Playing God E-Book

Andy Crouch

• Herausgeber: IVP
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 551

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Midwest Publishing Association Award of Excellence Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year ForeWord Book of the Year Award Honorable Mention Power corrupts—as we've seen time and time again. People too often abuse their power and play god in the lives of others. Shady politicians, corrupt executives and ego-filled media stars have made us suspicious of those who wield influence and authority. They too often breed injustice by participating in what the Bible calls idolatry. Yet power is also the means by which we bring life, create possibilities, offer hope and make human flourishing possible. This is "playing god" as it is meant to be. If we are to do God's work—fight injustice, bring peace, create beauty and allow the image of God to thrive in those around us—how are we to do these things if not by power? With his trademark clear-headed analysis, Andy Crouch unpacks the dynamics of power that either can make human flourishing possible or can destroy the image of God in people. While the effects of power are often very evident, he uncovers why power is frequently hidden. He considers not just its personal side but the important ways power develops and resides in institutions. Throughout Crouch offers fresh insights from key biblical passages, demonstrating how Scripture calls us to discipline our power. Wielding power need not distort us or others, but instead can be stewarded well. An essential book for all who would influence their world for the good.

Leseprobe

Andy Crouch

Playing God

Redeeming the Gift of Power

www.IVPress.com/books

InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400 Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 World Wide Web:www.ivpress.comE-mail:[email protected]

©2013 by Andy Crouch

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press®is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept., InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at <www.intervarsity.org>.

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

While all stories in this book are true, some names and identifying information in this book have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

Cover design: Cindy Kiple Images: © Pavel Khorenyan/iStockphoto

ISBN 978-0-8308-8436-0 (digital)ISBN 978-0-8308-3765-6 (print)

.

for David Sacks

1968–2013

artist, warrior and friend

Contents

Introduction

1 The Discovery of Power

Part One—The Gift of Power: From Generation to Generation

Exploration: Genesis 1-2

2 Power Is a Gift

3 Idolatry

4 Injustice

A Note: Evangelism and Social Action

5 Icons

Exploration: John 2

Part Two—The Grip of Power: It Will Not Be So Among You

Exploration: Exodus 20

6 The Hiddenness of Power

7 Force, Coercion and Violence

8 The Lure of Privilege

Exploration: John 13

Part Three—Institutions and Creative Power: From Generation to Generation

9 The Gift of Institutions

10 Principalities, Powers and Broken Institutions

11 Becoming Trustees

Exploration: Philemon

Part Four—The End of Power: We Had to Celebrate

12 Disciplined Power

13 The Sabbath Ladder

14 The End of Power

Exploration: Luke 15

Acknowledgments

Notes

Discussion Guide

Leading a Book Discussion

A Single-Session Discussion Guide to Playing God

A Six-Session Discussion Guide to Playing God

About the Author

Related Titles

Introduction

Power is a gift. That is this book’s central, controversial idea.

It may be that you don’t find that idea controversial, in which case you can happily skip this introduction and go straight on to the heart of the book. But I suspect most people have a hard time believing that power is a gift.

Gifts are good, and many people have a hard time thinking of power as good. Not long ago I was on a panel with a woman whose wisdom and insight I very much respect. During our discussion the topic of power came up. “I recognize that power is a reality,” she said reluctantly, “but I think all we can do is contain it and limit the damage it causes.” In her mind power always does damage. Yet she exercises great power, with much care and skill, in her work as a university professor.

Gifts also require a giver. Our use of power will always be disordered and destructive—will result in idolatry and injustice—unless we find a way to a restored relationship with the Giver of power. Even a great deal of Christian thinking regards power, as the apostle Paul said in another context, “from a worldly point of view.” But while power is in some ways the most worldly thing of all, if we take our understanding of power from the world we will miss its promise and misjudge its dangers. To truly understand the gift and danger of power, we have to put it back in the context of the Christian story, with that story’s audacious claims about the true beginning and end of the world we think we know. As we revisit that story, we may find it has much more to say about power than we have imagined, and that what it has to say is not what we expected.

Of course, many people would prefer not to think about power at all, and they sometimes use language borrowed from the Christian story to avoid thinking about it. A friend was speaking with the pastor of a multi-thousand-member megachurch, one whose name is instantly recognizable in the world of evangelical Christianity. “How do you handle the power that comes with your role as senior pastor?” my friend asked. “Oh, power is not a problem at our church,” came the reply. “We are all servant leaders here.” I believe it was a sincere answer—this leader’s commitment to servant leadership is genuine. But I have been in rooms when he walked in and have felt the palpable change of atmosphere, as if someone had abruptly turned down the thermostat and shut off the background music. He is indeed a servant leader, but he is also a person with power.

Because of our discomfort with power, we employ a wide range of near synonyms that seem more comfortable. We speak of leadership, influence or authority. All these are important and beneficial forms of power. But these words can camouflage what is really at stake. The best word for it, with all its discomfort, is power.

There is, I should add at the outset, one group of people who talk about almost nothing but power. The academic world, especially the humanities, has been shaped in the last generation by a new attention to the power dynamics at work in human lives and institutions. Influenced recently by Michel Foucault, and perhaps most deeply by Friedrich Nietzsche, whole disciplines have reoriented themselves around excavating the hidden power lines in human endeavors.

