Chaos and Control

The Creation of Control

In the biblical story told in the first pages of Genesis, God is a God who creates order out of chaos. One might even say that he creates by bringing order out of chaos[1], separating light from dark, waters above from waters below, waters below from dry land, until what begins formless and void (“welter and waste,” as Robert Alter translates it, capturing the poetic cadence of the Hebrew tohu va-bohu) is formed, ordered, and ready to be filled with beauty and wonder and life.

Last in creation, at the apex of that life, God creates humanity in his own image. Rather than provide an abstract explanation of what the image of God means, Scripture simply records the words with which God simultaneously charges and blesses humanity:

“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” - Genesis 1:28

The Creator who forms and fills now calls humanity to fill and form as co-creators. The God who brought order out of chaos now calls humanity to go on doing the same.

This means that in the first instance, the drive for control is good, and good on a fundamental level, integral to what it means to be human. We are meant to exercise control over an unwieldy creation, in order to bring order out of chaos. Control is not intrinsically evil in its structure, though it can be distorted in its direction.[2] In the rest of this essay, my aim is to probe these distortions, and gesture toward their redemption in Christ.

The Distortion of Control

To be a creature is to be limited, finite, dependent. This is not a result of the fall; this is simply what it means to be a creature in God’s good creation. “God made man hungry,” Alexander Schmemann wrote, and placed him in a garden with every kind of fruit for food. We are made to be dependent on food, on water, on one another - and of course, on God’s word. “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” (Deuteronomy 8:3; Matthew 4:4) We are meant to depend on God’s word as it directs our steps, lights our path, shows us which way to go - this way, not that; embrace this, reject that; eat from any of these trees, just not that one. God’s word reveals God’s character, wisdom, love, and it is his word that the serpent attacks when he introduces doubt to Eve’s mind in the garden. “Did God really say…?” - and suddenly, she isn’t sure. Is God’s word good? Will he take care of her? Why would he hold back this one tree?

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. - Genesis 3:6

She saw, and she took. She, and Adam with her (he was plainly standing right there), saw for themselves what was good rather than depend on God’s word, and they took control. But this was a distorting control; it didn’t bring order out of chaos, but unleashed the greater chaos of sin on the world and into the heart of every human being since. We all, like Adam and Eve, fall prey to the lie that God cannot care for us, that he doesn’t want to, that he’s holding out on us - and that, therefore, we are on our own to find some other means of exercising control over the chaos of our lives.

Technology is not the first or the only way that humanity has strived to do this, but it is particularly prevalent in our day and age. Think how many of our technologies claim to offer us a measure of control, without ever fully delivering. Social media offers control over our relationships; medicine and biotechnology offer control over death and disease; streaming video and audio services offer a permanent escape from boredom; developments in transportation and energy technology offer an escape from the limitations of being finite beings, physically located in just one place at a time.

But what if some of these limitations aren’t actually part of the chaos we were meant to overcome? What if in seeking to exercise control over the limitations of creaturely existence, we sometimes move further away from being human, failing to hear the word that God speaks to us through our very natures - this way, not that?

This doesn’t mean that technology has no place in humanity’s call to bring order out of chaos; it manifestly does, and some things that we strive against (disease, death) surely are a result of the fall, and surely are among those things we should work to overcome. What I want to suggest, however, is that we’re not always good at distinguishing chaos to be overcome from the creaturely limitations that are part of God’s good order.[3] What if one of the ways that we are meant to be formed as human beings is by bumping up against the limitations of being creatures, not as chaos to be overcome but as gifts to be received?

The Redemption of Control

I remember when I learned to throw a frisbee. Not the first time, when I was very young, but when I got to Stanford, a campus where throwing a proper forehand was considered a life skill on par with navigating the housing draw and Series A fundraising. Here’s the thing: throwing a forehand is not a natural motion. Most people can throw a backhand well enough, so that the disc flies level and straight to its intended target, but when you throw a forehand, your wrist naturally wants to turn over in a way that causes the disc to come out at a sharp angle, fading off to the side and landing on its edge, where it will roll, mockingly, away from you, further than you initially threw it. For a Stanford freshman, this is social death.

