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Total Control?

The Doctrine of Divine Determinism Reconsidered

By C. S. Cowles

In a chaotic and dangerous world, nothing is so attractive and reassuring as the oft-repeated declaration, “God is in total control.” It is not surprising that mega-church pastor Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life became a best seller soon after its release. In that book, Pastor Warren writes:

God prescribed every single detail of your body . . . your race, the color of your skin, your hair, and every other feature. He custom-made your body just the way he wanted it . . . He also decided when you would be born and how long you will live. He planned the days of your life in advance, choosing the exact time of your birth and death . . . Your race and nationality are no accident. God left no detail to chance . . . God never does anything accidentally, and he never makes mistakes.#1

This doctrine of Divine Determinism was spelled out in its classical form by John Calvin (1509-1564), the Reformation’s first systematic theologian and most influential thinker. Calvin built his enormously popular and widely embraced theological edifice on the foundation of God’s absolute sovereignty. “God,” he wrote, who is “creator of all so regulates all things that nothing takes place without his deliberation.”2# All events from the movement of the tiniest quarks to the activity of vast galaxies “are governed by God’s secret plan in such a way that nothing happens except what is knowingly and willingly decreed by him.”3# Reformed theologian A. Van De Beek adds:

Nothing can happen without the will of God, however strange the way may seem. However much dictators and tyrants, presidents and party leaders, generals and industrial magnates may flaunt their power, they are only instruments in the hands of almighty God.#4

Popular evangelical author Max Lucado takes this belief in God’s Total Control to its logical conclusion. In his recent book, The House of God, he approvingly cites Erwin Lutzer, who writes:

The devil is just as much God’s servant in his rebellion as he was in the days of his sweet obedience . . . The devil is God’s devil . . . He is pressed into service to do God’s will in the world; he must do the bidding of the Almighty.#5

As comforting as such a doctrine may be to many, ascribing to God total responsibility for everything that happens is fraught with hazards and difficulties, not the least being the unflattering and even grotesque image it paints of the “Controller.”

The Dark Side of God’s Control

On April 20, 1999, two teenage boys, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, shot 12 of their fellow students and a teacher at Colombine High School before turning their guns on themselves. One of these was Cassie Bernall, 17, who was shot to death while reading her Bible at a library table.#6 The day after the shooting, Cassie’s mother told a Denver Post staff writer the shooting somehow fit into God’s larger plan, and “in order to get Cassie’s message out and to make the impact that needed to be made and the changes that needed to be made in our world, that it had to be something really big.”7

For more than 30 years, Joni Eareckson Tada has been a beacon of inspiration and hope to millions of believers. Before rapt live audiences, in her many books, and on her daily radio program aired through 850 outlets, she never tires in attributing her diving accident at 17, which paralyzed her below the neck, to “God’s loving sovereignty.” It was His way of rescuing her from “a path of self-destruction.”#8

Barely had the twin spires of America’s Cathedral of Capitalism crashed to the ground on September 11, 2001, than Jerry Falwell, making an appearance on The 700 Club, reflexively attributed it to God’s proactive judgment. He blamed “pagans and abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians . . . the ACLU, People for the American Way, all . . . who have tried to secularize America.” Pat Robertson, the show’s host, agreed.#9

There is something eminently praiseworthy about Christians wanting to give glory to God not only in good times but also in bad. Yet integrity compels us to ask:

If God is the one who incited two teenage boys to shoot up their high school,

If God arranged the accident that broke a beautiful teenager’s neck,

If God incited Osama ben Laden to plan the September 11, 2001 attacks, and guided the hands of the hijackers as they slit the throats of the pilots and flew their airliners into the prearranged targets, killing over 3,000 innocent people,

If all the heart-attacks, crippling illnesses, diseases, plagues, accidents, divorces, natural disasters, and wars that have wreaked havoc throughout human history are God’s doing . . .

. . . then who needs a Satan?

John Wesley protested that to attribute such atrocities to God is an outrage against His character, and makes Him “more false, more cruel, and more unjust than the devil. . . . God hath taken [Satan’s] work out of [his] hands . . . God is the destroyer of souls.”#10

The God Whose Name and Nature Is Love

One of Benjamin Franklin’s oft-cited aphorisms is that to tell only half the truth is to lie. What is missing in Calvin’s portrayal of a tyrannical and despotic God is the very heart and soul of the Christian gospel, expressed so simply and yet so profoundly by John the Beloved: “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). John does not say that God is loving, or that love is even the greatest of His attributes. Rather, love is the essence of His character. Love is the sun around which all His attributes orbit, and the artesian well from which all His actions flow.

