1
" It is a source of refreshment, laughter, joy and life—and of more power. Remove power and you cut off life, the possibility of creating something new and better in this rich and recalcitrant world. Life is power. Power is life. And flourishing power leads to flourishing life. Of course, like life itself, power is nothing—worse than nothing—without love. But love without power is less than it was meant to be. Love without the capacity to make something of the world, without the ability to respond to and make room for the beloved’s flourishing, is frustrated love. This is why the love that is the heartbeat of the Christian story—the Father’s love for the Son and, through the Son, for the world—is not simply a sentimental feeling or a distant, ethereal theological truth, but has been signed and sealed by the most audacious act of true power in the history of the world, the resurrection of the Son from the dead. Power at its best is resurrection to full life, to full humanity. Whenever human beings become what they were meant to be, when even death cannot finally hold its prisoners, then we can truly speak of power. "
― Andy Crouch , Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power
2
" In his indispensable book The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri Nouwen boldly invites us to imagine ourselves not just in the place of the younger son, and then the elder one, but also in the place of the father. Many of Jesus’ parables are waiting for this kind of attention—his shepherds, widows and vineyard owners are not just clues to the true nature and identity of God, but to what we are meant to become by grace. But for us the path to becoming the shepherd requires first recognizing that we are the lost sheep; to become the searching widow, we must understand that we are the coin lost in the cranny; and to become the father requires first coming to terms with ourselves as his equally foolish, equally prodigal children. And that is, in a nutshell, what discipleship is about. In the crucible of discipleship we come to see just how distorted our vision for our own power has been and how small we have become, but we also discover just how lavish our Father’s goodness is and how much glory is waiting for us, how much more we are meant to be. "
― Andy Crouch , Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power
7
" As idolatry and injustice always go together—injustice requiring idolatry to justify exploitation, idolatry leading to injustice as the idols fail to deliver and demand ever greater sacrifices—so with the entrenched cultural patterns we call institutions. There is always a false god lurking behind every system of injustice, the god of nationalism or racism or misogyny, wealth or lust or power itself, which promises godlike abilities to some at the expense of others. And every institution that sustains the worship of a false god ends up neglecting the most vulnerable. The little ones are sacrificed on the altar of the idols’ demands, not once but generation after generation, until we forget that there ever could have been a way for every person and every created thing to flourish. This, in a word, is sin, not a few isolated acts but a pattern embedded into every human act, even and maybe especially our well-intentioned acts. Only by seeing sin as an institutional reality—embedded in concrete artifacts, played out in terrifying large and visible arenas, dictating rules that enslave rather than set free, and turning naturally differentiated roles into oppressively rigid structures of status and privilege—can we understand the damage idolatry and injustice have done. "
― Andy Crouch , Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power
9
" Far from being aloof or detached from power, the church is all about power—the end of power, meaning the purpose of power, the taming of power, and the unleashing of power for true flourishing. The church proclaims the true story of power. By telling the whole story from Genesis to Revelation, with its astonishing bookends of good, very good and glorious news, the church recognizes and affirms our human ambitions and aspirations, placing them in the context where they truly make sense and can find their rightful place. By telling the full truth about idolatry and injustice, not least by recalling the stories of how our own heroes fell into compromise and foolishness, the church makes clear just how damaging our pride is to ourselves, our neighbors and the whole groaning creation. And by recounting over and over the immense cost of redemption, the church leads us to abashed and grateful humility before the one who gave up everything for us. "
― Andy Crouch , Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power
14
" In their important book about race and religion in America, Divided by Faith, sociologists Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith observe that what most distinguishes white evangelical Protestants from black Protestants is not their theology or even their desire for racial reconciliation, but evangelicals’ lack of institutional thinking. When evangelicals think about solving social problems like the legacy of slavery and racism in the United States, they think almost exclusively in terms of personal, one-on-one relationships—which is why so many white evangelicals can imagine the problem of racism is solved if they simply have a handful of friends of other races. To think of race this way is to miss the fact that race and racism are institutional realities built on a complex set of artifacts, arenas, rules and roles. A few friendships that happen outside of those arenas and temporarily suspend a few of those rules and roles do little to change the multigenerational patterns of distorted image bearing and god playing based on skin color. Black Christians instinctively know that for the gospel to keep transforming America’s sorry racial story, it will have to keep challenging these deeply ingrained patterns and the structures that even now perpetuate them—while white evangelicals, who identify racism with a handful of dismantled artifacts like twentieth-century Jim Crow laws and legally segregated schools, cannot imagine that racism has a continuing institutional reality. "
― Andy Crouch , Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power
17
" Ultimately the reason for both the work of evangelism and the work of justice is not simply the relief of suffering, whether present or eternal. It is the restoration of God’s true image in the world, made known in the one true Image and Icon, Jesus Christ, and refracted and reflected in fruitful, multiplying image bearers set free by his death and resurrection to reclaim their true calling. Our mission is not primarily driven by a calculation of which suffering, present or eternal, we need to relieve most urgently; it is the fruit of glorious promises that call us into a new kingdom where the world is full of truth-bearing images. No image bearer can fully return to their true calling without finding themselves rescued and redeemed by the true Image Bearer, so no serious Christian witness in the world can fail to call people to put their trust in Jesus and the true God he makes known. And no image bearer can bear full witness to the glory of the Creator without the conditions for flourishing that are summed up in the rich biblical conception of justice. “He comes to make his blessings flow / far as the curse is found.” Because idolatry and injustice are the twin fruits of the curse, the work of evangelism and the work of justice are one. "
― Andy Crouch , Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power
20
" This father, indeed, is what the various fathers of the biblical story—from Noah to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to David—never quite managed to be with their own families. He does what they rarely managed to do with their own power: use it for ever-increasing abundance and blessing. He is an icon of the true image. Indeed, in the holy hilarity of his greeting, the lavishness of his feast, and the eagerness of his pleading, we glimpse not just an image bearer but the very One “from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name” (Ephesians 3:15), whose image is meant to be refracted in his sons and daughters. Like him, we are meant to pour out our power fearlessly, spend our privilege recklessly, and leave our status in the dust of our headlong pursuit of love. "
― Andy Crouch , Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power
