Sample chapter :
Myth 2: God is in control.
Script: I need to feel that someone else controls my life because I have never learnt to deal with responsibility, uncertainty or insecurity.
Now of course this is a bit of a biggie I know and one that has dogged the modern church since at least the teachings of Calvin. Gods control verses man’s free will; omnipotence against impotence, chance as opposed to divine intervention.
The two opposing positions, as I see them, put in the most basic of terms state this:
- On the one side - God's sovereignty is unconditional, unlimited, and absolute. All things are predetermined by the good pleasure of God's will.
- On the other side, - Gods control over the universe and our lives is limited in correspondence with man's freedom and response. Our experience of life results from the decisions and choices that we make along with a random collection of chance events. We as Christians and non-Christians alike therefore live, to some extent, at the mercy of what life brings us. The message of the Gospel within this view is that within this ‘universal situation’ God acts continually to redeem both our world and us, as individuals, from the consequences of our failure and sin and has ultimately done so in Christ.
Sounds a simple choice doesn’t it but of course it isn’t. Each set of beliefs brings with it huge definitions about the nature of God himself. In the end, we simply can’t separate ‘who God is’ from that which we perceive him to do or allow, or not do, particularly if we see Gods inaction as an action of choice. There is no easy answer to the problem. So why do I so definitely assert that the statement “God is in control” is a Myth?
Simply because in my view he can’t be!
The starting place for this discussion comes from two separate positions firstly from the nature of God as revealed in the New Testament and secondly from the nature of the world around us.
This isn’t to suggest by the way that God won’t sort all things out in the end or that the eventual destiny of all things will not be subject to his design. In the end, I believe that God will redeem the universe and triumph. No, what we are discussing here relates to the everyday situations within both our lives: more broadly the events within human history. This proposition doesn’t claim to answer all the questions; the fact is that none of the arguments work completely, mine simply makes more sense to me.
So:
Christians who believe that ‘God is in control’ hold a number of variations on the theme and apply these views to human life in different ways. At its most extreme God simply controls everything that happens physically within the world. Furthermore, proponents of this view also attribute God’s control to the question of salvation, believing in what some call the theology of ‘double predestination’ in which God’s control over mankind is so complete that he even chooses not only those who will come to salvation in Christ but also actively chooses those who won’t and who are therefore condemned to Hell.
The problems with this (more extreme) view are of course obvious. Firstly, man has no self-determination, no real choice or free will. Secondly, God becomes the one who selects (on some unknown basis) who will be condemned for all eternity! God then becomes the destroyer of men; the torturer of humanity both in this life (as he predestines suffering) and for eternity. For most Calvinists in my experience also believe in an eternal hell of millions of human souls. Furthermore, those whom you have the capacity to love as a mere flawed human being (if this person is not chosen to be saved) is to be unloved for eternity by the God who apparently is Love! The contradictions are too much for me.
Other Christians hold perhaps a lesser view of God’s control but nevertheless tend to see pretty much everything as in some way pre-ordained, including the choices that we make within our lives.
Of particular interest to me within this circle of beliefs is the observation that, in my experience, people who hold these views seem to place a particular emphasis on God’s control of all the things that go wrong for them. A fact that I have always found to be frankly a bit odd. Such Christians are for example, really ‘happy’ to attribute all their tragedies and traumas to God’s divine will while on the other hand, and equally as confusing, seem to take the good things in their lives as some-how less than the result of God’s blessing. I need to perhaps clarify a little of what I mean by this. It isn’t that these Christians don’t see the good things as from God, but the emphasis they place on Gods control of the good events seems some-how less intense. In suffering, their faith intensifies as they use their theology of God’s omnipotence to construct a more cope-able framework in which to survive their obvious pain.
One may think for example, of such people as ‘Joni’ who wrote a book in the 70’s which became a most famous Christian bestseller. Joni dived into the sea when she was a young girl and broke her neck. She was paralysed and spent her life inspiring others through her belief that God had caused this to happen to her in order that she might preach the Gospel, exemplifying as she did, an example of true suffering and yet victorious spirituality! Now I have no doubt at all, that during this horrendous situation God acted, God ministered and God redeemed her situation so that her wonderful ministry developed, but to say that God caused the accident in order to do this seems perverse to say the least.
Ultimately these in my opinion erroneous views, seem to come from probably two different sources. Firstly, from our life scripts and secondly from our monotheistic (there is only one God) theology. In particular this second point, I would suggest, comes from the very distinctive monotheism of the Old Testament where it has to be admitted God’s all-encompassing omnipotence has a very high standing and where everything is certainly seen as coming directly from God. The proposition: ‘There is only one God whose divine will must therefore governs all things’ is the proposition in question here, but, in reality, does it? While those who wrote the Old Testament may have culturally followed this idea does such thinking stand up today against the revelation of God held in Christ and within the pages of the N/T?
