September 18, 2025 • 52 mins
The modern world is full of technological wonders and advances in science. Yet despite human efforts to control the world, chaos and the unknown remain in our experiences through war, disease, natural disasters, and more. Kyle Stolzfus discusses how we can respond to the uncertainty and chaos of the world as followers of Christ. What is the proper response to chaos? What are ways that Christ can use us in an out-of-control world?
Facing Leviathan by Mark Sayers
This is the 285th episode of Anabaptist Perspectives, a podcast, blog, and YouTube channel that examines various aspects of conservative Anabaptist life and thought.
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
So that is one way, that is one way of dealing
with the storms of life or dealing with the
chaos, the uncontrolled, is to shrink them down,
to reduce them down, to reduce it to
a known and predictable space where we can just
live in relative comfort.
So we organize the world into this kind of round,
(00:20):
smooth frictionless space.
And then when Leviathan finally does get in
there, it's going to be terrifying because
we don't know how to deal with him anymore.
So Kyle, in our world today, it feels like we're
(00:40):
the most advanced, you know, there's
all this progress in science and technology and
all of these things and all the other
buzzwords that could be used.
And yet at the same time, there's this element of
chaos and the uncontrollable that we all
face and experience.
So we're going to talk about that in this
episode, because that's a very real experience
(01:02):
for all of us.
Tell me about how humans have tried to respond to
the uncontrollable in the past.
Like what are strategies, what are ways we've
looked at when things happen that we can't
explain or we don't know what to do with
how have humans in the past handled that?
I like what you're saying there.
(01:24):
It does seem like in our age right now.
We are transitioning from a stage where there's
just been a lot of equilibrium, a lot of smooth
sailing you might say, toward what some people
say would be more of a gray zone, you know,
where there's just more potential for chaos.
But regardless, we've always had to face it.
(01:45):
To be human is to face in ourselves
the possibility of chaos.
And there are certain times in history where
chaos or the uncontrolled was just more part
of your everyday experience.
It was just assumed that there was a lot of
uncontrolled forces in the world in a way
that for us, we don't have
(02:06):
that experience quite so much.
We're used to being in charge, we're used to
being in control a bit more.
But to your question there, how have people dealt
with the uncontrolled, how have they
dealt with chaos?
I think it's unfair to people, the ancients might
(02:28):
say, to just say that they lived in
a world of just credulity where they had no ways
of understanding chaos and uncontrolled
things and the whole world was just like magic
and they used incantations, which they knew
didn't work.
But they did have ways of both confronting and
(02:50):
corralling and also constructing responses
to chaos and the uncontrolled.
In the sphere of like religion, one of the more
extreme ways that you could talk about
controlling or at least not controlling, you
(03:10):
couldn't control it, but governing chaos was
through some form of sacrificial ritual.
So for example, some gods like Moloch, Canaanite
god, he was the sort of god you had to appease.
So it's like, I know that Moloch can at least
(03:33):
corral chaos, sometimes he causes it, so to
make him not cause it, I'm going to offer some
kind of appeasing sacrifice.
What's really horrifying about Moloch was he
demanded a child sacrifice as a means of
appeasement, right?
But that is one way they responded, it's like
some form of appeasement.
(03:55):
They also had a really rich vocabulary to name
chaos in a way that we are, I think our
language is a little bit more impoverished.
In the biblical story, you start off and there is
immediately a triumph of God over
the uncontrolled and the chaotic.
(04:16):
And also I think he doesn't withdraw from it, he
doesn't like name it evil.
There's the creation story,
there's God in the beginning, right?
And then he creates and there is the Hebrew tohu
wabohu, it's formlessness, it's chaos,
you might say.
(04:36):
It's like a churning mass and then God speaks
again and he takes action on that and he begins
to form things that are distinct,
you know, further clarification.
But what's interesting about the biblical story
is that when God creates and the spirit
broods, everything takes its origins here and
(04:58):
there's this mass of turbulent water we say
and then that's carried forward, okay?
It's carried forward in the Psalms, it's carried
forward, you see in Isaiah and especially
then in the Gospels, I think
we'll get to that a little bit later.
But you'll see the activity of God towards that
is to work with it and he sees possibilities
(05:18):
there.
They had language to work with, just one more
example maybe, I think it'll become relevant
later on is that for the Romans, which the first
Christians encountered, they also had
a really elaborate system of governance, of
ritual, of warfare, of heroes that they
(05:44):
saw as a way of both curbing and
controlling and exploiting chaos, okay?
And it's very ritualized ways that they saw
coming together, say in the Colosseum, the
way they gave a picture of how they saw that
Rome's enemies and criminals, those who would
introduce chaos into the economy of Rome would be
(06:05):
put under the thumb of the might
of Rome and then there
would be peace and prosperity.
Interesting because Caesar Augustus, if I'm
getting this right, was called the Prince
of Peace or something like that.
He'll bring peace to the world and all of these
things and I guess that was their way
of saying, "Yeah, we're going to control this.
(06:25):
You don't fit in the system, we'll smash you
because we can't allow the uncontrollable
into our society."
I think it's another way of saying it.
And they were geniuses at it.
The Romans, what made them dominate for so long
was just their efficiency.
They had incredible power and they could just
crush dissent and communicate well and so their
(06:50):
capacity there is really strong.
So yeah, Prince of Peace, you
will probably get there, right?
But also you see Christians picking up some of
the same language and saying, "You know
what?
Who the real Prince of
Peace is, that's just a parody.
He's the pretender.
We know who the real Prince of Peace is."
So the difficulty in our own lives and throughout
(07:13):
the human experience across time, the difficulty
is that chaos and what have
you is unexpected, unpredictable.
Yes?
By definition, right?
Yeah.
Like, what do we do with that?
You know?
Uh-huh.
That presents a challenge for people who are, you
(07:35):
know, if you're going to be trying to
control or manage the
uncontrolled, it's exactly that.
That's a threat to your credibility.
If it's your job, right?
If it's your job as a Ceasar or as a manager or
as an administrator, whoever you are, if
it's part of your job to deliver on results, to
(07:58):
name outcomes or to at least say, "I'm
going to make you peaceful and secure," that
possibility of chaos coming in, it's a direct
threat.
Not just to your job, but
it's to your credibility.
Because it's your job, right, to see your way
through chaos and to make certain kind
of outcomes predictable there.
And I would, if I can, just
(08:20):
enlarge that a little bit.
It seems as though that in our culture, you know,
we don't have Rome in the same way that
we used to.
We don't sacrifice to Moloch, so we say.
But what's become, what's really captured our
imagination as a way to deal with chaos,
(08:42):
as a way to tame Leviathan, that's one of those
biblical pictures of a...
Yes.
This mythical sea monster who, I think he's
historically real, but he also represents
these untamed forces.
And he lives in tohu wobahu, who he plays in the
deep, the biblical authors say in Psalms.
(09:03):
He seems to relish it.
That's where he lives.
In our times, we've turned increasingly to
competence and management.
We place a heroic individual in a boardroom, and
he is the one who can name outcomes and
(09:23):
say, "We should be here, here, and here, and
here's the timeline, and we're going to break
that down into smaller tasks for you.
And we'll have regular meetings until we achieve
that outcome, and that's how we will tame
Leviathan, put order to things, break down the
tasks, name outcomes, and then you can
(09:44):
become...you can optimize the process."
And I am describing there, it'd
be called the Taylorian management.
There's other ways of talking about management,
but that's the one that most kind of clearly
laid out.
You identify an outcome, you outline ways to get
to that outcome, and then you take
(10:05):
the process and you optimize it.
And I think it's that
optimization that we're still in love with.
You're optimizing
your...is this efficiency as well?
Would that be another way of describing this?
I think so.
You know, optimization is the process.
Efficiency is like the
characterization of the system.
You have an efficient system.
(10:25):
That's one that gets to the outcome with as least
chaos as possible, with as least expense.
Yeah, it's almost a trying to compensate for the
unknown or control the unknown factors.
Right?
Like we're going to get this thing just as locked
(10:46):
tight as we can to keep out the whatever,
unpredictable thing that may hit us.
Is this basically...that's kind of management
theory in a lot of ways, right, for organizations
and this, that, and whatever.
I think that's right.
It's a focusing in on one thing, one variable,
and you're saying that's what our goal is
(11:07):
here, and you exclude a lot of other things.
And then once you've got that locked in, you
identify the most expedient way to eliminate
other possibilities and
then to achieve that one thing.
But back to your question a little bit, it is
that nature, it's the nature of the chaotic,
(11:31):
it's the nature of the uncontrolled [indistinct], to
be exactly that, to be uncontrolled.
It will arrive out of some kind of unexpected
direction and it arrives on a timetable of
its own.
Yeah.
This is so true.
Okay, so to zoom in a little, how does what
(11:52):
you're describing fit with this idealized
view that many have in Western culture, or maybe
just humans in general, of the hero,
like the glorification of the individual who's
going to be that rising star to single-handedly
come in and tame the chaos
and fix the whatever situation.
I'm thinking like the way we lift up, figures
(12:15):
like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar,
these great men of history.
How does that fit with what you're describing?
Where does the idea of the
hero come into this picture?
You can learn a lot about a culture by taking a
look at who their heroes are and who it
is they see as being the good man, the great man.
My suggestion here is that, like in times you've
(12:38):
mentioned, like in Alexander the Great,
Caesar, they saw their
places on the battlefield, right?
