still have become incarnate. I have no way of definitively knowing if Barth was right about this, but it resonates with my sense of the character and intentions of the God we meet in the Bible. The Creator calls this world into being from nothingness because he purposes that there be personal creatures living in a covenant relation of love and trust with him. Jesus Christ, God with us, God made man and humanity taken up into God, is the meaning, point and purpose of this Creation. Was God being made flesh only a response to human rebellion? Is the incarnate God ultimately a solution to a problem we caused, not part of God's deepest, original intentions? Or has God always intended to be one of us, one way or another, no matter what it might take, no matter what the cost? I wonder.
The ghost of how things would have been if humans had acted differently haunts Holy Scripture. Speaking for God the Old Testament prophets seem to take it for granted that he is vividly aware that things not only could have gone differently, but that if the people of Israel had acted differently, if they had turned from injustice and idolatry, then things would have gone differently. If they had turned from trusting in power, money and invented gods, and put their trust in God they would not have gone into exile. The land of Israel would not have been lost. Israel would have become a kingdom of priests, drawing all the nations to knowledge of the living God. Or so it seems. Possibly, the long drawn out disaster that is the history of ancient Israel was all somehow inevitable, the program of folly and rebellion merely playing itself out. Maybe repentance was never really possible. But I wonder: couldn't things have been different?
Finally, consider Jesus in the gospels: even there it's worth wondering "What if things had been different?" Was there a moment of opportunity, now irrevocably lost? For a while, as Jesus goes about healing and teaching it seems that the people of Israel are hearing him and at last opening themselves to their God. Remember those great, enthusiastic crowds that followed him wherever he went, the triumphant Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem. But after that, things fall apart. Jesus seems to realize that that he won't be accepted, and he sets himself to force the issue, pushing his opponents through the deadly endgame that moves toward the cross. The biblical witness tells us that Jesus came to die, but might things have happened differently, or was it already too late? There's biblical precedent for seemingly inevitable verdicts of judgment being reversed. I wonder whether even if the most likely thing was for the people to do what they did, to finally reject Jesus and let the political and religious authorities execute him for blasphemy and sedition, because such is the disposition of the fallen human heart, there still might have been a chance. Maybe things could have played out differently, with first Israel, and then the whole world, joyfully accepting their King, their incarnate God and Savior. Some say the sacrificial death of God was from the beginning a necessity; that what happened is what had to happen. Maybe the ultimate act of reconciliation, counteracting the ultimate act of rejection, was inevitable from Eden on. I don't know. Maybe things would have been different, if different choices had been made.
Charles Williams wrote: "There ought to be a great curiosity concerning divine things." God's mighty acts on our behalf, our creation and our salvation, are fitting objects of wonder because they are wonderful, matters of awe. We are called to wonder about them. Asking about what would have happened, if things had been different, is one of the ways for us to answer that call. Amen.