Playing God
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Playing God

Redeeming the Gift of Power

Andy Crouch

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eBook - ePub

Playing God

Redeeming the Gift of Power

Andy Crouch

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About This Book

2014 Midwest Publishing Association Award of Excellence (General Trade)Granted the Digital Book World QED seal for quality in ebook design2014 Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year ("Also Recommended, " Leadership)ForeWord 2013 Book of the Year Award Honorable Mention (Adult Nonfiction, Religion)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.

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Information

Publisher
IVP Books
Year
2013
ISBN
9780830884360

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 essen...

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