I agree with the Foucauldians that power is everywhere. But in this book I am going to offer the outlines of a different way of seeing this reality. Underlying much of the academic fascination with power, it seems to me, is the presupposition that power is essentially about coercion—that even when power looks life-giving and creative, it actually cloaks a violent fist in a creative glove. I believe this is exactly backwards. I actually believe the deepest form of power is creation, and that when power takes the form of coercion and violence, that is actually a diminishment and distortion of what it was meant to be. Indeed, instead of creation being merely well-concealed coercion, violence is best seen as the result of misplaced and misdirected creation.

I have no hope, of course, of being as erudite or influential as Foucault himself. I am not a philosopher or a scholar of any sort; I am a journalist, and my job as a journalist is to do my best to make complicated things clear, quickly, for people who could be doing something else. Readers who want the real philosophical meat should turn to the book that first started me down this path, John Milbank’s supremely difficult Theology and Social Theory. (I wish them a safe journey.) Oliver O’Donovan’s life work, especially Resurrection and Moral Order and The Desire of the Nations, is a gift to those who want to think more deeply about the political implications of seeing power as creative love. A very different influence on me, years ago, was Marilyn French’s feminist manifesto Beyond Power, which awakened one privileged male university sophomore to the interaction of power and gender, and also started a low-simmering dissatisfaction with the idea that we could ever get “beyond power” in the way she seemed to hope. When I started to seriously explore these topics, Janet Hagberg’s wise and practical Real Power seemed much more helpful than French. None of these influences can be held responsible for anything I say here, except that they planted the seeds of a question: What if the Western intellectual tradition at least since Nietzsche (but further back, as Milbank shows, through Max Weber to the ancient Greeks) is mistaken about power? What if there is another way? If the gospel really is good news for all of creation, is it possible that the gospel is good news about power?

The truth is we need far more deeply Christian, deeply honest conversations about power than any one book can offer. My hope with this book is simply to get us talking about power, and talking about it in a new way, a way that goes to the heart of the good news and the One who alone is good.

There are four parts to this book. Each is punctuated by biblical explorations—looking at the themes of power in biblical texts from Genesis to John to Philemon to Revelation. The amazing thing about Scripture is that when we bring almost any serious question to it and begin reading and listening with that question in mind, we discover a richly textured, endlessly provocative way of seeing that question in the stories, poems, prayers, laments and prophecies of the Bible’s witnesses. A book that tried to treat “the biblical theology of power” would be a different and far thicker book, but I hope these biblical explorations at least show us, like geologists digging test wells in a newly discovered formation, just how much treasure remains to be unearthed when we start asking the Bible to form our imaginations about power.

The first part of this book makes the case that power is a gift—a gift that has been diminished and distorted by sin, but a gift nonetheless. Power is rooted in creation, the calling of something out of nothing and the fruitful, multiplying abundance of our astonishing world. It is intimately tied to image bearing: the unique role that human beings play in representing the cosmos’s Creator in the midst of creation.

You can’t tell a biblical story about image bearing, however, without talking about false images. The story of what has gone wrong with power is the story of how the image bearers misused their gift of creativity. They replaced the true image of the invisible God with all too tangible substitute images, false gods who bring nothing but diminishment and disappointment. The misuse and rejection of God’s gift of image bearing takes the form of idolatry and injustice, the two things God most hates. Understanding how these two distortions of image bearing relate to one another is the key to understanding what has gone so tragically wrong with the gift of power. Only when the true Image Bearer arrives do we begin to see how the story of our idolatry and injustice may have, against all odds, the happiest possible ending.

The second part of the book is about the very concrete ways that idolatry and injustice creep into our use of power—the ways we are tempted to play false gods. Like the man and woman in the Garden after they ate the fruit, power, so present and visible in the very good creation, now hides and seeks invisibility. It has gone underground and underfoot, tripping us up and luring us into false dreams and foolish ventures. When power resurfaces, it takes the form of coercion and violence, the most visible and visceral distortion of what power was meant to be. But even here we will see glimpses of a better way.

In the third part we will examine the way power is channeled over space and through time in the form of institutions. These days it is fashionable to be anti-institutional; around the world, people are losing trust in institutions and those who hold institutional office, whether prime ministers, company presidents or popes. But a closer look suggests that institutions are themselves a gift, indispensable for human flourishing and for the fulfillment of God’s intention for his image bearers. Indeed, so deeply do institutions express the gift of power, when they go wrong they go wrong in the most spectacular and fearsome way, becoming the “principalities and powers” that transcend mere human existence and join forces with the spiritual powers at war with God in the heavenly places. And yet God’s redemptive story is good news for institutions as well, and gives us a role to play in their taming and their thriving.

Finally, we will consider how to bring power, with all its gifts and all the ways it grips us, back under the lordship of the One before whom every knee will eventually bow, through the disciplines that put powerful people—like us!—in their proper place. The classical spiritual disciplines, along with disciplines as small as doing the dishes, humble us and open us to grace. They are capable of making us people who can truly bear the weight of the glory of the image of God, a life of true power. There is a way beyond power’s grip, through the practices of sabbath and worship that bring power to its proper end.

Why is power a gift? Because power is for flourishing. When power is used well, people and the whole cosmos come more alive to what they were meant to be. And flourishing is the test of power. Writing a book is an act of creative power, with all the risks and uncertainties that come with any true act of creation. Reading a book is its own exercise of creative power, one that requires the investment and risk of time, attention, hope and a kind of love. I’m grateful that you have taken up this book. I pray that when you put it down, you will be one step closer to the flourishing for which you were created, and that as we, together, make something of the world, the cosmos itself would groan a bit less and sing a bit more, as the whole creation awaits the revealing of the children of God.

1

The Discovery of Power

Last night in our neighborhood, the power went out.

