Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk and True Flourishing

by Andy Crouch

Here’s the paradox: flourishing comes from being both strong and weak. Flourishing comes from being both strong and weak. Flourishing requires us to embrace both authority and vulnerability, both capacity and frailty—even, at least in this broken world, both life and death.

In all these cases, what we need is not a linear “or” but a two-dimensional “and” that presses us to see the surprising connections between two things we thought we had to choose between—and perhaps even to discover that having the fullness of one requires that we have the fullness of the other.

Perhaps most importantly of all, true authority is always given. The capacity for meaningful action is not something we possess on our own. It

No other species has such a clear sense of responsibility for other species—what Christian theology calls dominion, the capacity and responsibility to act on behalf of the flourishing of the rest of creation.

And it is good. The sorrow of the whole human story is not that we have authority, it is the way we have misused and neglected authority. Our drive for authority—our sense of frustration when we are denied it or our sense of grief when we lose it—comes from its fundamental goodness.

The way I will use the word vulnerability in this book is a bit different from its usage in America today, where it is often limited to personal and emotional transparency.

The vulnerability that leads to flourishing requires risk, which is the possibility of loss—the chance that when we act, we will lose something we value.

True vulnerability involves risking something of real and even irreplaceable value.

So emotional transparency can be meaningful risk—or it can be calculated manipulation.

The unsettling truth is that just as human beings have more authority than any other creature, we also have more vulnerability than any other creature.

Authority, the capacity for meaningful action, has many sources.

Ultimately, suffering—vulnerability without authority—is the last word of every human life, no matter how privileged or powerful. We will end our days, one way or another, radically vulnerable to others, only able to hope that they will honor our diminishment and departure with care and dignity. The authority we carefully store up for ourselves will evaporate slowly or quickly, over the span of decades—or over brunch.

The most painful path to the quadrant called Suffering is the human choice, at the very origins of the species, to pursue Exploiting—to seek authority without vulnerability, godlike power without God-like character. We are vulnerable without authority because our first parents sought authority without vulnerability—and because their fallen children seek it still.

the vulnerabilities of our teenage years long after those years are gone, she lives with that vulnerability every day.

This is the reality of the globalized Internet world, in which the depredations of a few, the pornographers and exploiters who seek power without vulnerability (Exploiting), are foisted on those with no alternative (Suffering) in order to allow the privileged to live in ignorant comfort (Withdrawing). It’s a world in which poverty of spirit is bought at near-poverty wages. The flourishing of a few powerful companies—and we who use their services—is a mirage made possible only if you avert your eyes from the vulnerability they outsource to others.

The consequences of our failure to fully bear the divine image fall most heavily on those who live in this quadrant with no prospect of escape—the individuals and communities who exist in a state of continual vulnerability.