The Power of Weakness: Rethinking God & Authority

Listen to the full podcast episode on this topic.

Last week, I began by talking about power. I quoted Steven Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, who recently described a worldview in which the world is fundamentally governed by power, strength, and force rather than international norms or diplomacy. The basic idea is simple: If you're the biggest and strongest, you get to decide what happens. 

But this ideology of dominance is hardly new. It was alive and well in the ancient world, too. In fact, I think much of what we find in the Gospels is a direct reaction against it. 

Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor,” and “Blessed are the meek.” He says the first will be last and the last will be first. The humble will be exalted, and the exalted will be humbled. 

Mary sings something similar in the Magnificat:

“He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the mighty from their thrones. He has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” 

And then there's the basic story of Jesus himself. 

A peasant nobody from the backwaters of the Roman Empire is presented as the Son of God. He is born into poverty and dies as a criminal, humiliated and crucified by the political and religious powers of his day. 

And yet, in the Christian story, this crucified peasant is ultimately raised and glorified. 

What are we supposed to make of that?

A Different Kind of Power

The people living in Jesus' world had a pretty clear understanding of how power worked. The strong ruled the weak. The wealthy ruled the poor. Rome ruled everyone else. 

And many people understood this as more than simply the way things happened to be. It was understood as part of the divine order of things. The gods were powerful, therefore the powerful ruled. 

Then Jesus comes along and essentially says: No. That's not how God works. 

That's how the kingdoms of this world work. That's how Rome works. That's how corrupt religious and political systems work. 

But that's not how the kingdom of God works. 

Jesus presents a radically different vision of reality, one in which the poor and powerless are lifted up, the hungry are fed, the oppressed are liberated, the stranger is welcomed, and love, compassion, mercy, equity, and justice become the defining characteristics of God's kingdom. 

To his contemporaries, this sounded foolish. Impossible, even. 

That's why Paul's words in 1 Corinthians are so important: 

“The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.” 

Paul isn't simply saying that God is so incredibly powerful that even God's weakest moment is still stronger than anything we humans can manage. 

He's making a much more radical claim. 

God's definition of power is fundamentally different from ours.

When Power Is Actually Weakness

Think about a person who uses physical strength to control or hurt another person. 

Yes, they may technically have more physical power. But what we recognize in that behavior is actually profound weakness. It can come from insecurity, a lack of self-control, fear, or unresolved trauma. 

The ability to overpower someone isn't necessarily evidence of strength. 

Jesus' crucifixion makes a similar point. 

The political and religious authorities of his day were able to arrest him, humiliate him, torture him, and kill him. From the world's perspective, Jesus lost. 

But the cross exposes something about the people who wielded that power. Their supposed strength depended on their ability to control and destroy. 

Jesus' refusal to respond to violence with more violence reveals another kind of power entirely. 

Humility. Self-sacrifice. Love. Courage. Solidarity with the oppressed. 

These things look weak according to the world's definition of strength. 

But Jesus suggests they are actually the deepest form of strength.

The Kingdom Isn't Rome With Jesus in Charge

There's another important distinction here. 

I don't think Jesus came simply to flip the hierarchy upside down. 

The kingdom of God isn't a world where the oppressed eventually become the oppressors and the powerless eventually get to exploit the powerful. 

That's just Rome with different people sitting on the throne. 

Jesus isn't saying, “One day you'll have the power, and then you can do to them what they've done to you.” 

He's offering something much more radical. 

The kingdom of God shatters the entire master-slave dynamic. 

It doesn't simply change who is on top. It changes our understanding of what being “on top” means in the first place. 

This is one reason I find the concept of deconstruction so helpful. 

The goal of deconstruction isn't to leave one fundamentalism only to find another one. It's not about abandoning evangelicalism so that we can find a new religion and become just as rigid and dogmatic about that religion. 

It's about changing our entire relationship to belief. 

And I think something similar happens in Jesus' teachings about power. 

Jesus doesn't simply redistribute power. 

He redefines it.

Strong Theology and Weak Theology

Philosopher and theologian John Caputo has helped me think about this through the concepts of strong theology and weak theology. 

Strong theology imagines God primarily through the categories of worldly power: authority, control, certainty, coercion, hierarchy, and force. 

Weak theology takes seriously the possibility that God's power looks nothing like the power we see exercised by the kingdoms of this world. 

