Thoughts on Power and Truth

“I am the king of France, and the truth is that child is whoever I say he is.”

Reign S2 E1, ‘The Plague’ (2014)

 

A chess king has a certain amount of auctoritas, in that it’s the piece one needs to capture in order to win, but as concerns potestas, it can only move one square at a time, and so it’s not a particularly useful piece in actual gameplay. (The Latin terms feature a few a paragraphs down.)

I tend to feel one knows one’s got rather invested in the events of a television serial when one starts yelling at the screen urging the characters not to do the stupid thing they’re on the brink of doing. This is a point I have reached with the programme Reign, which is a totally unrealistic romp of a period drama following a young Mary, Queen of Scots.¹ For instance, at one stage in the first series, Francis, heir to the French throne and on that count technically Mary’s betrothed – though at this stage it looked very much as if he would be forfeiting both roles as soon as his half-brother Sebastian was officially legitimised to take them on – decided it would be a good idea to sleep with Lola, one of Mary’s ladies-in-waiting. I told them both it was a stupid thing to do, but for some reason these TV characters never seem to pay any attention. Still, I was proved right when Lola became pregnant with Francis’ child, attempted to keep said child a secret (particularly once Francis and Mary ended up getting married after all), almost underwent a primitive abortion procedure (though was persuaded out of it), married a relative stranger (who turned out to be an identity thief) in an attempt to pass the child off as his, and then nearly died in childbirth with none of her friends at her side. Dramatic and entertaining viewing, certainly, but Lola wasn’t exactly having the time of her life. I did tell them both it was a stupid idea.

Francis – by this point king following his father’s death – was eventually informed that he was the father of Lola’s child, and was thereupon confronted with a choice: either he could claim the child as his own, endowing him with a title and land, and Lola with the respected, if not exactly ideal, status of king’s mistress; or he could not claim him, and leave Lola to tell whichever lie she felt was most appropriate about her son’s parentage. The first option would, significantly, guarantee some kind of security for Lola and the baby, as well as facilitating the building of Francis’ own relationship with his son; the second would allow Lola more freedom, for instance to pursue another marriage, and lessen tension with Mary, who had not yet had any children and so whose position was unavoidably threatened by the existence of a son of Francis by another mother, even leaving aside any emotional concerns. A dilemma, clearly, but all the more so because of Francis’ status. He was king; his word was law; whatever he chose to say about this child would define his whole identity, case closed.

However rife with totally implausible (and extremely enjoyable) plotlines Reign may be, that kind of ruler’s power to make a lie the official truth is anything but confined to the realms of fiction. Examples can be plucked from all over the world and the whole length of human history: the attempted expunging of the pharaoh Hatshepsut from all official records;² the claim of Incan leader Pachacuti that the very rocks fought on his behalf;³ the propaganda disseminated by governments on all sides during both world wars.⁴ I’m quite sure you can think of plenty more examples of your own.

But the truth always gets out, doesn’t it? Despite the best efforts of posterity, we know a fair bit about Hatshepsut; I suspect very few of us are convinced by Pachacuti’s rocks-as-soldiers claim; and these days, wartime propaganda is recognised as exactly that, propaganda. Rulers might be able to decree something to be the case – they might even be able to convince the vast majority of their subjects of it – but that doesn’t amount to an ability to make it actually so. And likewise, back in the world of Reign, even if Francis had refused to claim Lola’s child as his own, he couldn’t have altered reality in order to make himself genuinely not the father.

Ancient Latin-speakers used to make a distinction between two kinds of power: auctoritas, that is, official political authority, and potestas, that is, the actual capability and resources necessary to get the job done. If you’re not totally appalled at the notion of explaining Latin terms using other Latin terms, we might equate auctoritas with power de jure, and potestas with power de facto. Although there is, admittedly, a little more nuance to the terms than that – they typically tended to be used to contrast the (positive) formal dominion of the elite with the (negative) unruly strength of the populus at large – I’d say they’re broadly similar to what we’re talking about here.⁵ Rulers like Francis and Pachacuti and those various wartime governments might have had total auctoritas over their subjects, but auctoritas doesn’t necessarily amount to potestas – and there are some things, like causing rocks to fight battles, or altering a child’s biological parentage, that no human being has the necessary potestas to achieve.

