Chapter Twenty: Jesus, Power, Truth and the Generation That Won’t Look Away

“The masculine perspective is you have to understand that life is war. It’s a war for the female you want. It’s a war for the car you want. It’s a war for the money you want. It’s a war for status. Masculine life is war.” (Andrew Tate, ANDREW TATE AND CHIAN DO NOT GET ALONG | Grilling S2 Ep 7).

What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome. Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not virtue but fitness.... The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of our love of man. And they shall even be given every possible assistance. What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and all the weak: Christianity [Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist: Attempt at a Critique of Christianity (1888), Aphorism 2].

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace” (Jimi Hendrix).

“With great power comes great responsibility” (Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben, Spiderman).

Introduction: Christianising the Dynamics of Power.

From Christopher Marlowe’s tragic tale of the life and death of Doctor Faustus to the coming of age of the young Peter Parker as he becomes “Spider-Man”, the world is well acquainted with the narrative of what happens to someone tasting power for the first time or knowing power without scruples or becoming intoxicated by the feeling of having power. Power is, in this respect, like money (and often the two make very comfortable bedfellows); used properly, both can do great good. Misused, both can lead to personal and even global catastrophe. Whether one leads a sports team, a religious community or the free world, power can have a magnetic allure.

In early antiquity, access to power, and the ability to exercise it, was an index of masculinity; I imagine that few people reading this would reckon that much has changed. From statues to victory parades and even the balance of domestic authority in households, shows of power were branded into the fabric of all social systems, including imperial rule.

In the age of identity politics, young people are particularly sensitive to the social dynamics of power. Gen Z is the demographic that came of age in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, and witnessed skyrocketing housing costs, wage stagnation, student debt concerns, massive wealth inequality and the revenue generating potential of celebrity. This is the generation that watched the Arab Spring, the death of George Floyd, the January 6th insurrection on Capitol Hill (2021), the United States attack on Iran, the arrest of the former Prince Andrew and the Unite the Kingdom rally in the UK in 2026 play out on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. On the same entertainment platforms, they have been privy to all manner of corporate misconduct, police violence, racial tensions, ‘manosphere’ misogyny, ecological disaster and labour exploitation. Their education has more than any other generation been committed to the analysis of privilege, systemic abuse, colonialism, racism, patriarchy and institutional failure. This last phenomenon has made this generation more suspicious of institutions – whether governments, universities, churches, media outlets – than any previous generation. Their paranoia was fuelled by fake news, religious scandals, political partisanship and conspiracy theories about everything from rigged elections to the global pandemic. They saw political social movements like Black Lives Matter, climate activism and #MeToo Playing out in real time and were deeply invested in questions about who was being heard, who was being excluded and who was being demonised. They were not just asking which individual or political party was responsible, but which system has led to this, who is it benefitting and who is it harming?

Now, do not misunderstand me; the sexual revolution and anti-war movements of the 60s and 70s proved that social revolutions, grassroots activism and suspicion about the use of power are nothing new. However, the systems of power-play, how they are controlled and communicated and how people become engaged with such revolutionary movements has experienced an enormous technological shift.

The lure and corrupting influence of power is not innovative either; as long as there has been human community, there have been attempts by one group to declare their authority and superiority over another and exercise enforced control over them. I want to suggest in this brief analysis that sensitivity about power imbalance is a significant component of the social discourse amongst young people, and young believers are constantly on the watch to see which side the church is on. For many who are deconstructing their faith position, they do so because they judged the church to be on the wrong side. This, of course, throws up all manner of difficult questions, not least of all, who gets to decide which side is right? I am not in this post going to attempt to say it is one end of the political spectrum or the other, a particular doctrinal position over and against another or attempt to reduce the question about the balance of power to who the ‘goodies’ and the ‘baddies’ are. My far meeker objective is to ask what we might discover about how power ought to be reckoned in a Christian context and how adopting the right stance might help young people have a more realistic picture of the church’s role in the pursuit of justice. In this age of politicised Christianity (and by that I do not mean that there has ever been such a thing as Christianity which does not exist in a political context, but rather that some forms of modern Christianity use religious and theological language to define and justify their political agendas) it can be very difficult for young people to have a realistic sense of what the Church’s call to discipleship to Christ should look like. If that call were defined by some American Christian nationalists, it could all at once be racist, anti-immigration, inflexibly pro Zionist (or bizarrely anti-Semitic), patriarchal to the point of misogynistic, rabidly anti-abortion, patronisingly homophobic and rigidly intolerant – and yet claim Jesus as its mouthpiece and publicly swear allegiance to him. It is little wonder young people are so confused. About this very sentiment, Richard Rohr’s classic dictum is worth repeating:

“Christianity is a lifestyle—a way of being in the world that is simple, nonviolent, shared, and loving. However, we made it into an established religion (and all that goes with that) and avoided the lifestyle change itself. We could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain throughout most of Christian history and still believe that Jesus is our personal Lord and Saviour or continue, in good standing, to receive the sacraments. The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on earth is too great.”