Only for a few minutes, mind you. Not enough to wake us from sleep, though the fan in the bedroom window must have coasted to a halt before resuming its cooling and soothing whir. Just enough to disrupt our digital clocks—when I got up this morning three of them were blinking in confusion—and unsettle the family computer, which was dark and silent until I restarted it. Just enough to remind us that flowing through our home, our neighborhood, our town and our nation is a current of power that almost never fails us. Almost every morning the clocks know what time it is, the computer has completed its overnight backups, the milk in the refrigerator is cold, and the water in the shower is hot.

I live surrounded by power. It very nearly killed me.

The summer after we moved into our current house, I started noticing a strange popping sound when I opened and closed the garage door. Somehow, for several weeks I failed to connect that sound to a problem we were having with our air conditioner. Its circuit breaker was tripping at odd moments. We would go to the garage, reset the circuit breaker and the air conditioning would work again. One more gift of power—effortless comfort on hot summer days.

One morning I had put my bike in the garage after a good long ride. Closing the garage door, I heard the abrupt “pop” again. This time I also noticed, barely out of the corner of my eye, a flash of light.

I opened the door again. I heard another pop and saw a searing bright arc of light illuminating the garage. There is only one thing that makes light that bright: high-voltage electricity jumping a gap from somewhere it should be to somewhere it shouldn’t. I jumped back in alarm, then gingerly crept under the half-opened door into the garage to investigate.

Our garage door, like most, was mounted on tracks and counter sprung with heavy coils of wire on each side that made it possible to raise and lower it easily. Some quick-working electrician, who had installed the air conditioning unit just outside the garage shortly before we moved in, had run the wire from the circuit breaker to the compressor right past one of those heavy metal springs. This was, shall we say, not exactly according to code. Over several months the travel of the spring back and forth had gradually rubbed off the insulation. Every successive opening or closing of the door dug deeper. Bare copper was waiting to make contact, and when it did the resulting arc of electricity was tripping the circuit breaker, making that popping sound and flash of light, and coming within moments and millimeters of finding its path to the ground through my hand on the door. There is no good reason, other than sheer luck, that I was never on the receiving end of 4,800 watts of power at the end of one of my morning bike rides.

The frayed cable is long since fixed, rerouted away from the door and protected by shielded conduit, by an electrician who swore under his breath when he saw the original job.

I still open that door a bit gingerly. I live surrounded by power.

Making Something of the World

Like the electric current that runs, with the rarest of interruptions, through my home, power is a fundamental feature of life. And as with electricity, those who have the most unfettered access to power are the ones who are likely to think about it the least—unless and until it suddenly disappears or violently appears. But that does not make it less important or dangerous or valuable. For power is all those things. It courses through our lives. When it is rightly used, it makes possible most of what makes us truly human. When it is misused, it puts all of us at tremendous risk. Like Narnia’s Aslan, it is never safe, even when it is good. Unlike Aslan, it is not always good.

What, then, is power? May I begin with a deceptively simple definition: power is the ability to make something of the world. Here I am borrowing unabashedly, just as I did in an earlier book, from the journalist Ken Myers, whose simple and profound definition of culture will serve us so well: culture is what human beings make of the world, in both senses—the stuff we make from the raw material of nature, but also the meaning we make. This is our basic task, preoccupation and quest: to make something of a world that comes with no ready explanation yet has seemed to nearly every human being to throb with meaning.

Power is simply (and not so simply) the ability to participate in that stuff-making, sense-making process that is the most distinctive thing that human beings do.

Of course, when we define power this way we recognize that we human beings are not the only creatures that make something of the world. Chimpanzees do it, and (with less complexity and more methane out the back end) so do cows. At an elemental level all life exhibits power, transforming its surroundings. And all life requires power. The yeast that transforms my dough into bread requires the input of heat and the stored energy in the carbohydrates of the flour in the dough. The tree in our back yard, shading our home with the new green of spring leaves or covering our lawn with the yellow blanket of fall, draws its power from the sun itself, the ultimate source of almost all the power we or any other part of creation have yet learned to harvest. The same sun, indeed, once shone on eons of living creatures that then slowly decomposed in layers far beneath the ground, becoming the coal, gas and oil that make our lives so seemingly effortless in so many ways. In all these transactions, slow or speedy, local or global, power pulses wherever we find life. When power departs, as in some of the darkest corners of the oceans or in the final gasp of death, world making also ends and, dust, we return to the earth that for a little while we had the power to change.

So power, in this broadest sense of making something of the world, is a universal quality of life, from coral reefs to cellists. But only human beings, as far as we can tell, exercise power in the second sense that Myers calls our attention to, not just making stuff but making sense. It is the unique power of human beings to invest our creations with meaning, to interpret the world rather than just blunder through it. As singular as our human power has become to physically reshape the world into gardens and cities, dammed rivers and mushroom clouds, even more singular is our ability to pass on meaning to the next generation, to shape their horizons of possibility with interpretations of not just what the world is but what it is for.

And what is powerlessness? It is being cut off from these two kinds of world making. The powerlessness of death means that the world may act on us, but we will never again act on it. Such powerlessness, just as much as power, is a fundamental feature of human existence, a reality of which those in the prime of our lives probably need all the reminding we can bear. We began, not so long ago, quite unable to make anything of the world, and we will soon be, much sooner than we can truly grasp, once again at the mercy of others’ power to sustain us. And a moment after that, as far as this world is concerned, we will be gone altogether. Our short interlude of power takes place between two infinitely long seasons of helplessness. The phrase “temporarily abled,” sometimes used by advocates for the “disabled” to describe those of us who currently have command of our bodies’ functions, is empirically, unassailably true.

