Playing God

Power, Andy Crouch claims, is a gift, and power is our “ability to make something of the world” (Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power, 17). Or, as he goes on to say, “the ability to participate in that stuff-making, sense-making process that is the most distinctive thing that human beings do. All of life, he says, requires power — or a space in which it/we exert will. So power is about the physical world and meaning-making. When powerlessness results from power then something has gone wrong with human use of the gift of power. Like sex slavery today.

When used well, power is glorious; when used wrongly, it is evil, systemic evil. When love shapes power it is God’s gift for redemption. Power brings life and power brings death. “Power at its worst is the unmaker of humanity” (25).

What makes power so hard to use for flourishing? Do you see power as neutral?  Are idolatry and injustice the two major manifestations of abusing power?

Crouch contends, in true fashion for common readings of the Bible, that we must begin with Genesis 1-2 (not Genesis 3), and there we see the God grants power — his “let it be” and “let us make” — for the purpose of flourishing. Lord Acton’s famous line is not the whole story: yes power can corrupt, but power can cause flourishing too. That is, love can transform power.

The Nietzschean theory of power, which he sees in both the Occupy movement and the Tea Party, is cynical of power and structure. So Andy Crouch, in a deft move, undermines Nietzsche by rewriting his theory in these words:

All true being strives to create room for more being and to expend its power in the creation of flourishing environments for variety and life, and to thrust back the chaos that limits true being. In doing so it creates other bodies and invites them into mutual creation and tending of the world, building relationships where there had been none: thus they then cooperate together in creating more power for more creation. And the process goes on (51, all italics).

This, largely Kuyperian, theory of power and its redemption is the heart of Crouch’s book. The choice, then, is between idolatry (Nietzsche’s dwelling place) and love (God’s dwelling place). Idolatry begins by turning something inherently good, God’s creation, into unrealistic greatness, transcending God’s created status for it. Crouch nails it with this, and he uses Steve Jobs to illustrate idolatry (of control of food): idolatry promises that we will not die and that we can be like God. Idolatry thus blocks the image bearer’s capacity to reflect the glory and power of God to the world.

Next to idolatry stands injustice as the abuse of power. Those with power (and money) can play God, and playing God over against another leads to injustice. So Crouch argues that injustice is idolatry. Both injustice and idolatry are exaltations of the human to the place of God to use power against another in ways that are inappropriate. And benevolence can be another way of making ourselves god! We pretend to omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence… all a kind of god-making. Short term missions can be this kind of god-making. Crouch is unafraid to say these trips do little but salve the conscience of the wealthy.

We are image bearers, designed to be icons (I use the word “eikon”), which means we are designed not to be looked at but looked through to see the God who made us. Perhaps the theme of Crouch’s first section in this book is to ask if we want to be looked at or looked through.