The basis of my thesis for this investigation is neither complex nor terribly ground-breaking but needs saying – and now more than ever. Christianity has always been a ‘turn the world upside down’ movement - or as many have poetically suggested, ‘a put the world the right way up again’ movement. In certain ways, the Christians sought to blend in with their surroundings; despite what you may have heard, they did not seek out martyrdom. In other ways, however, they sought to stand out like sore thumbs, inasmuch as they resisted engaging in certain social practices or embracing certain social norms for such things were deemed inconsistent with the Kingdom of God. Consider the tension in the following texts.

The Epistle to Diognetus is a defence of Christianity, presented by an unknown writer to a high-ranking pagan which purports to be a response to a real or assumed question about the faith:

Christians are not distinguished from the rest of mankind by either country, speech, or customs; the fact is, they nowhere settle in cities of their own; they use no peculiar language; they cultivate no eccentric mode of life. Certainly, this creed of theirs is no discovery due to some fancy or speculation of inquisitive men; nor do they, as some do, champion a doctrine of human origin. Yet while they dwell in both Greek and non-Greek cities, as each one’s lot was cast, and conform to the customs of the country in dress, food, and mode of life in general, the whole tenor of their way of living stamps it as worthy of admiration and admittedly extraordinary. They reside in their respective countries, but only as aliens. They take part in everything as citizens and put up with everything as foreigners. Every foreign land is their home, and every home a foreign land. They marry like all others and beget children; but they do not expose their offspring. Their board they spread for all, but not their bed (Epistle of Diognetus 5:1–7).

To a fair degree, the Christians were integrated into civic society, claiming no special territory or attire, but respected the marriage bed, did not abandon children and did not worship foreign gods. However, there is some tension as to how much separation there was between the Church and the world in various writers. Tertullian strove to emphasise the gulf between Greek philosophy and Christian revelation when he famously asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem” (The Prescription Against Heretics, written at the turn of the 3rd century). Clement of Alexandria, on the other hand, claimed that Greek philosophy was a divine gift to the Gentiles which would ultimately bring them to Christ; he wrote:

Perchance, too, philosophy was given to the Greeks directly and primarily, till the Lord should call the Greeks. For this was a schoolmaster to bring the Hellenic mind, as the law, the Hebrews, to Christ (Galatians 3:24). Philosophy, therefore, was a preparation, paving the way for him who is perfected in Christ (Stromata Book 1, Chapter 5).

We at times rather glibly use phrases like ‘in the world but not of the world’ to describe the Christian experience, but such maxims are only helpful to the degree that we have some index, however anecdotal, for just how ‘of the world’ it is reasonable to be whilst we are in it! As the reflections of Tertullian and Clement above suggest, the picture may not be as self-evidently straightforward as one might think. So then let us consider how Christians ought to think about power as we are in the world. On this aspect of the trajectory of this reflection, Rowland is particularly helpful in capturing my thoughts:

To be a follower of Jesus meant following the path of one who was regarded as an outcast by certain members of the ruling élite in his own day. It also meant looking forward to the establishment of a kingdom which would in due course take the place of Rome. As the Book of Revelation so graphically demonstrates, there could be no room for both Caesar and Christ in either this age or the new age [Christopher Rowland, Christian Origins: An Account of the Setting and Character of the Most Important Messianic Sect of Judaism (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2002), 283].

In this post, I want to suggest that the following power related dicta encapsulate the heart of gospel rootedness most profoundly:

1. Christianity contains a deeply embedded theology of strength-in-weakness.

2. The only true power is selflessness.

3. Empire, rooted as it is in the politics of domination, is inherently evil.

4. Young people are more likely to embrace a form of the faith governed by the above maxims.

(NB - With respect to #4 above, this form of the faith is the form I believe is most faithful to the biblical Jesus).

Like the final episode of all good sequels, this post will be in two parts! Part 1 is devoted to issues one and two above; I will address 3 and 4 in Part 2.

Dictum #1: Strength in Weakness

I begin with the plain talking assessment of David Alan Black:

God depends neither upon man’s strength nor his achievements, not even in the church. Instead, he seeks out the weak, ungodly, and hostile to redeem them and to fit them as vessels of his strength (Rom 5:6–8). Weakness is—as the Lord had expressed it to Paul—the place where God’s power is perfected. The Christian has nothing to give of himself; the strength he exhibits is the strength God had infused into him [David Alan Black, “Paulus Infirmus: The Pauline Concept of Weakness,” Grace Theological Journal 5:1 (1984): 92].

