by Andy Crouch
Without a doubt, this is the greatest paradox of flourishing: it is only found on the other side of suffering—specifically, our willingness to actively embrace suffering. The marriage of authority and vulnerability, which is our glad destiny as image bearers, is only possible if we are willing to bear vulnerability without authority.
Our mission in the world is to help individuals and whole communities—ultimately, all humanity—move up and to the right. But to do so, especially to set free those who have suffered the most from idolatry, addiction, injustice and tyranny, requires us to go where no one wants to go: voluntary exposure to pain and loss.
Why is this necessary? Because of the extraordinary grip of idols over our world.
The idols are all the forces that whisper the promises of control, invulnerable power and independence—and then, having seduced us with those promises, enslave us to their demands and blind us with their distorted view of the world. We have been so completely conquered by idols’ lies—we are so enslaved to their domination—that we cannot truly comprehend, let alone attain, a life that is as exposed to meaningful risk as it is capable of meaningful action.
In a healthy world, every increase in authority, every move upward, would be matched by an increase in risk, a move to the right. This is the pattern that would keep us dependent on God and one another, empowering others rather than hoarding our power, and discovering new dimensions of flourishing. But in the world as we know it, acts of authority frequently insulate us from risk rather than opening us up to it. Something is warped in the grain of the universe, something that prevents us from turning authority into flourishing—we are bent in the direction of exploitation, privilege and safety. Such is the power of the lies that have insinuated themselves into the human story from the very beginning.
All of us are afflicted by the forces of idolatry and injustice, but when we take responsibility for others’ flourishing we become even more exposed to the power of these forces. Even when leaders do bear real vulnerability, as we saw in the last chapter, it is necessarily hidden from others much of the time. Even when—perhaps especially when—leaders are at their most vulnerable, the rest of us persist in seeing them as invulnerable. We want to see them that way—we need to see them that way, lest we face the true reality of our own vulnerability. No matter how much leaders pursue integrity and flourishing, the forces preventing their true vulnerability from being seen are deep and powerful. Indeed, it is not too strong to say that those forces are demonic. Every leader and every community, whether we like it or not, is implicated in the cosmic rebellion that denies that vulnerability leads to flourishing.
What could truly break the power of that rebellion? If someone were to dramatically empty himself of authority, voluntarily give up the capacity for meaningful action, be handed over to the most exploitative forces in our cosmos, and go to the land of the dead, the realm of those who have lost all capacity for action—and if that same person were to return, rescued, fully alive, indeed with far more authority than we had ever seen or imagined—such a complete sacrifice, and victory, might conclusively unmask the lie that is at the heart of all exploitation.
In the wake of such a sacrifice and such a triumph, human beings might be set free from their fantasies of authority without vulnerability. They would see with their own eyes, and touch with their hands, the evidence that God’s power is greater even than death—they would know that nothing, and no one, can ever be ultimately lost when God acts to rescue and restore. Even very ordinary people who witnessed such an emptying, reversal and vindication might find themselves with authority no one could imagine they could ever have possessed, with a boldness to risk that was unprecedented even in their own histories. They might find themselves swept into the very courtyards, courts and courtrooms where the world’s idols hold sway, brought into the presence of the most powerful representatives of the whole cosmic system of exploitation, conducting themselves with utter authority and serenity. They might become the agents of a gradual but inexorable overthrow of the idols and their lies, even when those idols did their best to do their worst, consigning these representatives of true flourishing to torture and death.
Such people might begin to turn the world upside down.
King’s Cross
There is an ancient phrase in the Apostles’ Creed that is odd enough that some Christians, and some churches, omit it altogether: descendit ad inferos, “he descended to the dead” or more vividly, “he descended into hell.” It recalls the Hebrew idea of Sheol, the country of the dead. Early on, Christians came to believe that on Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter, Christ somehow journeyed to that realm to set free the “spirits in prison” (1 Peter 3:19), extending the benefits of his resurrection to those who had lived and died long before. The Orthodox have an icon called the Harrowing of Hell that shows Jesus, triumphant over death, grasping the arms of Adam and Eve—in most versions of the icon they look rather startled—and lifting them out of their graves.