And that's where they confronted
the chaotic and the uncontrolled.
They also recognized, for some anyway, that this
required something of them.
They had to develop the capacities to enter
(12:59):
bravely onto the battlefield, to enter into
Parliament or whatever it is they're practicing,
and that this may not be all about optimization.
They're actually going to have to demonstrate the
characteristics of a heroic person to
be thought of as a leader,
to be thought of as a hero.
(13:20):
These days, we esteem more the optimizers.
We esteem more the people who can build for us,
or at least give the picture of for us,
some kind of frictionless life, a life where
we've removed adversaries, a place where
(13:41):
we've removed frictions and obstacles.
Like the modern equivalent, say, something like a
Jeff Bezos, where with one click on
Amazon it'll be delivered
to my door the next day.
No problems, no friction,
just take care of the problem.
I don't ever want to see it again.
And society rewards people like that, say Jeff
(14:03):
Bezos, as now being one of the richest
men in the world, because he built this thing
that fixes these problems and optimizes our
lives.
Or am I taking this too far?
Would that be an example?
No, I think you're giving a good example there in
the example of quick delivery via
Amazon.
That's the frictionless ideal, is that perhaps we
(14:24):
could even get to the place where further
than me needing something, I don't really even
have to prompt it, suggesting to me what
I might need or want.
And Amazon does that a lot.
Amazon does really well with that, because you're
willing to give a little bit of privacy
away for the sake of surveillance so that they
can predict for you what things you might want.
Do you need more soap?
I think you've run out of soap.
(14:45):
Click this buy button and you can do it in one
click, it takes you half a second and
bingo, it'll show up at your door the next day.
You can buy a smart fridge
that'll help you do that.
Yes.
Keep inventory, it's like, I think you're about
out of this, would you like to help,
can I help you out?
But that's the ideal, is the
frictionless optimized life.
Another way of saying it is that in that form of
(15:06):
life, everything has become controlled,
predictable and optimized for me.
See, this is really interesting.
Actually, I've never thought about smart fridges
being a similar response, say, to chaos and
trying to control our
lives as ancient mythologies.
Let's not take that too far.
(15:27):
Yeah, obviously don't take it too far, but it
does come back to that human need of, I
really don't like when things are out of control.
I just want everything to work and nothing break.
It seems like it's touching at
something that's a very human thing.
Okay, so to bring it back around, as we were
(15:47):
talking about the hero and things, thinking
about does culture, I'm thinking, we're here in
America, so I'm thinking Western American
culture, whatever, have a warped
view of what the truly heroic is?
Well, and I find they're interesting too, like
warped view perhaps, but I'm still just
back there churning around
so smart, like a smart fridge.
(16:08):
What does that mean?
At least I would suggest to make a bit of
application there, we do need to become readers
of our culture.
We need to become aware, not just of like, "Oh,
wow, I have a smart fridge," but what
is this communicating to me about what
constitutes a good life?
(16:29):
If you need that, or depending on who it is
you're turning to, say, a Bezos figure, as
the chief optimizer, it's going to tell you a lot
about commitments, about what it is
you idealize as seeing a worthwhile life, and
it's probably got to come back to an element
of predictability, the controllability.
Could you ask your question again?
(16:50):
I'm losing the traffic.
Yeah, yeah.
So does our culture then have a
warped view of what the heroic is?
Or who we view as heroic, maybe if you want to
bring it to a person, like who we say that's
the heroes that we want to look up to?
It's a good question.
I feel like it's a partial view, and I could
point out some liabilities for that view of
(17:13):
things that sees the world basically in terms,
again, of optimization, controllability, and
predictability.
The first thing that that world is going to be
mute about, the first thing that it will
miss, would be those things that
are not quite so outcome-driven, okay?
(17:33):
Things that are less than optimizable, we'd say,
or that aren't predictable.
And here's where some of the falseness of holding
up as a hero, a person who you see
as like, "Oh, he's like the chief optimizer."
Well, it turns out in my own preparation for the
(17:57):
session, it turns out that many of the
most significant parts of our lives and of our
collective lives together are actually
kind of unpredictable.
And they mark us, they leave an impression on us.
So I'm thinking of things like 9-11, okay?
(18:21):
Or COVID, a little bit more recent in our
memories, and probably so traumatizing for
Western cultures because it felt so
uncontrollable, so unpredicted.
And we tried our best to make
it predictable and corralled it.
We don't have to go far there.
But it spun out of control.
(18:42):
But the response there is what was interesting.
We were, "Wow, this is out of control.
That's frightening."
But we can, we can, we can control it.
Yeah.
And that was the hope of the fall of Soviet
Russia, a kind of unforecast, right?
Or the rise of Nazism, also
(19:03):
uncontrolled and unforecast.
Arab Spring, a bit more recent as an example, a
significant shaping event, right, in modern
day Middle East.
But it was not foreseen.
It wasn't predicted by the analysts.
So our ability, it turns out, our ability to
predict things, to optimize things, to
(19:27):
make things controllable is in fact limited to a
very small portion of goods in our life.
And I'm not saying we can't control anything.
We can.
We can make food arrive at certain times.
We can have our fridge full.
Some of that stuff, but it doesn't scale up very
well to the stuff that really seems to
(19:47):
matter.
It's almost like it's a, you can optimize, but
it's only on a lot of the surface level
hands on type things maybe.
But then there's so much underneath the surface
that we just, you simply cannot.
Is that a way of saying it?
Maybe like materially goods.
Yeah.
(20:08):
Yeah.
Like I can hit a button and something will arrive
from Amazon, but I can't hit a button
and fix a broken friendship.
No, I don't think you can.
No.
It doesn't work that way.
You know, like how do you optimize?
There's like a lot of things
that you just can't, you can't.
And the question there becomes, and if you have
the hero is the optimizer, he can offer
you something when it comes to some portions of
(20:31):
life, which are to a degree important.
But what about when you've
got that broken friendship?
And if all we've got surrounded by is heroic
optimizers, they kind of go quiet, or at least
quieter.
They don't have quite so much to offer there.
So the danger, I think the danger we're
(20:52):
anticipating there is that if
you are at a time of relative
calm, if you're at a time where things are going
well, the optimizers can remain heroic.
But Leviathan still might be there.
He's just hasn't fully been known yet.
(21:14):
Or he may be at a phase of history where it's
relatively peaceful and chaos seems to
be kind of in the background.
My own fear is that we could prepare people and
designate them as leaders or heroes who
are in a lot of ways, optimizers, who are in a
lot of ways thinking, you know, the world
is basically governable.
(21:36):
My job is to govern it and control it and to
deliver results, to deliver outcomes.
And I can do that in the
most economical way possible.
Using the fewest resources.
And when chaos does poke its head up, we can
either squash it or ignore it.
But what the danger there is, if Leviathan does
show his head, we could have prepared,
(21:58):
we could have prepared a whole generation of
people or ourselves who don't know what
to do.
They fall mute.
Yeah, it's all Yeah, like what you were
describing there, as
you're saying that my brain was
thinking, oh, assembly line, like this idea of
like, I can optimize the assembly line,
I can, when you're talking hands on things, we
(22:20):
can figure out how to build stuff and make
things and fix this process and all of that.
But then when it comes to things that don't fit
into that framework, it does feel your
life could spin out of control so fast.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and even an example of that, though, you
know, it's, it's, it's Henry Ford, who
famously said, you know, you can have whatever
(22:42):
color car you want, as long as it's black.
Yes.
And but what's happening there, what's happening
there is he is, he's recasting this thing
of transportation and this new invention of
automobiles in terms of optimization.
Okay, so you think everybody can have a car.
But I hope you like black, because that's all
(23:02):
you're going to get out of this vision
of optimized processes.
The world becomes kind of monochromatic, even in
the goods, material goods you have.
So there's that side of it.
But I'm agreeing, you know, if if you would buy
wholly into the ideal of optimization
of frictionless life, it potentially becomes
(23:25):
idolatrous, kind of in the tone of Isaiah
44.
And who but a fool would make his own god, an
idol who cannot help him out one bit, kind
of how it's- as I'm paraphrasing there a little bit.
So that is one way that is one way of dealing
with the storms of life or dealing with the
(23:48):
chaos the uncontrolled is to shrink them down to
reduce them down to reduce it to a known
and predictable space where we
can just live in relative comfort.
So we organize the world into this kind of round,
smooth, frictionless space.
(24:08):
And then when Leviathan finally does get in
there, it's got to be terrifying because we
don't know how to deal with him anymore.
And then you start telling this is really getting
a bit tangential, but I think very
relevant when the Leviathan does poke his head
into we had everything working so well, you
know, and then the unexpected, the uncontrollable
happens, then people it seems like have have
(24:30):
this very human expression of trying to explain
it and comes to terms with the unexplainable.
Oh. You know, oh, well, it's because of and and
they'll come up sometimes with these crazy
outlandish ideas of this happened because the
government was controlling the weather
to use some crazy absurd example or like they're
they'll try to come up with an explanation
(24:51):
to at least help make
sense of it in their own heads.
I feel like that's a very human thing and almost
goes back to way back in the day, the
ancient mythologies of oh, we had crop failure
because we didn't sacrifice to the gods in
the right way or something like that.
That just feels like an incredibly human thing.
Yeah, I think you're right.