The paradoxical claim is so ubiquitous in the New Testament texts that one wonders how it could have been so thoroughly misappropriated within so much modern “Christian” thought. How did the power brokers in the American Evangelical right decide that dominance, war mongering, silencing of opponents, political lobbying and nationalism were Christian virtues? How could the racist, misogynistic, ableist and autocratic condescension of so many of their leadership mouthpieces be justified by hanging them on the scaffolding of Christian iconography? Much of it perhaps has to do with what I think lay at the heart of Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s brilliant thesis, which I attempt to survey below.

A cross section of American Christian men felt emasculated by what they saw as aggressive feminism and militant religious progressiveness. They needed saving; but a crucified Jew on a Roman cross was, in reality, a representation of the very demasculinized image against which they raged (I have to at least credit them for recognising this)! So, they reconfigured him with a cowboy-centric persona, cut in the image of a Charlton Heston or a John Wayne or a Donald Trump – a rugged, white, no-nonsense, emotionally disconnected, gun toting pugilist who could make sure no woman got too big for her boots. He was what disgraced “pastor” Mark Driscoll called “ultimate fighting Jesus”. He bore absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the Galilean preacher of the canonical Gospels, but that did not matter. That was inconvenient background noise. What mattered was that he stood for conservative values, would have voted Republican, been intolerant of leftism and would certainly not be talked down to by anyone in a skirt. He was the tonic that a particular disenfranchised cross section of Christian men desired, and if you squinted hard enough (and didn’t concern yourself with bothersome details like theology, history, anthropology cultural studies or the social sciences), looked remarkably like Jesus. When critical scholars and other invested readers do take the time to grapple with the necessary disciplines, a rather different picture emerges. One of the superlative attempts to do just this and, thus, demonstrate the capacity for the gospel to subvert the influence of society’s power brokers, religious and secular, is found in the work of the French philosopher, theologian and literary critic René Girard, who theorised about the origins of desire and the violent outworking of uncontrolled jealousy and envy. This brief survey of some of his ideas will hopefully help contextualise the correct Christian position vis-à-vis power.

Girard firmly believed that the gospel was the upending of power and violence. He hypothesised that civilisations were not built on order, discipline, mature debate or balanced exchange, but rather rivalry and mimetic desire leading to savagery and lynching. He called this process the cycle of mimetic desire. Have you ever been with young children where there are toys available to play? Often the children are incredibly shy but eventually one will come and grab a toy to play with. Almost like clockwork, the other children will suddenly want the same toy. This is the basis of mimetic desire; the other children, Girard would argue, do not want the toy because of the toy itself. Rather, they are imitating the desire of the child who first acquired the toy. They conclude that if one child wants the toy, there must be something desirable about it and they become jealous. People learn to desire by mimesis (imitation) and this acquisitive desire eventually gives rise to conflict. Whether it is children’s toys in the doctor’s office or territories rich in natural resources, desire is not awakened by an object itself, according to Girard, but rather by the desire of a third party for that same object. He would certainly agree with the dictum of Qoheleth:

Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from one person’s envy of another. This also is vanity and a chasing after wind (Ecclesiastes 4:4).

In the work of Girard, desire operates like a frenzied cycle: one acquisitive gesture awakens another acquisitive desire; the mimetic nature of the rivalry set in motion by these competing desires forces the rivalry it provokes to escalate in intensity, leading to two outcomes. First, the rival’s desire glamourizes the object of their desire in the eyes of others; the desire of onlookers is aroused drawing them into a virtual vortex of anger and violence called frenzy. When the frenzy reaches a tipping point, society teeters on the brink of self-destruction. Second, the only solution is for an entire community to be mobilised against one and the same individual (or individual group), directing their collective anger, fury and frustration against this one isolated entity. This isolating of the single one against whom the frenzied mob directs its anger is what Girard referred to as the scapegoating mechanism, and the isolated individual or community is the scapegoat.

In Girardian terms, this accusation and lynching of the victim is ‘Satan’, (which literally means ‘accuser’) - Satan is the power of accusation and lynching. Almost needless to say, Girard interpreted Jesus to have suffered as a scapegoat – a victim of lust for power in the provinces, control of the temple and rivalry between Jewish sects. Here, Girard draws upon the scapegoat tradition from Leviticus 16:9–10. The New Testament never refers to Jesus as a scapegoat, but Girard sees the idea embedded in the Johannine ‘Lamb of God’ discourse (John 1:29, 36) – the lamb eliminated any negative attributes and unsympathetic connotations of the goat! Salvation in Girardian terms has to do with liberation from the cycle of mimetic violence.

