Liberating Power vs. Alienating Power

Valentin Dedji1

My inspiration in writing this paper comes from two sources. One is the biblical story of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1-11). The other is a statement by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his book, The Social Contract: “The strongest is never strong enough to be always master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty” (Rousseau 1762).

First, I will explore the concept of power in the perspective of its Greek meaning. This may be understood as a dynamic force or authority, an empowering and liberating way of using someone’s prerogative vis a vis others within a social group, a local community or an institution. This is opposite to understanding power in a static, rigid or paralysing and dehumanising approach. I will question the abuse of power in a context of powerlessness. Second, I will focus on Jesus' strategy of peaceful resolution of conflicts in a crisis-ridden situation. Third, I will use Jean-Jaques Rousseau’s statement to point to the urgency of promoting an intelligible and responsible use of power that will prioritize respect of human dignity and facilitate accountability. Finally, I will propose a charter that will invite socio-political institutions, church institutions across denominations, and church leaders to become dynamic agents who will have the humility to draw lessons from how, in the presence of destructive and dehumanising forces, Jesus used his authority to challenge reckless ‘teachers of the Law’ and other members of institutional hierarchy and patriarchy in order to empower and restore human dignity in those who were brought to him. This will resolutely put all of us together in the right way of Christ in restoring a relation of trust and responsibility. Eventually, this may lead to the promotion of what I call justice conscious culture for the sake of peace in the world.

Revisiting Power in Contexts of Institutional Patriarchy and Hierarchy

Then everyone went home, but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the next morning he went back to the Temple. All the people gathered around him, and he sat down and began to teach them. The Teacher of the Law and the Pharisees brought in a woman who had been caught committing adultery, and they made her stand in front of them all. 'Teacher,' they said to Jesus, 'this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. In our Law, Moses commanded that such a woman must be stoned to death. Now, what do you say?' they said this to trap Jesus, so that they could accuse him. But he bent over and wrote on the ground with his finger. As they stood there asking him questions, he straightened himself up and said to them, 'whichever one of you has committed no sin may throw the first stone at her.' Then he bent over again and wrote on the ground. When they heard this, they all left one by one, the older ones first. Jesus was left alone with the woman still standing there. He straightened himself up and said to her, 'Where are they? Is there no one left to condemn you? 'No one, sir,' she answered. 'Well then,' Jesus said, 'I do not condemn you either. Go, but do not sin again.' (John 8:1-11)

Jesus' forgiving attitude toward the adulterous woman (John 8:5) shocked his questioners. He did not only forgive the sinner. What he really did was to challenge the double standard of morality that inflicted the death penalty on an adulterous woman while applying lesser sanctions to a man in the same situation. Unfortunately, in its own way, such a double standard is still present within most of our communities today. If we are to evaluate properly the relationship of Jesus to women in the gospels, we must bear in mind God's plan for human beings.

The first two chapters of Genesis give us two accounts of the creation of man and woman. The first belongs to the priestly tradition, the second to the Yahwist. The first account emphasises the fundamental equality of man and woman: “God created man in his image; in the divine imagine he created him; male and female he created them (Genesis 1:27). This implies that man and woman alike are created in the image of God and for God. Thus, humanity has two faces: male and female. Neither is one subordinated to the other for both look to God as equals. The second account, which presents woman as helper to man, emphasises complementarity rather than equality.

The Lord God said: 'It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a suitable partner for him.' So the Lord God cast a deep sleep on the man, and while he was asleep, he took out one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. The Lord God then built up into a woman the rib that he had taken from the man. When he brought her to the man, the man said: This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. (Genesis 2:18 and 21-23)

Despite this, we find in the Bible stories of incidents that occurred among the Jewish people and of experiences and reflections of individuals in search of God, which reflect a particular culture and age. In these incidents, male power and masculine superiority are taken for granted. Various books of the Bible reflect this prejudice. And even though we find in the Bible outstanding women who highlight values proper to women, these do not succeed in breaking down the prevailing masculine mentality of the Jewish people and of the entire world in that age.

Still today, the fact that all over the world thousands of women are victims of domestic violence due to the so-called male power is a big challenge to what the German philosopher Hannah Harendt has called 'the human condition'. More importantly, the misuse of power in the context of patriarchal system is a dangerous threat to social peace. For wherever violence reigns, there is a break of harmony and trust. There prevails an atmosphere of fear and bitterness. The worse consequence of this situation is the culture of silence that makes many vulnerable people (majority of whom are women and children) suffer silently.