(25:11):
And that is that
human tendency to look for causes.
Oh, say, it's there in Job.
Yes, you see life
in terms of cause and effect.
And there's always a clear cause.
And some of the call of say a Job is it seems
like by the time you get to the book, God's
(25:31):
call there is to you know, he's understanding of
that probing for cause, but he doesn't
give the cause.
We get a good view of the backstage ourselves in
the beginning of the book.
But even that isn't extremely clear.
Why did this happen?
And it's always Job's question goes unanswered.
Yeah.
That's a tough book to wrestle with, I think,
(25:53):
probably by design, you know?
Well, Leviathan shows his head in there a number
of times, probably for that reason.
That's a really great point.
But I think it does part of what
responding to the question there, too.
And if we got caught in this web of trying to
make things explainable, we can think that
(26:13):
by explaining things, then we can control things.
Yes.
And if other people explain things that they're
in control of them, right?
But it can become it can become it can take the
mystery out of it, for one thing, but
it can also just become paralyzing.
We never actually learn to face Leviathan.
(26:36):
Because he will come, we can't always explain it.
And to turn toward him with courage and faith
doesn't always require of us that we fully
understand.
We can still accept it.
This is part of my experience right now.
I'm not fully sure
I understand this is definitely adversity.
I think Leviathan is showing his head this feels
(26:57):
chaotic and there's a potential for
loss of control and to take the next step of
obedience without fully having to explain
why.
So as we think about all this, what then would
you say is the Christian view of facing Leviathan
or facing the uncontrollable, the chaos that
(27:19):
will inevitably hit our lives?
Yeah.
The Christianity has a
lot to offer here, I think.
But one pre-requisite is it
will have to change our lives.
We're going to have to be willing to not just
control, to manage, to optimize.
Because you do notice if you if you're just
(27:40):
trying to make for
yourself a smooth and frictionless
life, one of the things that happens is it tends
to focus on our own comfort, our own
need for preservation of that life.
The Christian way offers a way that accepts some
of the burden of facing chaos.
(28:01):
And that's willing to say, yes, I can accept
responsibility for that.
And I can walk into that freely and with courage
and faith, doing the best thing that I know.
And leave some of the outcomes up to God.
So I take some cues here, again, from the first
pages of Scripture, where when God creates,
(28:25):
when God creates, he creates that formless void.
And it's interesting to me that it's not assessed
as just evil, something to be fought against.
The Spirit of God hovers over it.
And there's the expectation that something more
is going to come out of that.
There's going to be formedness.
(28:46):
There's going to be flourishing.
So where the Spirit of God is hovering, you see
the possibility of potential and the glory
of God happening.
So you move forward in the scriptural story and
it comes up again where the actual phrase
toho wa-bohu, who doesn't come up very much, but
formlessness, voidness, and the possibility
(29:06):
of chaos springing in from quarters.
Yeah, that comes in quite a lot.
And what's interesting is that that same pattern
continues with God's work.
There's the potential of chaos and the Spirit of
God is hovering, he's brooding, and out
of that comes praise of God and comes to
flourishing of his people and creation.
(29:28):
A man like Joseph, I think he's the first that
said that the Spirit of God was actually
on him in the Bible.
And what does he do?
He steps into a place, a
foreign place, notwithstanding.
And where there's the potential for formlessness
and voidness through a famine, he brings some
order to that.
But it requires something of him.
(29:50):
He's not just an optimizer,
although he's pretty good at it.
It also requires something of him.
We carry that forward, there's so much here.
But you get to the Gospels, right?
There is another figure who we come to call the
Son of God, and we recognize him as the
Son of God partly through these pictures of him
(30:13):
doing things like walking on the deep.
He's walking on the formless void, and it doesn't
really seem to affect him.
He's not just avoiding it.
He's on it, and he can
(30:34):
command it, but he doesn't always.
And that becomes a picture of who Jesus is, of
what his willingness to enter into chaos
and the uncontrolled, which ultimately finds, I
think, its ultimate picture in his death
on the cross.
(30:54):
And that's the ultimate being out
of control sort of event, his death.
And a lot of things happen
there, but it gives us a picture.
What does it mean?
What does it mean to meet Leviathan?
Well does it mean
controllability, predictability, optimization?
(31:17):
Or is Jesus suggesting a different picture?
I think he's suggesting a different picture.
So for early Christians, for the first
Christians, I'll just say for
them, when they made confessions
like Jesus is Lord, part of what they're saying
is that the old and
(31:38):
tottering system for controlling
chaos of Rome couldn't deliver there anymore.
When Paul writes in Thessalonians,
he picks up this Roman catchphrase.
It might have been Roman
propaganda, you know, peace and prosperity.
Rome is here to control chaos.
And if you watch what's happening in the
Colosseum, we'll give you a
(31:59):
picture of what that's like.
Caesar is at the top.
We have legions.
We've got great communication.
We control chaos.
And Paul picks that language up and says, you're
hearing this language, peace and prosperity,
and there's going to be sudden disaster.
That title rightly belongs to Jesus.
So Rome and Caesar just becomes an imposter, a cheap
(32:22):
imitation of what Jesus promises.
So I think people are probably going to be
asking, okay, so how does this affect my life?
How does this look?
You know, like, what does this look like?
There's an interesting piece here because you
have in the ancient mythologies and the
(32:42):
heroes that they lifted up is this great man
comes in and, you know, it defeats the enemy.
Slays the dragon, takes care of the chaos, fixes
everything or the god of whatever, you
know, has appeased and the weather is great and
our crops don't fail this year.
You know, you have those kinds of stories.
But then in the gospel, you have Jesus comes and
(33:02):
instead of doing all of that, he is killed.
Like he dies and he leads by serving, you know,
washing the feet of the disciples.
And so it's like, whoa, okay,
this is a different picture.
This is a very different picture than, you know,
Caesar Augustus, who is like, I'm going
to control everything.
I'm going to fix everything.
Rome is the greatest thing
(33:23):
ever, you know, on this earth.
You want to talk a bit about some of that
contrast and then yeah, like how do we actually
live in the reality of that new, new reality of
what Jesus has established by dying on
the cross, I guess is a way of saying it.
And you have the old, some of the oldest
architecture we have shows that kind of world.
(33:46):
You've got a pyramid.
It all comes up to a point.
There's a Pharaoh, the representative of god or the
god himself, perhaps, and everything
flows down from there.
But what's strange here, there is a structure of
authority in the kingdom and answers to
Jesus.
But the upside downness of it is part of what
(34:07):
you're touching on is how do you understand
what power looks like?
How do you understand what it
looks like to defeat death and chaos?
Well, how about foot washing?
How about self-giving love?
And a willingness, a willingness to accept
responsibility for those who are weaker than you
(34:30):
A willingness to eventually, voluntarily enter
into something as extreme as death.
That's part of the Christian way.
It's not a way of empowerment, of entitlement, of
aggrandizement, of moving yourself up the
ladder so you can get to the top of power and
(34:51):
exercise more control, more predictability.
It turns toward the chaotic.
It acknowledges it, but it
doesn't seem to need to tame it.
And in some ways, it's a
willingness to be crushed by it.
And this is a paradox, right?
(35:12):
But to be crushed by it and to
give oneself over to God in hope.
That sounds very different to me.
The controller, the chief controller.
It's almost like the culture and human nature
says, "I'm going to collect as much power
and influence and stuff and resources that I can
(35:36):
so that I can control everything."
And Christianity is the other way around,
basically, where it's like you give yourself
up.
It's this pouring out of
self and sacrificial love.
And there's a quote I read.
It says, "Culture tells us that it is in the
public space or the public sphere
(35:57):
maybe, up on the stage. That's where
heroic leaders are made."
And whereas Christianity is the other way around,
it's those quiet moments of serving
and giving up yourself.
It's not up on the stage, with all the fancy
"I'm the best, I'm the hero" moments.
You want to speak into that a bit?
Yeah, great.
The culture we live in,
it can so prize platforms.
(36:19):
Yes, influencers.
Yeah, sure.
Is a nice modern word we use.
Here we are talking about this.
I think that Christianity is a lot about the
preparation of a certain kind of people.
And those people, maybe they perhaps could win a
platform at some time, like who's to
say?
(36:39):
But that needs to be given up to God.
And what the focus is, I think, is on a certain
kind of person who is prepared to bring presence.
So maybe the contrast could be helpful there.
It's presence, not platforms.
Oh, I like that.
Yeah.
That presence of, for example, we're talking
(36:59):
about efficiency and optimizing, but presence
is not very optimizable.
Not awfully.
That's why we begrudge it.
And it doesn't.
It seems so slow moving.
Yeah, because optimizing is like fixing
everything and checking
everything off the to-do list
and building systems and all of that.
(37:21):
You need that in certain things, perhaps.
Whereas presence is sitting with someone in their
moment of grief, say, being there for someone
when they're having a difficult time, helping
someone in a way that would have been more
efficient just to
hire someone to take care of that.
(37:41):
But instead, you show up and help that person
with fixing something on their house, whatever.
That doesn't check the efficiency box always.
But it does check the
presence box maybe or something.
I don't know.
Talk to me about that.
Well, that strikes me as important because it
corresponds to some of my experiences as
a pastor.
(38:03):
Part of my life, I'm an administrator and
optimization is something I enjoy.
I've got a bent toward efficiency.
