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/.

Everything At Once

“All I want to be is everything at once.”

Lenka, ‘Everything at Once’, Two (2011)

The relevance of the chameleon will be clear by the end of the first paragraph, I promise. Apparently this one’s from Malta.

Remember the Very Hungry Caterpillar?¹ The eventful life story of this gluttonous insect, written and illustrated by Eric Carle,² played, as I recall, a fairly prominent role in my five-year-old self’s formal education, though I have to say I was always perplexed as to why, if the caterpillar in question was indeed so very hungry, he didn’t just eat a few pieces of fruit in their entirety, instead of wastefully munching mere holes through a whole cornucopia’s worth. In fact, although The Very Hungry Caterpillar is indisputably Carle’s most famous work, I can’t say I could ever see why it particularly deserved to be; my personal favourite was always one called The Mixed-Up Chameleon.³

In this story, our reptilian hero, used to a simple life of changing colour and catching flies, takes a trip to the zoo, where he encounters and marvels at a whole variety of animals very different from himself. Observing particular abilities possessed by these other animals and wishing he too had these abilities, he finds that, by some mysterious magic, it’s not only his colour that he’s able to change; every wish is immediately granted. As a result, he ends up as a bizarre patchwork of creatures, sporting such disparate features as antlers, flamingo wings, a tortoise’s shell, and a giraffe’s neck, and totally unable to change colour or catch flies at all. And predictably, he realises that life as a typical chameleon wasn’t so bad after all, wishes to regain his original form, and, having regained it, goes contentedly home.

Be yourself, cries the not-so-subtle subtext; no good will come of wishing you were more like someone else. It’s a moral so obvious that I suspect we barely think about it beyond a vague approval to the effect that it’s a good lesson for the kids to learn. But I think it’s worth pausing over exactly what it was that our friend the mixed-up chameleon learned, because I for one am still discouragingly prone to making the very mistakes he did.

The chameleon’s ultimate problem was nothing more than straightforward covetousness – that is to say, desiring something belonging to somebody else. I’d anticipate that those of us who take the Bible as the authoritative word of God would all quite happily agree that coveting is a Bad Thing:

You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbour’s.

That’s the last of the Ten Commandments God gave his people Israel after rescuing them from slavery in Egypt, as recorded in Exodus 20.⁴ Now, funnily enough, I doubt that any of us finds her- or himself seriously wrestling with the sin of coveting someone else’s ox or donkey on a regular basis, but the real crunch point of the commandment is those few words at the end. As some of the other examples might suggest, we’re clearly not talking solely about external property – about stuff.

You shall not covet … anything that is your neighbour’s.

In the case of our friend the chameleon, it was the zoo animals’ abilities – attributes, talents – that he desired. He saw a polar bear and wished he were big, a fish and wished he could swim, a seal and wished he were funny. Coveting is a see-it-want-it sort of a process; one is made aware of the fact that somebody else has something, and resents the fact that it’s that other person who has it, rather than oneself.

 

Although if the chameleon had known about the threat of climate change, maybe he wouldn’t have been so keen to be more like a polar bear after all.

Moreover, it’s worth stressing that the chameleon wanted to be all these things simultaneously. No one improvement was enough to satisfy him; he wanted the ability to do anything and everything he saw another creature doing. Lenka expressed a similar sentiment in a song with which you may be familiar from its use in the 2012 television adverts for the then-new Windows 8:

As warm as the sun, as silly as fun,

As cool as a tree, as scary as the sea,

As hot as fire, cold as ice,

Sweet as sugar and everything nice,

As old as time, as straight as a line,

As royal as a queen, as buzzed as a bee,

As stealth as a tiger, smooth as a glider,

Pure as a melody, pure as I want to be –

All I want to be is everything at once.⁵

It’s a pleasant enough song to listen to, though it does rather give off the impression of having been written by a small child who has just learned what a simile is and is very excited about the fact. I don’t want to disregard Lenka’s lyrics too hastily, though: how often, after all, do I feel exactly the same way?

That I’m already graciously blessed with a good range of abilities and opportunities to hone them simply isn’t enough. I chat to a friend who’s particularly good at sewing, and wish I could do that; I hear someone effortlessly harmonise as we sing in church, and wish I could do that; I enjoy some kind of delicious food item that someone else has creatively prepared, and wish I could do that. Even if the skill in question is one in which I do already have some measure of proficiency, every superior demonstration of it at someone else’s hand is an occasion for my covetousness to rear its ugly head. It’s not that I want to exchange my current abilities for an alternative set, but that I want to supplement and augment them in almost every conceivable direction. Exactly like Lenka and the poor mixed-up chameleon, I want to be everything at once.

