Crouch Playing God

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8308-8436-0
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

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.

Andy Crouch (MDiv, Boston University School of Theology) is partner for theology and culture at Praxis, an organization that works as a creative engine for redemptive entrepreneurship. His books include The Tech-Wise Family, Playing God, and Strong and Weak.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Crouch, Andy

Leseproben

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...