But as a pastor, you're just invited into, almost
required to walk into these places
where there's nothing optimizable.
(38:25):
Grief, love, friendship, worship, lament.
And then you're called into these sorts of
situations where you can't offer optimization.
And it would be sacrilege if you tried to.
Because what this person is
going through is just sacred.
(38:46):
And what you can offer is the presence of God, is
the presence of the Spirit, that kind
of brooding over what it
is they're going through.
But that's only conveyed through presence.
And what strikes me about those kinds of
encounters is not only are
they not optimizable, they're
(39:08):
the ones that you come away
and you say, "Wow, I was changed.
The Lord met me in that."
And rarely have I had that kind of experience in
the moments where I feel like I'm in control.
Yeah, that's really true.
Because it's like you come away from something
like that and you probably aren't going to
say, "That was efficient and we optimized."
(39:30):
But you will say sometimes coming through those
moments, I'm just thinking of several
right now, where you're like, "I was transformed.
I was whoa, like I had growth."
Or maybe not me.
I mean that sounds- or that person experienced
some really powerful redemption, or healing,
or something.
Well, I mean, there was no checklist where you
(39:51):
just, "Yep, we did the formula and bingo,
we fixed it."
It's not those kinds of situations at all.
And I wonder if the two might be kind of
inversely related, where if
you make the world optimized
and controllable, predictable, exactly in
proportion to that recedes our capacity to
be like, "Wow, I think I was changed."
(40:12):
Oh, and other things like hope, or expectation,
faith, recede, where the
horizon of the predictable
increases, it seems to me.
It's not so much about making the kind of world
where we live in hope, where we live
(40:35):
only as far as our presence will allow us to go,
and we leave some of the rest up to
God.
And He comes through in
some really surprising ways.
Yeah, that's neat that you mentioned that,
because I'm just thinking of some of the more
powerful moments that I've
witnessed or been transformed by.
And they were generally in situations where it's
(40:58):
like, "This is just out of control.
I don't know what's happening."
But there was a really
powerful thing with presence.
Yeah, prescence is definitely part of it.
And there's a part you just can't really explain.
It's not like I can look back and be like, "Oh
yeah, these were the six things that came
together and bingo, and made this."
(41:20):
Although we frequently try to do that.
Again, that mental energy we have as humans to
look for causes and effects.
Yeah, well, I've tried, yeah.
We could really wear
ourselves out there though, too.
But it's just this, again, another quote here.
"God leads by serving and saves by
dying," like the example of Jesus there.
(41:41):
I think that's a really important piece.
And then the inverse, the myth of the hero tells
us that dynamic, charismatic, and glorious
individuals can heal cultures through their
personal skill and glory.
That's like the inverse of what Christ showed us.
(42:02):
That really lands.
It does seem, it's almost like this human nature
to want to lift up certain people as
like, "Ah, they've got the answer."
They've fixed it.
They have an incredible skill.
So therefore, we should follow.
I don't know.
I'm still wrangling with what that means because
(42:22):
it's such a human thing.
Yeah.
Well, at least maybe just exploring the contrast
here a bit like we are, it can mean that the
heroes, Christian heroes, they may not always be
able to demonstrate their capacity for
control, but they will be able to show presence.
(42:42):
And more than likely, they'll be able to show
that capacity, the old,
strong word of mortification,
of relinquishing, of saying, "This may not be
everything I hoped for, like Jesus in the garden.
"Father take this cup from me, but
nevertheless, not my will but thine be done."
(43:04):
And then he enters freely in.
And the courage is just
astonishing, the battle there.
But he's still willing to show up.
He's still willing to be present in that kind of
obedient but also voluntary way.
Whoa.
(43:24):
Yeah.
So I wonder, what sorts
of heroes do we need that
just demonstrate those capacity.
It's like I've sometimes wondered with students
here, maybe our heroes as Christians, maybe
they need to be the people who've had their
deepest fears relieved through trust in God.
(43:46):
That's going to look different.
Yeah.
Yeah, I like that though.
That's like really going down deep into those
things and seeing that Christ is there in it.
That's the transformation that happens.
That's the rootedness or the rest that can come
from that where we can be stable through
(44:09):
those times because we know
it's... can we fix the chaos?
No, but we're relying on Christ who can.
There's a lot more to that.
I feel like I need to dig into a bit.
That's so good.
We can sometimes have the picture with Western
Christianitiy, especially of the kind of
(44:30):
triumphalist Christianity that has trouble
dealing with things that we can't change,
that are intractably part of our experience, that
are painful, that are difficult, that
are whatever, or just challenging.
And then we have trouble there.
But again, for... in Jesus, in Jesus and his
descent into death, he united himself
(44:54):
to that one thing we all
have in common, which is our eventual death.
It's the ultimate chaos.
It's the ultimate uncontrolled event.
And in entering into that, you
could ask if this really goes bad.
In the furthest extreme,
who will be there for me?
And that's Jesus giving his,
(45:15):
"Yes, I will be there even unto death.
I'll go that far for you."
And on the cross, when he says, "My God, my God,
why have you forsaken me?"
How far will you go, God, to be present with me?
Even that far, to God forsakenness on our behalf.
It just becomes a powerful way of seeing that in
(45:36):
Christ's voluntarily giving himself over
to death, he even changed the
nature and use of death itself.
We no longer need to be terrified of it.
We could say, "Oh, this isn't quite what I want.
But I could give myself over and I could still act in
the best way I know how.
So for those watching or listening to this, I'm
(45:59):
sure many are facing the uncontrollable,
they're maybe dealing with chaos in life, things
that the unexpected, the unpredictable.
So what can they do with this?
What is a proper response?
Where should they turn?
Yeah, give us something that people can take away
(46:19):
from this for their own lives.
In talking with...
It was a mother of young children for whom chaos
takes the face of her children.
And one thing I don't want to be heard here is
that you can't do anything,
that there's no appropriate steps to take toward
(46:43):
making things a little
bit more controllable, even.
I'm not trying to suggest that.
I'm not trying to suggest that we just relinquish
control or that we just take
our hands off the wheel entirely.
What I am trying to say is that to...
(47:04):
I'll start theologically.
To participate, to live in the Spirit of Christ
is to not make those- that need
for control the ultimate thing.
It's a tyrant.
And to live as if we can control things and
predict things and make
everything smooth and frictionless
very quickly becomes idolatrous.
(47:27):
So the first thing I'd suggest for people is to
have a look, to look critically at our lives
and to especially look at the things which
suggest that, yes, life is
actually very controllable.
That's our pervasive world.
Everything about our life is about optimization,
about controllability, predictability.
(47:48):
It's not just on the manufacturing line.
It's in our social lives.
It's in medicine.
It's in things which have ultimate significance
and it's suggested to us,
"You could optimize this."
So examine that.
Another thing I'd suggest
here is don't run from adversity.
(48:08):
It's like Paul was so delighted in some of his
young churches that he was a
shepherd over when they faced adversity.
It wasn't so much that they faced it.
He wasn't a masochist,
who just like, "Oh,
they're suffering. That's good."
It was that they were actually investing in it
and there was the new creation
breaking out on the other side of it.
(48:30):
They were changing into the
glory of Christ, into his image.
So don't run from adversity.
A lot.
Again, our culture tells that discomfort is bad.
And if you encounter
discomfort, you need to soothe it.
You need to do away with it.
Talk through it, whatever it
takes, but it's probably a bad thing.
(48:51):
So I'd suggest if you find yourself in an adverse
situation, don't close in on it too quickly and
say, "This is bad and I
need to get away from it."
Try to sit.
Try to be quiet.
Allow the Spirit to work and ask, "What
possibilities are there here
(49:11):
for Christ to be revealed?"
I'd suggest too, and this is practical, I think,
so much of our ability as either individuals or
as communities to weather the difficult times
which do come, to weather the deep,
comes not just through our heroicness as
(49:34):
individuals, not just through our willpower and
our ability to bootstrap things.
It comes through a wide tapestry of friendships
that we've invested in deeply already.
It comes through shared experiences with people
who we've already got a connection with.
It comes through cultivating the kind of life
(49:57):
that is rich and has a lot of stories in it,
which help us to stay oriented and focused.
And I think it comes too through having already
introduced into our lives
willingly and voluntarily, adversity
to cultivate the resourcefulness
that we need to kind of steer in.
(50:17):
And then when the really big things do happen, it
gives you more resources.
Almost like building a level of resiliency.
That's a good word.
Resilience is part of what
you're, I think, developing.
You live that kind of widely interested and
varied and storied life.
Yeah, this is really good to think about these
(50:40):
things because it's so easy to say, "Oh, well, chaos.
Ah, that's scary. We're just going to
ignore that or we're going
to try to fix everything."
And that can go badly in time.
And I think it's very important to have these
kinds of conversations in life.
And I think that'd be something I would encourage
(51:00):
listeners to do is to actually
not just ignore these things.
It's so easy just to say, "Oh, I
don't even want to think about that."
And to circle it back around to remember that
Jesus is the one who walked
on the surface of the sea.
That's right.
The formless and void.
That's a beautiful picture.
And sometimes he did calm the sea. He did
(51:21):
have control over those things.
And that's something I
think about a lot actually.
When things feel like they're
just spinning out of control.
It's like, "Well, come back to that."
So anyway, that's something
I would like to leave there.
But yeah.
Well, thanks for sharing, Kyle.