So what am I saying? That it’s an infringement of the tenth commandment ever to want to learn a new skill? That we sin every time we ever aspire to anything? Unsurprisingly, no. Covetousness isn’t wrong because it involves the desiring of something; there are all sorts of things it’s very right to desire, like the vindication of a just cause, or the love of one’s spouse, or the coming of the kingdom of God. Rather, covetousness is wrong because it involves the selfish desiring of something despite the fact that said something belongs to somebody else. You shall not covet … anything that is your neighbour’s. The implication, inescapably, is, “I would rather I had that good thing than you did.”

And that kind of attitude reveals not only a brazen flouting of the tenth commandment, but also – particularly when applied to abilities – a fundamental failure to live in accordance with 1 Corinthians 12:

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body … God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.”⁶

 

An example of an activity requiring input from both the eye and the hand.

The “I have no need of you” there can be doubly construed; on the one hand, it could easily mean, “I have no need of you because I don’t think that what you do is at all important;” or on the other, it could just as easily mean, “I have no need of you because I think what you do is very important, and as a result, I’d much rather do it myself, thanks very much.” Either way, it’s clearly not acceptable as far as God’s concerned. If the only reason I’m not coveting someone else’s abilities is because I’m disdaining them as unimpressive, that doesn’t testify to my selflessness but to my arrogance – which is really just selfishness in another guise. And if I am coveting, then I’m not submitting to God’s design for how the body of Christ – the community of believers, the Church with a capital C – is supposed to work. The section of 1 Corinthians I quoted above is sandwiched within its chapter between two other sections of very similar structure:

For to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.

And a little later:

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating, and various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret?

The questions are clearly rhetorical, because they were already answered in the negative in the first layer of the sandwich. God doesn’t give anyone a full set off all the abilities going; he apportions to each one individually as he wills. There are always going to be loads of things that I’m rubbish at and other people are really good at, and that’s very deliberate on God’s part. That’s how the body of Christ is supposed to look. And, like everything God ordains, that’s ultimately a very good thing.

Diversity of abilities within the Church means we can’t all be splendidly self-sufficient islands; it forces us to depend on one another. We have to generously help one another where we have the capacity to do so – bear one another’s burdens – and bow graciously out where someone can do a better job than we can – submit to one another.⁷ It’s that kind of interdependence that creates a home for real love and unity, which, I think it worth mentioning, was the subject of Jesus’ last prayer before he entered Gethsemane, so evidently something of a priority for him.⁸ Coveting others’ abilities, by contrast, represents, at its heart, a movement towards robbing them of their God-given role, and practically kicking them out of the body altogether. “I have no need of you.”

So what can I do the next time I find myself pulling a mixed-up chameleon and wishing I could add an ability I see someone else displaying to my own repertoire? The answer isn’t to try to persuade myself that that ability isn’t actually that great and so I don’t really want it after all. Rather, I can take the fact that I do (rightly) value the ability in question and redirect it towards praising God for the way he has designed the community of his people to work. I can thank God that he has given that person that gift, partly for the person’s own blessing and enjoyment (which, if I’m truly being loving towards this person, should be a cause close to my heart), but also (more significantly) so that he or she might use it for the benefit of the rest of the body – which includes me, of course. And I can also thank God that he has given me my own set of abilities, partly for my own blessing and enjoyment, but also (more significantly) so that I might use them for the benefit of the rest of the body. Indeed, the benefit of one’s fellow-believers is, unlike covetousness, a perfectly valid motivation for learning a new skill, though one should still bear in mind that it’s not any individual’s job to be the whole of (or indeed a disproportionately huge chunk of) the body.

As the mixed-up chameleon found out, trying to be everything at once is more burdensome than it is freeing, and hinders one from properly doing what one is actually already good at – be that catching flies or writing blog posts. God designed the community of believers so that none of us would be encumbered with an obligation to be everything at once, but so that we would all be able to benefit from the fruit of one another’s unique abilities, in which light there’s no need for covetousness. So instead of wishing we were everything at once, let’s strive to be what we are in the most God-honouring way possible, and make space for others to do the same.

Footnotes

¹ If not, this audiovisual rendering of the classic children’s book is as good a reminder as any: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4HI7q38VmQ.

