“Everything under control.” This is how German sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes the program of modernity. Modernity asserts that the good life comes from bringing more of the world within reach. This once implicit goal of modernity is fast becoming the texture of daily life. There are few aspects of our world—or even beyond it—left untouched.
However, the cost of such control is indisputable. Sure, we reap the benefits of technical and social advancements. But with those advancements comes acceleration. We are getting more done with more information at our disposal. But this increased tempo of production and communication has not led to the good life. In other words, we are interacting with more of the world at a faster pace but seem to find it less enchanting, less “vocal.”
Rosa argues this muteness is the root cause of burnout and despair. This isn’t necessarily new. When Tocqueville visited America in the 1800s he noticed a pervasive “melancholy in the midst of abundance”. The abundance of early American life was effectively muting the world, and that muting has only intensified. Today, not many can deny our despair-inducing deafness––even Matty Healy, an atheist and lead singer of The 1975, sings “Jesus save us. Modernity has failed us.” While Rosa is a secular academic sociologist whose personal belief system seems to be broader than orthodox Christianity, he readily acknowledges religion as having the capacity to offer the true good life. However, it is the Christian faith alone that makes sense of our problem, and offers the solution.
The Problem: Distortion of Control
Our modern obsession with control is, as many things are, a distortion of the first chapter of the Bible. Mankind is created in the Triune God’s image with glory, dignity, and authority. They are tasked with increasing, subduing, and ruling. This authority to control is a deputized authority. It is an extension of God’s own authority and control.
However, God’s rule always humanizes and enables one’s voice. The first authoritative act by Adam was to name the animals. Our control, in contrast, has increasingly resulted in the dehumanization of ourselves and others, and the silencing of our world. For example, we have more points of connection with others than ever before, but the over-digitization of relationships has actually resulted in a decline in human interaction.
To understand what went wrong with control, we need to recall what control was meant to be. In Creation Regained, Albert Wolters describes humanity’s role this way:
God’s rule of law is immediate in the nonhuman realm but mediate in culture and society. In the human realm men and women become coworkers with God; as creatures made in God’s image they too have a kind of Lordship over the earth, are God’s viceroys in creation.
Notice there are two realms of dominion and control and our deputized authority is situated within the human realm. Wolter further clarifies our authority by distinguishing between nature and norms:
We are all familiar with the laws of nature, the regular order in the realm of physical things, of plants and of animals. These include the laws of gravity, motion, thermodynamics, photosynthesis, and heredity—all the “natural laws” discovered by physics, chemistry, biology, and the other “natural sciences.”
Norms, on the other hand, are those “laws” that are controlled (instituted, cultivated, enacted, upheld) by humankind. In other words, God’s control is direct over nature, and deputized over norms.
The problem arises when we attempt to control like the Superior, rather than as His deputies. This is where we have erred. We have sought to control what is—for the creature—uncontrollable. Instead of aligning cultural norms with creation’s nature, we have tried to force creation’s nature to fit human norms.
For example, Wolters identifies both heredity and biology as firmly fixed in God’s domain of control (i.e. nature). However, this is just one of the many areas where we seek to control the uncontrollable!
Rosa cites our increased control in the birthing process: we perform embryo screening, amniotic fluid tests, and a host of other assessments in order to determine, even before birth, whether a child meets our expectations (norms). We are even on the cusp of being able to control our child’s physical characteristics and personality traits in utero (nature).
But, rather than improve our quality of life, these “advancements” have paradoxically led to an increase in birth-related anxiety. Indeed, one of the casualties of trying to control the nature of the world is that we distort its true nature. Creation by nature speaks to us, but we have rendered it mute by our incessant attempt to master it through control. The result of this muting is fear and anxiety. And yet, we don’t stop! Rather we assume our unhappiness is the result of “un-busted limits”, as Paul Kingsnorth calls them. We are a culture without limits.
Solution: Resonance as Counter-Control
Rosa argues for a different mode of relating to the world altogether. He says “the basic mode of vibrant human existence exists not in exerting control over things but in resonating with them.” Rosa outlines four characteristics of resonance:
Affection: This is an encounter with transcendence; hearing the “voice” of the world, which declares God’s authority and control (Ps. 50:6). This is not something we conjure on our own, but rather something outside of us that acts upon us.
Emotion: This is the emotional, mental, physical, or spiritual response to the affective experience. These first two comprise a double movement of a) passively being affected and then b) actively relating to.
Transformation: As a result of 1 and 2, we do not—indeed, cannot—remain the same. We are awakened to the possibility of a good life.
Unpredictability: This entire process, Rosa says, is always characterized by a certain elusiveness. We can’t guarantee a resonant encounter! We cannot find them; they find us.
However, such resonance is rarely our normative experience. Our lives are anti-resonant by default, and right away Scripture gives us the first and clearest example of such anti-resonance. Adam’s failure to encounter God’s transcendence in the garden without exercising distorted control (i.e. attempting to make God’s omniscient nature his own), led to shalom––true resonance!––eluding all of humanity!
