Control and Agency
Are we indeed the masters of our fate? Can we control outcomes?
Are you in control?
Before you answer that, back it up just a little bit and consider these ideas. They come from philosophy but are used in things like computer programming. Conditional logic. Hypothetical syllogism. I know, I know. Fancy-dancy words. But the reasoning behind the thousand dollar words is a ten-cent phrase: “If this, then that . . .” Or, if you prefer, “Controlled outcomes.” Put in the right stuff and you will get the results you want. Our computer programming may be built on it. But well does it work with human beings? Some respond, “ It’s a way to get, I guess you could say, ‘your best life now.’” Or, heck, why not just “name it and claim it?” But you know what that is? It is a desire to control.
William Ernest Henley (1849–1903) was a gifted English writer from Gloucester. The son of a bookseller, his boyhood was enriched by books and ideas, some good, and some not so much. At the age of twelve, Henley was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the bone. By his late teens the disease had progressed to the point that his left leg was amputated below the knee. A few years later, in 1873, tuberculosis attacked his remaining foot, and his physicians urged a second amputation. Refusing, Henley traveled to Edinburgh and placed himself under the care of Joseph Lister (1827–1912), the English surgeon whose pioneering work in antiseptic surgery was transforming the survival rates of patients across the world. Under Lister’s care at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary—nearly two years, from August 1873 to the spring of 1875—Henley’s remaining leg was saved. It was during this long convalescence that he composed “Invictus,” that famous poetic treatise that asserts,
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul. [vv. 1-4]
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul. [vv. 13-16]A careful reading of both poem and life reveals that the lines are less about “agency” and more about “outcomes.” And that is not something to laud. It is humanist hope at best. However, that’s my assessment, but my little literary criticism is not Gospel. I leave impressions and conclusions to the reader as to the spiritual value of Mr. Henley’s poem. Nevertheless, the lines raise a universal question: Are we masters of our fate? Surely, whether we are masters or not, we can, mostly, possibly, “control” our own attitudes. But how about outcomes? I think it is fair to say that many of us might deny such a premise with our lips but pursue it like Invictus. “Pursue what, exactly?” you rightly ask. I think we call the thing “control.”
A Balance-the-Books Word
Control, from an old Gaulish word, contreroller, that crept into Middle English after the Norman invasion, is from the Latin (contrarotulus) and was an accounting term. A control was the duplicate account book. The idea is that the accounting books must match, the outcome being the same. This was the word chosen in time to convey the human desire for expectation to match outcome. The examples are astonishingly plentiful. One may expect that if you implement certain standards about screen time, your child will follow them. Or a young lady may expect that her efforts to direct her would-be husband’s behavior will certainly secure the desired outcome. “Don’t worry about the booze, babes, and bass, Dad. I can train him to be a family man.” And the outcome? Right.
Well, we should be clear. Control is not wrong in itself. There are many things we can control to some degree, with reasonable expectations of conformance. We must control our cars when we drive them. But even in that instance, our expectations of the outcome, based on certain actions we take, cannot impede other factors. What if you drive on a beautiful suburban lane, with overhanging live oaks, and it just happens that a limb falls? You are driving at the speed limit, your eyes are on the road, scanning for vehicles or pedestrians every 4–6 seconds, and looking in the rearview mirror every 10–12 seconds. No diddling with texts on your phone. No fiddling with the radio dial. You are in full control. Nothing should happen. But the old oak is not privy to your expectations and is completely out of your control. An unseen crack in a limb, a sudden jolt of two squirrels landing on it, sends a limb tumbling down just as you pass beneath it. You are okay. But your windshield has a crack. What happened? You lost control. Phenomena dissonance, if you will. To refer to the old Norman word, your books just don’t match reality. Or, to put it bluntly: You never really had complete control.
Okay. Switch gears. Joseph Lister, 1860.