² A talented and prolific guy – here’s his official website: http://www.eric-carle.com/home.html.

³ If I recall rightly, this video version is the very same one that sparked my fondness for the story as a child: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEqoJMNU2eo.

⁴ Have a look at the whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=exodus+20&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Here’s the music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE9tV1WGTgE.

⁶ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+12&version=ESVUK. Give the whole thing a read and keep it open – we’ll be coming back to other bits of it in a second.

⁷ The italicised expressions are taken from Galatians 2, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Galatians+6&version=ESVUK, and Ephesians 5, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians+5&version=ESVUK, respectively. I’ll let you track down the individual verse references for yourself.

⁸ As recorded in John 17: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+17&version=ESVUK.

How to Write Epic Hymns

Unfortunately, I was forced by the download rules on the computer on which I wrote this post to reuse an image from a previous one. Not totally unrelated, though, right?

There is a formula for writing great hymns.

 

That’s not to say that every great hymn ever sticks to said formula like glue, nor that any hymn which does stick to said formula like glue must automatically be great, but it certainly seems to me that an awful lot of very good ones follow a clearly identifiable pattern that goes something like this.

 

Verse One focusses on God’s transcendent qualities, perhaps including his eternal existence, some key features of his unchanging character, and his work in creation.

 

Verse Two focusses on the incarnation (that is, when the Son of God became a human being, Jesus).¹

 

Verse Three focusses on the cross, where Jesus sacrificed himself to pay the penalty for our wrongdoing so that we might be reconciled to God.

 

At some point in Verse Three or Four, there’s a bit about the resurrection, when Jesus was raised to everlasting life as the firstfruits of a new creation.

 

And Verse Four, predictably, focusses on that new creation to come when God’s kingdom will be fully established in total perfection.

 

It’s not hard to see why it’s a reliable recipe; all the key aspects of the gospel are covered in a nice logical order. All the hymn needs now is a theme to distinguish it, a common lens through which all its components may be viewed, and it’s ready to be enthusiastically belted out on a Sunday morning (or whenever else one might want to enthusiastically belt out an epic hymn). The formula isn’t totally rigid, of course: extra verses may be included here and there to introduce other themes or elaborate on present ones; equally, verses might be squashed together; and we haven’t yet considered the possibility of such a thing as a refrain. Still, many really great hymns conform to the formula at least to a certain extent.

 

And I would like to make it very clear here that I’m not complaining. The gospel never changes, so it’s perfectly predictable that our hymns should be rather, well, predictable. Much as hymns can of course deviate from the formula without deviating from sound doctrine, the formula is, at its heart, a good and secure outline of the gospel, and so it’s surely commendable for a hymn to follow it. We should not be bored of these truths. Christians have a horrible tendency to want to move beyond the gospel, to reach Level 2, to attain to some higher level of divine knowledge – but there is no moving beyond the gospel that doesn’t amount to moving outside it. The following is from the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the church at Colossae:

 

And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, [Jesus] has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.²

 

The gospel from which we must not shift if we are to be presented holy and blameless before God is the same one that has been proclaimed in all creation. It’s the same old story, every single time, and we are to continue steadfastly in it, not rewriting the ending or getting distracted by subplots. The gospel, unchanging, is nevertheless the only thing that stands any chance of changing us.

 

In which light, I’m a huge fan of the Epic Hymn Formula and its stubbornness in churning out the same old truths. And it’s not as if every hymn that follows the formula is exactly the same; each has its own unique perspective on the gospel it proclaims. Those common lenses I mentioned earlier give us new eyes to see the same reality and be blown away by it all over again.

 

I’m writing this rather pushed for time, so I can’t provide as extensive a list of examples as I would ideally have liked, but here are a few favourite formula-followers of mine just off the top of my head:

 

At the name of Jesus

Crown him with many crowns

Christ triumphant

From the squalor of a borrowed stable (Immanuel)

How great thou art

I cannot tell

In Christ alone

 

A very meagre list, certainly, so I’d be delighted to be informed of any of my lovely readers’ favourites. Hymnary.com is a good place to search for old hymns (on which the copyright has expired!) by the odd bits of lyrics you can remember.³

 

Footnotes

 

¹ The word ‘incarnation’ is from the Latin for ‘in flesh’, if you didn’t know.

 

² Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Colossians+1&version=ESVUK.

 

³ It also has details of tunes, author biographies, and multiple scores for lots of them and generally seems like a pretty great resource: http://www.hymnary.org/.