Just as shalom eluded Adam in the garden when he sought to control the uncontrollable, so too the life we so desperately want eludes us when we approach life as a series of moments to be controlled. The experience of truly being alive––resonance––is the result of rightly ordered control. More specifically, resonance is the (albeit, unpredictable) result of the friction between our limits and the uncontrollability of God’s created world.
In fact, this counter-intuitive reality––that we experience life through less control––is in the very redemptive DNA of the Christian story. This redemptive DNA is echoed in Hartmut’s characteristics of resonance:
Affection: Though initially alienated from God, by grace we are acted upon by the external “call” of transcendence sounding in Jesus. New life is stirred within us as we are born again.
Emotion: The soul, having been implanted as Hodge says with a new “habit of spiritual affection and action” through regeneration, immediately acts out of this new habit with the free response of faith and repentance in light of the person and work of Jesus Christ.
Transformation: The grace of this effectual call, regeneration, and conversion transforms us––we become new creations. We are justified, adopted, and continually transformed through the work of sanctification.
Unpredictability: However, this entire process of election is mysterious and elusive, having its origin in the hidden mind of the Triune God before the foundation of the world.
Because these characteristics of resonance are embodied in God’s redemptive reality, resonant experiences––moments when God’s voice breaks through––work to draw us into His resonant heart. And while we cannot completely mute the divine voice of our Shepherd, when we exercise distorted control, we muffle our ears to its sound.
Rosa warns that as soon as we enter into a combative relationship with the world, or switch to a mode of aggression, we close ourselves off, dampening the possibility of resonance. And what could be more combative than trying to control the uncontrollable nature of creation? Unfortunately, such control is the driving cultural form of our lives.
So what is our way forward? How do we balance our call to deputized control of creation with the uncontrollability of creation?
The Psalms: A Resonance-Shaped Life
The solution is not to abandon the creation mandate or to give up all control, but to embrace the limits of our deputized authority while connecting with the God who governs what we cannot. As we move towards a balance of rightly-ordered control and connection, resonance becomes a beautiful possibility.
The Psalms are marked by the balance of an often visceral lack of control over the uncontrollable, and yet a profound connection to the sovereign Lord. By striking this balance, the Psalms teach us how to exercise dominion while not cutting off the world around us (and therefore our experience of God) through distorted control. The Psalms “bring within reach” the speaking creation (and Creator).
It is no accident that the Psalms have played a central role in the Christian life; Jesus—the resonant Lord—was steeped in them, quoting more from the Psalms than from all other Hebrew Scriptures combined. He alone perfectly embodied the balance between direct control (his divine nature) and deputized control (his human nature). Thus, as songs of Jesus, the Psalms serve as a guide to resonance—consider their speed, shape, and subject.
Speed
The musical aspect of the Psalms makes it a natural antidote to an ever-accelerating society. Many of the Psalms were composed as songs; they quite literally keep time. This is why music is so effective at centering us, calming down our bodies and minds in stressful seasons. Our favorite songs do not accelerate each time we hear them. They continue on at a familiar, friend-like pace. The Psalms move at the tempo of grace, breaking against our impulse to control the uncontrollable.
Shape
We have seen the shape—the formula—of resonance. The Psalms as an organized whole share this same shape:
- encounter with the Lord and the promise of his Messiah (Affection);
- responses from God’s people of lament, joy, thanksgiving, remembering (Emotion);
- deep transformation through praise (Ps. 30) and confession (Ps. 51) (Transformation);
- patient anticipation on the Lord’s promise of deliverance (Unpredictability).
The Psalms are songs and prayers in response to an encounter that leads to transformation. Each Psalm is by nature a chronicle of a resonant experience.
Subject
Not only are the Psalms marked by a resonant speed and shape, the very subject matter of the Psalms keep our “feet on the ground” (a phrase often used by Rosa). Rosa describes our relationship to the world with chapter titles like “Breathing,” “Eating and Drinking,” “Gaze,” “Countenance,” “Sleeping,” “Laughing,” “Crying.” These earth-bound, human realities are ones the Psalms are deeply concerned with—realities that remind us of the human limits of our control.
The Psalms not only guide us in our humanity by reminding us of our limited realm of control, they also move us along the axes of resonance. Rosa lays out various vertical axes of resonance—plotlines where encounters with resonance are most likely to occur in our world. These axes are religion, nature, art, and history—subjects which saturate the Psalms.
They are the religious affections of Israel. They declare the grit and grandeur of nature. They are, as poetry and song, art of the highest degree. And, chronicling the story of Israel as God’s covenant people, they are history. As such, the Psalms put us directly in the path—on the axes, if you will—of a resonant encounter with God.
Everything is under control and we’re paying the price. But the solution isn’t to stop the machine of societal advancement; there is no getting off the carousel. The solution is resonance—relating to our accelerating world within our human limits, cultivating the good life. But only a resonant encounter with the living God through his promised Messiah can give us this good life—a life of flourishing in this world.
The Psalms guide us toward this encounter, not as a blueprint for control but a cadence for connection. As we inhabit them, we connect not only with their speed and shape, but their capital “S” Subject (Lk. 24:44).
Hayden Nesbit is an associate pastor at Walnut Creek Presbyterian Church.
