I have a predilection for thin theological books. I don't mind the substantial, weighty, 'need a desk to read them' kind of volumes. Some of the heavy weights are amongst my closest friends on the shelves. But there's a comforting and subversive satisfaction in having a three foot shelf packed with more than sixty books, each of which is worthy of more of our time and effort than many a weightier tome.
It would be fun to make a list of my dozen favourite thin theological books; thin in size and page numbers, not content. For now I want to introduce one of those slight and slim books that I'm so glad to have read and to own.
Just before that, it's worth reflecting on what it means to 'own' a book. You buy it and you possess it. That's the book as artefact. But then you read the book and you can never unread it. The words pass through your mind but some of them stick; ideas are awakened and the scenery of your inner world is ever so slightly, but now and then significantly, changed. In the process of reading, the reading person changes; in other words reading is a transformative process that enlivens the intellect, pushes the imagination, educates the conscience and ultimately shapes the character from which flows action and behaviour.
Books that open up new horizons, give birth to new ideas, question unexamined assumptions, stimulate imagination and persuade towards new discoveries of truth, such books do something crucial for our growth and inner health - they help us change our mind. Now that too is a telling phrase, 'changing your mind'. Any book that changes the way we think, provokes deeper thought, makes us see the world differently, is a gift that shoves us out of our cosy comfort zone into the cold, fresh daylight in which we see new things and are astonished at what we didn't know we didn't know. To change my mind is to see further, deeper, clearer; and in the light of that new insight the world is different, and such new discoveries compel me to revise my place and purpose in that world.
All of this, a thin book can accomplish.And Mcgill's is such a book. This is one of the most theologically perceptive books about power that I know. When power becomes demonic, that is, when power is about domination, exploitation, possession and life lived at the expense of others, the result in human life is violence, destructive conflict and systemic injustice. In short, suffering. Widespread, extreme and often avoidable suffering caused by the dominant will to power is the problem of our age, argues McGill. Now he was writing this in 1968, but 50 years down the line the book reads like a commentary on a world being racked by powerful systemic forces, power centred personalities and politicians, weakening of institutions that have sought to contain, restrain and reduce abuse of military and political power. McGill, before the phrase became theological currency was identifying the baleful, insinuating, pervasive realities of "structural sin", systemic, institutional, cultural influences which diminish freedoms, dominate and threaten human societies, and give rise to real evils, violence and consequent suffering.
His analysis of violence leads him to the unfashionable term 'demonism', which he believes is the spiritual reality of our day. Those pages exposing and exploring 'the demonic as the decisive form of evil'' are a potent antidote to those who would dismiss the those realities Paul described as 'principalities and powers', and as 'spiritual wickedness in high places'. This critique of evil has to be read in the age of Trump and Putin, the rhetoric of 'locked and loaded",denials of ecological crisis, fake news and media generated dread, Cambridge analytica and the harvesting of personal data as a weapon of persuasion. It is astonishingly prescient. At the centre of McGill's argument is a concept of power explained as a spectrum. "At opposing ends of the spectrum lie two powers - demonic power that is violent, destructive and dominative, and the power of God that is creative, totally open, self giving and expansive."
The power of God is understood by McGill, not in philosophical categories of omnipotence, hierarchy, imposition or dominance. The power of God is the power revealed in Jesus, who is the human embodiment of the inner life of the Triune God, eternity manifest in history. Service, not domination is God's modus operandi. The contrast between the power of evil as the power to kill, and the power of God as the power to give life could not be more stark.
The contrast between power as domination and power as the willingness to serve is a telling ultimatum to 21st Century post-postmodern cultures and peoples. Relinquishing power as influence over, power as domination of, power as possession of, or power as unquestioned right to self-assertion, is an approach radically at odds with the way the world is currently constructed. Such a concept of power, as service, is unlikely to catch on as the life aspiration of those who buy into a culture of possession, status, ambition and self-absorption in the big project of being me at all costs. But power is a reality in the world of human affairs, and here is Mcgill's approach in two sentences: "Because people today feel the impact of evil chiefly in terms of abusive power, they are asking about God chiefly in terms of his redemptive power. And in the churches they hear very little on this theme." (50)
That is where theology comes in. The victory of Christ is not power conquest, but suffering love. The crucifixion celebrates human power to kill; the resurrection demonstrates and celebrates God's power of life over death, the power of love over violence, and the power of self-giving to challenge self-will, self-interest and most of the other composite nouns qualified by that elusive reality of the self at the centre of each human's being.
This isn't a book to summarise. It needs to be read, slowly. Its construal of God as Triune interchange of giving and receiving takes time to register as the contradiction of all our human drivenness towards self-preservation and the success of project 'me'. No, it isn't arguing for self-negation, but for a recognition that we are each both givers and receivers, capable of being there for and with each other rather than against each other. Jesus has shown us who God is, how God expresses power, what love looks like when it takes on the principalities and powers.
I offer one quote from a book that is like this on nearly every page:
"Jesus alone is our true neighbour. He comes to us as a Samaritan might come to a Jew. On the surface he is simply not impressive enough to satisfy us. And yet he heals our deepest wounds and brings us the gift of eternal life. From the world's viewpoint, he comes in a broken and contemptible form, incapable of preserving even himself. He is not powerful in terms of his title and function...He is only powerful - but sumpremely powerful - in the life that he gives to men and women, healing their human sickness and opening to them the gates of paradise. He so fully restores them that they are enabled to become his servants, and in his name may be compassionate to others as he has been to them. He so heals them that by his power they too can go and do likewise...God himself has given us Jesus Christ as our neighbour." (110-111)
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