At the moment, I'm reading a book called A NEW KIND OF CHRISTIAN by Brian McLaren, and thought I'd share an excerpt from the third chapter (pages 22-24). As for context, this is written as a journal entry directed to God:
"I was thinking about the statement 'God is in control.' I know that the question of what that statement means has been under hot debate in recent years, with the 'openness of God' camp suggesting new interpretations and traditionalists crying 'heresy' in response. Now I realize that this debate really reflects some thinking people questioning their own modernity, not your ultimate power. At any rate, what does 'God is in control' really mean to people today? I am almost certain that we cannot consider the word control without thinking of it mechanistically. In other words, for you to be in control means to make something happen your way, the way an operator operates a machine, flipping switches, turning gears, pressing buttons, causing effects that cause other effects. I think it is almost impossible for us to consider control meaning anything else. But then I consider this: before the modern world, there were no complex machines. There were no switches to flip, buttons to push, or gears to grind. If I recall correctly, some of the first complex machines, clocks, were beginning to be developed in the 1300s, but it wasn't until the harnessing of the pendulum for clock technology in the early 1600s that modern machines really became commonplace. So God, whatever a person in ancient biblical times would have meant by saying 'God is in control' (if he would have said such a thing at all) it is almost certainly very different from what we mean today. For him, your control was associated with farmers controlling animals or parents controlling children or perhaps a king controlling subjects - all very different from an operator controlling a machine 'like clockwork.' So if we say the Bible speaks of you being in control (a word that doesn't even appear in the old King James Version, according to my concordance), we run the risk of importing and imposing all our modern conceptions of clockwork, operation, mechanism onto you. We end up thinking of you in a way that may really distort both your nature and our situation in relation to you. In one way, Lord, this makes me want to praise you, because many of our intellectual problems with faith, like the whole issue of how evil can exist in your universe, seems to disappear or shrink when we step outside the mechanistic model. In other words, if a company designs a plane and it crashes due to design failure, we hold the designer liable. Or if a person drives a car drunk and kills a pedestrian, we hold the driver responsible. In both cases, the machine designer or operator is the only sentient being capable of being held responsible. But if a parent raises a child with all appropriate guidance and the child grows up and rejects his parents' teaching and commits a crime, we don't hold the parent responsible in the same way. So I can see how limiting ourselves as moderns to a mechanistic view of the universe - and of you - really creates problems for us. Forgive us, Lord, for judging you according to our own incomplete paradigms."
MP
Just wanted to get your feedback about your own experience of church...you can be as honest as you like, and can even answer anonymously. If you have a moment and would like to share your thoughts, please leave your comments below as they relate to these interrelated questions:
