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

by Andy Crouch

Flourishing is not actually the property of an individual at all, no matter how able or disabled. It describes a community.

So emotional transparency can be meaningful risk—or it can be calculated manipulation. An already powerful person can use what seems like emotional honesty, even tears, to win followers, avoid confrontation or sidestep accountability.

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. We are not just born naked, we are born dependent, exposed in every conceivable way to the possibility of loss.

Indeed, as the scholar Walter Brueggemann pointed out many years ago, the way the original man in Genesis 2 recognizes the original woman as his suitable partner, after seeing so many other creatures that would never suffice, is with this outburst of poetry: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23). Bones—hard, rigid, strong. Flesh—soft, pliable, vulnerable. We image bearers are bone and flesh—strength and weakness, authority and vulnerability, together.

I have come to believe that the image of God is not just evident in our authority over creation—it is also evident in our vulnerability in the midst of creation. The psalm speaks of authority and vulnerability in the same breath—because this is what it means to bear the image of God.

In the end, this is what love longs to be: capable of meaningful action in the life of the beloved, so committed to the beloved that everything meaningful is at risk. If we want flourishing, this is what we will have to learn.

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 greatest challenge of success is the freedom it gives you to opt out of real risk and real authority.

The real temptation for most of us is not complete apathy but activities that simulate meaningful action and meaningful risk without actually asking much of us or transforming much in us.

Amidst safety the world has never before known, the greatest spiritual struggle many of us face is to be willing to take off our bubble wrap.

At the moment that you begin to use alcohol to manage your vulnerability in a social situation, you are heading up and to the left. At first, and up to a point, it will work wonders. A few drinks will take the edge off the sense of risk and exposure you felt when you walked in. They will give you a heightened sense of power and possibility. You will be living the intoxicating life of a minor god. But over time, as with all addictions (and all idols), the effect begins to wear off. A higher and higher dose is needed for the same effect. And gradually, the thing that once delivered authority without vulnerability begins to expose you to risk and rob you of authority. In the long run, unless you are delivered by a miracle of grace, you will find that the very thing that promised authority without vulnerability has betrayed you, handing you over to the depths of suffering—vulnerability without authority.

The church once enumerated seven deadly sins—lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. Most of them are ways of pursuing authority without vulnerability. Sex without commitment (lust), food without moderation (gluttony), goods without limit (greed), anger without compassion (wrath), and above all the pursuit of autonomous, godlike power (pride)—all these are forms of what Scripture calls, most comprehensively, idolatry, the use of created things to pursue godlike power without risk or limit. (Sloth, of course, is the deadly sin that corresponds to Withdrawing, the safety of risking nothing in the world; and envy may be the besetting sin of Suffering, the jealousy and bitterness of those who can see only their own vulnerability and others’ authority.) All these are just variations on the promises that accompanied the very first idol, the fruit proffered by the serpent in the Garden: “You will be like God”—unlimited authority—and, “You will not die”—none of that vulnerable creaturely dependence.

Our idols inevitably fail us, generally sooner rather than later. And as they begin to fail, we begin to grasp ever more violently for the control we thought they promised and we deserved. This is why the end result of life in this quadrant is exploitation—ripping from the world, and especially from those too weak to resist, the good things our idols promised but are failing to deliver.

I am not sure there is a “law of conservation of vulnerability” in the same strict sense, but it is still a general rule: vulnerability shed by one group of people is inevitably borne by others’ suffering.

The first things any idol takes from its worshipers are their relationships.

Indeed, one way to understand the pervasive theme of judgment and hell in the New Testament is that those who would have authority without vulnerability ultimately cannot be trusted with authority at all. In the end, the justice of God will abolish the authority of those who have purchased their power at the price of others’ flourishing, those who refuse to enter into relationship with the God who is authority and vulnerability together.

Leadership does not begin with a title or a position. It begins the moment you are concerned more about others’ flourishing than you are about your own. It begins when you start to ask how you might help create and sustain the conditions for others to increase their authority and vulnerability together.