Just as there is more to world making than just making stuff, however, there is more to powerlessness than being unable to bring about a tangible change in the world. The deeper and more debilitating form of powerlessness is to be cut off from making meaning. There are able-bodied people all over the world whose physical capacity to make something is undiminished (much less diminished, in fact, than my own body’s after decades working at a screen), but who are denied any opportunity to make their own sense of the world. Perhaps they were denied this by being cut off from education, the process by which human beings gain the cultural fluency to participate in culture’s ultimate task of meaning making. Perhaps they are denied by deeply ingrained assumptions about who matters in the world—excluded from the circle of meaning making by virtue of their skin color, gender or dialect. Their attempts at sorting out meaning, bestowing significance and telling truthful stories are ignored, mocked or worse. In an unsettling irony, millions of them make the very cultural artifacts that allow us to engage in meaning-making acts—within reach as I write are my smartphone, my laptop, my ebook reader, my widescreen monitor, all the essential tools that allow me to make something of the world in the deepest sense. But the voices and stories of those who made these tools remain unheard and untold, and the goods they manufacture arrive in our stores and homes sealed in supernaturally clean plastic, from which human fingerprints have been conscientiously removed.

This is not the way it was supposed to be. To be sure, not all powerlessness is bad. Some of our limits are themselves a gift. The things our human bodies cannot do far outnumber the things we can do; our ability to make sense of the world runs up against the world’s many unfathomable mysteries. These limits often serve us well. But when powerlessness results from the exercise of power—when one person or group of people acts to deprive another of power, and especially when that pattern of exclusion persists from generation to generation—then something has gone fiercely wrong, and not just for the ones who directly suffer their disempowerment. Because the ability to make something of the world is in a real sense the source of human well-being, because true power multiplies capacity and wealth, when any human beings live in entrenched powerlessness, all of us are impoverished.

Modern-day Slaves

Perhaps no statistic reminds us more graphically of the distortion of power in our world than this: there are twenty-one million slaves in the world today. They labor as brick makers, coffee harvesters, cigarette rollers and domestic servants. They are not free to leave. If they try, they are savagely beaten. Millions are serially raped in brothels—as young as nine years old—and even those not enslaved in the sex industry are liable to be sexu­­ally exploited at the whim of their masters. They are paid nothing beyond the barest amount for their subsistence, often ostensibly to pay off debts incurred by themselves or their parents, but in fact laboring under onerous interest rates that ensure that their debt will never be discharged.

One early summer morning I was on a train to meet some of these modern-day slaves. The train departed from the bustling station in Chennai, in southeastern India, rolling west through the lush fields where you never fail to see people, countless people, planting, harvesting, cultivating, working. I had come to Chennai to meet Jayakumar Christian, the director of the Indian affiliate of the international humanitarian organization World Vision. I had asked for a few hours of his time for an inter­view and had assumed we would meet at World Vision’s headquarters. But Jayakumar had emailed me a few weeks before my arrival, telling me to expect a train trip. “I am taking you to Gudiyatham,” he said when we met just after dawn on an already-sweltering morning. “I need to visit our program there, and I want you to come along.”

In the Gudiyatham district, nine years before this visit, child slavery had been rampant. In one small village of perhaps two hundred people, twenty elementary-school-age children were enslaved: Prabhu worked in a filthy motorcycle shop, Boobalan sat at a loom all day weaving, Ghanthi rolled cigarettes, Suresh made matches. None went to school. The debts they were theoretically paying back were for 2,000 to 4,000 rupees—in US dollars, fifty to one hundred dollars. But everyone knew that those debts would never be paid off.

The tiny amounts are significant and indicative of the new face of slavery worldwide. In the era of the Anglo-American Atlantic slave trade, to purchase another human being could cost thousands of dollars. Slaves obtained through the Atlantic trade were (as odious as it is even to write this phrase) valuable property, as valuable as a horse or a mule. Today, it is not just India where you can purchase a slave for one hundred dollars—in his 2008 book A Crime So Monstrous, the journalist Benjamin Skinner describes negotiating to purchase a twelve-year-old girl in Haiti, for the purpose of labor and sex, for a grand total of fifty dollars. In the documentary film At the End of Slavery, Ambassador Mark Lagon observes that this means that modern slaves are in effect disposable, “like a styrofoam cup.”

Such slavery is illegal in every country in the world, and few government officials are eager to admit that it is happening on their watch. But it is happening, thanks to official complacency and, often, complicity. (Not infrequently, Indian police are called to brick kilns that enslave children, called, that is, by the owners of the kilns, to give the slaves a beating and thus also to undermine any hope that the authorities care about their captivity.) There is a cruel irony in the fact that two centuries after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade by the British Parliament, one hundred and fifty years after the Union’s victory in America’s Civil War, more human beings are enslaved today than were trafficked across the Atlantic in two hundred years of chattel slavery.

If you want to understand power’s dangers, slavery has one advantage: it is vivid and complete in its corruption. In enslavement one human being asserts unlimited power over another, an assertion that requires not just the inflation of the slave owner’s power to unholy, godlike levels, but the eradication of the slave’s power. Some masters may be relatively benevolent (as some were, at least in their own eyes, in the era of American slavery). But the master-slave relationship remains one of categorical lordship, and it is predicated on the owner’s assertion of the right to take anything and everything from the slave, up to and including her life. Ultimately the owner owns everything; the slave owns nothing.