Fortunately, every dorm has an upperclass resident advisor, specifically trained in coaching inept freshman to throw a disc (as well as figuring out the meal plan and Series A fundraising). Mine was a third-year chemistry major; let’s call him Josh. I remember the day Josh came up to me, gamely attempting to learn to throw a forehand, and said, “Here - try this.” He was holding a bungee cord in his hand. “What’s that for?” I asked. “Just - here, try it like this,” Josh said, as he tied the bungee cord around my waist and my throwing arm, at the elbow.

“How’s that supposed to help?”

“Just throw it,” Josh said.

The bungee cord had my elbow pinned to my hip, leaving only my forearm free, so that I had to torque my whole body around to get anything behind the throw - but it worked. The disc didn’t go far, but it came out straight, and level, and glided calmly and silently across the field, sustained by its own lift like an eagle riding a thermal current. I looked at Josh.

“Keep doing that for a while, until you feel it,” he said, turning back to the dorm.

And he was right. By the end of the afternoon, I could feel it; my elbow knew where to be, my wrist knew its proper slot, and I could actually put my arm into throwing for distance. The constraint had set me free.[4]

What I just described will surprise no one who has ever learned a skill, or, that is, acquired a habit. The path to freedom runs through constraint. No one is born free to play a Bach piano sonata until they have labored endlessly over mind-numbing scales. Steph Curry makes hundreds of shots in an empty gym for every three-pointer he drains in a game. Freely conversing in a foreign language only comes after years of repetitively declining nouns, conjugating verbs, and pronouncing sounds that don’t exist in your native tongue. In case after case, the formation of virtues and good habits requires the constraint of well-chosen jigs, and not just in the case of physical habits. A good life is promoted by a healthy embrace of constraints: marriage, sabbath, apprenticeship in craft or scholarship, a sense of belonging, even of being tied down, to a place and a people.

But which constraints are good? How do we distinguish between the chaos of the fall, and the goodness of creaturely limitations? Well, that takes wisdom. And almost always, wisdom is handed down, master to apprentice, parent to child, RA to hapless freshman. “Here - try this,” says the master. “Watch how I do it.”

Eugene Peterson, the late pastor and author, is probably best known for his plain-English translation of the Bible called simply “The Message.” Here’s how he renders Jesus’ words, “Come to me, all who are weary,” in Matthew 11:28-30:

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

“Walk with me and work with me - watch how I do it,” Jesus says. Jesus, the word made flesh, both fully divine and fully human - indeed, the one who reveals humanity to itself. Jesus shows us what it means to be human as he lives a life of perfect obedience to the Father, in dependence on the Holy Spirit. He rests (even as he redefines the sabbath in its orientation to life), he takes time away to pray, he hungers and thirsts without forgetting that his primary dependence is on the word of God. In the wilderness, when tempted, he succeeds precisely where Adam and Eve failed, refusing to see and take up for himself anything other than what God has said is good.

In the life of Jesus we see most fully what the Apostle Paul means when he encourages us to, “walk by the Spirit” (Galatians 5:16) - not in order to be superhuman, but to be fully human. Are you walking with him, watching how he does it? Are you spending time in prayer, in God’s word, with his people?

“In your service is perfect freedom,” wrote Augustine. It’s when we remember God’s goodness to us, depending on his word in obedience to him, that we unlock our greatest capacity to be free from the chaos of a fallen world, and can even experience rest, rather than relentless striving, in the midst of exercising control.

[1] This is not to say that God’s work of creation begins with some unformed, chaotic matter - not, that is, to contradict the teaching that he creates out of nothing. It’s just to say that this isn’t where the focus lies in the Genesis account. Gerhard May has written a compelling account of the development of the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, making clear that it is a teaching that doesn’t derive from one single, clear text, but - like other concepts such as Trinity, or homoousios, words that don’t appear in Scripture but have been judged central to orthodoxy - developed over time as the only way to harmonize all that Scripture says about God’s act of creation and his relationship to what he has made.

[2] Readers of Al Wolters’ Creation Regained will recognize my debt to his distinction between structure and direction, which allows us to distinguish between the inherent goodness of the created world and its corruption in a fallen state.

[3] Sorting through questions of how technology ought to be used is well beyond the scope of this short essay, but a great place to start is with John Dyer’s book From the Garden to the City.

[4] To throw a plastic disc, you understand. Let’s not make too big a deal out of this.