Yeah, good to be with you.
Thanks for listening to this episode.
(51:41):
If you found this interesting, you should check
out this other episode we did with Kyle.
As always, you can find all of our content on our
website at anabaptistperspectives.org.
Thanks again for listening, and
we'll catch you in the next episode.
So that is one way, that is one way of dealing
with the storms of life or dealing with the
chaos, the uncontrolled, is to shrink them down,
to reduce them down, to reduce it to
a known and predictable space where we can just
live in relative comfort.
So we organize the world into this kind of round,
(00:20):
smooth frictionless space.
And then when Leviathan finally does get in
there, it's going to be terrifying because
we don't know how to deal with him anymore.
So Kyle, in our world today, it feels like we're
(00:40):
the most advanced, you know, there's
all this progress in science and technology and
all of these things and all the other
buzzwords that could be used.
And yet at the same time, there's this element of
chaos and the uncontrollable that we all
face and experience.
So we're going to talk about that in this
episode, because that's a very real experience
(01:02):
for all of us.
Tell me about how humans have tried to respond to
the uncontrollable in the past.
Like what are strategies, what are ways we've
looked at when things happen that we can't
explain or we don't know what to do with
how have humans in the past handled that?
I like what you're saying there.
(01:24):
It does seem like in our age right now.
We are transitioning from a stage where there's
just been a lot of equilibrium, a lot of smooth
sailing you might say, toward what some people
say would be more of a gray zone, you know,
where there's just more potential for chaos.
But regardless, we've always had to face it.
(01:45):
To be human is to face in ourselves
the possibility of chaos.
And there are certain times in history where
chaos or the uncontrolled was just more part
of your everyday experience.
It was just assumed that there was a lot of
uncontrolled forces in the world in a way
that for us, we don't have
(02:06):
that experience quite so much.
We're used to being in charge, we're used to
being in control a bit more.
But to your question there, how have people dealt
with the uncontrolled, how have they
dealt with chaos?
I think it's unfair to people, the ancients might
(02:28):
say, to just say that they lived in
a world of just credulity where they had no ways
of understanding chaos and uncontrolled
things and the whole world was just like magic
and they used incantations, which they knew
didn't work.
But they did have ways of both confronting and
(02:50):
corralling and also constructing responses
to chaos and the uncontrolled.
In the sphere of like religion, one of the more
extreme ways that you could talk about
controlling or at least not controlling, you
(03:10):
couldn't control it, but governing chaos was
through some form of sacrificial ritual.
So for example, some gods like Moloch, Canaanite
god, he was the sort of god you had to appease.
So it's like, I know that Moloch can at least
(03:33):
corral chaos, sometimes he causes it, so to
make him not cause it, I'm going to offer some
kind of appeasing sacrifice.
What's really horrifying about Moloch was he
demanded a child sacrifice as a means of
appeasement, right?
But that is one way they responded, it's like
some form of appeasement.
(03:55):
They also had a really rich vocabulary to name
chaos in a way that we are, I think our
language is a little bit more impoverished.
In the biblical story, you start off and there is
immediately a triumph of God over
the uncontrolled and the chaotic.
(04:16):
And also I think he doesn't withdraw from it, he
doesn't like name it evil.
There's the creation story,
there's God in the beginning, right?
And then he creates and there is the Hebrew tohu
wabohu, it's formlessness, it's chaos,
you might say.
(04:36):
It's like a churning mass and then God speaks
again and he takes action on that and he begins
to form things that are distinct,
you know, further clarification.
But what's interesting about the biblical story
is that when God creates and the spirit
broods, everything takes its origins here and
(04:58):
there's this mass of turbulent water we say
and then that's carried forward, okay?
It's carried forward in the Psalms, it's carried
forward, you see in Isaiah and especially
then in the Gospels, I think
we'll get to that a little bit later.
But you'll see the activity of God towards that
is to work with it and he sees possibilities
(05:18):
there.
They had language to work with, just one more
example maybe, I think it'll become relevant
later on is that for the Romans, which the first
Christians encountered, they also had
a really elaborate system of governance, of
ritual, of warfare, of heroes that they
(05:44):
saw as a way of both curbing and
controlling and exploiting chaos, okay?
And it's very ritualized ways that they saw
coming together, say in the Colosseum, the
way they gave a picture of how they saw that
Rome's enemies and criminals, those who would
introduce chaos into the economy of Rome would be
(06:05):
put under the thumb of the might
of Rome and then there
would be peace and prosperity.
Interesting because Caesar Augustus, if I'm
getting this right, was called the Prince
of Peace or something like that.
He'll bring peace to the world and all of these
things and I guess that was their way
of saying, "Yeah, we're going to control this.
(06:25):
You don't fit in the system, we'll smash you
because we can't allow the uncontrollable
into our society."
I think it's another way of saying it.
And they were geniuses at it.
The Romans, what made them dominate for so long
was just their efficiency.
They had incredible power and they could just
crush dissent and communicate well and so their
(06:50):
capacity there is really strong.
So yeah, Prince of Peace, you
will probably get there, right?
But also you see Christians picking up some of
the same language and saying, "You know
what?
Who the real Prince of
Peace is, that's just a parody.
He's the pretender.
We know who the real Prince of Peace is."
So the difficulty in our own lives and throughout
(07:13):
the human experience across time, the difficulty
is that chaos and what have
you is unexpected, unpredictable.
Yes?
By definition, right?
Yeah.
Like, what do we do with that?
You know?
Uh-huh.
That presents a challenge for people who are, you
(07:35):
know, if you're going to be trying to
control or manage the
uncontrolled, it's exactly that.
That's a threat to your credibility.
If it's your job, right?
If it's your job as a Ceasar or as a manager or
as an administrator, whoever you are, if
it's part of your job to deliver on results, to
(07:58):
name outcomes or to at least say, "I'm
going to make you peaceful and secure," that
possibility of chaos coming in, it's a direct
threat.
Not just to your job, but
it's to your credibility.
Because it's your job, right, to see your way
through chaos and to make certain kind
of outcomes predictable there.
And I would, if I can, just
(08:20):
enlarge that a little bit.
It seems as though that in our culture, you know,
we don't have Rome in the same way that
we used to.
We don't sacrifice to Moloch, so we say.
But what's become, what's really captured our
imagination as a way to deal with chaos,
(08:42):
as a way to tame Leviathan, that's one of those
biblical pictures of a...
Yes.
This mythical sea monster who, I think he's
historically real, but he also represents
these untamed forces.
And he lives in tohu wobahu, who he plays in the
deep, the biblical authors say in Psalms.
(09:03):
He seems to relish it.
That's where he lives.
In our times, we've turned increasingly to
competence and management.
We place a heroic individual in a boardroom, and
he is the one who can name outcomes and
(09:23):
say, "We should be here, here, and here, and
here's the timeline, and we're going to break
that down into smaller tasks for you.
And we'll have regular meetings until we achieve
that outcome, and that's how we will tame
Leviathan, put order to things, break down the
tasks, name outcomes, and then you can
(09:44):
become...you can optimize the process."
And I am describing there, it'd
be called the Taylorian management.
There's other ways of talking about management,
but that's the one that most kind of clearly
laid out.
You identify an outcome, you outline ways to get
to that outcome, and then you take
(10:05):
the process and you optimize it.
And I think it's that
optimization that we're still in love with.
You're optimizing
your...is this efficiency as well?
Would that be another way of describing this?
I think so.
You know, optimization is the process.
Efficiency is like the
characterization of the system.
You have an efficient system.
(10:25):
That's one that gets to the outcome with as least
chaos as possible, with as least expense.
Yeah, it's almost a trying to compensate for the
unknown or control the unknown factors.
Right?
Like we're going to get this thing just as locked
(10:46):
tight as we can to keep out the whatever,
unpredictable thing that may hit us.
Is this basically...that's kind of management
theory in a lot of ways, right, for organizations
and this, that, and whatever.
I think that's right.
It's a focusing in on one thing, one variable,
and you're saying that's what our goal is
(11:07):
here, and you exclude a lot of other things.
And then once you've got that locked in, you
identify the most expedient way to eliminate
other possibilities and
then to achieve that one thing.
But back to your question a little bit, it is
that nature, it's the nature of the chaotic,
(11:31):
it's the nature of the uncontrolled [indistinct], to
be exactly that, to be uncontrolled.
It will arrive out of some kind of unexpected
direction and it arrives on a timetable of
its own.
Yeah.
This is so true.
Okay, so to zoom in a little, how does what
(11:52):
you're describing fit with this idealized
view that many have in Western culture, or maybe
just humans in general, of the hero,
like the glorification of the individual who's
going to be that rising star to single-handedly
come in and tame the chaos
and fix the whatever situation.
I'm thinking like the way we lift up, figures
(12:15):
like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar,
these great men of history.
How does that fit with what you're describing?
Where does the idea of the
hero come into this picture?
You can learn a lot about a culture by taking a
look at who their heroes are and who it
is they see as being the good man, the great man.
My suggestion here is that, like in times you've
(12:38):
mentioned, like in Alexander the Great,
Caesar, they saw their
places on the battlefield, right?
And that's where they confronted
the chaotic and the uncontrolled.
They also recognized, for some anyway, that this
required something of them.
They had to develop the capacities to enter
(12:59):
bravely onto the battlefield, to enter into
Parliament or whatever it is they're practicing,
and that this may not be all about optimization.