The attitude of Jesus to women represented a real break with this distortion among his people and with the dominant categories of his time. His behaviour elicited reactions of surprise and even scandal among his contemporaries, including his own disciples. In John 8:1-11, Jesus' pardon to the adulterous woman expresses his rejection of a moral law that discriminates against women. If there is equal responsibility in sin, there ought to be an equal sanction. This explains the challenge of Jesus to the scribes and Pharisees and to all present: 'Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her' (John 8:7). When Jesus is at last alone with the woman, he used his authority to speak to the lady in such a way that will probably give a new direction to her life: 'Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on, do not sin any more' (John 8:11). One can easily imagine the impact of this incident and the hostility that Jesus awakened in those who saw this attach on the foundations of the social and religious order in which they lived and from which they benefited.

Giving Peace a Chance

Sadly, all over the world today (e.g. Burundi, Rwanda, Israel, Northern Ireland, Pakistan, Sudan, Zimbabwe) there are many zones of violent conflicts which arise from a wide range of socio-political crises where very often oppression, social injustice, abuse of power, dictatorship and tribalism are the main causes. But if the process of forgiveness and healing is to happen and to succeed, ultimately acknowledgement by the culprit is almost indispensable. Acknowledgement of the truth and of having wronged someone is important in getting to the root of the breach. Otherwise, failing to do so will only lead to what the prophet Jeremiah calls 'healing the hurt lightly' and crying, 'Peace, peace where there is no peace' (Jeremiah 6:14 and 8:11). That was what happened in the tragic history of Rwanda. In a vivid analogy, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said that the history of Rwanda was typical of a history of 'top dog' and 'underdog'. The top dog wanted to cling to its privileged position and the underdog strove to topple the top dog. When that happened, the new top dog engaged in an orgy of retribution to pay back the new underdog for all the pain and suffering it had caused when it was top dog. The new underdog fought like an enraged bull to topple the new top dog, storing in its memory all the pain it was enduring, forgetting that the new top dog was in its view only retaliating for all that it remembered it had suffered when the underdog had been its master. As rightly pointed out by Desmond Tutu, 'it was a sad history of reprisal provoking counter-reprisal.'3 As observed by the Brazilian theologian Rubem Alves, when one fears the fuure, 'one acts in order to prevent the future from happening'. This is what occurs in political arena when sections of society resort to violence due to anxiety over the possibility of change in national leadership.

That is why forgiving and being reconciled are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation expresses the awfulness, abuse, pain, degradation, and truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking but it is worthwhile because in the end there will be real healing from having dealt with the real situation. If the wrongdoer has come to the point of realising his wrong, then one hopes there will be remorse, or at least some contrition or sorrow for that wrong. This should lead him/her to confessing the wrong he has done and asking for forgiveness. This obviously requires a fair measure of humility, especially when the victim is someone in a group that one's community has despised, as was often the case in South Africa when the perpetrators were government agents.

The fascinating thing about Jesus' way of bringing about peace is that it aims pre-eminently at the healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships. There is no doubt that Jesus' strategy seeks to rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator, who should be given the opportunity to be reintegrated into the community he or she has injured by his or her offence. As explained by Desmond Tutu: “n the act of forgiveness we are declaring our faith in the future of a relationship and in the capacity of the wrongdoer to make a new beginning on a course that will be different from the one that caused us the wrong. We are saying here is a chance to make a new beginning. It is an act of faith that the wrongdoer can change.” According to Jesus we should be ready to do this not just once, not just seven times, but seventy times seven (Matt. 18:22).

Crafting Habits of Justice, Accountability and Respect for Human Dignity

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 'the strongest is never strong enough to be always master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty,5 is a clear indication of the ephemeral characteristics of power. The real strength of an institutional authority does not rest on its brutality or its ossified structures. Instead, power and authority become respectable entities when they are able to embody within their functional system a genuine respect for human dignity, a culture of accountability and justice. In the prevailing situations in many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America where corruption in all its forms is a source of revenue to few people at the expense of millions of men and women who are deprived of a minimum living standard, the fundamental question to be asked is: how can God's people express their anthropological dignity through their culture in continents where socio-political and economic structures do not allow the expression of their own humanity? I share the Cameroonian theologian Jean-Marc Ela's point of view that in a context of disintegrated political-economic structures, Christian identity will become a dignified condition in our local communities only when it aims pre-eminently at nurturing an adequate social transformation and justice.

Therefore, the gospel will serve healthy culture by enabling the grounding of a justice-conscious culture.6 As Reinhold Niebuhr views it, all societies are built around power, and whilst power is necessary to ensure justice, the same power can and does lead to injustice. The democratic balance of power is the best way of ensuring that justice is maintained in society. This is particularly valid for African societies. But the practice of justice cannot simply be a political programme with no significance for the lives of people in society. As pointed out by Andrian Hastings, 'the reconciliatory model is a unitary and unifying one'.7 In Christian praxis the unifying norm is the 'all in all' of Christ, from which no one is excluded. Reconciliation without justice is of course not reconciliation; likewise, justice without reconciliation is also not justice. True practice of justice involves loving, forgiving, and reconciled relationships in history. As we can see, this will involve a big responsibility from churches across all denominations at local, national and international levels.

