I “attended” a livestream interfaith prayer service the other night, after the chaotic and shameful events at the Capitol, and one of the participants offered this nugget as part of  her prayer: “We know that you are in control.” Meaning God. It’s a sentiment I have heard expressed countless times, but it is becoming harder and harder for me to countenance. The thought that came to mind this time, and which I almost shared in the comments pane, was, “God is in control? Then God has an interesting strategy.”

If God were in control of the events at the Capitol, at what point did God intend to step in and exercise that control? Apparently not before a woman was killed and our country became a laughingstock or an object of pity in the eyes of the world. If God is in control when it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic, what’s the magic number of deaths that will trigger God’s action? Two million? Three million? If God was in control during, say, the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, then God must have meant for a quarter of a million people to die, right?

I don’t mean to blaspheme or sound impious. What I do mean to do is to look at the world clear-eyed and forgo comforting fictions such as, “We know God is in control,” or, “The Lord sits enthroned over the flood; / the Lord sits enthroned as king forever,” as Psalm 29:10 would have us believe. These statements, when contrasted with the reality of life in the world, lay bare the inadequacy of the depiction of God as a divine interventionist who can miraculously step in to avert disaster. Or bring it, for that matter. Logically, if God is in control and 360,000 people in our country lie dead from a viral pandemic, with more dying every day, then this controlling God must get the credit for those deaths. That’s the clear implication we ignore when we blithely mouth the untruth that “God is in control.”

So where is our hope if we cannot trust in a divine puppet master directing the activity of the world? I may sound like a record stuck on a scratch when I say this, but I believe our hope lies in the portrait of God that process theology paints. This God is not in control in any simplistic sense; rather, God accompanies creation and seeks to persuade recalcitrant matter to go in a direction that will result in the full flourishing of life for all concerned. But it’s not called recalcitrant matter for nothing. It resists. We resist. Viruses that arise in the course of the evolutionary processes that make life possible resist God’s direction and wreak devastating havoc. Think of the last time you tried to convince somebody who held a different political opinion to come over to your way of seeing things, and you will have an idea of what God is up against in seeking to persuade the world to operate according to God’s good and perfect will.

Make no mistake, “The voice of the Lord is powerful; / the voice of the Lord is full of majesty” (v. 4), and we ought always to “ascribe to the Lord the glory of [God’s] name; / worship the Lord in holy splendor” (v. 2). But we do not ascribe glory to God when we misrepresent the divine nature. You may come to a different conclusion, but I find more comfort in the thought that God is unequivocally for us and is working with all God’s might to bring about the best outcomes despite considerable resistance than in the  notion of a God who is “in control” but allows death and destruction on a massive scale. That God sounds to me more monstrous than divine.

I for one do not wish to worship a monster. I want to worship the God of infinite love, and seek to cooperate with that God in the reclamation and renewal of the world.