Here is a link to an article by Tony Campolo: Why God is not in Control.
He begins with:
All too often when there is news of a tragedy, such as a mass shooting or a child suffering from bone cancer, there will be someone who will say something like, “God is in control. We must accept that what’s happened is part of God’s plan!”
At the funeral of a young man who died in a mountain climbing accident, the pastor said in his homily, “We must see what has happened as God’s will!” At that, the father of the young man stood and shouted, “The hell it was God’s will! When my son died, God was the first one who cried.”
Other excerpts:
The story I get straight from scripture is that there are evil non-rational principalities and powers that are loose in the world, sometimes working through evil people (Ephesians 2:2) and that God is not the author of the confusion and disorder that come from these destructive powers (1 Corinthians 14:33).
All that God created was meant to be good, as it says in the opening chapters of the book of Genesis. Today, however, things are not as God willed for them to be…
As hard as it is for us to grasp, we have to accept that we have a God who was willing to give up power and give up control in order to live out love for us. That is what the cross is all about. The salvation story is about a God who humbles Himself and emptied Himself of power (the words “empty” is the translation of the word kenosis in the Greek of the New Testament) in order to express fully His love for us. In Christ, God became weak for our sakes and became, according to the theologian Jürgen Moltmann, the Crucified God. It’s the choice that God made when he came to us in Jesus Christ.
As a professor at Eastern University, I earnestly try to challenge my students to define themselves as agents of God..
On the societal level, they all are called to participate in the political process in wrestling against the “principalities and powers.” According to theologians such as Walter Wink and Hendrikus Berkhof, these powers and principalities include the corporate institutional structures of government and economic systems so that they can do the good that God wills for them to do, rather than the evil for which they are often responsible (Ephesians 6:12).