In this corrupted version of absolute power—very different from other kinds of power we will consider shortly—power is a finite resource, jealously hoarded. For a slave to gain power requires the master to lose power, which is part of the reason that full slavery includes a claim on the children of slaves, leading to the phenomenon, still common in parts of Southeast Asia today, of multiple generations enslaved by a single owner. A slave owner can never admit that the slave might create something outside of the owner’s control, even a child. In a corrupted power relationship, all power must accrue to the powerful.

“We Free Slaves”

For time out of mind, this had been the reality of life in Gudiyatham. But when I met Prabhu, Boobalan, Ghanthi and Suresh, they were no longer slaves. For nine years World Vision staff had been patiently, steadily working in the district. They had started a women’s association with an emphasis on financial literacy and pooled savings. The members told Jayakumar proudly that just a few months before they had walked into a local bank, something “we would never have had the courage to do before,” and found that the bankers treated them with respect, thanks to the substantial sum they had set aside for a deposit account. World Vision had worked with local village councils, called panchayats, to address substandard housing and create job training programs. They had started a citizenship training program for former “untouchables” who had never before thought of themselves as having the rights of citizens. (A few weeks before my visit, local Hindu fundamentalists had attacked the World Vision office, claiming that the citizenship program was a covert effort to proselytize. Fortunately, village leaders rallied, persuading the local police that the program was entirely legal, and managed to avert mob violence.) At every step World Vision had educated the community about India’s laws against bonded labor and the right of children to go to school.

So at lunchtime a dozen middle-school-age children filed shyly into the World Vision office, immaculately dressed in their school uniforms, and told Jayakumar and me their stories. Ghanthi, perhaps twelve years old, quickly warmed to Jayakumar’s questions and gentle prompting, and told us that two years before she had given up hope for her future. Now she was in school. What did she want to do when she finished school, Jayakumar asked? “I will become a doctor and come back to this village,” she answered without hesitation and with a twinkle in her eye. Was child slavery still a problem in her district, he asked? “There are a few children still in bonded labor. But we go to the slave owners and tell them, ‘You need to stop this! You could go to jail!’” I wasn’t sure I had heard correctly. Was she saying that former child slaves were confronting slave owners? “Yes, and we tell the children they have the right to leave. We have freed three children this month.”

Perhaps the most astonishing moment of our visit was the “children’s panchayat.” At this weekly meeting the children could practice the skills of civic life, rehearsing roles they might eventually play as adults. Except they weren’t just playing. With obvious delight and pride, fifty boys and girls sat on banana leaves in a small clearing and told us how they were ending slavery in their district. They presented fragrant garlands of honor to Jayakumar and me (feeling entirely unworthy), sang local songs for us, told stories of how life was changing in their village and then asked Jayakumar to address them.

Jayakumar is a man of a few well-chosen words. His face gleamed with perspiration and pride as he said, “There are three things I want you to remember when you grow up. Remember God. Remember your parents. And remember your community.” It struck me that he was asking them to remember—and honor—parents who had handed them over to slave owners, and, for that matter, to remember God when many circumstances in their lives might seem to argue for God’s distance or nonexistence, and to remain committed to a community that for many years had tolerated the most egregious forms of injustice.

Yet as I listened to Jayakumar’s simple and gentle words I felt, and the children’s intent faces suggested they too felt, that something essential was being restored to them. The liberation being accomplished in this district was not just individual release from bondage, the sum of the names posted on the wall at the World Vision community office. The lines of community, family and faith, fractured by exploitation, were being healed as well. What poverty and powerlessness had taken away, Jayakumar’s colleagues were steadily, carefully restoring—or, actually, had already restored.

Indeed, there was nothing in the demeanor or manner of the children or their parents that would have caused me to think that they were either poor or powerless. They radiated confidence and pride, yet also humility and generosity. One ten-year-old handed me a coconut, its top freshly lopped off to give access to the cool, sweet water inside. She was the host, I was the guest; she was the expert, I was the student; she was, in the time-honored tradition of hospitality, honored in the act of honoring her visitor. I can still taste that coconut water, the sweet and fragrant taste of shalom.

On the train on the way back to Chennai, I said to Jayakumar, “It’s odd. These people are still materially poor. But they don’t act poor.”

He smiled broadly. “That is how I know it is time for World Vision to leave this district. Our work is nearly done.”

A Different Kind of Power

Jayakumar Christian is a powerful man. He has a PhD from an American institution and works for one of the world’s largest multinational organizations. He is responsible for eight thousand employees across India, with connections to the highest levels of Indian government, business and religious leadership. “Poverty is the absence of linkages, the absence of connections with others,” Jayakumar told me. By that measure, Jayakumar is the very opposite of poor.

But when Jayakumar picked me up for our trip to Chennai, he was wearing the same utterly plain long kurta, made of coarsely woven cloth, that my friends told me he wears every day. For our day-long trip he carried a small cell phone, a few bills of currency and nothing else. Most leaders at Jayakumar’s level would be answering their phone or responding to email and text messages at every spare moment; Jayakumar’s phone rang once the whole day. When I visited him at World Vision India’s headquarters the next day, his desk in a small, simple office was entirely bare. Jayakumar lived a life of utterly intentional simplicity—a life that allowed him to give his full attention to one place and person at a time, and to be equally accessible to a peasant farmer or a prime minister.