They're actually going to have to demonstrate the
characteristics of a heroic person to
be thought of as a leader,
to be thought of as a hero.
(13:20):
These days, we esteem more the optimizers.
We esteem more the people who can build for us,
or at least give the picture of for us,
some kind of frictionless life, a life where
we've removed adversaries, a place where
(13:41):
we've removed frictions and obstacles.
Like the modern equivalent, say, something like a
Jeff Bezos, where with one click on
Amazon it'll be delivered
to my door the next day.
No problems, no friction,
just take care of the problem.
I don't ever want to see it again.
And society rewards people like that, say Jeff
(14:03):
Bezos, as now being one of the richest
men in the world, because he built this thing
that fixes these problems and optimizes our
lives.
Or am I taking this too far?
Would that be an example?
No, I think you're giving a good example there in
the example of quick delivery via
Amazon.
That's the frictionless ideal, is that perhaps we
(14:24):
could even get to the place where further
than me needing something, I don't really even
have to prompt it, suggesting to me what
I might need or want.
And Amazon does that a lot.
Amazon does really well with that, because you're
willing to give a little bit of privacy
away for the sake of surveillance so that they
can predict for you what things you might want.
Do you need more soap?
I think you've run out of soap.
(14:45):
Click this buy button and you can do it in one
click, it takes you half a second and
bingo, it'll show up at your door the next day.
You can buy a smart fridge
that'll help you do that.
Yes.
Keep inventory, it's like, I think you're about
out of this, would you like to help,
can I help you out?
But that's the ideal, is the
frictionless optimized life.
Another way of saying it is that in that form of
(15:06):
life, everything has become controlled,
predictable and optimized for me.
See, this is really interesting.
Actually, I've never thought about smart fridges
being a similar response, say, to chaos and
trying to control our
lives as ancient mythologies.
Let's not take that too far.
(15:27):
Yeah, obviously don't take it too far, but it
does come back to that human need of, I
really don't like when things are out of control.
I just want everything to work and nothing break.
It seems like it's touching at
something that's a very human thing.
Okay, so to bring it back around, as we were
(15:47):
talking about the hero and things, thinking
about does culture, I'm thinking, we're here in
America, so I'm thinking Western American
culture, whatever, have a warped
view of what the truly heroic is?
Well, and I find they're interesting too, like
warped view perhaps, but I'm still just
back there churning around
so smart, like a smart fridge.
(16:08):
What does that mean?
At least I would suggest to make a bit of
application there, we do need to become readers
of our culture.
We need to become aware, not just of like, "Oh,
wow, I have a smart fridge," but what
is this communicating to me about what
constitutes a good life?
(16:29):
If you need that, or depending on who it is
you're turning to, say, a Bezos figure, as
the chief optimizer, it's going to tell you a lot
about commitments, about what it is
you idealize as seeing a worthwhile life, and
it's probably got to come back to an element
of predictability, the controllability.
Could you ask your question again?
(16:50):
I'm losing the traffic.
Yeah, yeah.
So does our culture then have a
warped view of what the heroic is?
Or who we view as heroic, maybe if you want to
bring it to a person, like who we say that's
the heroes that we want to look up to?
It's a good question.
I feel like it's a partial view, and I could
point out some liabilities for that view of
(17:13):
things that sees the world basically in terms,
again, of optimization, controllability, and
predictability.
The first thing that that world is going to be
mute about, the first thing that it will
miss, would be those things that
are not quite so outcome-driven, okay?
(17:33):
Things that are less than optimizable, we'd say,
or that aren't predictable.
And here's where some of the falseness of holding
up as a hero, a person who you see
as like, "Oh, he's like the chief optimizer."
Well, it turns out in my own preparation for the
(17:57):
session, it turns out that many of the
most significant parts of our lives and of our
collective lives together are actually
kind of unpredictable.
And they mark us, they leave an impression on us.
So I'm thinking of things like 9-11, okay?
(18:21):
Or COVID, a little bit more recent in our
memories, and probably so traumatizing for
Western cultures because it felt so
uncontrollable, so unpredicted.
And we tried our best to make
it predictable and corralled it.
We don't have to go far there.
But it spun out of control.
(18:42):
But the response there is what was interesting.
We were, "Wow, this is out of control.
That's frightening."
But we can, we can, we can control it.
Yeah.
And that was the hope of the fall of Soviet
Russia, a kind of unforecast, right?
Or the rise of Nazism, also
(19:03):
uncontrolled and unforecast.
Arab Spring, a bit more recent as an example, a
significant shaping event, right, in modern
day Middle East.
But it was not foreseen.
It wasn't predicted by the analysts.
So our ability, it turns out, our ability to
predict things, to optimize things, to
(19:27):
make things controllable is in fact limited to a
very small portion of goods in our life.
And I'm not saying we can't control anything.
We can.
We can make food arrive at certain times.
We can have our fridge full.
Some of that stuff, but it doesn't scale up very
well to the stuff that really seems to
(19:47):
matter.
It's almost like it's a, you can optimize, but
it's only on a lot of the surface level
hands on type things maybe.
But then there's so much underneath the surface
that we just, you simply cannot.
Is that a way of saying it?
Maybe like materially goods.
Yeah.
(20:08):
Yeah.
Like I can hit a button and something will arrive
from Amazon, but I can't hit a button
and fix a broken friendship.
No, I don't think you can.
No.
It doesn't work that way.
You know, like how do you optimize?
There's like a lot of things
that you just can't, you can't.
And the question there becomes, and if you have
the hero is the optimizer, he can offer
you something when it comes to some portions of
(20:31):
life, which are to a degree important.
But what about when you've
got that broken friendship?
And if all we've got surrounded by is heroic
optimizers, they kind of go quiet, or at least
quieter.
They don't have quite so much to offer there.
So the danger, I think the danger we're
(20:52):
anticipating there is that if
you are at a time of relative
calm, if you're at a time where things are going
well, the optimizers can remain heroic.
But Leviathan still might be there.
He's just hasn't fully been known yet.
(21:14):
Or he may be at a phase of history where it's
relatively peaceful and chaos seems to
be kind of in the background.
My own fear is that we could prepare people and
designate them as leaders or heroes who
are in a lot of ways, optimizers, who are in a
lot of ways thinking, you know, the world
is basically governable.
(21:36):
My job is to govern it and control it and to
deliver results, to deliver outcomes.
And I can do that in the
most economical way possible.
Using the fewest resources.
And when chaos does poke its head up, we can
either squash it or ignore it.
But what the danger there is, if Leviathan does
show his head, we could have prepared,
(21:58):
we could have prepared a whole generation of
people or ourselves who don't know what
to do.
They fall mute.
Yeah, it's all Yeah, like what you were
describing there, as
you're saying that my brain was
thinking, oh, assembly line, like this idea of
like, I can optimize the assembly line,
I can, when you're talking hands on things, we
(22:20):
can figure out how to build stuff and make
things and fix this process and all of that.
But then when it comes to things that don't fit
into that framework, it does feel your
life could spin out of control so fast.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and even an example of that, though, you
know, it's, it's, it's Henry Ford, who
famously said, you know, you can have whatever
(22:42):
color car you want, as long as it's black.
Yes.
And but what's happening there, what's happening
there is he is, he's recasting this thing
of transportation and this new invention of
automobiles in terms of optimization.
Okay, so you think everybody can have a car.
But I hope you like black, because that's all
(23:02):
you're going to get out of this vision
of optimized processes.
The world becomes kind of monochromatic, even in
the goods, material goods you have.
So there's that side of it.
But I'm agreeing, you know, if if you would buy
wholly into the ideal of optimization
of frictionless life, it potentially becomes
(23:25):
idolatrous, kind of in the tone of Isaiah
44.
And who but a fool would make his own god, an
idol who cannot help him out one bit, kind
of how it's- as I'm paraphrasing there a little bit.
So that is one way that is one way of dealing
with the storms of life or dealing with the
(23:48):
chaos the uncontrolled is to shrink them down to
reduce them down to reduce it to a known
and predictable space where we
can just live in relative comfort.
So we organize the world into this kind of round,
smooth, frictionless space.
(24:08):
And then when Leviathan finally does get in
there, it's got to be terrifying because we
don't know how to deal with him anymore.
And then you start telling this is really getting
a bit tangential, but I think very
relevant when the Leviathan does poke his head
into we had everything working so well, you
know, and then the unexpected, the uncontrollable
happens, then people it seems like have have
(24:30):
this very human expression of trying to explain
it and comes to terms with the unexplainable.
Oh. You know, oh, well, it's because of and and
they'll come up sometimes with these crazy
outlandish ideas of this happened because the
government was controlling the weather
to use some crazy absurd example or like they're
they'll try to come up with an explanation
(24:51):
to at least help make
sense of it in their own heads.
I feel like that's a very human thing and almost
goes back to way back in the day, the
ancient mythologies of oh, we had crop failure
because we didn't sacrifice to the gods in
the right way or something like that.
That just feels like an incredibly human thing.
Yeah, I think you're right.
(25:11):
And that is that
human tendency to look for causes.
Oh, say, it's there in Job.
Yes, you see life
in terms of cause and effect.
And there's always a clear cause.
And some of the call of say a Job is it seems
like by the time you get to the book, God's
(25:31):
call there is to you know, he's understanding of
that probing for cause, but he doesn't
give the cause.
