"Why didn't God send the rain and the
snow a week earlier?" I asked my wife shortly after moisture from
the skies dampened the fires that had destroyed more than three
thousand homes in Southern California. "Because God doesn't
control the weather," she replied.
I like her answer! She said that God
"doesn't" control the weather, not that God
"can't" or "won't." Putting it this way keeps us
close to what we experience, observe and learn from Scripture. It also
spares us the arrogance of parsing too precisely what God is able or
unable to
do. After all, when we say that we "can’t" do something,
we often mean that to do so would be inappropriate, not that it would
be impossible.
The word "control" is decisive. It
implies complete dominance, as when we control a machine. Physicist
and theologian John Polkinghorne rightly observes that "there are
clocks and there are clouds," however. It’s a safe bet that
even God recognizes this difference and acts accordingly.
I would not have objected if my wife had
said, "Usually God does not control the weather."
Although there may or may not be rare exceptions in the pattern she
identified, something that is a matter of continuing discussion, we
ought to base our lives on our best understandings of how God typically
acts. Mature believers discern God in ordinary events, immature ones
only in extraordinary ones.
How, then, does God act in our lives and
throughout the universe? We can identify at least three primary
answers to this question. Some prefer one, but many affirm them all.
Even those who value all three usually make one of them dominant and
interpret the other two in light of it, however.
None of these three answers will appeal to
two groups of people who otherwise have very little in common.
One the one hand, some say that God is not actual or that the
actuality of God resides entirely within our own experience:
psychological, sociological or both. On the other hand, others
hold that God wholly and solely determines every single
thing that happens right down to the smallest detail. The three
following possibilities lie between these contrary
extremes.
God as Intervener:
Imagine a series of circles and suppose that each one represents an
event. If we completely color some circles and leave the others wholly
uncolored, we picture the idea of an intervening God. According to
this view, God does not cause some events. The empty circles symbolize
them. God wholly causes other events and the completely colored ones
indicate them. The basic message is that God completely determines
some events and has nothing to do with all the rest.
This view attributes too much responsibility
to God for some events and not enough for others. Also, we often link
the idea that God works as an "intervener" to the notion
that we can persuade God to act on our behalf if we plead intensely
enough, perform certain rituals or make large enough contributions to
charitable causes. If this is not superstition, it is very close to
it. It leaves us vulnerable to religious abuse and exploitation.
God as Initiator:
When we become weary and wary of picturing God as an
"intervener," we often choose to think of God as an
"initiator." In this case, only the first circle is
completely covered. All the others are wholly empty. The basic idea is
that God created the universe ages ago and established the patterns of
regularity by which it has since proceeded on its own. God started
things but is no longer involved.
This view has the advantage of leaving us
less vulnerable to superstition and exploitation. It also encourages
us to discover the principles by which things take place so that we
can live in harmony with them. It also pictures God as consistent and
predictable, neither arbitrary nor capricious. All this is to the
good.
This image of God fails to articulate our
sense that God continues to be active throughout the universe,
however. This sense emerges partly from positive impulses we detect in
own lives and partly from the degree of progress or development we see
around us. Life is not static. It seems to be moving in the direction
of greater complexity and intensity with increasing opportunities for
both good and evil. It seems to be prompted by something
"More" than the sum of the universe and all of its
inhabitants. This "More" is God.
God as Interactor:
According to the image of God as "interactor," God’s
typical mode of action is not coercive but persuasive. As indicated by
the story of what Elijah learned when hiding and moping in a cave, God
is in a "still small voice," not the wind, earthquake and
fire. (I Kings 19)
When we use a series of circles representing
a sequence of events to illustrate this view, we make each one partly
colored and partly uncolored. This suggests that God is active in some
way and to some extent in every moment in our lives and in every
occurrence throughout the entire universe. It also implies that God
influences all occurrences but wholly determines none of them, except
perhaps on occasions so rare that they are not relevant to our
everyday experience. According to this view, the most helpful question
to ask is not "Is this event caused by God?" but rather
"What aspects of this occurrence constitute God’s positive
influence?" This question presumes that, as long as life
cognitive life lasts, God can help us make things somewhat better no
matter how disappointing or destructive they have become.
The effectiveness of God’s influence
differs from event to event in harmony with our ability and
willingness to respond to it favorably. We can illustrate this by
varying the amount of each circle we darken, making certain that no
circle is wholly empty or entirely colored. This makes it clear that
we have considerable influence over what happens. It also makes it
evident that many things are not now subject to God’s control.
Two features of the recent fires in Southern
California illustrate this point. First, at least one of them appears
to have been intentionally started by a young man who was seen
speeding away in a van after throwing a flaming object into the dry
foliage. He apparently ignored the continuing positive influence of
God in his life. Second, once the hillside burst into flames, it was
even more difficult for God, given the divine predilection for
persuasion rather than coercion, to influence the course of events because
fires do not have central nervous systems. Persons have central
nervous systems; for this reason it is far easier for God to influence
a person than a rock. Although it "sings" and
"dances," in this respect a fire is much more like a stone.
Because God does not usually override our
freedom, and because God does not typically compel things like fires
that have little or no freedom, many things now happen that do not
reflect God’s will. The recent fires in Southern California would
seem to be among them.