Now with God, things are rather different. Have a look at Genesis 1:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light.⁶

I won’t quote the whole chapter, but do give the rest of it a scan. There’s a pretty distinct pattern, the first example of which I put in bold above. God said, “Let such-and-such be the case”, and such-and-such was so.⁷ This is the very first aspect of himself that God wants to get across to us when we pick up a Bible; this is our primary introduction to the king of the universe: he is a king whose power is such that his decrees don’t just make theoretical legal changes, but actually alter reality so that it conforms to them. What God says, goes, no exceptions whatsoever.

The same point is made in the book of Romans: God … calls into existence the things that do not exist. Or, as the King James Version would have it, God … calleth those things which be not as though they were.⁸ In other words, God’s power is so great, his will so completely irresistible, that he can issue a command to something that doesn’t actually exist yet, and said something will start existing simply in order to follow that command. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth – and all he had to do was order them to exist. Unlike with human rulers, there is no disparity between God’s auctoritas and his potestas; they are seamlessly tied together. Both are absolute.

And this is why God is truth. Francis could, through his auctoritas, have decreed it so that Lola’s child was legally not his; he could have perpetuated the lie using every resource at his disposal, every ounce of the limited potestas he could muster, but a lie it would nevertheless have remained. When God decrees something to be the case, on the other hand, that thing is immediately obliged to start being so. It cannot be a lie, because it cannot resist the absolute power – auctoritas and potestas together – of God who has declared it to be true.

It’s no surprise the Bible gives this truth about God prime position, because it colours the way we read everything else in scripture. Everything God affirms is bound to be so, not even just because God knows everything and is faithful to keep his promises, but because his very affirming it means it is literally impossible for it not to be so. That’s the kind of power we’re dealing with when we open our Bibles. I’m ashamed to say I often drift into thinking rather less of God’s word than that.

But what great comfort there is – not vague, numbing, fluffy-bunny-slippers-type comfort, but real, solid, dependable comfort rooted in unshakeable certainty – in the knowledge that it’s with that same power that God affirms our status before him, if we’re trusting in Jesus.

So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God. – Galatians 4:7

God, the king of the universe, claims me as his own, gives me the status of a son in his family, establishes his relationship with me, endows me with an imperishable inheritance, guarantees my security forever – and because he has decreed it, it is impossible for it not to be so.⁹ Whatever he chooses to say about me defines my whole identity, case closed – and not just in some theoretical legal plane but in hard, physical fact. What God says, goes, no exceptions. I need never fear otherwise.

Footnotes

¹ Available on Netflix if you happen to like totally unrealistic romps of period dramas as much as I have discovered I do: https://www.netflix.com/browse.

² The BBC are very happy to tell you all about it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/hatshepsut_01.shtml

³ I’ll admit I got that one from a Horrible Histories song. I would link to it, but the music video appears to have vanished from both YouTube and the CBBC website. How disappointing.

⁴ Apparently, in 1915, the Bryce Commission, set up to investigate various outrages German military were popularly alleged to have committed against Belgians, actually concluded that many of the accusations were accurate: https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/depicting-the-enemy. Amazing what you can learn from a bit of online searching.

⁵ More details are available from kunthra at Transparent Language’s Latin Langauge Blog: http://blogs.transparent.com/latin/the-mobs-of-ancient-rome/.  

⁶ I’ll give you the whole chapter, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+1&version=ESVUK, though if you have a paper Bible about, it’s not exactly a hard chapter to find.

⁷ Minor point, but I think the two are tied even more closely together in the Hebrew: וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֖ים יְהִ֣י א֑וֹר וַֽיְהִי־אֽוֹר׃ (wayyomer elohīm y’hī or way’hī or); because of the weird way the Hebrew verbal system works, the ‘there was’ is literally the same as the ‘let there be’, its meaning only changed by the ‘and’ stuck on the front of it.

⁸ Do have a look at the whole thing: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+4&version=ESVUK. God’s ability to call things into existence – and, similarly, life out of death – makes so much sense out of Abraham’s faith, which is then used as a model for our own. This stuff really matters.

⁹ I’m currently particularly excited about the doctrine of adoption having recently read J. I. Packer’s Knowing God on a church week away. It’s an extremely good read; I would highly recommend it. As usual, 10ofthose will do you a pretty good deal: https://www.10ofthose.com/products/489/knowing-god/.