Imagine yourself at any church service you want. Imagine the music, the preaching, the reading of Scripture. Hear the voices of others next to you in welcome or in questions or in laughter. Feel yourself bumping against strangers and friends. Observe the movements of others on this scene as they jostle, listen, squirm. Listen to the message proclaimed; watch the administration of the bread and the cup.
Now, some questions: Where was power on this picture? How did it work? What was power doing? From where was power coming? Did you even see power on this picture before now?
Asking about how power functions in unseen ways only highlights how, for a lot of, power goes unnoticed until there was an egregious breach of trust. And in recent times, there have been innumerable breaches in church contexts, each infamous and obscure, and incessantly centered on the abuse of individuals: the manipulative sermon, the self-serving and even predatory pastoral figure, the overreach of the pulpit into politics.
This is the context—of pastoral failures, political alliances, and confusion about what power means for the church—by which David E. Fitch offers his newest book, Reckoning with Power: Why the Church Fails When It’s on the Wrong Side of Power.
From the onset, Fitch has in view the assorted high-profile cases by which the incorrect form of power has been found operating throughout the church. His examples include Christian nationalism, moral failures, sexual abuse, and other forms of injury. In summing up the present situation, Fitch proposes that there are “really two sorts of power at work on the earth”:
There is worldly power, which is exerted over individuals, and there may be godly power, which works relationally with and amongst individuals. Worldly power is coercive. […] Worldly power is enforced. It is susceptible to abuse. God’s power, then again, isn’t coercive. God works by the Holy Spirit, persuades, never overrides an individual’s agency, convicts, works in relationship.
On the worldly side are variations of what Fitch calls “power over.” Tyrannies, organizations, and even justice-coded movements to redistribute power all operate on this same basic model, he argues, and so they most clearly reveal their underlying congruity in displays of violence and other coercion.
This antagonistic understanding of power pervades how Christians take into consideration our lives, each inside and beyond the church, and we’re tempted to similarly use “power over” due to its sheer effectiveness. This is dangerous for Christians, Fitch argues. “It is true that worldly ‘power over’ can still be employed for good purposes, if limited purposes, with the best management and accountability,” he writes. “But it’s fraught with danger, and it limits what God can do.”
Fitch surveys the Scriptures to back this assertion, however it is difficult to read the Bible without seeing the pervasive fingerprints of “power over,” including amongst God’s people following God’s commands. The Scriptures are rife with stories of conquest and kings, of violence and misdeeds by authorities. Here, Fitch contends that the Bible points Christians toward the instance of Jesus, who modeled submission to God and the redemptive way of the Spirit. He subsequently explains most (if not all) the biblical stories of “power over” as “leaders attributing the acts of worldly power to God”— biblical figures’ sinfully blurring divine commands with worldly notions of the way to wield the authority God has given them.
This history of blending “power over” with the ability of God continues throughout church history, Fitch writes, as church leaders from the 2nd century to the twenty first have combined “power over” and God’s “power under.” Even those that handled the mix comparatively well, just like the Reformer Martin Luther’s depiction of “power over” as God’s way of preserving order inside society, mixed the 2 in practice to sometimes terrible effect.
More recently, declamations of Christian nationalism provide a vividly negative object lesson in how this mixing leads Christians astray. Even the well-intentioned pursuit of social justice, Fitch says, may perpetuate the very “inequities, abuses, and exclusions” it seeks to undo if activists take a “power over” approach.
So, what does the choice of “power under” appear like? How does “power under” function in practice? As history and Scripture show us, Fitch writes, it’s dangerously easy to miss a shift—even perhaps accidental or well-intentioned—from exercise of “power under” to “power over,” whether in ourselves or in our institutions. There isn’t any how-to manual for discerning the 2 powers, though we might even see “red flags that indicate worldly power is already at work.”
And there are green flags of “power under” too—practices reminiscent of mutual submission, receiving the plurality of gifts which can be present within the body of Christ, and inclusion of those affected by decisions in leadership processes. For Fitch, a consistent emphasis on listening, trusting within the illuminating power of the Spirit, and all individuals submitting to one another in pursuit of God’s voice are key to embodying the “power under” of Jesus.
Fitch’s concern over how churches have prioritized organizational self-preservation on the expense of affection and justice—or have used mechanisms of state and social power to enact changes favorable to Christians—is well-founded. And his call for Christians to develop difficult habits of listening, mutual submission, and conversation is sorely needed.
