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A New Testament Perspective on Power

John Lehman, the Secretary of the Navy through most of the 1980s, once said: Power corrupts. Absolute power is ... kind of neat. For the next 20 minutes, Im going to think about what power is, and what the NT has to say about it. First, we will look at what power meant in the world of the 1st century, the backdrop for the NT. Then I want to turn to ponder what power sometimes means in our own world. Hopefully, with that all in mind we will better understand what power means in the NT, and what this means for us men here tonight. So lets turn the clock back rst, to ...

Power in the ancient world

In the rst century Mediterranean world, when the NT was written, power lay foremost in the hands of the gods, and other superhuman entities (for much of this, see chapter 11 of Michael Gorman's great book, Cruciformity). Amongst humans, political authorities were seen as the most powerful, and could be seen to be so because of their close connection with the gods. So the Roman emperor was perceived by his loyal subjects as almost divine. And while some were considered divine only after they died, one or two tried to claim divine honours during their own life time. Emperor cults started up, moving from the eastern side of the empire, to the west cults which would honour the human emperor and, in some cases, worshiped him as if he were one of the gods. The power of the emperor manifested in the so-called Pax Romana, the peace of Rome the authority of the emperor to establish and maintain peace across his empire. Of course, those who opposed the Roman empire experienced the other side of this peace death, even death on a cross. Crucixion was indeed the visible sign of opposition to the power of Rome. So here is a glimpse of power, in the ancient Roman world. It asserted itself with religious terminology, and maintained its potency with violence. This was a picture mirrored, in a similar way, amongst the religious leaders in rst century Israel-Palestine. Jerusalem became the centre of what some scholars have called the domination system. This is a short hand for describing the way the social system was organised. In such a situation, the many were ruled, overpowered, by the few, namely the wealthy, the monarchy and aristocracy. The wealth of society went into the purses of the ruling aristocracy, a system made possible through restricted land ownership, the implementation of taxes and importantly, debts. This situation was legitimised with religious language: the king ruled by divine right, society was as God willed it, etc.

Power Today
Is power seen in a signicantly different way today? There is one major text, which has been called "the greatest single study of power on record" (Adolfe Berle), namely Niccolo Machiavellis little book, The Prince. His analysis of the sort of power a leader could exercise has inuenced a fair amount of modern thinking about power, an inuence one can perhaps see even in parts of the church. For Machiavelli, power is morally ambiguous, it could not nor should not always be good. Power is a force which defeats opposition. Power is a warrior and a hunter. Of course, mixed together with various modern pop gender stereotypes, this sometimes transforms into such claims as: Real men, i.e. the powerful, assert themselves. Real men are warriors. Real men ght. As Machiavelli wrote: "A prince should have no objective but war". The princes main aim is to beat the competition. To win, we must exercise power over opposition. Fight or ight. Power or weakness (and here some of you might hear echoes of the tremendously lucid German philosopher, Nietzsche, who sought to explain human behaviour in terms of his concept of the will to power, der Wille zur Macht) May 23rd, 2011.

Power and the NT

We have now looked at various notions of power, both ancient and contemporary. Clarifying these matters will help us now to better hear the voice of the NT. What does the NT say about power? Here are just a few things to ponder. The rst thing to notice is that Power as a concept was not demonised, rejected out of hand as if it were a rude word. There are all kinds of things said about power in the NT. But power was understood in very specic ways. Just like the notions of power we examined at the beginning were not value neutral but evoked wider themes such as battle, struggle and even violence, the NT also conjures its own associations. The rst thing to say is that power was seen to belong rst and foremost to God. 2 Corinthians 4:7 says, But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. You remember, in the ancient world power was associated with the gods. But for the NT power is concentrated not just on a fuzzy notion of divinity. Power belongs to a very specic God, the one true Lord, the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The famous poem or hymn in Philippians 2 says that God the Son emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, that he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death -- even death on a cross. Despite what some translations seem to suggest, Christ does this for us, not despite the fact that he is God, not despite his eternal divine power. Christ offers himself to death for others BECAUSE he was in the very form of God. Because he was one with God, powerful beyond description, therefore he humbled himself for others. This shows us the sort of God to whom true power belongs. And it is why Paul can speak of the gospel in the following way in Romans 1:16, For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith. The gospel is not about the power of God. It IS the power of God. In other words, the sort of power that this God exes is for others, for the benet and salvation of those who do not deserve it! The power of God is the good news. So this is the second thing to say about power in the NT. This power which belongs to God is exercised for the sake of others, it is service of others. Think about it this way. You may have seen Spiderman lms? With great power comes great responsibility. For the NT this is really a tautology: there is no power without responsibility power is a life acted responsibility for the sake of others. This is also seen in the way the NT speaks about miracles. The common NT word for miracles is dynamis, i.e. they are deeds of power. And Jesus exercised such power for the sake of others. His miracles restored broken lives, and brought them back into community. The greatest chapter in the NT about miracles is probably 1 Corinthians 12. Here Paul spends quite some time explaining that the various gifts of the Spirit, one of which is working deeds of power. It is not about personal gain; it is about harmonious community, it is about serving others. It is about love. Because true NT power is about serving others, that power cannot be domination. Actually, some scholars say that one of Jesus' main points of contention in his teaching was the so-called domination system in Israel-Palestine. Jesus rejection of it explains his teaching of the forgiveness of debts, his treatment of those of the edge of society, the radical egalitarianism inherent in his practice of table fellowship, and so on. Power to inuence via domination, through crushing others: this was the kind of social system the teaching of Jesus radically challenged. Power is about service for the sake of others. Third, the NT also says that this power is seen most clearly not in exercises of great pomp and majesty, not in resounding victory and storming success. Rather, and this is a revolution, the power of this God was seen most clearly in weakness. After experiencing unanswered prayer in 2 Corinthians 12:9, Paul says that God speaks to him with these words: Power is made perfect in weakness. So Paul exclaims in the next verse in response: whenever I am weak, then I am strong. You see, the gospel reveals a God who May 23rd, 2011.