“It is well that you should be thoroughly sensible of this,” said Wesley, “the heaven of heavens is love. There is nothing higher in religion: there is, in effect, nothing else.”#11 Generations of believers have felt their own hearts lifted to “heavenly realms in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:7) by this great Charles Wesley hymn:

Love Divine! All loves excelling,
Joy of heaven to earth come down.
Fix in us thy humble dwelling,
All thy grace and mercies crown.

Over against a one-sided emphasis upon God’s sovereignty that inevitably paints a ghastly portrait of what Martin Luther called “the dark side of God,” is the clear and unambiguous countertestimony of John, who exults, “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). James’ exuberant witness is that God is “the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow” (1:17, nasb). Because God’s love is not an abstract ideal, but was incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, we no longer see “a poor reflection” of God “as in a mirror,” but “with unveiled faces” behold “the glory of God in the face of Christ” (1 Corinthians 13:12; 2 Corinthians 3:18; 4:6). All the New Testament witnesses agree with Paul when he says, “In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” (Colossians 2:9). “To see what God is like,” says Philip Yancey, “simply look at Jesus.”#12

The truth is that exercising Total Control is precisely what God cannot do and still be faithful to His essential nature of agape love. When God said at the dawn of creation, “Let there be . . . ,” He began relinquishing control. In his fine book, The Story of God, Nazarene theologian Michael Lodahl writes,

There is something about this word of “letting be” that bespeaks God’s generosity in the giving of being out of the riches of His own being, a divine fascination with and love for beings of all sorts, a wondrous stepping back by God in allowing creation to truly be.

God has bestowed upon the universe He created a certain degree of autonomy and power, including the power of life and death. The sun, winds, and rain upon which all life depends also produce forest fires and tornados. When God created man and woman and gave them dominion over the earth, He thereby deferred a certain amount of control over the world—for good and evil—into human hands. God limited His sovereignty at the point of creation/creature freedom.

And that is all to the good, for Total Control is the way of dictatorship, not love. Love does not dominate but liberates. Love does not coerce but gently persuades. We see this beautifully modeled in Jesus. Whatever we say about His relationship with people, the expression Total Control simply does not work. He made no effort to micromanage the lives of His disciples. He could not stop the rich young ruler from turning away, nor 70 disciples leaving Him when the going got tough. He could not prevent Judas from betraying Him or Peter from denying Him. In the ultimate irony, He who came into the world to save others could not save himself from the cross and still be faithful to His nature of agape love.

Rather than dominate, Jesus cut through 613 laws of Moses plus thousands of suffocating, tyrannizing, and oppressive religious regulations, by which the Jews of His day sought to implement God’s Total Control over every aspect of life, by simply saying, “Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-40).

Jesus said God is like a king who gives His servants varying degrees of talents and abilities. Then He departs into a far country and says, “occupy till I come” (Luke 19:13). How they invest their talents is entirely up to them. The only requirement is that they do something constructive with the gifts and opportunities He has left in their hands.

It is clear that Jesus was supremely interested not in authority and control but in dynamic relationships. And relationships, both human and divine, can thrive only in a context of nonthreatening and noncoercive freedom. It is not Jesus who seeks to dominate, but sin. “Everyone who sins is the slave of sin,” Jesus said, “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:34, 36). Jesus sets us free from the tyranny of sin to become the unique persons we were created to be. I wonder if it is true of God as it is with parents; we are not half as interested in what our children do as in what kind of persons they become. And we have to let them go before they can fully become who they are.

The God Who Risks

Twice I relinquished sovereign control of my car. Twice I gave my car keys to my teenage children. Twice they totaled the car. They could have killed themselves and others. But that is the risk parents must take if their children are ever to grow up, and become autonomous, and responsible adults.

That is precisely the risk God took when He created humans “in his own image” (Genesis 1:27): namely, they might exercise their moral freedom in ways that not only would frustrate His gracious intentions but in the end circle back to destroy themselves, which is exactly what occurred. Beginning with Adam, “sin entered the world . . . and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned” (Romans 5:12-17). This tragic turn of events was never God’s original intention or purpose. In the beginning He created a marvelous universe free of violence, evil, and death. In the end, He will inaugurate “a new heaven and a new earth,” in which “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Revelation 21:1-4). Sin, in all of its toxic forms, is an alien intruder, a consequence of human freedom misused and abused: for “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).