Agency vs. Control
What you did have was “agency.” Human beings are “free” agents. We can say, “I will drive at the speed limit,” and we do. We can say, “I resist using my iPhone to check email while I drive. I could end up in a crash, or I could hurt someone else. It is not worth it. I will not do it.” And that is that. You have made your decision. That is “agency.” But what if the lady in the vehicle in the opposite lane decides to check her emails? What if her car begins to drift toward your lane? (By the way, keep your eyes on the wheels of approaching vehicles, not the larger body. The wheels are the indicators we can most easily discern—from my professional commercial truck driving certification course in Tulsa, Oklahoma, circa 1979; there had to be a use for it eventually.) Mercifully, the other driver sees the peril and steers back to her side of the road. You pull over on the shoulder of the suburban lane. Your windshield is cracked by an ancient oak limb, and now you are almost in a car crash. “What more can happen? I never knew this subdivision was so dangerous!” And that is the point. Life is dangerous because we cannot control all the variables. We cannot completely control those things closest to us. Certainly, your agency is laudable. You maintained driving integrity through your decisions and your commitment to it. Some outcomes were, therefore, mitigated by your agency. But control? Not completely. And not completely means “you are not in control.”
The Philosophy of Control
Control is called a causal phenomenon in classical philosophy. “Control” is always contingent—dependent on other things. Agency—your decisions, your attitudes, your ability to think for yourself—is direct, not causal; active, not passive. Perhaps the greatest thing ever written about control was set down by a Greco-Roman philosopher. A former slave, this man apparently had a lot of time to think and to read. After his servitude, he reached the Adriatic coast of Greece, below Albania—the Roman province of Illyricum—and established a school. There, with his young assistant and student, Arrian, he lectured, and the student took notes grounded in Stoic thought (a commitment to realism, practicality, and personal responsibility, or “agency”). The teacher was Epictetus (c. 50–135 AD); the resulting work is the Enchiridion (meaning “a manual”—in this case, a collection of teachings on various areas of life meant to guide the student). On the matter of “control,” Epictetus said,
“Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing; not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not of our own doing.”
Control is not a phenomenon within our power. Only in the several vital spiritual elements of our conscious life can we exercise influence so that the desired outcome matches the standard. To refer again to the original Latin word that became “control,” we alone can’t make the books match: expectation and reality. More plainly spoken, we can’t control anything but ourselves (and, as we will see, even that is altogether impossible without an “alien” power quite apart from ourselves).
A Christian Reflection on Control
One day, as I was about to walk out of a systematic theology class, my seminary professor asked me to stay. I should add that he was also my dear friend. We shared many memorable times together, including surviving the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history and watching football games on television. We even lived with him and his dear wife as we transitioned to and from seminary (and when our son was born). So whenever Dr. Robert Reymond (1932–2013) asked me to linger a bit after class, I thought he wanted to go to lunch, since it was about that time and we often got together at this suspect place (eventually shut down by the food and health officials of South Florida—a dubious distinction, since we ate at some pretty primitive places in that scenic playground of millionaires, megachurches, and drug lords) for bottomless bowls of tortilla chips and salsa with our one-dollar tacos. But on that day he had something else for me to chew on. I remember it like this.
“Mike,” he began, as he picked up his books and notes from the lectern and stuffed them into his tan Lands’ End carry-all, all done without ever bothering to look at me, “I have figured out something about you.” That didn’t sound good. And it wasn’t. “You are an idolater.” He waited for my response. I had none. Then he laughed. I did not laugh. “What do you mean, Dr. Reymond?” He smiled with his eyebrows raised, as if I had asked whether the sky was blue. “I mean exactly what I say,” and then, you guessed it, he laid on more mustard: “Mike, you are just an idolater.”
Now, seminary can be tough. But when your professor of theology calls you an idolater, that’s just nothing but a really bad day. Really bad.