3 expresses his divinity and power precisely through weakness and apparent defeat, as also 1 Corinthians chapter 1 makes clear. And this weakness was, for Paul, not simply feeling a bit low. No, this weakness was a concrete experience of Paul in his life, involving weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities, as he puts it in 2 Corinthians 12. It involved, as he puts it in 2 Corinthians 11:23-28, hard labours, imprisonment, oggings, and often being near death. It involved being beaten with rods. A stoning. Shipwrecks, danger from bandits, danger in the city, toil and hardship, many sleepless nights, hunger and thirst, and even the experience of being cold and naked. This was Pauls understanding of weakness. And it was in this that power was made perfect. In weakness Paul was strong. So in sum, what are some key NT themes associated with power? Power is exercised not occasionally for the sake of others, but power is dened as a life spent for the sake of others, in loving service. This is a picture which our brief overview of power in the ancient and modern worlds throws into stark relief. Rather than power OR weakness, power is perfected IN weakness.

Power and being a man

Let me nish this by reecting on what this might mean in the context of this mens evening. You see, this NT vision of power was modelled and embodied by the one true and perfect Man, Jesus Christ. According to the NT, power is not directly a manly thing. It is a Jesus thing: and Christ himself must show us what being a true man is all about. Power is a wonderful gift of God. Dont let anybody tell you otherwise. Power is nothing to be ashamed of, men. Problems arise in the church, however, when we start to think about power without reference to Jesus, when its primary associations are the ones we found in the world: power as ght. Power as battle. Power as victory and even violence. Power or weakness. Let me speak my mind now, and I have been told you like plain talk. There is a danger in some male circles of the modern church to mix up what the world says about power, with what the NT says. Yes, power, we want more of that but then we start to look not to the true power seen in the life of Jesus, but to the power spoken of and exercised in the world, the lost world, the world gone astray, the world which once crucied God as a blasphemer on Good Friday. Examples? Okey dokey. I came across this picture of Jesus on the internet. Jesus has become, here, merely a symbol for being a dude, a manly man. The sort which swaggers into church complaining that everything has gone downhill because it has become too chickied, to quote one preacher I heard on YouTube recently (I must protest at this point for another reason: it was actually because of the chicks that I went to church in the rst place!). Paul knew what he was doing when he wrote to Christians in Rome, the power-centre of the 1st century world: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God (Romans 12:2). This picture of Jesus is a vision which has ironically not, as Hebrews 12 puts it, kept its eyes xed on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross. May 23rd, 2011.

4 This is a better pictorial representation of the truth:

In the true picture of the cross, Jesus does not muscle man his way down to clobber his enemies. It ends in death. In weakness. In a tomb. But as Paul put it in 1 Corinthians 1:18, The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it IS the power of God. It is a power which ultimately belongs to God and is then seen in the greatest miracle of all: resurrection. But before the word resurrection evokes too much of a fanfare of victory and triumph in our minds, Paul says in Philippians 3:10 that the power of Christs resurrection is coterminous in this life with sharing in Christs sufferings by becoming like him in his death. God wants us men to embrace all that it means to be men and not to pretend we shouldnt be what we were created to be. He loves it when we are set free to reect Gods image in the way that men were created to be. And of course we all agree that Christ is the true image of God. And yet this Jesus is not a cipher for some universalised notion of masculinity which is a testosterone-pumped warrior, balking at all things pink. Not just a few preachers have fallen in love with some popular stereotypes of what it means to be a powerful man, you see, and then tried to tell us that if we want to be men, we need to climb mountains and ght battles, captivate women and communicate over beers in monosyllabic grunts. Approximately true for some men, I dont doubt, go climb mountains if that gives you joy, but hoisted up as a universal truth about masculinity, it is emasculation, and simply gonads-kicking silly! Hulk Hogan is not the litmus test for what being a real man is all about - thank God -, Jesus Christ is. And this is even more challenging and exciting, radical and liberating. The NT shows a power which belongs rst to God not us, and is one which is exercised for the sake of others, indeed such embodied power is service of others, a power perfected in weakness. What is the NT perspective on power? We know what it is by looking to Jesus, and thus also learn what being a powerful man is really all about.

Chris Tilling, St Mellitus College

May 23rd, 2011.