Jayakumar’s staff in Gudiyatham greeted him with undisguised affection and excitement. They had endured the late-night raid by Hindu fundamentalists a few weeks before; Jayakumar’s motive for making this trip, it became clear, had been less about showing a Western journalist a successful project and much more about visiting members of his team who had been through a harrowing experience and still faced threats. Several of them had been in Gudiyatham for nearly a decade, raising fami­­lies in a district far from their home. They were working across the grain of local patterns of power (probably another factor in the mob’s assault on their office) yet also working alongside local officials who were willing to recognize the persistent pattern of child labor and work to end it.

In a place where power had been abused for generations, Jayakumar and his staff represented a very different kind of power. This power was actually giving life rather than constricting it. It occurred to me that none of the children, women or village leaders I met would likely have wanted the World Vision staff to give up their power, any more than they would have welcomed the thought of disbanding their village savings association or the children’s panchayat. For this power was not like the slave owners’: it was not a finite quantity that had to be hoarded but a multiplying resource, like life itself. When the village children gained power, that did not mean that Jayakumar or his colleagues lost it. Indeed, with Ghanthi on their side, they were making more progress than ever.

Power at Its Best

Here is what we need to discover about power: it is both better and worse than we could imagine. Power at its best is the power exercised by Jayakumar and his colleagues at World Vision, and perhaps even more by twelve-year-old Ghanthi, boldly confronting slave owners and planning to be a doctor. It is the one swift stroke of the machete that opens a coconut for the honored guest. It is a source of refreshment, laughter, joy and life—and of more power. Remove power and you cut off life, the possibility of creating something new and better in this rich and recalcitrant world. Life is power. Power is life. And flourishing power leads to flourishing life.

Of course, like life itself, power is nothing—worse than nothing—without love. But love without power is less than it was meant to be. Love without the capacity to make something of the world, without the ability to respond to and make room for the beloved’s flourishing, is frustrated love.

This is why the love that is the heartbeat of the Christian story—the Father’s love for the Son and, through the Son, for the world—is not simply a sentimental feeling or a distant, ethereal theological truth, but has been signed and sealed by the most audacious act of true power in the history of the world, the resurrection of the Son from the dead. Power at its best is resurrection to full life, to full humanity. Whenever human beings become what they were meant to be, when even death cannot finally hold its prisoners, then we can truly speak of power.

Yet it is the way of our world that the very thing that makes us fully human at our best is what most truly corrupts us at our worst. Power at its worst is the unmaker of humanity—breeding inhumanity in the hearts of those who wield power, denying and denouncing the humanity of the ones who suffer under power. This is the power exercised by the money lender, by the police who ignore or protect him, by the officials who would rather not confront him. This power ultimately will put everything around it to death rather than share abundant life with another. It is also the power of feigned or forced ignorance, the power of complacency and self-­satisfaction with our small fiefdoms of comfort. Power, the truest servant of love, can also be its most implacable enemy.

Many people who have heard the subject of this book have urged me to choose a less abrupt and unsettling word than power. What about authority or influence or leadership? But these words are too safe, and they are too one-sided, too reassuringly benign. The word power has electric force, jolting us awake. Power at its worst should unsettle us, should shock us. But power at its best is also much more than these safer words can convey. It is the current of life. It is dangerously good.

I think this book really began on the train home from the Gudiyatham district, having looked into the eyes of children who had known literal slavery and real freedom, sitting next to Jayakumar as he dozed after a long and intense day of listening to and loving his staff, their communities, their neighbors. I remember thinking, I am inches from a saint.

These are the moments that have shaped my life: the moments when I see that the world is infinitely worse, and infinitely better, than it appears. And that is what I have come to believe about power.

Part One

The Gift of Power

In the Beginning It Was Not So

Exploration

Genesis 1–2—Original Power

All of us have a functional Bible within the Bible—the parts of the book that we read, rehearse and remember. With a library as sprawling and complex as the Christian Bible, it is inevitable and probably necessary that we pay attention to some parts more than others. But I’ve concluded there are four chapters missing from the working Bibles of all too many Christians, and these missing chapters are not some obscure ceremonial texts or dusty corners of the royal chronicles. Instead, they are the very bookends of Scripture: the first two chapters of Genesis and the last two chapters of Revelation.

And to miss these chapters—the first two about the creation, the second two about the new creation—is to miss the whole point of the biblical story. When these chapters drop out of our functional Bibles, our understanding of culture, power and salvation itself is badly weakened.

Of course, these chapters are not literally missing from our Bibles, and indeed both Genesis and Revelation have been the subject of more than a little misplaced attention throughout church history. Revelation has been mined for clues to the very thing Jesus explicitly told his disciples neither he nor they could know—the exact timing of the end of the world. Genesis, meanwhile, has in recent history been used to undermine what we can know about the development of the natural world from the discoveries of cosmology, paleontology and biology, rather than being read as a defini­­tive, revealed account of divine creation that confronted polytheistic pagan cosmologies of conflict.

But the potential for misunderstanding and misuse shouldn’t deter us from granting these crucial chapters the authority they were meant to bear. Beginnings and endings matter. If we were to come upon a novel with the first and final chapters ripped out, in order to enjoy it or even understand it we would need to fill in those missing pages with our best guesses about the protagonist’s and antagonist’s origins and final destinies. Our guesses might be true to the author’s intent, or they might be wildly off the mark, but they would be guesses all the same. And if the first or last pages revealed some essential information or crucial plot twist, we might well misread the whole book in between.

Indeed, if we have not fully absorbed the message of Genesis 1–2 and Revelation 21–22, we will surely supply some sort of beginning and ending to our own subcanonical versions of the biblical story. And in fact you could classify recent Christian movements by the alternative beginnings and endings they have supplied in place of the Bible’s own. In the last century some liberal Protestants, finding Revelation a bit embarrassing, adopted a progressive eschatology in which the benign processes of human history would lead to ever greater harmony. This had little to do with John’s dramatic and cataclysmic vision, but it fit well at a moment when Christianity aspired to be utterly at home in the world.