It is well that we, like Job, should praise God in all of life’s tragedies, but certainly not to praise Him for them (Job 1:1-22). God has no disposition whatsoever to add to the suffering and loss we experience due to the fact that we live in a fallen world under the shadow of sin’s curse. God does not cause all things, but “causes all things to work together for good to those who love [him], to those who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28, nasb).

We dishonor our gracious and loving heavenly Father when we attribute accidents, natural disasters, and diseases to Him, or charge Him with responsibility for the damage fallen, fallible, and patently evil people do to themselves and to one another. In that His essential nature is love, He cannot do anything contrary to love. “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” (1 John 3:1). How great indeed!

The God who has revealed himself fully and finally in Jesus does not wound but heals. He does not afflict but comforts. He does not kill but raises the dead (2 Corinthians 1:3-10). The God whose love is fully displayed on the cross would rather suffer than cause suffering, would rather be crucified than crucify, would rather die than damn, and did!

God’s Saving Sovereignty

Here is the good news: when sin and death have done their worst, our “compassionate and gracious God . . . abounding in love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6) carries us into himself “on eagles’ wings” (Exodus 19:4). Sin and death will not have the last word! From Genesis to Revelation the Bible shouts, “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:16-17).

We can have full confidence that the Sovereign God whose life-giving Spirit brought light out of darkness, creation out of chaos, and life out of death is still Lord over all the earth. True, He has wrapped His sovereignty in nonintrusive, noncoercive, and nonthreatening love. Yet we who put our faith and trust in Him can live in the wonderful security of knowing that “no power” in heaven or on earth “will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39). That is where God is in Total Control.

Jesus told a wonderful story to illustrate how God’s loving sovereignty works. It is the story of a self-centered son who asks for his inheritance, in effect saying to his father, “Drop dead!” Though deeply wounded, the father gives him what he demands, and lets him go. That the wayward son might eventually come to his senses and freely return to his father on his own is worth the risk of relinquishing Total Control. And, of course, that is the way the story ends, in a warm and reconciling embrace. Though the son does not recover his squandered inheritance, he is welcomed home. Such love bonds can be forged only when genuine human freedom is valued and honored.

Lewis Smedes, long-time professor of Theology and Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, tells about a searing tragedy that caused him to question his inherited and embraced confidence in God’s Absolute Sovereignty. Born and raised in the bosom of Dutch Reformed Calvinism, he not only graduated from Calvin College but also returned to teach in their religion department. It was during that decade his whole theological edifice, built upon the assumption of God’s “silent, strange, and secretive control,” was shaken to the core.

After years of frustration and the failed efforts of four fertility clinics, his wife miraculously became pregnant. They were ecstatic. Six months along, Doris began losing amniotic fluid. The doctor was worried that the baby would be severely malformed. After a few anxious hours, the doctor broke into the waiting room and exulted: “Congratulations, Lew, you are the father of a perfect man-child.”

Less than 24 hours later, their pediatrician called, urging him to get to the hospital immediately. By the time he got there, the miracle child was dead. Devastated, he confesses:

On the day that our baby boy died, I knew that I could never again believe that God had arranged for our tiny child to die before he had hardly begun to live . . . I am no more able to believe that God micro-manages the death of little children than I am able to believe that God was macro-managing Hitler’s holocaust. With one morning’s wrenching intuition, I knew that my portrait of God would have to be repainted.#13

And this is why Jesus came, to “repaint” our distorted portraits of God until we can clearly see “the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).

Dr. Cowles is professor emeritus of Bible, Theology, and Preaching at Northwest Nazarene University. He is also adjunct professor at Point Loma Nazarene University.

1. Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003), 22-26.
2. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminster, 1960), I, xvi, 3.
3. Ibid., 193-4, 200-1.
4. A. van de Beek, Why? On Suffering, Guilt, and God, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 97.
5. Cited approvingly by Max Lucado in The Great House of God (Dallas: Word, 1997), 149.
6. TIME (May 3, 1999), 25.
7. Andrew Guy Jr., The Denver Post (April 24, 1999), 3A.
8. Tim Stafford, “Heaven-made Activist,” in Christianity Today (Jan. 2004), 47-50.
9. Newsweek (September 24, 2001), 7; USA Today (September 18, 2001), 13A.
10. John Wesley, “Free Grace,” in The Works of John Wesley (London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1872, reproduced by photo offset by the Nazarene Publishing House, Kansas City, Missouri, n.d.), VII, 373-386.
11. John Wesley, “A Plain Account of Christian Perfection,” in Works (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House reprint of 1872), XI, 430.
12. Philip Yancey, Reaching for the Invisible God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 125.
13. Lewis B. Smedes, My God and I: A Spiritual Memoir (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 120-125.