He saw the scapegoating mechanism in many of the great literary sources. Practically, perhaps one of the most nefarious examples is the Third Reich. Hitler managed to mobilise Germany against European Jewry; he convinced the populace that Jews were responsible for the collapse of the German economy and further persuaded the German people, that the Jewish people did not support them after World War One. Mobilising people against one common enemy, that is, scapegoating, produces an ugly solidarity – a ‘fellow feeling’. This warped sense of positivity in finding someone to blame for one’s problems had a common result in literary sources. The unity of the mob was believed to please the gods, hence the positive feelings. So, any violence was justified - and there you have it - the sacralization of violence. How could the violence be wrong if it pleased the gods? (Not dissimilar, of course, to the way the far right even today attempt to mobilise the country against immigrants claiming that they are responsible for economic disparity, high unemployment and widespread poverty). This was the myth prevalent in so much of the literature that Girard surveyed - that is, of course, until he went back to the Bible – and here is the kicker!

The Gospels completely pulled the rug from beneath the feet of all the other literary greats – for unlike them, the Deity sided with the scapegoat. Girard saw this captured in the irony of the statement by the high priest in John:

⁴⁷ Therefore the chief priests and the Pharisees convened a council meeting, and they were saying, “What are we doing in regard to the fact that this Man is performing many signs? ⁴⁸ If we let Him go on like this, all the people will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take over both our place and our nation.” ⁴⁹ But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all, ⁵⁰ nor are you taking into account that it is in your best interest that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish instead (John 1:47–50, emphasis added).

Caiaphas, of course, did not believe that Jesus was going to be the saviour of the world. Rather, he was concerned that Jesus’ activity might arouse such intense suspicion from Rome that they would take action against the Jews. Caiaphas meant that it would be more beneficial for Isarel to have Jesus done away with than to jeopardise the already tense relationship between the Jews and their Roman overlords. In other words, he sought to make Jesus the scapegoat for the people. In mobilising against the scapegoat, Caiaphas proved himself the typical religious leader. However, as John’s Gospel goes on to articulate, Caiaphas and his cronies were completely out of sync with God, and this was the moment of revelation! The deity did not side with the rich, the elite or the power brokers. Instead, God sided with the scapegoat, thereby unmasking the great deception of sacred violence. This, for Girard, was what made the Christian retelling of the story of the hero unique. Hence, for Girard, Christianity undermined all violence as anti-theistic. As Garland has it:

By contrast, the life and death of Jesus reveal a different way: “God’s power is the power to renounce power.” This use of power comes off as powerlessness, and no more so than when Jesus hangs on a cross, but it demonstrates the power of God and the wisdom of God that are stronger than human strength (1 Cor 1:24–25) [David E. Garland, A Theology of Mark’s Gospel: Good News about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2015), 451].

Irrespective of whether you are entirely persuaded by René Girard’s thesis about the scapegoating mechanism or not, (and I certainly have my scepticisms about it as a model for the origins of society), his reading certainly demonstrates something that is deeply embedded within New Testament theology. True strength is captured in trusting the ways of God. This is the narrative captured by Jesus’ own consternations in the Garden of Gethsemane. When one of his own followers resorted to violence, his response was swift and unambiguous:

⁵¹ And behold, one of those who were with Jesus reached and drew his sword and struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his ear. ⁵² Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place; for all those who take up the sword will perish by the sword. ⁵³ Or do you think that I cannot appeal to My Father, and He will at once put at My disposal more than twelve legions of angels? ⁵⁴ How then would the Scriptures be fulfilled, which say that it must happen this way?” [Matt. 26:51–54].

Jesus certainly had a nuclear option available to him; one which might have wowed the crowds and persuaded many. It is certainly one which would have been the kind of extraordinary display of power which would have sent his masculinity rating through the roof. Yet, as Girard would concur, this would simply have been to perpetuate the very cycle of violence the Gospel denounced. Violence was not and is not the way and could never be. Violence only begets violence - indeed, the maxim ‘those who live by the sword will die by the sword’ is one of those biblical cliches which entered common parlance from the Gospels. Jesus may well have desired legions of angels to come to his aid, but his desire was not the objective of his mission. That, rather is captured in Gethsemane:

³⁹ And He went a little beyond them, and fell on His face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will.” ⁴⁰ And He came to the disciples and found them sleeping, and He said to Peter, “So, you men could not keep watch with Me for one hour? ⁴¹ Keep watching and praying, so that you do not come into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” ⁴² He went away again a second time and prayed, saying, “My Father, if this cup cannot pass away unless I drink from it, Your will be done.” ⁴³ Again He came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy. ⁴⁴ And He left them again, and went away and prayed a third time, saying the same thing once more. ⁴⁵ Then He came to the disciples and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and resting? Behold, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is being betrayed into the hands of sinners (Matt. 26: 39–45).

The real irony of the Gethsemane drama is that it follows hot on the heels of Jesus’ eschatological discourse. In Matthew 23–25, Jesus predicts the conditions that will lead up to the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of Rome and then seems to use this as a springboard to talk about the end of the world. Most notably in the section Matthew 24:36–44, Jesus issues the explicit warning for the disciples to remain alert and keep watch because no one knows when the end will be, not even Jesus himself. Then he calls them to pray with him in the garden, and they do the very opposite of keeping alert and watching. They drift off and start snoring!

