Evangelicals and the Will to Power

I begin with this confession: I'm tempted by the will to power. 

It’s Lent—a season for giving special attention to the direction of our lives and for course-correcting where we’ve drifted. Practicing Lent may be new, misunderstood, or even rejected by evangelicals, but I’ve found it deeply helpful as I “turn my face toward the cross,” asking what needs to be crucified so that new creation can be raised to life. This year, it feels especially worth considering whether being motivated by what I’ll call the will to power is a course that needs correcting.

By “the will to power,” I mean a moral instinct many of us recognize: the belief that if something good is going to happen in the world, it’s up to us to seize it, fight for it, and make it so. If you want the world to be a certain way, you need to exert yourself and battle for it. This instinct—the sense that our values require champions who will not only represent them but conquer in their name—is, I think, a defining spirit among my evangelical brothers and sisters in this decade (though it has been around far longer). It is a moral vision that has gripped the theological imagination of American evangelicals.

What often goes unnoticed, however, is that this vision did not originate in the church. In fact, it closely mirrors a moral framework most famously articulated by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

There are a few things many American evangelicals may know about Nietzsche:

1)    He had a wild mustache; and

2)   We don’t like him because he’s the guy who said “God is dead.”

What we may not recognize is just how much of his playbook we’ve absorbed—often without realizing it.

Nietzsche’s famous line—“God is dead, and we have killed him!”—comes from a philosophical parable he told. In it, a man (think of a John-the-Baptist-style prophetic figure) stands in the middle of a European city crying out to passersby. His accusation is not that they are actively rebelling against God, but that they are living as though God no longer meaningfully exists. They attend church, maintain polite friendships, and use religious language, yet God does not truly factor into how they make decisions, spend money, or raise their children. That, Nietzsche says, is the sense in which “we have killed him.”

Nietzsche does not necessarily celebrate this condition, but he does insist on honesty about it. As he sees it, people should stop cloaking their lives in a thin veneer of Christianity and admit that they do not actually want God to disrupt or upend them.

From there, Nietzsche imagines three kinds of responses to this realization:

1)    Those who cannot—or will not—see how the world ‘really’ works. They are content as long as their comfortable lives remain undisturbed. They live in nice homes, enjoy their entertainment, and take their vacations. They don’t want to be bothered by uncomfortable truths, and as a result, they are unlikely to make much of a difference in the world.

2)    Those who do see the world for what it is but feel powerless to do anything about it. They acknowledge that they are living without God, yet resign themselves to the belief that life has no real meaning. They see clearly, but act very little.

3)    Those who recognize that meaning does not come from above, but must be created from within. These are the people who exert themselves, shape the world in their own image, and impose meaning through their strength and creativity. The pinnacle of this type is the figure Nietzsche famously calls the Übermensch—the one who can rise up, create values, and bring the world to heel through force of will. This, ultimately, is the fullest expression of the will to power.

It is this moral vision—willing ourselves to power—that I fear has blinded many evangelicals to the way of the cross. The motivation is often sincere. Many people I love hold a set of deeply cherished values and admire those who can advance those values in a world that seems hostile to them.

What’s fascinating is that Nietzsche himself is the one who popularized the language of values. For him, it does not finally matter whether what one values is good or evil; what determines the worth of a value is whether someone strong enough can impose it on the world. Values, in this sense, are validated by victory.

This is also why Nietzsche wasn’t a fan of Jesus. He thought that Jesus was generally just making trouble for the people like Caesar – the Übermensch – who had been able to rise up and make the world as they wanted it to be. By preaching a kingdom in which the meek would inherit the earth, Nietzsche thought, Jesus was just fomenting anger among people who would never be able to rise up and conquer.

So why has this vision of rising up, exerting ourselves, and imposing our values become so seductive for people who are named for the “good news” (euangelion)? The gospel Jesus proclaimed was precisely that the world does not work according to Rome’s patterns. The good news was that the world was being remade by a God revealed not through domination, but through self-giving love—through a man who used his power to wash feet, heal the sick, embrace outisders, and was lifted up not on a throne, but on a cross.

The earliest Christians staked their lives on the conviction that Jesus was right: that the way of the cross was a world-altering subversion of our concepts of power by which God was renewing the world. They trusted that what God resurrects will always exceed what we could ever accomplish through force of will. The kingdom in which they were citizens was not one seized through power, but received through faithfulness.

My point here is not finger-pointing. It is confession.