Whatever exactly took place on Holy Saturday, that most solemn of sabbaths, the day itself is as crucial to the full truth of Jesus’ lordship as Good Friday and Easter Sunday. There is a gap—on that first Saturday, it would have felt more like a chasm—between Jesus’ death and his resurrection. Two nights pass without any apparent hope. His body lies cold in the tomb; his friends shiver in their total exposure to vulnerability. Jesus drains the cup of wrath to its dregs. He does not just take one taste of death, spit it out and fly up to heaven. He descends to the dead, and there, for all that his disciples can see or know from Friday to Sunday, he stays.
There is something deep in the human heart that knows that the last enemy to be conquered is death. Death is the last enemy not just because it takes life but because the fear of death prevents real life. The fear of loss has robbed our world of more life and more flourishing than any actual loss we could ever suffer.
But death is not just a mirage. Loss is real, the risk of loss is real, and vulnerability is real. Those who try to wish away loss, to promise action without risk and life without vulnerability, participate themselves in the very destructive system that ensures suffering, loss and death. Only those who have faced loss, who have drunk from the cup of undiluted vulnerability—and who have been rescued by a power infinitely beyond their own at the depths of their greatest need—can offer hope stronger than the idol’s word of fear.
The descent to the dead finds its way into the myths that shape our culture—and, probably, every culture. In our lighter entertainment, we may settle for heroes who only seem to die—no movie is complete without the penultimate moment of despair when it seems that all is lost, followed by the inevitable though surprising reversal that leads to victory. But our most compelling stories—the archetypal tales that shape our deepest hopes and fears—recognize that mere peril is not enough for real heroism. Not until someone has actually sacrificed everything, drained the cup and returned to tell the tale, can we believe that real victory has been won.
J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, so lighthearted in its early books, takes its hero in the climax of the sixth book to a cave with his beloved mentor Albus Dumbledore, where Harry must force Dumbledore to drink ten times from a poisoned goblet. Then they ascend to the parapet of Hogwarts, where Dumbledore commands his own murder in order to save the life, and very possibly the soul, of one of the books’ most despicable characters. In the seventh book it is Harry himself who must give himself up to death. On the other side of that sacrifice he encounters Dumbledore again in an otherworldly version of the train station named King’s Cross. The most beloved children’s books of our time—or perhaps any time—are unflinching in their understanding that true happy endings are won only at the greatest cost and that no king is truly a king without a cross.
True happy endings are won only at the greatest cost. No king is truly a king without a cross.
So the phrase descendit ad inferos not only says something important about the
extent of Jesus’ redemptive suffering—how deeply he participated in human loss, how far his saving power extends—but also about the nature of Christlike life and leadership. Only those who have descended to the dead can be fully trusted to lead—because only they can truly declare vanquished the fear that animates all idolatry and exploitation.
How to Descend
“It was the spring semester of the academic year, and I was in trouble.” Those were the opening words of President Philip Ryken’s convocation address at Wheaton College on August 27, 2014—the first chapel service of the fall. Ryken was not referring to a time of difficulty from some distant spring semester during his own student years. Instead, in an address titled, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” he described his descent into a deep depression just a few months before, to the point where “I wondered if I had the will to live.”
Convocation at Wheaton is a formal affair, and Ryken wore the academic robes that signaled his academic training and his office—the signs of authority. Like the Presbyterian pastor that he is, he read a thoughtfully composed address from a manuscript. But the content of his address was the raw experience of someone who has entered into the darkest night of the soul, only emerging thanks to the persistent love of family and friends and the grace of God. “Now that I’m giving this address,” he joked, “maybe I should title it ‘Everybody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.’”
For any of us, let alone a college president, to speak so candidly about our darkest moments would be a considerable risk. And yet in the months after that address, every time I spoke with a member of the Wheaton community about themes of healthy leadership and authority, they brought up Ryken’s unforced honesty. It had made him a different, better kind of leader—and it had made the college a different, better kind of community.