Once I grabbed a chair and sat down, and was past the imminent danger of shrinking into a cockroach on the floor, Dr. Reymond began to defend his position. He was smiling as he spoke: “Mike, I notice that you have expectations of this course. You have a rather intuitive drive to arrange things nicely and neatly. I understand—I have that too. But in doing so, you are missing some important lessons that God is teaching us in His Word. Systematic theology—the ordered arrangement of doctrine revealed in Scripture—has its limits. There is mystery. And mystery is a reality in the Bible, because God has not told us everything we think we must know. Notice how Jesus answered the disciples about the accidental fall of the tower of Siloam, which killed people, and about the atrocities the Romans had perpetrated against the Jews (Luke 13:1–5). They were dealing with the reality of evil and the sovereignty and goodness of God, and applying systematic theology. But it didn’t add up for them. And what was Jesus’ response?”
I looked up for the first time since Dr. Reymond had revealed my true identity. “He just said, repent—because the same thing can happen to you.”
He responded with an “Okay, now you’re getting it” sort of nod. “How about Romans 9?” He was referring to Paul’s discourse on the absolute sovereignty of God. In Romans chapter nine, the Apostle Paul anticipates the question in the minds of his readers—how can he assert that God was not absent when Pharaoh’s heart was hardened? Paul expected his readers to reply, “Well, what’s the point if God is sovereign? Are we not free?” Paul answers, like the rabbi he was trained to be, with a question: “Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?” (Romans 9:20). Over and over, throughout the Word of God, we meet this same tension between God’s sovereignty and our “free” agency (you will see why I prefer the word “agency” to “will”). “So our theology,” he said, “is an exercise in humility. And ‘control’ is idolatry. I know—I have the propensity too. We all do. We expect that since we act in a certain way, believe certain truths, and make decisions based upon those truths, others will follow through. And ‘they’—including me—may not necessarily meet your expectations. That brings disappointment in you, frustration in me, and can poison a class of students. Instead, I want to show that human reason has its limits. We think, ‘God is great, God is good, therefore evil cannot manifest itself.’ But the tower fell, and people died. Paul taught God’s sovereignty, but his answer, like Jesus’, was focused on our attitudes, our responses—not ‘control’ over things that are clearly outside our realm of ‘control.’”
I told him that I understood. “But how about the idolatry thing?”
Dr. Reymond grabbed the handle of that burlap-like bag of his and moved toward the door of the classroom. “Well, it is authoritarianism to will something and then make others do exactly what you want, or to have things go just the way you expect. It’s also witchcraft to divine outcomes out a brew of conditions. And this is not just semantics—it’s not a mere abstract notion. You will learn that when you teach, when you preach, those who hear will respond as those who heard Paul: some will listen, and some will leave without believing; others will say they would give Paul another hearing; and, by God’s grace, some will believe.”
I responded with a slowly pronounced sentence: “So . . . you . . . are . . . saying . . .”
He finished my sentence with rapid clarity: “. . . that you are an idolater.”
“Yeah. I got that part. So, you are saying?”
“Vacate your pretended throne of the land called Control. Trust God.”
Believe it or not, that was one of the finest lessons I had in seminary. I was awarded the faculty-approved prize in systematic theology at the conclusion of my studies—a nice and undeserved honor. But I learned that theology must be practiced in humility, leaving room for mystery as a necessary component. Beyond that, I learned that human agency is a reality. But control of outcomes is, well, idolatry. We cannot charm all the factors in the world into lining up with our accounting of things. To have such an expectation not only exhibits ignorance of how things are in God’s world, but also creates a way of thinking that leads to hurt, anger, disappointment—and everything but the desired effect of your “control.” So, if we all suffer from this, and it generally gets worse before it gets better, what do we do?
We are free agents. But our wills, our desires, must be transformed. This is, as Dr. Reymond reminded us, an “alien” activity—that is, transformation must come to us from outside ourselves. Our wills are infected by a sin nature that always moves the compass needle of our thinking toward pleasing ourselves first and always. It is not that those who are unregenerate (i.e., not yet submissive to receive God’s grace) cannot do good things. Of course they do, and we are blessed by many such contributions. But we are dealing with an internal compass that is unseen yet can have horrible consequences. Jesus said that we must be born again (John 3:3–7). Paul spoke of unbelievers being dead, and of being made alive to fulfill their purposes in life (Ephesians 2:1–10).
