2024 best books, part 3

In part 1 of this three-part series, I summarized Introduction to Internal Family Systems by Richard C. Schwartz. In part 2, I talked about Religious Trauma: Queer Stories of Estrangement and Return by Brooke Petersen (with a nod to When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion by Laura Anderson).

Finally, the last of my favorite 2024 reads: The Uncontrolling Love of God by Thomas Jay Oord.

The Uncontrolling Love of God

I've discussed this book before. (See "Making Sense of Hurricanes, Heart Attacks, Miracles, and More.") But I want to return to it in light of the books I've already discussed. Recall:

1. We try to control, eliminate, and exile parts of ourselves we don't like and hold our traumas and pain. But there is a better way: listening and compassion. (Schwartz, part 1)
2. High-control religious communities can traumatize. Queer stories show the healing potential both in leaving non-accepting congregations and, even more, in returning to accepting congregations. (Anderson and Petersen, part 2)

Images of God shape communities of faith and individual faithful people, and faithful people and communities of faith shape images of God. Controlling faith and controlling images of God are different sides of the same coin. Our images of God need healing, just as much as we and our congregations do.

Here a book that can heal our image of God, and again, teach us to be wiser, more skilled healers of our neighbors.

Oord's goal is to offer a response to a question many of us have: "If God is good, why do bad things happen?" Or, more personally, "Why would God do this to me?" He aims for a response that is both true to our experience of life and the world and true to scripture. That response, in brief, is:

1. God is love.
2. God is love, not by choice but by nature.
3. Love does not control or allow preventable evil.
4. God cannot control people or nature, nor can God allow preventable evil.
5. Scripture itself affirms both that
    + God's powerful and uncontrolling love sustains and influences us and all creation, and that
    + God cannot know exactly what will happen in the future or prevent all evil.
6. God cannot, because of the very nature of God: uncontrolling love.

Most of us were raised on an image of an all-powerful, all-knowing God. I know I was. So it may be too much for you to agree that God cannot do some things or to accept that God's limitations are good news. That's okay. You don't have to agree with me or with Thomas Jay Oord, or any other of the author's I've shared about.

The potential for healing drew me so powerfully to this image Oord offers. I was convinced by the title alone: the uncontrolling love of God. Wow! So I must admit, I was not a critical reader of this book. I'm a cheerleader for this book and this image of God, as you no doubt can tell.

Consider the following questions, at least, part of the finer point Oord makes.

• When we say God is all-powerful, do we actually mean, God is all-controlling?
• Can we imagine an all-powerful God that does not control?
• What new possibilities open up if it were true that God's essential nature is uncontrolling love?
• What if God did not so much grant humans free will? What if a God of uncontrolling love could only create uncontrollable creatures, like us?

Maybe you're stuck on the difference between power and control. Take gravity, for example. We are all of us under the power of gravity, but it does not control us. Invisibly, constantly, gravity influences us. In fact, the health of our bodies depend on it. Gravity has participated our evolution as a species. Talk about power! But it does not control us. We are free to defy it, as the astronauts currently in the International Space Station can attest.

So by all means, cherish an all-powerful God. Can we at the same time question the all-controlling image? And could doing so participate in Jesus's ministry of healing?