To be more specific, the incongruity of the prevailing theological discourse and social realities in Africa, as Jean-Marc Ela expresses it, raises the question whether 'in a society that yearns for change and progress, for welfare and freedom, the Church ought to sit back and be content with nice big Sunday worship services and lively liturgies using native languages and native musical instruments'. Ela suggests that 'only in taking the building of the world seriously do we become ourselves really capable of speaking, living, and working with this indispensable transcendent horizon as our ultimate purview'.8 This is where our communities need 'the courage to hope'9 as Dr Sam Kobia, General Secretary of the WCC, has put it. Churches can contribute to national democratic transformation by developing local communities of participatory democracy. In the words of Jon Sobrino:

In the Church of the poor the age-old barriers between hierarchy and faithful, priests and workers, peasants and intellectuals have been broken down. They have been broken down not by a process of formal democratization in which all are made equal, but by the rise of solidarity in the form of 'bearing one another's burdens', being 'one' ecclesial body, and thus making the Church 'one'.10

Concluding Remarks

Inspired by Jesus' responsible and compassionate way of using his power in order to bring about peace in crisis-ridden situations, here is my approach to the redefinition and use of power in our churches and communities. The first step will be to foster or to craft habits of responsibility, accountability, and reconciliation in which victimisers and victims alike can have their personality healed, their dignity restored, and their humanity created anew. It is a perspective in which 'a memory can now give life to the future rather than dwelling on the undeniable hurts of the past'.11 While I applaud the claims of many peoples for justice, particularly in African societies where violence and lie have largely legitimated wrongdoing as the rule of the day, I have challenged the view that retributive justice can be the indispensable and inevitable principle.12 My other concern has been to contribute to an alternative theological reflection on ways and means to break through our respective societies' existential brokenness whereby, according to a so-called 'natural law' some groups of peeople are 'predestined' to be 'rulers' and others 'vassals'. Historical circumstances have made some 'oppressors' and others 'oppressed', some are 'victims' while others are 'victimisers'. As a result, 'the musical harmony of God's self-giving communion'13 is transmuted into a cacophony of voices competing with one another for access to power, material resources, and a self-validating identity. As Gregory Jones poignantly puts it, 'within this cacophony, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern the legitimate claims of those who have been and continue to be denied access to power, material resources, and selves.'14 Caught in this vicious circle, many people throughout the world are now the heirs of histories and habits of mutual destruction that make it difficult, if not impossible, to break out of the cycles of violence and counter-violence, of demising and being diminished. The positions of 'victimiser' and 'victim', 'oppressor' and 'oppressed' become entrenched, and both moral anesthesia and obsessive guilt make it virtually impossible to break the cycles whereby people diminish and destroy one another, themselves, and creation, Here and now, more than ever, church and political leaders as well as ordinary citizens in our societies need to take seriously Jesus' compassionate and liberating words: 'I do not condemn you either. Go, but do not sin again' (John 8:11).

Bibliography

Dedji, Valentin, Reconstruction and Renewal in African Christian Theology (Nairobi: Acton Publishers, 2003).
Ela, Jean-Marc, African Cry (New York: Orbis Books, 1986).
Gutierrez, Gustavo, The God of Life (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1991).
Hastings Adrian, African Catholicism: Essays in discovery (London: SCM Press, 1990).
Hastings, Adrian, The Theology of a Protestant Catholic (London: SCM Press, 1989).
Jones, Gregory, Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis (Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1995).
Kobia, Samuel, The Courage to Hope (Acton Publishers, Nairobi: 2003).
Sobrino, Jon, The Church and the Poor (SCM Press, London: 1981).
Tutu, Desmond, No Future Without Forgiveness (Rider, London: 1999).

NOTES:

1 Rev. Dr. Valentin Dedji is an ordained minister from Africa and a lecturer in missiology currently based in the United Kingdom.
2 Gustavo Gutierrez, The God of Life (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1991), p. 167.
3 Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (London: Rider, 1999), p. 208.
4 Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, p. 220.
5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contrast
6 Cf. Adrian Hastings, African Catholicism: Essays in Discovery, p. 35.
7 Andrian Hastings, The Theology of a Protestant Catholic, p. 110.
8 Jean-Marc Ela, African Cry, pp. 8 and 88.
9 Samuel Kobia, The Courage to Hope (Nairobi: Acton Publishers, 2003).
10 Jon Sobrino, The Church and the Poor (London: SCM Press, 1981), p. 103.
11 The expression is from Robert Schreiter, 'Reconciliation', p. 380.
12 I have discussed these issues in full details in my book, Reconstruction and Renewal in African Christian Theology (Nairobi: Acton Publishers, 2003).
13 See Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis (Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1995), p. 114.
14 Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness, p. 115.