If the Problem is Chaos ...

What’s the problem the Bible addresses? I mean the problem behind all the problems. The problem at the heart of all problems. Manny Arango, a pastor and public speaker, in a cohort I was teaching landed on chaos and he began chasing it … and I began following him and encouraging him, and he did his thesis on chaos. In the cover image above you can see his thesis morphed into a book, and I want to recommend it to you. The image of “chaos” just might give you an opportunity to reframe what God works against in our world.

This is the foreword I offered to the new book by Manny Arango, Crushing Chaos: Calm Your Storms. Order Your Life. Find Your Peace (New York: Penguin Random/WaterBrook, 2025).

There are good reasons to capture the cosmic problem with humans and the world order with the word chaos, and not just because it derives from one the Bible’s first (and very cool) Hebrew terms. We are prone to dig our heels in with traditional and historic words, like sin and transgression and even our “Adamic nature.” Chaos was tamed by God and re-ordered into the beauty of all creation flowing as designed by our Creator. The primordial problem with creation then was not sin against God but chaos itself. It’s the fundamental problem behind all fundamental problems.

Chaos is systemic in that impact all of creation, all our governmental systems, all our economic systems, all our (yes) church systems, and all our relationships. Chaos then is not something entirely subdued. It’s the original problem that lurks in the corners like some goblin, waiting to rise into a presence that disrupts the good order of God. Nothing speaks systemic chaos more than the oceans – dark, gloomy, mysterious, fathomless, filled with death. Only one can tame the ocean and that is the One Water Walker, Jesus, who walked on the water, reached out his hand to a sinking follower, and then calmed the chaos above (storms) in order to calm the chaos below (the turbulent waters).

Chaos is spiritual in that it distorts God’s love into magical thinking, it disrupts the flow of God’s grace toward us into what must be earned, it disengages us from God, from ourselves, and from those we are to love. Chaos is spiritual because it transforms the gospel about Jesus Christ into a weapon that can be used to manipulate, control, and dominate. Chaos turns Christ into a weapon against the world rather than the revelation of God’s grace and love and justice and beauty.

Chaos is personal because it invades our innermost self, coercing to think we are unworthy, unable, unwilling, undesirable, and ugly – but we are not. God loves us. Christ died for us. Christ was raised for us. Christ is coming back for us. The Spirit is with us, in us, for us, and empowering us. God has done all this for us because God wants our innermost self to be redeemed, transformed, and empowered to love, to bring chaos into beauty, and to shift the conversations away from domination and violence to goodness and justice and peace.

Chaos is personal because we are not only prone to wander, as the old hymn has it, but we prone to wander into the wild and the wilderness. Where chaos rules, where order is not to be found, and where we can be “free” to live in the wild out of reach of God’s order.

Chaos is a story, one we cannot live in and flourish, but it has become a compelling story for too many today. Chaos whispers to us that we can do our own thing, that “you be you, I’ll be me, and we can get along.” Chaos knows that you are not you without us, and that We cannot flourish on our own, that Walden is no place to live for those made to love one another. (I’m told Thoreau’s mother did his laundry.) Chaos takes us into the wilderness to ruin us, to weaken our need for love, and to diminish our yearnings for justice and peace. Chaos brings anxiety; God’s ordering in Christ brings the true peace.

Manny Arango, in Crushing Chaos, has given us the gift of a word – chaos – and by it and through it and with it paves a new path through the disorders of our modern world, naming it for what it is – chaos, and taking us through chaos into the beauty of God’s redemption and empowering presence. Crushing Chaos is courageous, creative, and compelling. The dragons of disorder can only be ordered when chaos is crushed by the Lion who, paradoxically, doubles as the Lamb. Crushing Chaos turns the whole Bible into a story of God taming chaos, of God turning chaos into order, and of an ordered creation finding its best order in Christ. Chaos then is scriptural but order is even more so.

Most of all Crushing Chaos names what ails us, what disrupts us, what ruins us, what wounds us, what crushes us, what divides us, and what deconstructs us. At one time, long ago when I was a college student, a professional asked what had become of sin. People liked the title of his book but America was not ready to embrace the truth: sin was real. Manny is asking the same question with the primordial word and the primordial problem, with the word chaos. He’s also proposing the primordial redemption: order. Ordering is God’s work, and it not as simplistic as creating “out of nothing.” Ordering turns chaos into beauty, ordering turns darkness into light, ordering turns empty seas into waters teaming with fishes, empty skies into skies filled with birds, and open spaces into communities populated by those energized by God’s image to care for this world and the persons in it. Ordering then is the flipside of chaos. If chaos is the systemic, spiritual, and personal problem we face today, the solution is not government control, it is not one Man running the world. It is God ordering it and God’s created images sub-ordering what God is ordering.

Ordering sees this world as God’s temple, as an earth shaped by God for you and me to bring the fruits of our labor into order as a way of worshiping God and loving one another. Creation’s true Order is a Person, Jesus Christ, and Jesus crushed chaos on the cross and who rose to establish an order based on grace, on love, on justice, and on peace. No word captures our world better than chaos, and the only solution to chaos is God’s true, lasting, and flourishing order.

Scot McKnight

Professor in search of God’s order