Playing God Quotes

“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

“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

“There is perhaps no single thing that could better help us recover Jesus’ lordship in our frantic, power-hungry world than to allow him to be Lord of our rest as well as our work. The challenge is disarmingly simple: one day a week, not to do anything that we know to be work.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“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

“Every idol makes two simple and extravagant promises. “You shall not surely die.” “You shall be like God.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“Over and over in the Gospels, Jesus interrupts his agenda for those who have nothing to offer him but need everything from him.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“The Christian hope is not for a gradually improving world any more than it is for a fountain of youth. But Christian hope overcomes the forces of despair and decay in the midst of this world, and provides foretastes of the coming kingdom where anyone who will receive the Lamb’s sacrifice will be raised to life, and where the glory and honor of the nations will be presented as offerings to the King of kings.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“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

“Power at its worst is the unmaker of humanity—breeding inhumanity in the hearts of those who wield power, denying and denouncing the humanity of the ones who suffer under power. This is the power exercised by the money lender, by the police who ignore or protect him, by the officials who would rather not confront him. This power ultimately will put everything around it to death rather than share abundant life with another. It is also the power of feigned or forced ignorance, the power of complacency and self-satisfaction with our small fiefdoms of comfort. Power, the truest servant of love, can also be its most implacable enemy.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“I am also practicing cello to wean myself from power and accomplishment, to place myself back in the posture of a learner, cultivator, and creator. To become a bit like a child. To detoxify from the too-ready recognition and privilege that accompany even the most modest forms of success, to become available again for something surprising and new. Just as children flourish by growing into adults, so adults flourish by cultivating childlikeness, avoiding the spiritual hardening of the arteries that comes with competence and experience.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“Evangelism is not an end in itself. It is the means to an end: restoring the image bearers’ capacity for relationship and worship, where the true Creator God is named, known and blessed.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“power is nothing—worse than nothing—without love.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“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

“Making room for gleaning limits and disciplines our daily exercise of power. Any of us who possesses any significant power should ask each day what we might leave undone that day for the sake of others’ creativity. But on a weekly basis we are commanded not just to leave margins around our exercise of power but to withdraw from it altogether. In the practice of sabbath, as of making room for gleaning, we once again play in the footsteps of the Creator God, whose work was not without rest and within whose sabbath all the rest of the story has unfolded.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“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

“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

“I’ve concluded there are four chapters missing from the working Bibles of all too many Christians, and these missing chapters are not some obscure ceremonial texts or dusty corners of the royal chronicles. Instead, they are the very bookends of Scripture: the first two chapters of Genesis and the last two chapters of Revelation. And to miss these chapters—the first two about the creation, the second two about the new creation—is to miss the whole point of the biblical story. When these chapters drop out of our functional Bibles, our understanding of culture, power and salvation itself is badly weakened.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“Poverty is the absence of linkages, the absence of connections with others,”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“The only biblical prosperity gospel is a posterity gospel—the promise that generation after generation will know the goodness of God through the properly stewarded abundance of God’s world.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“A sabbathless life ends up with neither true work nor true rest, but with frantic and ineffective activity punctuated by couch-potato lethargy.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“How many times have I been put at the front of the line without even knowing there was a line? How many times have I walked through a door that opened, invisibly and silently, for me, but slammed shut for others? How many lines have I cut in a life of privilege?”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“The answer may lie in something we do not always fully appreciate about the crucifixion of Jesus: just how institutional it was. The central institutions of Jesus’ world—the Roman occupying army and its procurator, the Romans’ client king Herod, and the religious establishment led by the Jerusalem Sanhedrin and its high priest—all play pivotal roles in the trials that lead to Jesus’ condemnation. And in doing so all of them are revealed to be deeply corrupt.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“Many evangelical tellings of the biblical story, especially those designed to deliver an evangelistic message, effectively began with Genesis 3: the fall of humanity. And they ended with Revelation 20: the casting of Satan and all his works into the lake of fire. Understood this way, the gospel runs an abbreviated gamut from original sin to final judgment. The original good creation and the glorious new creation are afterthoughts when they are mentioned at all.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“no man is the slave either of another man or of sin”: Augustine, City of God 19.15, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 943.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“At its worst, privilege is blindness: Amid the vast literature on race and privilege, one especially useful book from a Christian perspective for those from the dominant culture is Paula Harris and Doug Schaupp, Being White: Finding Our Place in a Multiethnic World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004).”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“What we do with our power is ultimately a sure guide to what we will do with the God who claims the power to raise the dead. Either we will grip ever more tightly to our own power in fear of its disappearance, or we will become bolder and bolder in our use of our power to prepare for its ultimate end: the restoration of the world’s shalom by the world’s power-yielding, powerful Creator.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“The church exists to help us put to death our unholy addiction to playing god, to die to our selves and rise to the exercise of true selfhood, “having nothing, and yet possessing everything” (2 Corinthians 6:10). It exists to make possible for our stewardship of power the blessing Galadriel offers to Gimli in The Fellowship of the Ring, even as it echoes her stark refusal to make any absolute promise: “I do not foretell, for all foretelling is now vain: on the one hand lies darkness, and on the other only hope. But if hope should not fail, then I say to you, Gimli son of Glóin, that your hands shall flow with gold, and yet over you gold shall have no dominion.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“the whole reason for John’s Revelation is to encourage the churches strewn around the rim of the Mediterranean to lift up their eyes from the imperial power of Rome and every earthly Babylon. John is commissioned to bring these churches a vision of ultimate reality, in all its glory and justice, so that they can live faithfully, candles set in lampstands in a dimly lit world.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“We have somehow twisted Jesus’ pithy rebuke of the Pharisees, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27) from a warning against legalism into a license for neglect. We seem to forget that in the very next breath Jesus asserts, “so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath” (v. 28), thus asserting his lordship over—not exemption from or indifference to—this very good gift from God to his image bearers. There is perhaps no single thing that could better help us recover Jesus’ lordship in our frantic, power-hungry world than to allow him to be Lord of our rest as well as our work. The challenge is disarmingly simple: one day a week, not to do anything that we know to be work.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

“What kind of margins should be left at the edges of modern economic sectors so that the unemployed can still do meaningful work, and the poor have opportunities to provide for their own families rather than standing in line waiting for others’ generosity? In the restaurant and grocery sector, with their close links to agriculture, for-profit companies and not-for-profit organizations have partnered to ensure that the abundant leftovers of modern food service become available for the clients of food banks—though these efforts could be much improved by creating opportunities for the dignity of harvest rather than the passivity of handouts. But the practice of margins and gleaning has more than just an economic application. It applies wherever there are dramatic disparities in power. Precisely because our power is the result of genuine image bearing, a genuine human calling to have dominion over the world in God’s name, the human hunger for power is insatiable. We seek greater opportunities to use our gifts for a good reason: we are meant for far more. It is not wrong to want to “expand our territory” (in the words of the Old Testament figure named Jabez). But the more our territory expands, the more we must embrace the disciplines that make room on the margins for others to also exercise their calling to image bearing.”
― Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power