We get a good view of the backstage ourselves in
the beginning of the book.
But even that isn't extremely clear.
Why did this happen?
And it's always Job's question goes unanswered.
Yeah.
That's a tough book to wrestle with, I think,
(25:53):
probably by design, you know?
Well, Leviathan shows his head in there a number
of times, probably for that reason.
That's a really great point.
But I think it does part of what
responding to the question there, too.
And if we got caught in this web of trying to
make things explainable, we can think that
(26:13):
by explaining things, then we can control things.
Yes.
And if other people explain things that they're
in control of them, right?
But it can become it can become it can take the
mystery out of it, for one thing, but
it can also just become paralyzing.
We never actually learn to face Leviathan.
(26:36):
Because he will come, we can't always explain it.
And to turn toward him with courage and faith
doesn't always require of us that we fully
understand.
We can still accept it.
This is part of my experience right now.
I'm not fully sure
I understand this is definitely adversity.
I think Leviathan is showing his head this feels
(26:57):
chaotic and there's a potential for
loss of control and to take the next step of
obedience without fully having to explain
why.
So as we think about all this, what then would
you say is the Christian view of facing Leviathan
or facing the uncontrollable, the chaos that
(27:19):
will inevitably hit our lives?
Yeah.
The Christianity has a
lot to offer here, I think.
But one pre-requisite is it
will have to change our lives.
We're going to have to be willing to not just
control, to manage, to optimize.
Because you do notice if you if you're just
(27:40):
trying to make for
yourself a smooth and frictionless
life, one of the things that happens is it tends
to focus on our own comfort, our own
need for preservation of that life.
The Christian way offers a way that accepts some
of the burden of facing chaos.
(28:01):
And that's willing to say, yes, I can accept
responsibility for that.
And I can walk into that freely and with courage
and faith, doing the best thing that I know.
And leave some of the outcomes up to God.
So I take some cues here, again, from the first
pages of Scripture, where when God creates,
(28:25):
when God creates, he creates that formless void.
And it's interesting to me that it's not assessed
as just evil, something to be fought against.
The Spirit of God hovers over it.
And there's the expectation that something more
is going to come out of that.
There's going to be formedness.
(28:46):
There's going to be flourishing.
So where the Spirit of God is hovering, you see
the possibility of potential and the glory
of God happening.
So you move forward in the scriptural story and
it comes up again where the actual phrase
toho wa-bohu, who doesn't come up very much, but
formlessness, voidness, and the possibility
(29:06):
of chaos springing in from quarters.
Yeah, that comes in quite a lot.
And what's interesting is that that same pattern
continues with God's work.
There's the potential of chaos and the Spirit of
God is hovering, he's brooding, and out
of that comes praise of God and comes to
flourishing of his people and creation.
(29:28):
A man like Joseph, I think he's the first that
said that the Spirit of God was actually
on him in the Bible.
And what does he do?
He steps into a place, a
foreign place, notwithstanding.
And where there's the potential for formlessness
and voidness through a famine, he brings some
order to that.
But it requires something of him.
(29:50):
He's not just an optimizer,
although he's pretty good at it.
It also requires something of him.
We carry that forward, there's so much here.
But you get to the Gospels, right?
There is another figure who we come to call the
Son of God, and we recognize him as the
Son of God partly through these pictures of him
(30:13):
doing things like walking on the deep.
He's walking on the formless void, and it doesn't
really seem to affect him.
He's not just avoiding it.
He's on it, and he can
(30:34):
command it, but he doesn't always.
And that becomes a picture of who Jesus is, of
what his willingness to enter into chaos
and the uncontrolled, which ultimately finds, I
think, its ultimate picture in his death
on the cross.
(30:54):
And that's the ultimate being out
of control sort of event, his death.
And a lot of things happen
there, but it gives us a picture.
What does it mean?
What does it mean to meet Leviathan?
Well does it mean
controllability, predictability, optimization?
(31:17):
Or is Jesus suggesting a different picture?
I think he's suggesting a different picture.
So for early Christians, for the first
Christians, I'll just say for
them, when they made confessions
like Jesus is Lord, part of what they're saying
is that the old and
(31:38):
tottering system for controlling
chaos of Rome couldn't deliver there anymore.
When Paul writes in Thessalonians,
he picks up this Roman catchphrase.
It might have been Roman
propaganda, you know, peace and prosperity.
Rome is here to control chaos.
And if you watch what's happening in the
Colosseum, we'll give you a
(31:59):
picture of what that's like.
Caesar is at the top.
We have legions.
We've got great communication.
We control chaos.
And Paul picks that language up and says, you're
hearing this language, peace and prosperity,
and there's going to be sudden disaster.
That title rightly belongs to Jesus.
So Rome and Caesar just becomes an imposter, a cheap
(32:22):
imitation of what Jesus promises.
So I think people are probably going to be
asking, okay, so how does this affect my life?
How does this look?
You know, like, what does this look like?
There's an interesting piece here because you
have in the ancient mythologies and the
(32:42):
heroes that they lifted up is this great man
comes in and, you know, it defeats the enemy.
Slays the dragon, takes care of the chaos, fixes
everything or the god of whatever, you
know, has appeased and the weather is great and
our crops don't fail this year.
You know, you have those kinds of stories.
But then in the gospel, you have Jesus comes and
(33:02):
instead of doing all of that, he is killed.
Like he dies and he leads by serving, you know,
washing the feet of the disciples.
And so it's like, whoa, okay,
this is a different picture.
This is a very different picture than, you know,
Caesar Augustus, who is like, I'm going
to control everything.
I'm going to fix everything.
Rome is the greatest thing
(33:23):
ever, you know, on this earth.
You want to talk a bit about some of that
contrast and then yeah, like how do we actually
live in the reality of that new, new reality of
what Jesus has established by dying on
the cross, I guess is a way of saying it.
And you have the old, some of the oldest
architecture we have shows that kind of world.
(33:46):
You've got a pyramid.
It all comes up to a point.
There's a Pharaoh, the representative of god or the
god himself, perhaps, and everything
flows down from there.
But what's strange here, there is a structure of
authority in the kingdom and answers to
Jesus.
But the upside downness of it is part of what
(34:07):
you're touching on is how do you understand
what power looks like?
How do you understand what it
looks like to defeat death and chaos?
Well, how about foot washing?
How about self-giving love?
And a willingness, a willingness to accept
responsibility for those who are weaker than you
(34:30):
A willingness to eventually, voluntarily enter
into something as extreme as death.
That's part of the Christian way.
It's not a way of empowerment, of entitlement, of
aggrandizement, of moving yourself up the
ladder so you can get to the top of power and
(34:51):
exercise more control, more predictability.
It turns toward the chaotic.
It acknowledges it, but it
doesn't seem to need to tame it.
And in some ways, it's a
willingness to be crushed by it.
And this is a paradox, right?
(35:12):
But to be crushed by it and to
give oneself over to God in hope.
That sounds very different to me.
The controller, the chief controller.
It's almost like the culture and human nature
says, "I'm going to collect as much power
and influence and stuff and resources that I can
(35:36):
so that I can control everything."
And Christianity is the other way around,
basically, where it's like you give yourself
up.
It's this pouring out of
self and sacrificial love.
And there's a quote I read.
It says, "Culture tells us that it is in the
public space or the public sphere
(35:57):
maybe, up on the stage. That's where
heroic leaders are made."
And whereas Christianity is the other way around,
it's those quiet moments of serving
and giving up yourself.
It's not up on the stage, with all the fancy
"I'm the best, I'm the hero" moments.
You want to speak into that a bit?
Yeah, great.
The culture we live in,
it can so prize platforms.
(36:19):
Yes, influencers.
Yeah, sure.
Is a nice modern word we use.
Here we are talking about this.
I think that Christianity is a lot about the
preparation of a certain kind of people.
And those people, maybe they perhaps could win a
platform at some time, like who's to
say?
(36:39):
But that needs to be given up to God.
And what the focus is, I think, is on a certain
kind of person who is prepared to bring presence.
So maybe the contrast could be helpful there.
It's presence, not platforms.
Oh, I like that.
Yeah.
That presence of, for example, we're talking
(36:59):
about efficiency and optimizing, but presence
is not very optimizable.
Not awfully.
That's why we begrudge it.
And it doesn't.
It seems so slow moving.
Yeah, because optimizing is like fixing
everything and checking
everything off the to-do list
and building systems and all of that.
(37:21):
You need that in certain things, perhaps.
Whereas presence is sitting with someone in their
moment of grief, say, being there for someone
when they're having a difficult time, helping
someone in a way that would have been more
efficient just to
hire someone to take care of that.
(37:41):
But instead, you show up and help that person
with fixing something on their house, whatever.
That doesn't check the efficiency box always.
But it does check the
presence box maybe or something.
I don't know.
Talk to me about that.
Well, that strikes me as important because it
corresponds to some of my experiences as
a pastor.
(38:03):
Part of my life, I'm an administrator and
optimization is something I enjoy.
I've got a bent toward efficiency.
But as a pastor, you're just invited into, almost
required to walk into these places
where there's nothing optimizable.
(38:25):
Grief, love, friendship, worship, lament.
And then you're called into these sorts of
situations where you can't offer optimization.
And it would be sacrilege if you tried to.
Because what this person is
going through is just sacred.