You can see the contrast in the way we understand the kingdom of God. 

Strong theology might imagine God returning to earth in overwhelming power, destroying the rulers and authorities of the world, judging the wicked, and rewarding the righteous. 

You can find versions of that vision in Scripture, and the early church certainly believed in a coming kingdom of God that would bring an end to unjust rulers and systems. 

But there's another way of understanding God's kingdom. 

Perhaps the kingdom is revealed and embodied wherever we see love, compassion, humility, mercy, justice, liberation, welcome, and care for the vulnerable. 

Strong theology says, “We have the answers. We have the one right understanding of God. And if you disagree with us, you're not merely disagreeing with us. You're disagreeing with God.” 

Weak theology begins somewhere else. 

It says that religion is a human construction. That no single tradition has a monopoly on God. That God can be encountered across cultures, religions, and human experiences. 

Strong theology treats the Bible as a perfect, inerrant word from God. 

Weak theology can see the Bible as a complicated collection of human writings: myths, metaphors, legends, folk tales, parables, poems, histories, and wisdom literature. Those aren't weaknesses to apologize for. They can be precisely what makes Scripture spiritually rich. 

Strong theology tends toward hierarchy and control. 

Weak theology emphasizes equality, boundaries, personal autonomy, and the dignity of every person. 

And this is why I think strong theology can become a kind of power grab. 

When we claim that our understanding comes directly from the ultimate authority in the universe, we can use God's authority to legitimize our own authority. 

It's human power projected onto God. 

And it's very difficult to build a cult around a God who isn't interested in controlling people.

The Problem of an All-Powerful God

This critique of strong theology also extends to the idea of God as an all-powerful supernatural being who intervenes in the world according to our expectations. 

I see the problem with this every week in my work as a hospice chaplain. 

I meet people whose loved ones are dying terrible deaths. I meet people experiencing unimaginable grief and emotional distress. And sometimes their suffering is compounded by the belief that an all-powerful God should have prevented it. 

They wonder: 

Where is God? 

If God could have stopped this and didn't, what does that say about God? 

We see the same problem when someone survives a terrible accident and says, “God saved me.” 

It may be a deeply meaningful statement for that person. But what does it mean for the family whose loved one didn't survive? 

Was God simply more interested in saving one person than another? 

Did God love the survivor more? 

That doesn't sound like good news to me. 

Now, I want to be careful here. Some people genuinely need a strong belief in a powerful God to survive. 

Some people are doing theology for survival. Their faith may be what keeps them from despair. 

I don't want to take that away from anyone. 

But I do wonder why so many of us were taught that this was the only way to understand God in the first place. 

I think there are healthier ways to understand God.

Maybe We Were Meant to Be Mystics

I've come to believe that the church should have taught us to be more like mystics than traditional theists.

Mysticism can sound weak to people who have been taught that God is supposed to be a powerful being somewhere “up there,” controlling the universe. 

But the mystical understanding of God isn't really about a supernatural being sitting on a throne in the sky. 

God is more like the depth dimension of reality itself. The sacred presence in which we live and move and have our being. The love that connects us. The mystery beneath and within everything. 

That sounds less powerful because it doesn't give us a God we can put in charge of everything. 

But maybe that's the point. 

Maybe the God revealed in Jesus isn't interested in being another Caesar. 

Maybe God isn't trying to dominate us. 

Maybe God is inviting us into a different way of being human.

The God I Can Believe In

I grew up Pentecostal. I grew up believing in an almighty, all-powerful God. I believed in divine healing, exorcisms, supernatural intervention, and all the rest. 

And I've come a long way since then. 

I'm increasingly interested in the God revealed through weakness rather than domination. 

For me, the deeper meaning of the crucified and deified peasant from Bethlehem is found in his radical humility, radical love, and radical selflessness. 

It's found in his insistence that the divine and the sacred can be encountered in ourselves, in one another, and in the ordinary fabric of our mortal lives. 

The cross tells us that God doesn't need to overpower the world in order to transform it. 

Perhaps God's power looks less like domination and more like love. 

Less like control and more like compassion. 

Less like certainty and more like wonder. 

Less like hierarchy and more like solidarity. 

And perhaps what the world calls weakness is precisely where we discover the strength of God. 

I don't find strong gods compelling anymore. 

For me, the so-called “weak and foolish” God revealed in Jesus is the only God worth believing in.