A good friend of mine named Michael Walker recently preached a sermon called “The Humiliation of the Word.” He based it on John 1:18, “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.” Michael’s premise was this: the only way for the Father to be made known was for the Word, Jesus Christ, to be sent in the weakness and humiliation of a human life marked by the cross.
The implications of this are staggering. “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you,” Jesus said to his disciples (John 20:21). In other words, just as grace and truth have been made known through the suffering humiliation of Jesus Christ, so his disciples are called to make him known through lives of suffering love and weakness. As my friend Michael put it, “Intimacy with Christ is always the source of strength through which we can endure the path of suffering love, the position of weakness – it is never an escape from it.”
We live in a culture in which the church is no longer the dominant influence over society, and no longer shapes the pattern of behavior and belief in the surrounding culture. Some Christians have responded to this reality by working for the re-creation of a Christian culture, in which the church would again possess a place of dominance. But our call is not to witness to Jesus Christ through grasping for power and control, but through embodying the gospel in a way that demonstrates his suffering love for the world, that welcomes the place of weakness.
What would our lives and our churches look if we were to pursue not positions of power but of weakness? How would your life be transformed? How might this alter where you live, how you shop, who you spend time with, how you use your money? Consider the humiliation of the Word and let your life be changed.
Comments
AWESOME post! The one
Wed, 09/21/2005 - 07:56 — Alex (not verified)AWESOME post! The one question I have is that I was reading something about James Davison Hunter, where he said: “To change the world is to take power seriously…. It’s to take seriously raising leaders, building networks and taking over institutions.” IF (big if) I understand him correctly, he is arguing that Christians need to take over a bunch of recognized institutions (christianculture.com wrote an article on Hunter’s view of this on their website). My question is: what is the Church’s role in pursuing suffering and positions of weakness, and what is the Church’s role in taking over elite institutions? Should both roles be priorities, and, if so, how?
Alex, I had the same question
Wed, 09/21/2005 - 21:19 — GL (not verified)Alex,
I had the same question when I read Corey's post. I also thought, "One, Corey is trying to make us think. It's hard to be provocative AND qualify everything. Two, he only has 600 words with which to work."
But, maybe Corey would say, "Nope, no elites. No participating in positions of power."
I'm curious to see where this goes....
Alex- This is a great
Thu, 09/22/2005 - 14:15 — Corey Widmer (not verified)Alex-
This is a great question, one that I have frequently discussed with others. I was actually a student of James Hunter's at University of Virginia, so I have been significantly shaped by his thinking and I am not unfamiliar with it.
First and foremost I would answer your question by saying that I think the humble position of the Christian that I reflected on in my post is more descriptive than prescriptive- in other words, although this calling may end up directing you to certain places of work or certain neighborhoods to live in, this posture of humility is an orientation we are to take up within every position in life God puts us in. So, God does not exclude Christians from places of secular power and influence, indeed, He may even place you there intentionally, but the way you perform and behave within that position will be determined by the new model and the new path of the cross that Jesus has laid out for you. Jesus said it like this: "The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you shold be like the smallest, and the one who rules like the one who serves." (Luke 22:25-26).
What would this look like for a person in a position of influence and even power? I would recommend strongly a sermon I heard by Tim Keller called "Creation Care and Justice" (you can get it off the Redeemer Church website). In it Keller discusses the people that the book of Proverbs calls "The Righteous Ones," who are those people who are in positions of influence and power, but who use their influence and power to disadvantage themselves in order to bring blessing and advantage to others. The weak and the poor want these people in places of authority and influence, because they know that they will use those positions to bring blessing rather than self-aggrandizement. I think another way to say this is that these "righteous ones" are going in the way of the cross.
In sum, I don't think we are called to outright pursue positions of power for the sake of "taking over" elite institutions. Too often that attitude reflects not one of self-giving and blessing but of threatened anger and reaction. Instead, when we are put into positions of power and influence, Christ calls us to the way of the cross. And no matter what position we are in, we are called to follow the pattern of Christ's humiliation, one result of which I believe is that all Christians of any position and stripe are called to have a special concern for those who are weakest and most overlooked in our society. The only other thing I would say is that ironically, often by living in the margins and working for those who are the weakest, the right kind of infleunce and power emerge (eg, Martin Luther King, even Ghandi!), something I can only attribute to the inside-out pattern of Christ's Kingdom.
Corey, I appreciate your
Thu, 09/22/2005 - 22:20 — Glenn (not verified)Corey, I appreciate your answer. The reason I wondered in my previous comment what you would say is that at UVa I've been party to conversations of SOME Christian graduate students and professors who take Hauerwas to mean that Christians should not participate in power. They may misunderstand Hauerwas or extend him farther than he would agree, but the sense that I got was that participation in power is wrong.
From your comment I see that you would not share this perspective and I don't either. When I asked, in a Hauerwasian discussion, "What about God calling a person to be, say, a Senator?" I was told that God would not call a Christian to such a position and anyone who thought so was arrogating him/herself.
I know many today object to various aspects of Neiburhr's typologies of Christ and Culture and with good reason. Still, I think they can be of SOME utility in describing patterns of living. I think a combination of Christ Against Culture and Christ Transforming Culture has merit. We should be resisting the world, and your description of ways of serving amidst positions of power is one of many ways of resisting the world. But persuading others, including those outside the church, to take the downward path of humiliation might be seen as transformative, and I think transforming our understanding of leadership and power would be a wonderful thing inside and outside the church.
Great discussion here on a
Tue, 09/27/2005 - 07:21 — Timothy (not verified)Great discussion here on a thought-provoking post. I thought I would add two points before this draws to a close.
In Trinitarian theology, the second person of the Trinity is subjected to the first person as a Son to a Father. This is not because the Son is inferior, but actually because the Son chooses subjection to the Father. The Son chooses this subjection in order to be associated with us--or, that we may be associated with him, and through him to the Father. In that vein, Gregory of Nazianzus pointed out that Christ is continually choosing subjection to the Father on our behalf as the continuing mediator for our sins. It is interesting to think of this choice of subjection as a continuing dynamic within the Trinity--and it is deeply convicting. Christ chooses subjection because of our choice for sin.
On Niebuhr, his book should more accurately be called "Christ and the World." Culture is just his term for naming the world apart from Christ. This has the unintended result of credentialing what the Bible calls the "world" as "Culture"--as though the world or the culture is where we live by default and being Christian or following Christ is somehow different from that or outside of it. Christianity must reaffirm that living in Christ is "reality" and the "world/culture" is the inauthentic existence--the mirage, or illusion. The whole enterprise of standing in the world as Christians and impacting it for Christ should be brought into question. Christ creates space in the world for us to live. Christ IS our culture. We don't live in the world, we live in Christ. In fact, Christ is the only culture that produces authentic life. And as we survey history, it is Christ who has made room for communal living in society (common ground) through the work of his church.
I guess I'm suggesting that we do need to be a little more forceful in our attitude toward bring all things captive to Christ. If we believe that Christ is the culture of life, then we believe that all people, individually and communally, would be happier and more fulfilled living in subjection to the Lord. Do we want to leave our culture in the "world" or draw the world and its culture into Christ?