Evangelical Protestants, less at ease in the world (or at least less willing to admit it), took a different tack. Many evangelical tellings of the biblical story, especially those designed to deliver an evangelistic message, effectively began with Genesis 3: the fall of humanity. And they ended with Revelation 20: the casting of Satan and all his works into the lake of fire. Understood this way, the gospel runs an abbreviated gamut from original sin to final judgment. The original good creation and the glorious new creation are afterthoughts when they are mentioned at all.

This smaller story is true, as far as it goes. We really do live under the curse of the relentless and restless human declaration of independence from God, and under the reality of coming judgment. But there are serious problems with this truncated version of the biblical story. The first is that it doesn’t seem to offer much good news—a story that starts with sin and ends with judgment is a bad-news-to-bad-news story. What is the good news in such a story? In all too many tellings the good news simply becomes the message that for those who believe in Jesus, it is possible to escape the story altogether, being plucked by a kind of divine skyhook into an eternal life outside the doomed story of the world. But of the world itself, especially its beauty and wonder, the truncated story of Genesis 3 to Revelation 20 has little to say.

There is a deeper problem with a gospel that runs from Genesis 3 to Reve­lation 20. Such a “gospel” in truth tells the world nothing that the world does not already know. Original sin, Reinhold Niebuhr liked to say, is the only Christian doctrine that is empirically verifiable. Our neighbors may not believe in a Fall, but they cannot deny that something is terribly out of joint in the human story. At the other end of history, modern science has made it clear that “progress” is not just a historical fantasy but a physical impossibility. Thanks to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the total amount of disorder in the universe is increasing, and one distant day the universe’s vast reserves of information, energy and order will be dissipated in a great and final sigh followed by an everlasting silence. True, this cosmic story ends not in fire but in ice (although some models leave open the possibility that the universe will collapse again upon itself in a final fiery burst of annihilation)—but the ultimate loss of all things is not in doubt. The vision of a sulfurous, consuming lake of fire is an eerily apt metaphor for the eradication of history and meaning that is assured in the world as we know it. That end may be unimaginably distant, but it is inexorably approaching as certainly as our own individual deaths.

So a story that begins in sin and ends in judgment doesn’t just fail to be good news. It isn’t news at all. It tells our neighbors nothing they cannot figure out on their own. But the Bible’s story is a story of good news: both good and news, both unexpected and unexpectedly hopeful. It is good news about the end: the astonishing claim is that the world will not be forgotten or left to its own decay, but rescued and remade. It is good news about the beginning: this world does not simply originate in primordial conflict, whether the cosmic conflict of the Enuma Elish or the pitched struggle of Darwinistic competition, but in abundance and delight. And it is good news about power.

From “Make It So” to “Let There Be”

The first chapter of Genesis is full of the goodness and good results of creative power. Genesis begins not with violence but with breath and word. The Creator God does not need to wrest being out of chaos; instead, God calmly speaks the simple words “Let there be.” These words, in what grammarians call the “jussive” form, are not direct imperatives. They are simultaneously more powerful and less controlling than that.

When we think of power, we often think in the imperative mood. I came of age during the televised command of Patrick Stewart’s memorable character Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the rebuilt USSEnterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Captain Picard would famously lift a finger and say, “Make it so.” The imperative mood is suited to command. It leaves little room for independent reflection or action by the subordinate, and indeed in the heat of an encounter with a hostile Romulan warbird the last thing anyone needs is an indecisive captain giving vague suggestions, open to various interpretations, to a philosophically minded crew. In times of crisis clear imperatives can be the difference between life and death, something that is as true for parents of toddlers as for captains of starships.

But the creativity of Genesis 1 is not the result of crisis. So rather than ordering the primal elements around like lieutenants on red alert, God says, “Let there be,” in many ways an even more powerful phrase than “Make it so.”

“Let there be” does not have to assert power, it assumes it. It does not have to impose power, it indwells it. Yet “let there be” also suggests a multiplication of power that is not found in the peremptory phrase “Make it so.” “Make it so” is a strictly limited and limiting command. The subordinates making it so are not expected to make anything else so—their job is to put into practice the precise decision arrived at on the bridge, no more and no less. But when the words let there be ring through the universe, they accomplish very literally what they describe—the creation of being where there was none before. New beings come into existence, each with their own capabilities, potential and sphere of influence. Indeed, “Let there be” bequeaths power to others, making room for more power.

By saying “Let there be,” the Creator God makes room for more being, for more agents who could utter their own “let it be.” And in response to that divine jussive, acting in the space opened up by God’s creative power, they will engage in their own acts of creativity. On the successive days of Genesis’s story, those empowered creatures will yield seed, bear fruit, rule the day and the night, fly, be fruitful, multiply, creep, and fill the earth.

And they will swarm.

And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.” So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day. (Genesis 1:20-23)

God’s creative act brings forth not carefully regimented sets of creatures but “swarms” of them. Swarms are not well suited to the imperative mood. Anyone who has been too near a swarm of honeybees, gone scuba diving among schools of fish or seen a wheeling flock of sparrows over a grain field at sunset knows how awesomely unpredictable a swarm can be. Other translations use the word teeming for the animals of Genesis’s fifth day, another word of incalculable and inestimable abundance. The Creator is not seeking a world full of pets, individually domesticated ani­mals bred to be attentive to their human masters. He delights in wildness. Swarming and teeming are part of what make the world good—the overflow and excess of life. All of this actually gives greater glory to God, who has breathed into existence the vast spaces of earth, sky and sea where these creatures can teem, than would a meticulously tended back yard. The Creator loves teeming.