It is, to borrow Isaiah’s exclamation, that I and a man who has been tainted by these seductive tendencies and I live among a people who succumb to these very temptations. I’m tempted by visions of the will-to-power that are termed ‘leadership’ and heralded as virtuous among my people. I’m tempted to identify the way I want the world to be and look for those who can most effectively make it that way. I’m tempted to see myself as a theological culture warrior, amassing intellectual ammunition for the sake of overcoming those in the other camp. That is precisely why I need seasons like Lent and the opportunity to name and turn away from these temptations in favor of the cross. These 40 days are for being honest about whatever tempts me away from the pattern of the cross, especially when it looks like a virtue in my community: exerting our ‘values’ as powerfully as possible. For followers of Jesus, even the most powerfully exerted values are not good if they can’t stand before the foot of the cross.

“Lord, have mercy upon me, O Lord, according to your unfailing love.”

*An examination of the way the will to power has shaped evangelical engagement in American politics is available in my chapter, "Voting, Values, and Vocation: The Shape of Evangelical Politics" in Whatever Happened to Evangelicalism? Al Truesdale, ed. (The Foundry Publishing, 2017).

The Good News Challenge

While speaking at a retreat recently, I went to the fitness center to use the treadmill, where a cable news channel was playing. The news wasn't good. I don't mean only that bad things were happening, but that in those moments, I wasn't being shaped to be a person of the good news. The cable news writers certainly had my formation in mind, but it wasn't toward the profoundly good news that all things are being made new in Jesus. It started to dawn on me how formative that kind of thing is, and it made me wonder about taking some intentional time in Lent to turn off cable news and fill that time with the good news of the gospel instead. It made me wonder what might happen.

Here's the challenge: turn off cable news from Ash Wednesday until Easter, replace that time with reading one of the gospels, and let's see what happens. I've dropped a reading plan below for each of the gospels. Take your pick, and if you feel so inclined, I'd love to hear how it's going along the way.

Reading Plans:

Matthew	Mark	Luke	John
Ash Wednesday – Feb 18 Matthew 1–2 Feb 19 Matthew 3–4 Feb 20 Matthew 5–6 Feb 21 Matthew 7–8 Feb 22 Matthew 9–10 Feb 23 Matthew 11–12 Feb 24 Matthew 13–14 Feb 25 Matthew 15–16 Feb 26 Matthew 17–18 Feb 27 Matthew 19–20 Feb 28 Matthew 21–22 Mar 1 Matthew 23–24 Mar 2 Matthew 25–26 Mar 3 Matthew 27–28	Mar 4 Mark 1–2 Mar 5 Mark 3–4 Mar 6 Mark 5–6 Mar 7 Mark 7–8 Mar 8 Mark 9–10 Mar 9 Mark 11–12 Mar 10 Mark 13–14 Mar 11 Mark 15–16	Mar 12 Luke 1–2 Mar 13 Luke 3–4 Mar 14 Luke 5–6 Mar 15 Luke 7–8 Mar 16 Luke 9–10 Mar 17 Luke 11–12 Mar 18 Luke 13–14 Mar 19 Luke 15–16 Mar 20 Luke 17–18 Mar 21 Luke 19–20 Mar 22 Luke 21–22 Mar 23 Luke 23–24	Mar 24 John 1–2 Mar 25 John 3–4 Mar 26 John 5–6 Mar 27 John 7–8 Mar 28 John 9–10 Mar 29 (Palm Sunday) John 11–12 Mar 30 John 13 Mar 31 John 14–15 Apr 1 John 16–17 Apr 2 (Maundy Thursday) John 18–19 Apr 3 (Good Friday) John 20–21

Better News Than Silent Night: The Goodness of Christmas in Real Life

(Post adapted from a sermon at The Village Church you can watch here.)

Here is my confession: I like a clean Christmas. Throughout my life, I’ve been shaped to want a Christmas that looks like every Hallmark card I see on the store shelves and sounds like the Christmas songs I’ve sung since childhood. These days, my desire is manifesting as the longing for an Instagram-worthy holiday, where nothing is out of place and everything looks flawless.

Somewhere along the way, I think that I’ve come to associate Christmas with a time when hard stuff is supposed to stop, or at least can be ignored for a few days. That way, nothing intrudes on a picture-perfect holiday, and peace arrives because of a lack of disruption. I’ve been wondering, though, if those expectations and hopes I have for Christmas have muted the goodness of the news that arrives in Christmas.

Here's how Luke tells it:

Now in that same region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for see, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger (Luke 2:8-12).