Yet it is Jesus’ stance that is most telling. The way of the cross is the way of trust - and this is the basis for a Christ centred deconstruction of the dynamics of power.

Evaluation: Christ Centred Deconstruction and A Theology of Weakness.

It is one of the most counterintuitive notions in the entire biblical thought world, and yet Paul captures perfectly how God completely inverts human value systems as they pertain to power. It was this apparent penchant for weakness that made Friedrich Nietzsche so exercised about the Christian narrative (indeed, he once claimed that Christianity and alcohol are the two great means of corruption, for they both dulled the senses and prevented the kind of competitive approach to life that leads to real self-actualisation (The Anti-Christ, Chapter 60)):

²⁷ but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, ²⁸ and the insignificant things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, ²⁹ so that no human may boast before God (1 Cor. 1:27-29).

Girard above writes very much in the vein of Paul; Paul here effectively says God sides with the scapegoat. This was a sharp counter to the pervading Roman view in the first century milieu. As Ford notes:

The idea of a god who would humble himself to the point of taking on flesh to become like man was utterly preposterous to the Greco-Roman concept of divinity. Humility and deity simply did not mingle [Coleman M. Ford, “Striving for Glory with God: Humility as the Good Life in Basil of Caesarea’s Homily 20,” Themelios 44:2 (2019): 281].

Humility was associated with weakness in the Roman mind; it was the antithesis of moral excellence and flourishing. Interestingly, the earliest critics of the Christian movement expressed this very disdain. Celsus, who closely studied the Christian writings, so he could effectively discredit them, considered Jesus to be nothing more than a third-rate magician who had learned the dark arts from the Egyptians. Beginning with his contempt for Mary and the circumstances of Jesus birth, Celsus writes:

[Mary] was turned out of doors by her husband, a carpenter by trade, because she was convicted of adultery; that after being driven away by her husband, and wandering about for a time, she disgracefully gave birth to Jesus, an illegitimate child, who having hired himself out as a servant in Egypt on account of his poverty, and having there acquired some miraculous powers, on which the Egyptians greatly pride themselves, returned to his own country, highly elated on account of them, and by means of these proclaimed himself a God [Origen, Contra Celsus 1.28, citing Celsus’ work True Doctrine].

Celsus did not have any problem with the idea of a man becoming or being divine; his problem was with someone like Jesus claiming divinity. It simply did not compute; there is no way that a crucified peasant and a God could be meaningfully juxtaposed in any religion, ideology or philosophy worth taking notice of. This is the tension that still exists in many modern expressions of Christian thought. Too many of the loudest voices spouting “Christian” propaganda struggle with the same tension that the Romans did but, rather than discredit Jesus, they simply remake him.

For anyone who is deconstructing the Christian faith, and even for those who are not, this great incarnational paradox is not and never was intended to be resolved, fixed or sanitised. This was, of course, what many Gnostics did. Flesh is weak and susceptible; therefore, it could not possibly be the product of the true God. Hence, the God of the Hebrews is in fact a counterfeit - a monster called Yaldaboath born of the error of Sophia (Wisdom) after she attempted to create without assistance from her counterpart. The true God could not create something as weak and degenerate as flesh so, to resolve the tension, the Gnostics claimed that all matter was the evil creation of the false god of the Jews.

As a paradigm, this cannot be up for serious debate. Jesus was not a power-monger, the earliest believers were not power hungry and chasing power is patently anti-Christ. Nietzsche, Celsus and Aristotle (had he been around to see it) baulked at what they saw as a warped creed, the inversion of everything that was conducive to human flourishing, and which pandered only to the feeblest, mentally un-robust and pathetic classes of humanity. Yet, somehow, that divine strength, the only strength capable of setting the world back to rights and restoring the conditions of Eden, lay buried in the crucible of human weakness, as most perfectly embodied on Calvary. Weakness is helpfully defined by Buckley as:

…the openness to the humiliations and sufferings that issue in the inability to secure one’s own future, to protect ourselves from any adversity, to live with easy clarity and assurance, or to ward off shame, pain, and even interior anguish. [Michael J. Buckley, What Do You Seek? The Questions of Jesus as Challenge and Promise (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016), 84].

It is in the embrace of this unknowing and uncertainty that Christians learn to trust the living God. This is the trust with which Jesus gave his life, having wrestled in Gethsemane. Abraham before him agreed to execute the very son that God had promised him, reasoning that if this was the son of promise and God demanded his death, that he must have planned to resurrect him. In this way, the author of Hebrews writes that Abraham foresaw the resurrection of Christ (Heb. 11:17–19). Paul urges us to imitate this faith (Rom. 4:17–25); trust in the God that can bring back to life. Trust in this God does not require our strength – even our greatest fear, the fear of death itself, is swallowed up because of the strength of Christ (Heb. 2:14–15). The Pauline dictum, “Therefore I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in distresses, in persecutions, in difficulties, on behalf of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong,” is not a self-flagellating rant, an attempt at reverse psychology or evidence that Paul was a masochist. It is rather his acknowledgment that success both in life and ministry is to allow the God of creation to work through you in fullness – not to imagine that He requires your assistance. God does not harness our strengths as if He needs them.