But even a new will—where the compass points to God and His glory, and thereby to our good (self-interest is not evil, but normal; Jesus used that reality in His teaching, even as the Bible does, e.g., “the desires of your heart,” Psalm 37:4)—even a Christ-transformed soul can will good or bad. The will, once in bondage, is free to make similar—not identical—choices; our wills are, in a sense, more attuned because of the historical reality of Jesus Christ having come the first time. Yet for all our new attitudes, new thoughts, new desires, we cannot control another. Control is impossible except in one area.
Control and Self
We cannot make the books match, nor can we create outcomes for others or for circumstances. We can make biblically sound decisions for ourselves. We can teach others. We can train up our children in the way they should go, trusting that when they are old they will not depart from it (Proverbs 22:6). But we cannot control the child’s behavioral outcomes between the time we taught them and—if they have strayed—the time we pray they will return to God. That is the gap, the “mystery” in the equation. And when they are old, or older, they will come to the Lord, acknowledging that we could not control them.
The way to happiness in life is to leave our burdens at the foot of the cross and to trust the Lord Jesus with the things we cannot control.
We do have free agency. Joseph Lister, mentioned at the beginning of this paper, was a devout Christian, a Quaker who later became an Anglican. He was a humble, quiet man, as one might expect of a Quaker. His father made microscopes, and encouraged his son to become a physician. In the course of his studies, young Lister became adept at research. His professors regarded him as a mediocre surgeon (later shown to be a great miscalculation) but a sufficient researcher. Lister, with his father’s microscope and his growing experience in both academia and the surgeon’s theater of operation, demonstrated that one man can change things. How? Agency. Lister used his God-given abilities, his inquisitive mind, and his keen observations to recognize the nature of infection and how to avoid it, and in doing so raised the survival rate of surgeries dramatically. In fact, to connect Lister only to germ research is to limit the remarkable, consequential life of this man. Consequential. Outcomes. Lister worked for good outcomes, and it changed the world. He used the free agency God gave him for good. But he did not divine outcomes. He labored at the root of the problem, and from there consequences emerged that were world-changing.
And if you are in Christ, you have a will that is bent toward the things of God—not a perfected will, but a will now inclined to the Lord. You can make good decisions. You can have the right attitude. You can make choices that will bring spiritual and even material good. You can reflect on the world around you, make observations, form questions, and live a sanctified inner life. Control is not just an allusion, as is often said. The desire to control outcomes is an impossibility, and if unchecked, becomes an obsessive reality that will damage the soul and even hurt those around you—including, no, especially, your loved ones.
But here is the bridge over the gap, the key to the mystery: You can pray to God. God does control outcomes. God can change hearts. God can govern sinners as easily as saints. He can control the weather as easily as He controls “dark matter,” as astronomers call it—the invisible power that creates gravity and the forces of immense magnitude that hold the planets in their courses, sustain the very fabric of your body, and regulate the universe. Jesus is the One who brings us to the Father as we pray in the Holy Spirit. God: our all in all. He, and He alone, is the Lord of outcomes. Mystery is not answered in the Bible with predictive power, but with humble hearts. “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).
You know what? It is a whole lot nicer letting God be God. It is so much better to live in the tension of the mysteries.
Suffering, persecution, and the atrocities human beings commit against one another are hard to reconcile in the books of faith. It was Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), the Viennese psychiatrist who was persecuted as a Jew by the Nazis and survived multiple concentration camps, who wrote one of the most influential books I have ever read, Man’s Search for Meaning. In it, Dr. Frankl thought critically and reflected deeply on his experiences in the camps:
“Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
How so experientially true. And yet. And yet. I cannot add to, nor would I even critique, Frankl’s message. It remains a powerful apologia for the image of God in man, despite the horrible disfiguration of that image by demonic-influenced sin and shame. But I will say this as a Christian, and as a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ:
A life of contentment may be found by praying simply: “Lord, I have sought to follow You in this. But now I leave it with Thee. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”
Since I believe I am writing to someone whom God intends, I pause, even now, to pray for you. May you know such transforming power from on high to say that prayer with faith.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.