Part of my problem is that I can’t read this passage without the Charlie Brown music playing in my imagination, yet another mark of my desire for a ‘clean’ Christmas. The reality of this passage is grittier, even than Pigpen’s personal hygiene. The announcement of good news came to the shepherds right where they were, in the middle of the realities of life among sheep. It’s surprising in at least a couple ways:

1)    This wasn’t the kind of good news they were used to receiving. In the ancient world, especially in the Roman Empire (which controlled Bethlehem in those days), bits of good news would often be announced, primarily regarding military victories that were expanding the Empire. The technical term for those announcements were ‘gospels,’ and they were meant to bring gladness to the people who heard them. But for these shepherds, that news was a long way off, likely from places they’d never been before. How could that be good news for them, in the middle of their situations? The announcement of good news on the first Christmas was right in the middle of their situations, not some distant reality.

2)    Other announcements of good news were related to the birth of an emperor. The birth of Augustus, for example, was presented in the Roman world as good news for all people because he was a savior, a god among the people who would bring peace. Luke is clearly playing the announcement of Jesus’s birth off the notion that Caesar Augustus was a savior who would bring peace to all humanity. But the additional difference is that Luke is emphasizing the entrance of Jesus right into the middle of shepherd realities. Jesus won’t be a god from a distance, but God-with-us, who enters into the middle of hard, gritty reality.

This is why I’m challenged this year to let go of some of my hopes for a clean, perfect Christmas. The good news of Christmas isn’t that Jesus comes to insulate us for a few days from the hard stuff we’re enduring; it’s that Jesus has entered into the middle of gritty reality and is redeeming it.

One more note of some theological importance is needed: I’m not suggesting that Jesus enters into the middle of hard realities simply to make them disappear. That would be pressing us back into the ‘gospel’ of clean Christmas. The kind of good news that comes as part of Christ’s incarnation is that he has entered most fully into even the death-dealing realities of human life, it did its worst to him in his death, and he came out on the other side in his resurrection. The hope isn’t that we won’t endure hardship or death; the hope is that we are following Jesus through it toward resurrection. That is better news than a clean, Instagram-perfect Christmas can deliver.

If I haven’t lost you so far, I fear I may here: I’m not a huge fan of the song “Silent Night.” It’s certainly nostalgic for me, and I adore the melody, but its opening lyrics are part of the reason I think I’ve come to equate Christmas with a pause from life’s hardships, rather than the gritty redemption of them. “All is calm, all is bright…” sometimes forms in my imagination a bit of a Hallmark card. In fact, the subtle critique of Silent Night is one of the reasons I have come to love Andrew Peterson’s musical telling of the birth of Jesus in his song, “Labor of Love.” “It was not a silent night,” the song opens, “there was blood on the ground…And the stable was not clean; And the cobblestones were cold…” Maybe that’s not the image that we want hanging around our quest for a clean Christmas, but it surely offers better news than the gospel of ‘Christmas is a few days where I can act like the world isn’t broken.’ The power of the gospel of Jesus entering right into the middle of a world groaning for redemption as a woman in labor has got to be better news than, “the little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.” (Yes, I’ve also got some theological hang-ups with “Away in a Manger.” 19^th-century Christmas carols tended to carry some odd theological baggage.)

Lest you think I’m a grinch in theological garb, come to ruin the perfect Christmas by critiquing our culture’s most beloved traditions, let me offer a closing story about my friend Jeff. He died yesterday after a battle with ALS, and I already miss him. Most of Jeff’s life was a gritty reality. Addiction led him to homelessness, and his body bore the brunt of all of it. Jeff experienced what I can only describe as grace-filled, even miraculous redemption, and he was never quiet about it. I still smile when I think about how wonderfully disruptive he could be when he wanted to tell people about how much Jesus had changed him. Jeff is who comes to mind when I think of the shepherds. Jesus was born into the gritty reality of their circumstances, and he entered right into the middle of the brutally difficult situation Jeff was in.

Our church meets on a university campus in a building adorned with a steeple and stained glass, so when people would come to visit, I think they’d bring with them expectations of a “Silent Night” experience. What they got was Jeff the shepherd, often proclaiming aloud the good news of a God who enters into the middle of gritty reality. That’s why I think the incarnation is better news than a Hallmark movie could ever deliver. This Christmas Eve, we’ll gather and light candles and, yes, we’ll sing Silent Night. But I’m really going to miss Jeff, a shepherd who constantly reminded me just how good the news really is.