Rather depressingly, however, some of the loudest and most influential voices in Christian propaganda have usurped the platforms and exert something of a stranglehold on the narrative which unfairly tarnishes all of us. Despite what the prosperity preachers tell you, God does not need our money; despite what Christian nationalists tell you, he does not require our patriotism; aside from the warbling of the Evangelical dominionist lobby, we do not have to fulfil the Seven Mountain Mandate (the bizarre and power crazed notion that believers must conquer and install biblical values into seven key spheres of society: religion, family, education, government, media & arts, entertainment and business); irrespective of conspiratorially minded right wing fundamentalist belief, Christians are not beholden to a particular political stance necessary to usher in the end times and hasten the second coming of Christ. All of these ideas represent flawed human claims to power. They have no basis in the teachings of Jesus or the will of God, who tells us that we are more than conquerors because of the inimitable, unconditional and perfect love of Jesus Christ (Rom. 8:37).

If, therefore, you as a deconstructor have been caught in the crossfire of the power lust of religious leaders, experienced any kind of bullying or had people attempt to exert their authority over you, you do not need to be in two minds about who God sides with. God represents those who have no power. He sides with those who have been denied agency. He does not need to be placated with rituals, creeds or traditions - rather, He demands: ¹⁶ “Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from My sight. Stop doing evil, ¹⁷ Learn to do good; seek justice, rebuke the oppressor, obtain justice for the orphan, plead for the widow’s case (Isa. 1:16–17). After all, pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world (James 1:27) – it is not to hoard power, amass wealth and put your opponents in their place! Victims of the actions of power crazed leaders may well feel that they have been let down by Jesus. After all, these leaders are supposed to be his representatives; but make no mistake about it. Jesus was pristinely clear about the demands of leadership, and they were a deliberate counter to leadership in a Greco-Roman context:

“You know that those who are recognized as rulers of the Gentiles domineer over them; and their people in high position exercise authority over them. ⁴³ But it is not this way among you; rather, whoever wants to become prominent among you shall be your servant; ⁴⁴ and whoever wants to be first among you shall be slave of all (Mark 10:42–44, emphasis added).

This has been the fundamental error of so many “Christian” leaders in their apprehension of the dynamics of power. In seeking to domineer and exercise authority, they have denied Jesus, who is unambiguously clear - it is not this way among you. If Christian leadership is indistinguishable from the often domineering, heavy-handed authoritarianism one might expect from the military, the corporate world or a doomsday sect, then to describe it as “Christian” is simply a misnomer. Jesus’ own words tell us that he would not recognise it as leadership he would endorse. These musings lead us nicely into the second dictum - the only true power is selflessness.

Dictum #2: Selflessness as True Power

In the dark old days when I was entering the age of majority, there was no such vocation as “influencer”. To this very day, whenever I hear someone describe their occupation as “influencer”, I internally recoil and ask with an eye rolling, sarcastic cynicism I cannot hide, “Influencing whom and to do what”? Yet, at a time where the age is digital, the intelligence is artificial, presence is virtual and truth is increasingly whichever version of a narrative best serves the partisan interests of a community or individual, influence, in its broadest sense, is a potent form of social capital. The power to get people on your side, to accept your version of the story (no matter how outlandish that might be), act on your behalf, vote for your candidate, publicise your views or persuade others that you are the best choice in any given context, is power indeed! Yet to truly achieve this is to encourage your listeners that their interests are in some way best served by your position. What, then does it take for someone to exert themselves primarily for someone else’s needs and not their own? That most enigmatic and wonderful passage in Philippians where Paul asserts the nature of true humility as centralising the needs of others provides the beginning of a theoretical answer:

Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility consider one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others (Philippians 2:3-4)

The Bible depicts selflessness as something fundamentally rooted in agape, with Christ as template. It is not a tangential value, but the outstanding mark of Christian identity and discipleship. The text from Philippians 2 above is an introduction to the famous Christ hymn. What is the absolute benchmark and standard of doing nothing from selfishness or empty conceit and humbly considering others as more important than oneself? It is, as the hymn says, Christ becoming incarnate, born as flesh, taking the nature of a slave and submitting to an ugly, diabolical and ignominious death by crucifixion.