From “Let There Be” to “Let Us Make”

And then, significantly, the voice changes and becomes more personal. Whereas the rest of creation is brought into being through the jussive “let it be,” on the sixth day God speaks unexpectedly in the plural “cohortative” form, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” Now God is personally invested and involved. This is no distant sovereign decree; it is an intensely personal decision to crown creation with the image bearers who will themselves be invited to share their Maker’s fruitful dominion over the world.

Only after this personal decision do we hear an imperative addressed to the image bearers. And what are they commanded to do? To develop their own power: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28). The command is to teem and become agents of teeming. These image bearers will become the kind of persons who can themselves say “Let there be” and “Let us make,” not just deputies or functionaries in a heavenly bureaucracy of command and control, but agents of creativity in a universe designed to create more and more power.

Indeed, while you may never have thought of grammar as a particularly practical subject, this progression of verbs happens nearly every time human beings put their power to creative use. All creative work begins with the jussive “Let there be.” As I was drafting this chapter, I was also drafting a proposal for a new project for my employer. My job was to lay out not just an accurate picture of the cultural and business environment, but to speak into being a picture of what should and could be, long before a single article was written or minute of video was shot. Every proposal, every business plan, and for that matter every architectural blueprint, culinary recipe, and Little League roster is an act of saying “Let there be.” Let there be something rather than nothing. Let reality expand to include this possibility, let the world open up to this new way of seeing what is and what can be. Creativity begins in the jussive mood.

But if creativity begins with “let there be,” it moves quickly to the cohortative: “Let us make.” If even divine creativity requires a community, then any human creativity involves more than just an individual fiat—we gather with a circle of partners to define, refine and in many cases greatly improve the original vision. Just as the climax of creation, the introduction of God’s own image bearers into the world, only happens in the context of the divine community, so we often find that our own creative vision does not reach its full potential until we bring others into the process. This is why the next stage of the project will involve meeting after meeting, as a core team begins to form and apply their own creativity toward asking what the ultimate, highest form of the original idea might become. In other words, we will apply our collective efforts to flourishing—to bringing the greatest possible result out of the early ideas and the initial forms. What will emerge from those conversations will almost certainly be more fruitful, creative, surprising and alive than what was envisioned in the pages of the original proposal.

Only after the jussive has given way to the cohortative and a group of image bearers have said “Let us make” together will we then use the imperative, and even then we will use hard-edged commands like “Make it so” quite sparingly. Mostly we will say “Be fruitful and multiply” to the people we employ and empower for the work. Fill the space created by our early vision with your own creativity. If we have done our job well, at this stage we will have surprisingly little to do because others will be taking up their own creative task. And if they do their task well, the creation will be enriched, more useful, more beautiful and more capacious for further creativity. This is power as it is meant to be.

Power Is for Flourishing

On the very first page of the Bible, then, power, flourishing and image bearing are connected. Power is for flourishing—teeming, fruitful, multiplying abundance. Power creates and shapes an environment where creatures can flourish, making room for the variety, diversity and unpredictability of coral reefs and tropical forests, but also the surprising biological richness of high deserts and ocean depths. And image bearing is for power—for it is the Creator’s desire to fill the earth with representatives who will have the same kind of delighted dominion over the teeming creatures as their Maker. Which means image bearing is for flourishing. The image bearers do not exist for their own flourishing alone, but to bring the whole creation to its fulfillment.

Thousands of years after Genesis was written, we can see in a way its first readers could never have imagined just how much capacity these human image bearers had to fill the earth—just how much power was ultimately available to them, coiled in the physical elements’ chemical and nuclear bonds, and emerging from the incredible complexity of the human mind and the fecundity of human culture. But we also know that on the very next page of our Bible is a tragic twist in the story. The original image bearers flaunt their freedom in the garden and abandon their original vocation. The result is diminishing, rather than flourishing, their own and the whole created order’s, as dominion and delight turn to domi­nation and exploitation. And here too today we see the inexpressible horror of the full playing out of this story in dimensions and at scales of which the first readers of Genesis were mercifully innocent. Image bearing has indeed turned out to be far better, and far worse, than anyone but the Creator could ever have imagined.

But as Christians we have the great privilege of reading this story from the perspective of its most decisive chapter, and we know that not all is lost. In the fullness of time two image bearers uttered their own “let it be” back to the Creator. A young woman called herself the handmaiden of the Lord, saying, “Let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38), making room for the one true Image of the invisible God to take on visible flesh. And her son, in a garden on the night before his death, prayed, “Yet not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). They returned to the humble power of the jussive, and there at the turning point of history, the promise of true image bearing, true flourishing and true power was restored.

2

Power Is a Gift

Power is for flourishing. This means power is a gift worth asking for, seeking and—should we receive it—stewarding.

This is not the only thing we need to know about power. We also need to know how power can go wrong—how it has gone wrong. But that is not where we should begin. There is a saying in the legal world: “Hard cases make bad law.” There are plenty of hard cases with power. Sometimes, admittedly, it can seem that the whole history of power is one long story of perversion and betrayal. In fact, if I were not a follower of Jesus Christ I might believe that was the deepest truth about power. I might follow Nietzsche, Foucault and all their modern and postmodern disciples into the abyss of cynicism, seeing every human story as a power play.