Is God in control?

For many years beginning in college or maybe even high school, I kept a folded slip of paper in my wallet.  Written on it in blue pen was a single bible verse.  The crease in the slip had been folded and unfolded so many times that the paper was almost torn in two.  The ink had run and faded.  My handwriting was so scrawled that I must have written down the verse in a moment of haste, or perhaps near-panic.  The verse was Romans 8:28, which is included in our epistle reading today and which many of you probably know from your own memory, or bumper stickers, or gauzy social media memes: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose.”

What an enormous comfort.  I don’t remember what I was going through when I hurriedly jotted Romans 8:28, but I do know that for a long time in my younger life I read it often, and relied upon it, and was exceedingly glad St. Paul had originally written those words.  “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose.”

It didn’t take long in life, however, for the verse to raise as many questions as it provided soothing answers.  And as time went on, others I encountered in life would quote this verse back to me in situations for which it didn’t seem to ring true.  Romans 8:28 was deployed as another way of saying—a scriptural prooftext—that God is in control, directing all events, large and small.  Rather than instilling deep peace, it began to make me deeply uneasy, as if invoking Romans 8:28 were an attempt to keep the thin façade of a shoddy religious worldview from cracking.  Sometimes Romans 8:28 was invoked with regard to relatively small or trivial things, but not always.  The straw that broke the camel’s back for me—and I share this as gently as I can, knowing that there is no greater grief in this world—was the first time I, as a priest, had to bury a child.  With good intentions and a loving heart, a parishioner said of the child’s death, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose.”  And she followed it up with the modern corollaries, “Everything happens for a reason” and “God needed a new little angel.”  To my ears, these words, deployed in this way—both the scripture and the add-ons—seemed less a comfort than a taunt.  The implication was that God took the child, that God caused this thing to happen, and that, somehow, the death of a child was good as part of God’s orchestrated plan.

Hear me say: I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now.  Whatever St. Paul means by Romans 8:28, it isn’t that.  God doesn’t will the death of children.  God doesn’t lead people to run red lights and engineer automobile accidents.  God doesn’t manipulate the world in such ways.

But St. Paul speaks truth, so how are we to understand his claim in Romans 8:28?  In what way does God weave all things together for good for those who love God and who are called according to God’s purpose?

It is helpful here to draw on the thread of Christian thought known as “process theology.”[i]  Process theologians don’t see our experience in the world as a scripted performance, with us merely playing out parts God has already written from beginning to end.  Such a world would be like a marionette on a string, and in it God would, indeed, be the author of each event that occurs, including the most senseless and horrific.  Instead of such a world, process theologians imagine the cosmos as still unfolding, still emerging, still in process (thus the name of their school of thought), and in which even God, along with us, can be surprised, overjoyed, and grieved by what transpires in each moment. 

This renders God more intimate and relatable, because God is experiencing each novel moment in the world as we are, with wonder, and whimsy, and shock, and maybe even confusion.  But how can this be?  It is possible because process theology also takes very seriously—perhaps more seriously than any other theological school of thought—the creation’s free will, or said differently, our own role as co-creators with God.  We speak, act, birth things into being alongside God, and it is often our human action, both individually and collectively, both immediately as when we run the red light or distally as when, for instance, our pollution of the earth increases societal incidence of cancer, that ushers in pain and leads to grief.  God grants us the latitude by our own free will to create things good and ill in this world, and our creativity can thrill or shock, overjoy or grieve, even God.  This is another way of conceding that, in and through our God-given freedom, God is not entirely in control.

Given all of this, how would a process theologian interpret Romans 8:28?  How would she say that God weaves all things together for good?

In process theology, God holds within Godself as potential—not yet created—the best of all possibilities, for each individual and for the creation as a whole.  And in each emerging moment of existence, God always sets before the creation the best possibility.  I think we can grasp that.  You and I both know in moments large and small in our lives the experience of having before us the next step, not yet taken, that feels best and right, that will contribute something meaningful to the world or will help you flourish.  Those best-possibilities-set-before-us are how and where God acts, and that internal feeling—that tug forward—when we know which next step is right is what the process theologians call God’s “lure,” calling us toward the good and the best for us.  That surely seems like God weaving together all things for good, doesn’t it?

But you and I also know that more often than not we shut our ears, eyes, and hearts to God’s lure.  We ignore the best possibility God sets before us, and we choose otherwise.  God doesn’t do that to us, and God doesn’t impede our free will.  God sets before us the best of all possibilities, and then we choose to take that, or some other, step into the future. 

Every moment of our lives, big or small, mundane or momentous, is a forked path, a decision point between one thing or the other.  In the moment, we choose God’s good, or we choose otherwise.  And when we choose other than God’s good, sometimes that good—whatever it was in that moment—is cut off forever.  Life doesn’t include mulligans.  We do things that cannot be undone.  Our decisions have real and often irrevocable consequences.

Process theology concedes this reality entirely.  In our freedom, we co-create alongside God, but unlike God, often what we create is not good.  But here is where process theology grasps Paul’s great truth in Romans 8:28: In each moment, as soon as we decide, as soon as we act, as soon as we do some thing that takes us a step down the wrong path, a step away from God’s previous good for us, God readjusts and sets anew in front of us, in light of our past decisions, the very best of all possibilities!  And then we choose again.  And then, taking into account the consequences of that choice, God sets before us the best of all possibilities.

Think about it this way: It is as if God is a cosmic GPS.  When I’m driving Google Maps provides me the best route for my journey, but I may choose to turn left when the GPS tells me that a right turn is the best way to go.  My bad choice may put me behind an accident, or in road construction, or onto a flooded street.  Thankfully, the moment I choose, Google Maps recalibrates, and, given the consequences of my choice, Google Maps offers me the new best possible route for my journey.  It doesn’t ignore the choice I’ve made, and it must respond in light of my previous choice, but with a newly recalibrated route it offers me the new best way forward.  And eventually, no matter how many wrong turns I stubbornly make, Google Maps will see me safely to my destination.  It will weave the best route through my journey.         

In our lives, God does the same.  God has granted us a world of wonder and freedom, and for that we are thankful.  But the flip side of that gift is that in our freedom we can choose poorly, and do damage, and the world can do damage to us.  That damage is real, and it can be, for God as well as for us, impossible to undo.  But that doesn’t mean we are bereft, hopeless, or alone.  No matter what bad choices we make, or no matter what the world does to us, causing us disappointment and pain, God is always there, in the next emerging moment of our lives, calling us toward the best of all possibilities for us.  Always.  In every moment.  In that way God lures us forward, never giving up on us.  God truly weaves together our worst and our best moments, until hope against hope, God looks upon our lives and says, “It is good.” 

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[i] For a clear and concise explanation of process theology, see https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/process-theology/.  See also books by Dr. Jay B. McDaniel, my former professor at Hendrix College, who is a leading process theologian.