The God Who Intervenes

It’s becoming increasingly common to hear those who have gone through some form of theological deconstruction say, “I no longer believe in an interventionist God.” But this strikes me as little more than functional atheism. Are we back to the absent clockmaker God of the eighteenth-century deists? Who needs a noninterventionist God? What good is that God? If God doesn’t intervene, then we must all save ourselves, which is to say we are all lost. A God who does not intervene is not the God of the Bible, not the God of love, and not the Father in heaven that Jesus talked about. The merciful intervention of God is what Jesus addresses in the parable of the Unjust Judge.