I don’t think it does.
Is God the author of our sufferings? Does he bring them into our lives for some unknown divine reason, to teach us lessons or to refine our faith? Personally, I don’t see this at all. After all, why would he? If he wanted to teach us these lessons why would he do so in the cruellest of ways? And where does it stop? Is personal tragedy, national tragedy, suffering and pain actually Gods will at times for our lives? As a Police officer I saw countless acts of evil perpetrated on people by other people. Are these victims supposed to see God as in some way the motivator behind these events? In my view this simply makes no sense at all. It makes our N/T God of love into an evil despotic ruler who simply toys with his creation inflicting needless suffering supposedly to achieve his own ends.
I prefer a more fluid theology.
For me life is a mixture of the random and of what we make it. It is determined by circumstances, by choices made sometimes by ourselves and sometimes by others and we should add, from the consequences of a powerful evil that has entered our existence and which corrupts all creation.
God, I believe, seeks constantly by his grace, to redeem life and bring into our lives the power of his healing Christ centred Love as revealed in the Gospel.
I will expand my view:
Theologically, I would suggest, we live in a world that since the fall exists in a state of ‘Chaos’, in a state of decay. The universe is dying, falling apart if you like, spiralling downwards, all is not set or part of some carefully worked out plan or working as it should be and this biblically speaking is the effect of a disease called sin.
The results of sin are firstly, all that is bad in the world, secondly, the presence of a significant spiritual evil and thirdly the selfishness that exists within the hearts of both men and women which also corrupts our lives and the lives of others.
In the New Testament this current state is illustrated perhaps most strikingly in the Apostle Paul’s concepts of the ‘new verses the old order.’ In a variety of different ways Paul talks of a tension between what God is doing through the new ministry of the kingdom in Christ and the ‘old corrupted order/situation/world’ in which the whole universe exists.
In the new kingdom (the places where God’s kingdom influence is now active) God is working to bring redemption, that is, he is present and active and working to bring peace. God then, provides us through this, a foretaste of what is to come when he will act to re-create all things. God is not then in control, at least not yet, (we kicked him out in the garden of Eden) but he is here and his presence brings into our lives the influence of his redemptive action and love by the power of his Holy Spirit and in Christian terms anyway the place where this influence is most active and obvious is called his Church.
In his Church
universal, in its people, in their lives and through its ministry to the wider
world God exerts his influence and seeks to deliver to all a foretaste of his
new Kingdom and of his love. His role then, if you like, rather than being to
control (for the world is lost to him by its own choice) is to redeem, to make
good from that which is in chaos, to bring some order and love to that which is
in decay, to quote Paul “God works IN
In practical terms then when tragedy comes it is neither God who brings it or who orders it, it is part of life and a direct consequence of the fact that life, existence itself, is in chaos. It is a result of sin, of man’s inability to live as God had intended. It is the result at times simply of the decisions of evil people, of the influence of this corruption within mankind itself. It is also, I believe, the result of spiritual evil an independent force which exists in opposition to God and whose aim is to corrupt all that is good. The bible calls the author of these influences the Devil or Satan.
God’s role within this universal tragedy is then, as I have said, to redeem. If we let him he will come along side us, love us, deliver us, reassure us and give us hope even within our darkest moments, for Christ has conquered all darkness and even death itself, the ultimate loss.
In conclusion then to say that God is in control denies his nature for He IS LOVE. It also denies the fact of man’s free will and flies completely in the face of reality itself. There is simply too much badness, sadness, and evil in the world for it to be true.
Does this make God powerless? Not at all, for he is redeeming all things.
Isn’t this in itself a bit mean? Why doesn’t God step in and change things? He has and he is in Christ.
Why did God let all this chaos exist in the first place? Why did he let man fall into sin and let sin corrupt the world? Why didn’t he create without the possibility of corruption?
Perhaps because free will is an essential aspect in creation. To create without the possibility of that creation failing, without giving it the ability to be creative itself (with all the dangers that brings) would perhaps make creation itself pointless. Also, of course, we tend to think that God is limited by nothing but perhaps he is limited by his own very nature, perhaps God ‘HAD’ to create in this way? Does God have the ability to act outside of his nature? I don’t think he can for to do so would cause him to deny himself (or in other words, to sin, and if there is one thing God can’t do, its sin.) So maybe this is just the way it had to be! Creation had to have the choice and sadly it chose to sin, to follow its own path and by doing so brought all this chaos into the world as it fell away from God and automatically began to die.
The Grace and love of God is shown in the fact that while we, like the prodigal son, walked away and squandered our inheritance, God followed us and has been loving us back to himself within the chaos ever since and despite our rejection of him. Christian books New testament books