99+ Andy Crouch Quotes on Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power and Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling - Quotes.pub

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Because technology is devoted primarily to making our lives easier, it discourages us from disciplines, especially ones that involve disentangling ourselves from technology itself.

In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that the more you entertain children, the more bored they will get.

The biggest cultural mistake we can indulge in is to yearn for technological solutions to our deepest cultural problems.

We only get one life to live. Wouldn’t it be better spent enjoying and serving the world God made rather than a glowing screen?

Technology is in its proper place when it helps us bond with the real people we have been given to love. It’s out of its proper place when we end up bonding with people at a distance, like celebrities, whom we will never meet.

If progress is not the right word for buildings or poems, what is the right way to evaluate cultural change? I suggest integrity.

We are continually being nudged by our devices toward a set of choices. The question is whether those choices are leading us to the life we actually want. I want a life of conversation and friendship, not distraction and entertainment; but every day, many times a day, I’m nudged in the wrong direction. One key part of the art of living faithfully with technology is setting up better nudges for ourselves.

Brew coffee or tea, sit with a friend and ask them questions – questions just one step riskier than the last time you talked. As you listen, observe the flickers of sadness or hope that cross their face. Try to imagine what it must be like to live their story, suffer their losses, dream their dreams. Pray with them and dare to put into words their heart’s desires, and dare to ask God to grant them.

So here’s where we have to start if we are going to live as flourishing families in an age of easy everywhere: we are going to have to decide, together, that nothing is more important than becoming people of wisdom and courage. We are going to have to commit to make every major decision, and many small decisions, on the basis of these questions: Will this help me become less foolish and more wise? Will this help me become less fearful and more courageous?

The home is the place where worship of the true God starts: the place where we remember and recite God’s Word, and where we learn to respond to God with our heart, soul, strength, and – as Jesus added when he called this the greatest commandment – with our mind as well.

Leadership begins the moment you are more concerned about others’ flourishing than you are about your own.

In the Synaspismos we witness two strong leaders willing to submit to one another—to embrace the gifts the other brings and to join together, shields overlapping, in a shared mission. The icon is all about Peter and Paul, and it is also all about something much greater than Peter and Paul. Precisely because of their differences, both the differences we see portrayed and the differences we know about from the New Testament, the icon invites us to ponder what could bring two men together in this way. What—or who—would be powerful enough to draw them together in this greeting, to hold them together across all of their barely concealed discomfort?

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

It is a word for shared strength, comradeship and partnership—the sharing of power that enabled both Peter and Paul to fulfill their vocations as ambassadors of the gospel across the Roman Empire.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

And it is amazing how often the most trustworthy trustees are those who have personally experienced the worst that idolatry and injustice can do. There is good news for all those who have been thrown into the pit by the Nietzschean power plays of every human structure and system—God does not forget his image bearers even in the deepest and darkest prison. And there is hard news for those who seem like the children of privilege, the ones who are handed the robe and ring even before they deserve it; they too will be broken by the very institutions they thought they would rule, and will have to choose whether to forgive and serve them nonetheless, to seek destructive dominance, or to descend into a hell of their own disappointment. It might seem like it should not be this way. Surely institutional problems require institutional solutions. But this is not the witness of Scripture. Instead, over and over, both the most likely suspects and the most unlikely ones are called by God to become trustees. God works through the favorite son Joseph, and God works through the Canaanite prostitute Rahab. God calls Saul, the tall and dominant warrior, and God calls David, the youngest son keeping the sheep. Esther and Ruth, Nehemiah and Ezekiel, Hezekiah and Jeremiah—the story of the institutions of the world hinges not on institutions but on persons. It hinges on image bearers, and on their very personal responses to the injustice and idolatry that surround them, whether they become caught up in god playing or humbled in worship, corroded by cynicism or sustained by hope, bitter or forgiving. So the institutions of our time will be changed not by impersonal institutional forces; they will be changed by trustees, the image bearers who face their institutions’ failings, forgive them and lead toward a better way. One of them is named S. Kandaswamy. One of them could be you.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

I actually believe the deepest form of power is creation, and that when power takes the form of coercion and violence, that is actually a diminishment and distortion of what it was meant to be.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

All true cultural creativity happens at the edges of the horizons of the possible, so by definition our most culturally creative endeavors have a high risk of failure.

Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling Quotes

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.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

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).

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

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.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

King wrote. Silence is the underlords’ failure.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

if the work of creating consistently leaves us depressed or drained, it is likely that we have somehow missed the path.

Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling Quotes

I rarely feel such clear signs of fatigue and anxiety on days that are filled with travel, meetings and assignments—only when I stop to rest. Without sabbath, I would be dangerously ignorant of the true condition of my soul.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

Initially, all idols seem to deliver exactly this escape from mere goodness into transcendent greatness. Consider the weather. In our scientific age, amidst the technological achievements of modernity, we have lost much of our reverence for and sense of helpless dependence on the weather. But imagine the sense of mastery and awe that must have overwhelmed the first people who pounded out an exuberant and desperate dance, in hopes of cajoling the sky god into bringing rain, when they were rewarded by an unexpected cloudburst an hour or a day later. Or the sense of awed gratitude and newfound power when a libation poured out on the ground seemed to deliver an abundant harvest. There must have been some such moments—how else would the rituals have become credible?

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

it is extraordinary how few Christians make any concerted effort to keep the commandment of sabbath rest. 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.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

Unchecked power, driven by self-interest, scarcity, grandiosity and aggression, is deadly to God’s original fruitful purposes.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

Is the result of cooperation the seizing of power? Not so: cooperation mysteriously creates more power than there was before, so that the more we work together the more power we discover is available to us.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

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.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

The powerful have a hard time seeing their own power and its effects. We do not see when our exercise of power is cutting off life and possibility for others; we do not see the ways others are resisting or undermining our own power.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

What makes action meaningful? Above all, meaningful action participates in a story. It has a past and a future. Meaningful action does not just come from nowhere, and it does not just vanish in an instant—it takes place in the midst of a story that matters.

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

No story shows more clearly Jesus’ utter disregard of human privilege—disregard, not antipathy or distaste. He is swayed neither by Jairus’s prominence nor by the woman’s poverty, but by the faith and desperate need of each one. Jesus is not a strategic political calculator, currying favor with the local leaders; nor is he a revolutionary, ostentatiously undercutting the powerful. He is a restorer of daughters, known and unknown, socially central and socially marginal. And while he is indifferent to human power, he is so exquisitely aware of his own power to restore health (which is simply another way to say flourishing image bearing) that the slightest faithful brush with his cloak brings him to a halt, not content to have power flow anonymously and disconnectedly, searching out relationship with the ones who seek him.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

So finding our place in the world as culture makers requires us to pay attention to culture’s many dimensions. We will make something of the world in a particular ethnic tradition, in particular spheres, at particular scales. There is no such thing as “the Culture,” and any attempt to talk about “the Culture,” especially in terms of “transforming the Culture,” is misled and misleading. Real culture making, not to mention cultural transformation, begins with a decision about which cultural world—or, better, worlds—we will attempt to make something of.

Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling Quotes

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.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

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.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

To live fully, in these transitory lives on this fragile earth, in such a way that we somehow participate in the glory of God—that would be flourishing. And that is what we are meant to do.

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

If culture is to change, it will be because some new tangible (or audible or visible or olfactory) thing is presented to a wide enough public that it begins to reshape their world.

Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling Quotes

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.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

When we try to establish justice apart from worship of the true God, at best we will, as Jayakumar reminded me, simply replace one set of god players with another. What will never be addressed by these thin, secular conceptions of justice is the heart of the biblical understanding of justice: the restoration of the human capacity to bear the image in all its fullness.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

It is an almost precise inversion of Lord Acton’s observation: the more power we have over our children, the more we are willing to sacrifice for them. Love transfigures power. Absolute love transfigures absolute power. And power transfigured by love is the power that made and saves the world.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

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.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

was never bound by the narrow expectations of others. But when we examine Jesus’ changes of plans more closely, we discover an unmistakable pattern: Jesus’ changes of plans almost always took him in the opposite direction of his own privilege. The purpose of every one of Jesus’ improvisations was the restoration of image bearing in places where it had been lost. He exercised his power to interrupt in others’ interests, never his own.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

Lincoln’s terrifying words did not apply to the Civil War itself, by the grace of God: If God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

Nothing is gained and much is lost when a life spirals into idolatry—no matter how much creative image bearing may also be preserved by the mysterious workings of common grace. Had Jobs been able to turn from his more extreme forms of god playing, his life might have yielded much more, not less, lasting cultural fruit.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

To the extent that power is the result of idol making and idol playing, it will almost always distort our deepest relationships. That distortion does not necessarily have to take the form of divorce; for every family visibly broken by a powerful member’s incapacity to keep his promises, there is another where spouse and children know the equally cruel reality of unavailability and unreliability. As the funny but also sadly cynical T-shirt puts it, “Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

Hope for a life beyond this life, and a world of shalom beyond this world of injustice, is the greatest resource for the work of justice here and now. Christian hope for a world made new is not an alternative to doing justice—it is the most essential resource for it.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

One of power’s invisible perquisites is that others grant you deference without your having to ask for it.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

Paul’s letter to Philemon has never been fully satisfying to activists and abolitionists, nor to those who bear the burden of injustice. It seems too incremental, too slow to right systemic wrongs. But it is less slow than it is patient. Paul’s expectations of Philemon are indeed radical, but they are couched in the radical patience of love. Institutions, even image-breaking ones, are so deeply woven into our culture that they cannot be ripped out of the cultural fabric without doing serious damage. Only when broken, image-breaking institutions are carefully unwoven and replaced with the power of new imagination and new image-bearing relationships can they be fruitfully discarded. Perhaps this is why Paul’s letter, so radical in its expectations, ends with hospitality, friendship and grace. Only as guests and friends of the true Host, the one who is himself preparing a guest room for us, can we unmake our institutions at their worst and be ready to greet him joyfully and wholeheartedly at his own return.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

Most failures of image bearing have vastly greater consequences than a game won or lost. The scandalous truths about the Roman Catholic Church that burst into the open in the 2000s were not just about “overlord” priests idolatrously abusing young people, robbing them of their image-bearing dignity while playing a hideously exploitative parody of the God they were sworn to serve. There was also the role of “underlords” in the church hierarchy who passively enabled the abuse by inaction or inadequate action. Many of these institutional actors were nominally more powerful than those they malignly neglected to discipline—up to and including bishops, archbishops and cardinals—and they were certainly greater in number than the abusers. But they failed to use their power to curb idolatry and to protect the vulnerable. The outrage was not just what some did, but what many others did not do.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

Just as the only real antidote to the temptations of money is lavish generosity, so the only real antidote to the temptations of power is choosing to spend our power in the opposite of the way the world encourages us to spend it: not on getting closer to the sources of additional power or on securing our own round-the-clock sense of comfort and control, but spend it on getting closer to the relatively powerless.

today the United States imprisons twice as many people per capita as it did just thirty years ago, and (at nearly one person out of every hundred) more any other country in the world: 2.3 million Americans are “institutionalized” in this manner today, and the effects of their incarceration are both invisible and pervasive. Because of its disparate impact on ethnic minority communities in particular, the institution of incarceration has been called “the new Jim Crow”—seen most of all in the absence of young black men from the home as fathers and from the labor force as productive workers.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

Those who are preoccupied with status must constantly expend their energy on sorting out the status of those around them. But Jesus, completely unconcerned with his own rank or place in the pecking order, shows a corresponding lack of interest in associating with the “right sort” of people. He meets procurators and prostitutes, tax collectors and zealots, synagogue leaders and women with twelve years of disabling medical troubles, with precisely the same care and truthful attention. He never fails to honor the image of God in each of these daughters and sons; he never pays the slightest compliment to the exaggerated images and roles they play.

Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power Quotes

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