And so, in what follows, I would like to affirm his practical suggestions while asking some harder questions on the sustainability of the framework undergirding Reckoning with Power as a complete, which I argue doesn’t ultimately offer a compelling way forward.
In naming the pervasiveness of “power over,” not only throughout the Scriptures but in church history and in contemporary church practice, Fitch has rightly identified the twin nature of sin: It tells the reality, but only partially.
In Eden, the Serpent was right that the person and woman would have their eyes opened, can be like gods, would know good from evil. Worldly power likewise tells a partial truth: It can effect change—accomplish an ideal deal—even perhaps for objectively good causes. The query that Fitch wants us to reckon with is what else comes bundled with that promise of change, like how the Fall got here bundled with the Serpent’s promise of data.
To be certain, grasping “power over” has brought devils upon devils right into a cleaned-out house (Luke 11:24–26). But it’s unclear that “power over” and “power under” are—or will be—as far apart as Fitch claims. I even have drawn attention to Fitch’s comments in regards to the utility of “power over” for that reason, for they highlight how these two types of power are incessantly companions. The direction of “power over” often works in concert with the persuasion of “power under.”
And perhaps that closeness isn’t purely the failure of the flesh. Perhaps, sometimes, it’s because Christians have a (borrowed and chastened) capability to call sin and heresy and to supply an account of what can and can’t be a part of the people of God. It is unclear to me, for instance, how a church purged of all “power over” might preach something as difficult because the Sermon on the Mount, the Decalogue, or the Prophets. How can faithful church leaders “judge those inside” the church (1 Cor. 5:12) without some measure of “power over” the people of their spiritual care?
For the ability of Christ shouldn’t be only to serve but to bind (Matt. 18:18)—not only to forgive but, as Fitch himself notes, to inform the reality (2 Cor. 6:4–7). It shouldn’t be clear, in other words, that creatures reminiscent of us will be freed from the blurring Fitch wants us to abjure (even setting aside the incontrovertible fact that Christians are at all times sinners undergoing repair).
Put in another way, it shouldn’t be clear that the church can do without some type of “power over,” though we must always aim to reliably wield it not as a sword but as a healing scalpel. Jesus’ own ministry offers not a number of instances of service coupled with commands, of “power over”—a commanding of not only demons but of authorities and disciples. Jesus seems to couple the 2 forms of power, albeit in limited ways.
This shouldn’t be to say that the practices Fitch offers are futile, only that there isn’t any secure means through which we are able to fully separate these kinds of power. The corruptions of power may appear in any number of the way. We cannot draw a tidy line between “power over” and “power under,” naming the previous as worldly and evil and the latter as godly and good, and call the matter settled. “Power over” could also be utilized in a Christlike manner to reprimand sin, and “power under” shouldn’t be proof against corruption and will even develop into a whitewashed tomb (Matt. 6:5–8; 23:23, 27).
Indeed, as creator Lauren Winner has observed, the very practices of God’s repair amongst us can themselves be subject to “characteristic damage.” The fractures of a fallen world persist even inside gifts of grace. Acts of mutual submission may ultimately be strategic, for instance, as people practice “power under” while secretly biding their time. And there are few words more laden with the expectation of ending disagreement and conversation than the “power under” tactic of “consensus.”
In the wake of so many publicized abuses of power, it is correct to be concerned how we use power as Christians, to encourage accountability, to proceed to discuss the way it forms and malforms us, and to take care of the wounded. Fitch writes with the fervour of 1 who has seen damage and power up close, and his eagerness to call the church away from its temptations is to be commended.
But what we’d like shouldn’t be a purer model of power but the continuing bonds of forgiveness. We must assume that we’ll the truth is harm each other, a minimum of in unintended ways. We must not assume that we are able to someway delay “power over” altogether.
I say this not because I want to embrace a form of Christian realism; on that, Fitch and I are in firm agreement. It is solely that the form of power Fitch desires to reject cannot be fully put away, though we must definitely reject certain versions of it: Christians should always heed the warning of Samuel and never want to have power like the opposite nations (1 Sam. 8:10–22). I say this not because Christians lust for control but because “power over,” in its best form, is the form of authority Christ gives to his church. It is power over sin, death, and the devil (Luke 10:19; 2 Cor. 10:4), and to refuse to take it up with fear and trembling is an influence failure of a unique kind.
Myles Werntz is the creator, most recently, of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together and co-author with David Cramer of A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence. He writes commonly at Christian Ethics within the Wild.