In Galatians 6:2, to completely fulfil the law of Christ we must “Bear one another’s burdens”. This effectively recapitulates Galatians 5:14, where Paul asserts that the whole Law is fulfilled in one statement: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself”. Again, there can be little doubt where this reference to Leviticus 19:18 fits. The template and the pristine example of loving one’s neighbour as oneself is Messiah Jesus on the cross. This kind of selflessness can function as creative power. Consider all the contexts in which power is used to subjugate, to oppress, to marginalise or abuse. Follow the trail and you will find self-interest.

Selflessness moves in the other direction, as perfectly evidenced on the cross. Consider John’s

passion account: the last command John records as Jesus took his final breaths were to his mother, “Behold your son” and to the beloved disciple, with reference to his mother, “Behold your mother”. The last time that John records Jesus exercising power as he hung on the cross was to create community and encourage a context of loving family between his mother and his disciple.

Self-interest is an energy that leads to conflict, jealousy, anger, envy and factionalism (as we have already seen in the theorising of René Girard). Recall the opening quotation from Andrew Tate - if the masculine life is all about war, then it is ultimately about competition and acquisition. How can I remove the “opposition”, obliterate the obstacles and deny the agency of anyone getting in my way. This is the power of self-interest.

Real power is the power to create an environment so earmarked by love, that people want to enter its orbit just to experience it. René Breuel suggests that happiness is a by-product of selflessness - I would concur and say that true power has the ability to create happiness. Dominance, manipulation and bullying may get “results” in the short term, if we read results as productivity. However, as is, so commonly the case in human experience, in the long term, it just breeds resentment, fatigue, fear, disconnectedness and ultimately any sense of productivity is undone. Breuel writes:

Happiness, in this same logic, is a product of selflessness. It is a consequence of engagement, of surrender, of participation. It requires an attentive and interested posture to the world. It is like God’s dew for those who look outward… If we pause to observe for a moment, who are the happiest people you know? Probably, they will also be some of the most selfless people around you. And who are the least happy? The most self-centred. Selfless people are free to see things that will not necessarily benefit them. They are not driven by self-interest and thus can be interested in others for their own sake. They are not caged within their selfishness; they are free to wander and roam and encounter. For instance, when they meet someone, they are not compelled to use the other person for individual attention or for benefit; they can simply appreciate that person. A psychologist examined this process, explaining that self-interest “fosters self-absorption and thereby constricts the range and depth of gratifications available in pursuing interests in other people, activities, and events.” In other words, selfishness closes us within ourselves, but self-forgetfulness opens us up to the splendour around us [René Breuel, The Paradox of Happiness: Finding True Joy in a World of Counterfeits (Bellingham, WA: Kirkdale Press, 2013), 48–49].

Contrast this with Nietzsche, above (with emphasis added):

What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.

Consider the most challenging teachings of the early church - and most especially those which would have been sharply contested in the context of imperial philosophy and social culture. Jesus said, ^“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you… (Matt. 5:43–44)! Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you? This borders on the outlandish! Yet it emerges from the creative power of selflessness. If our focus is how much we’ve been hurt, we will hate our enemies. Interestingly, the Jewish Law never says anywhere that one should hate their enemies, but it was certainly in the social atmosphere of first century Jewish Palestine. Qoheleth had said that there was a time to love and a time to hate (Ecc. 3:8); Jesus probably had in mind the words of the Psalmist who wrote, “Do I not hate those who hate You, LORD? And do I not loathe those who rise up against You? I hate them with the utmost hatred; they have become my enemies (Ps 139:21–22). Even the divine voice declared, “Yet I have loved Jacob; but I have hated Esau…” (Mal. 1:2–3). The leader of the Qumran community instructed them that they ought to “love all the sons of light, each according to his lot in God’s design, and hate all the sons of darkness” (1QS1). So, despite there being no explicit command to hate your enemies, Jesus’ comment would not have sounded out of place to his audience. For Jews living in Roman Palestine, there is almost no doubt what Jesus meant - love your Roman overlords, and when they persecute and antagonise you, pray for them. If the people fixated on how they had suffered at the hands of Pagan regimes who had caused social and political problems for Israel over the years, Rome just being the latest iteration, only anger and bitterness would rise up. Only selflessness could engender love for one who you would deem an enemy. For, as Paul writes, love does not ζητεῖ ⸁τὰ ἑαυτῆς – literally, love does not seek the things of itself (1 Cor. 13:5). Although all things are permitted, Paul writes, “No one is to seek his own advantage, but rather that of his neighbour” (1 Cor. 10:24).