(38:46):
And what you can offer is the presence of God, is
the presence of the Spirit, that kind
of brooding over what it
is they're going through.
But that's only conveyed through presence.
And what strikes me about those kinds of
encounters is not only are
they not optimizable, they're
(39:08):
the ones that you come away
and you say, "Wow, I was changed.
The Lord met me in that."
And rarely have I had that kind of experience in
the moments where I feel like I'm in control.
Yeah, that's really true.
Because it's like you come away from something
like that and you probably aren't going to
say, "That was efficient and we optimized."
(39:30):
But you will say sometimes coming through those
moments, I'm just thinking of several
right now, where you're like, "I was transformed.
I was whoa, like I had growth."
Or maybe not me.
I mean that sounds- or that person experienced
some really powerful redemption, or healing,
or something.
Well, I mean, there was no checklist where you
(39:51):
just, "Yep, we did the formula and bingo,
we fixed it."
It's not those kinds of situations at all.
And I wonder if the two might be kind of
inversely related, where if
you make the world optimized
and controllable, predictable, exactly in
proportion to that recedes our capacity to
be like, "Wow, I think I was changed."
(40:12):
Oh, and other things like hope, or expectation,
faith, recede, where the
horizon of the predictable
increases, it seems to me.
It's not so much about making the kind of world
where we live in hope, where we live
(40:35):
only as far as our presence will allow us to go,
and we leave some of the rest up to
God.
And He comes through in
some really surprising ways.
Yeah, that's neat that you mentioned that,
because I'm just thinking of some of the more
powerful moments that I've
witnessed or been transformed by.
And they were generally in situations where it's
(40:58):
like, "This is just out of control.
I don't know what's happening."
But there was a really
powerful thing with presence.
Yeah, prescence is definitely part of it.
And there's a part you just can't really explain.
It's not like I can look back and be like, "Oh
yeah, these were the six things that came
together and bingo, and made this."
(41:20):
Although we frequently try to do that.
Again, that mental energy we have as humans to
look for causes and effects.
Yeah, well, I've tried, yeah.
We could really wear
ourselves out there though, too.
But it's just this, again, another quote here.
"God leads by serving and saves by
dying," like the example of Jesus there.
(41:41):
I think that's a really important piece.
And then the inverse, the myth of the hero tells
us that dynamic, charismatic, and glorious
individuals can heal cultures through their
personal skill and glory.
That's like the inverse of what Christ showed us.
(42:02):
That really lands.
It does seem, it's almost like this human nature
to want to lift up certain people as
like, "Ah, they've got the answer."
They've fixed it.
They have an incredible skill.
So therefore, we should follow.
I don't know.
I'm still wrangling with what that means because
(42:22):
it's such a human thing.
Yeah.
Well, at least maybe just exploring the contrast
here a bit like we are, it can mean that the
heroes, Christian heroes, they may not always be
able to demonstrate their capacity for
control, but they will be able to show presence.
(42:42):
And more than likely, they'll be able to show
that capacity, the old,
strong word of mortification,
of relinquishing, of saying, "This may not be
everything I hoped for, like Jesus in the garden.
"Father take this cup from me, but
nevertheless, not my will but thine be done."
(43:04):
And then he enters freely in.
And the courage is just
astonishing, the battle there.
But he's still willing to show up.
He's still willing to be present in that kind of
obedient but also voluntary way.
Whoa.
(43:24):
Yeah.
So I wonder, what sorts
of heroes do we need that
just demonstrate those capacity.
It's like I've sometimes wondered with students
here, maybe our heroes as Christians, maybe
they need to be the people who've had their
deepest fears relieved through trust in God.
(43:46):
That's going to look different.
Yeah.
Yeah, I like that though.
That's like really going down deep into those
things and seeing that Christ is there in it.
That's the transformation that happens.
That's the rootedness or the rest that can come
from that where we can be stable through
(44:09):
those times because we know
it's... can we fix the chaos?
No, but we're relying on Christ who can.
There's a lot more to that.
I feel like I need to dig into a bit.
That's so good.
We can sometimes have the picture with Western
Christianitiy, especially of the kind of
(44:30):
triumphalist Christianity that has trouble
dealing with things that we can't change,
that are intractably part of our experience, that
are painful, that are difficult, that
are whatever, or just challenging.
And then we have trouble there.
But again, for... in Jesus, in Jesus and his
descent into death, he united himself
(44:54):
to that one thing we all
have in common, which is our eventual death.
It's the ultimate chaos.
It's the ultimate uncontrolled event.
And in entering into that, you
could ask if this really goes bad.
In the furthest extreme,
who will be there for me?
And that's Jesus giving his,
(45:15):
"Yes, I will be there even unto death.
I'll go that far for you."
And on the cross, when he says, "My God, my God,
why have you forsaken me?"
How far will you go, God, to be present with me?
Even that far, to God forsakenness on our behalf.
It just becomes a powerful way of seeing that in
(45:36):
Christ's voluntarily giving himself over
to death, he even changed the
nature and use of death itself.
We no longer need to be terrified of it.
We could say, "Oh, this isn't quite what I want.
But I could give myself over and I could still act in
the best way I know how.
So for those watching or listening to this, I'm
(45:59):
sure many are facing the uncontrollable,
they're maybe dealing with chaos in life, things
that the unexpected, the unpredictable.
So what can they do with this?
What is a proper response?
Where should they turn?
Yeah, give us something that people can take away
(46:19):
from this for their own lives.
In talking with...
It was a mother of young children for whom chaos
takes the face of her children.
And one thing I don't want to be heard here is
that you can't do anything,
that there's no appropriate steps to take toward
(46:43):
making things a little
bit more controllable, even.
I'm not trying to suggest that.
I'm not trying to suggest that we just relinquish
control or that we just take
our hands off the wheel entirely.
What I am trying to say is that to...
(47:04):
I'll start theologically.
To participate, to live in the Spirit of Christ
is to not make those- that need
for control the ultimate thing.
It's a tyrant.
And to live as if we can control things and
predict things and make
everything smooth and frictionless
very quickly becomes idolatrous.
(47:27):
So the first thing I'd suggest for people is to
have a look, to look critically at our lives
and to especially look at the things which
suggest that, yes, life is
actually very controllable.
That's our pervasive world.
Everything about our life is about optimization,
about controllability, predictability.
(47:48):
It's not just on the manufacturing line.
It's in our social lives.
It's in medicine.
It's in things which have ultimate significance
and it's suggested to us,
"You could optimize this."
So examine that.
Another thing I'd suggest
here is don't run from adversity.
(48:08):
It's like Paul was so delighted in some of his
young churches that he was a
shepherd over when they faced adversity.
It wasn't so much that they faced it.
He wasn't a masochist,
who just like, "Oh,
they're suffering. That's good."
It was that they were actually investing in it
and there was the new creation
breaking out on the other side of it.
(48:30):
They were changing into the
glory of Christ, into his image.
So don't run from adversity.
A lot.
Again, our culture tells that discomfort is bad.
And if you encounter
discomfort, you need to soothe it.
You need to do away with it.
Talk through it, whatever it
takes, but it's probably a bad thing.
(48:51):
So I'd suggest if you find yourself in an adverse
situation, don't close in on it too quickly and
say, "This is bad and I
need to get away from it."
Try to sit.
Try to be quiet.
Allow the Spirit to work and ask, "What
possibilities are there here
(49:11):
for Christ to be revealed?"
I'd suggest too, and this is practical, I think,
so much of our ability as either individuals or
as communities to weather the difficult times
which do come, to weather the deep,
comes not just through our heroicness as
(49:34):
individuals, not just through our willpower and
our ability to bootstrap things.
It comes through a wide tapestry of friendships
that we've invested in deeply already.
It comes through shared experiences with people
who we've already got a connection with.
It comes through cultivating the kind of life
(49:57):
that is rich and has a lot of stories in it,
which help us to stay oriented and focused.
And I think it comes too through having already
introduced into our lives
willingly and voluntarily, adversity
to cultivate the resourcefulness
that we need to kind of steer in.
(50:17):
And then when the really big things do happen, it
gives you more resources.
Almost like building a level of resiliency.
That's a good word.
Resilience is part of what
you're, I think, developing.
You live that kind of widely interested and
varied and storied life.
Yeah, this is really good to think about these
(50:40):
things because it's so easy to say, "Oh, well, chaos.
Ah, that's scary. We're just going to
ignore that or we're going
to try to fix everything."
And that can go badly in time.
And I think it's very important to have these
kinds of conversations in life.
And I think that'd be something I would encourage
(51:00):
listeners to do is to actually
not just ignore these things.
It's so easy just to say, "Oh, I
don't even want to think about that."
And to circle it back around to remember that
Jesus is the one who walked
on the surface of the sea.
That's right.
The formless and void.
That's a beautiful picture.
And sometimes he did calm the sea. He did
(51:21):
have control over those things.
And that's something I
think about a lot actually.
When things feel like they're
just spinning out of control.
It's like, "Well, come back to that."
So anyway, that's something
I would like to leave there.
But yeah.
Well, thanks for sharing, Kyle.
Yeah, good to be with you.
Thanks for listening to this episode.
(51:41):
If you found this interesting, you should check
out this other episode we did with Kyle.
As always, you can find all of our content on our
website at anabaptistperspectives.org.
Thanks again for listening, and
we'll catch you in the next episode.
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