As I said near the beginning of this reflection, I really don’t believe that the ideas I’m presenting here are earth-shatteringly innovative. I do think, however, given that this post is all about the dynamics of power, that it is important to get this the right way round so it is meaningful as we consider the conversations young people are having. I do not think that selflessness is the opposite of power; on the contrary, I think it is one of the highest expressions of power. It is my view that the truest metric of a successful society is the degree to which it supports its weakest members. Society flourishes when people choose to use their resources, capabilities and influence for other people’s flourishing and not their own personal acquisition or private wealth. We might say that selflessness is the energy that transforms power from domination into stewardship. This is why Jesus said whoever wants to become great amongst you must become your servant (Mark 10:43). Selflessness as social force takes individual power and transforms it into collective wellbeing, building trust, restraining domineering attitudes, galvanising communities, inspiring philanthropy and enabling people to prosper together as a collective. A society where people are more predisposed to ask, “How can I serve?” will almost inevitably prove more connected, happier and more resilient than one where people routinely ask, “What can I get?” I long for a society which would define masculinity along these lines, but that is a conversation for another day.

Evaluation: Christ Centred Deconstruction and the Power of Selflessness

Generation Z often appears more sensitive to selfishness than any other. It is possible that this is because of what experts often refer to as an “availability heuristic” – that is, the phenomenon of people thinking something is more common than it actually is because of their continued exposure to it. Gen Z is the generation which industrialised social media and so became particularly suspicious of performative leadership, hypocrisy, hidden agendas and

image management. Where these phenomena appear in the church, they are ripe for deconstruction. Whether we wish to admit it or not, young people are simply not disposed to look at Jesus without looking at the church. The two go hand-in-hand and if we are self-interested, we become defective stewards of the gospel of Christ. The gospel itself rests on the divine act of selflessness. In his brilliant reflections on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Kirkpatrick notes:

According to Bonhoeffer, much of the development of Christian thought has been founded on an error. In the face of primitive humanity’s ignorance about themselves, the world, and the meaning of life, the church has forged God into the ultimate and comprehensive answer to every question—a transcendent, all-powerful being, who rests outside of our experience, to dominate it all. In doing so, the church has also guaranteed its own importance and control as God’s minister. However, according to Bonhoeffer, such a God has never truly existed, and if we are to understand him rightly, we must begin where he reveals himself most clearly—with someone whose greatest achievement is to hang on a cross. [Matthew D. Kirkpatrick, “Christ the Failure: Bonhoeffer and the Paradoxical Power of Weakness,” in eds. R. Sirvent, & D. Reyburn, Theologies of Failure (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019), electronic version].

He continues, this time citing Bonhoeffer:

God consents to be pushed out of the world and onto the cross; God is weak and powerless in the world and in precisely this way, and only so, is at our side and helps us. Matt. 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us not by virtue of his omnipotence but rather by virtue of his weakness and suffering! This is the crucial distinction between Christianity and religions. Human religiosity directs people in need to the power of God in the world . . . The Bible directs people toward the powerlessness and the suffering of God; only the suffering God can help. [Kirkpatrick, “Christ the Failure”, citing Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers].

Bonhoeffer’s conceptualisation of God in the world through Christ is the superlative reflection on the selflessness of incarnation and crucifixion. If we can articulate power in a Christian context in this way to young people in the throes of deconstruction, whether that deconstruction is radical and involves questions about the authenticity of the faith or is just the continual rethinking of the ideas that we hold dear, then power becomes beauty. It becomes something to behold and something to cherish because of its potential to build, to support, to encourage, to empathise and to show compassion. God’s power is suffering power, empathy power and selflessness power. It is power that speaks to the innermost longings of the human soul because it acknowledges and validates our agency without judgment, marginalisation or dominance.

Concluding Reflections

I dare say that as you have been reading through these reflections, certain types of people, leadership administrations and specific individuals have probably popped into your mind, who exemplify the understanding of power against which I believe the gospel rages. There is possibly some inevitability to this and I will leave it to you to assess the reasonableness of identifying specific people or leadership in this regard. However, it would not shock me if most of the people you thought of were well-connected, rich men in positions of political or religious power often propped up by a frustrated and despondent populous. It is commonly frustration and despondency with the social and domestic economy that leads people to willingly put their trust in power drunk narcissists. Such people often feed on the fear and insecurity that uncertain times breed; indeed, they always have done.

It is, thus, the church’s duty to present a hope filled alternative. The selfless, strength-in-weakness gospel of Christ is so thoroughly an upending of the status quo, it appears to embrace and resist power all at the same time. It appears this way because it has power to transform power. When the gospel is lived, that tension present in the patristic writings, where the church is in some ways assimilationist and, in others, separatist becomes a lens through which we understand the world. With this lens, we can overcome the usual partisan polarities: right vs left, conservative vs liberal, fundamentalist vs progressive, capitalist vs socialist, etc. We can overcome them because Jesus’ gospel, marked as it is by strength in weakness and selflessness, takes us beyond human divisions and into a new spiritual reality. In this reality, bigger, stronger and more powerful, become ways of talking about love and grace, and not competition and dominance. When the church learns to occupy this space, it can begin to earn the trust of young people seeking to discover their place in the world. That is when it can truly be said that the power of love has triumphed over the love of power.