Nineteen million people have viewed the TEDx Houston talk that made Brené Brown a household name (at least in households that watch TED talks). It begins engagingly enough, with Brown narrating how her research for a PhD in social work began to focus on the question of why some people are so “whole-hearted” even in the face of great adversity—able to sustain a sense of love and belonging. But ten minutes in the talk takes a remarkable turn, as Brown describes the way she began to personally pursue the kind of vulnerability she was discovering in her healthiest subjects. Suddenly we are hearing not just wise words from an experienced researcher, but the raw and wry confession of a fellow human being. “The definition of research is to control and predict—and now my mission to control and predict had turned up the answer that the way to live is with vulnerability and to stop controlling and predicting,” she told the audience. “This led to a little breakdown—I call it a breakdown; my therapist calls it a spiritual awakening.”
The outpouring of admiration and affection that has followed Brown’s talk is a sign of what so many people are hungry for—not just the expertise she wields so deftly, but the honesty she offers so freely.
My friend Jim is a tenured professor in a department at a major research university where most faculty are more feared than loved. Yet Jim is admired and indeed beloved by the graduate students he supervises. Thanks in part to his talents, his character and his simple good fortune, failure and loss have been a remarkably small part of his life. But they are a huge part of his influence. “I’ve learned a lot over the years about how to be focused and effective in my work. When I share ways to manage time well or make effective career decisions, my students politely say they find it helpful,” he told me somewhat ruefully. “But what really seems to matter to them is when I share my failures.” Somehow, knowing that such an accomplished person nonetheless experiences disappointment and frustration turns out to be more empowering than simply knowing his secrets for success.
Each of these people has found—or stumbled upon—the paradox of flourishing. The most transformative acts of our lives are likely to be the moments when we radically empty ourselves, in the very settings where we would normally be expected to exercise authority. As Jim has discovered, his competence is helpful—but his vulnerability is transformative. This is not the manipulative vulnerability that primarily benefits the person already in power, but an unforced gift of truthfulness. Descending to the dead, embracing a position of unequivocal vulnerability, accomplishes something nothing else can.
These moments of descent ad inferos are necessarily rare. It would be odd, and not ultimately fruitful, for the president of Wheaton College to give an annual chapel address disclosing his deepest personal distress from the past year; it would be self-indulgent for a tenured professor to constantly regale his students with accounts of his failures. (Regular viewers of TED talks can judge for themselves whether the touching personal disclosure at the ten-minute mark has, since Brené Brown’s talk went viral, become an expected cliché rather than a genuine sacrifice.) The kind of vulnerability we are called to on a day-to-day basis is far more prosaic—and in its way more demanding—and we will examine it in the next chapter.
But communities also need people who are willing to move decisively down and to the right, surrendering authority while taking up unusual vulnerability. Ronald Heifetz, who has taught a highly regarded course on leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government for several decades, observes that the primary responsibility of every leader is to avoid assassination. True enough. Quite aside from the upheaval that assassination introduces into any nation or organization, an assassinated leader is obviously of no further use. Heifetz is simply observing that leaders must take care to preserve their authority, their capacity for action—which requires, at a minimum, remaining alive—even while they lead their communities into appropriate vulnerability.
But a more accurate version of Heifetz’s dictum would be this: you only get to be assassinated once. So as far as possible, the ultimate responsibility of a leader is to choose wisely and well the form and timing of that descent. Indeed, someone who is not ready to descend to the dead—to hand over all authority and embrace maximum vulnerability—is almost certainly in the grip of idolatry. After all, there is another word for someone who will never give up power, especially one who devotes more and more energy to avoiding assassination: a dictator. We might amend Heifetz this way: the primary responsibility of every leader is to prepare and plan for their descent to the dead.
Sometimes we get more than one opportunity to dramatically and publicly embrace vulnerability. Nelson Mandela, a leader of the armed resistance movement in South Africa called the African National Congress (ANC), had his first moment of descent to the dead when he was convicted of treason and sentenced to prison on Robben Island, the prison compound located on an island nine cruel miles from Cape Town. It was there, stripped of his authority, that Mandela became convinced (and began to convince others) that the ANC had to find a way to make peace, with justice, with the apartheid regime. In the exile of suffering, he acquired a spiritual authority he would never have found any other way. And when, against all odds, apartheid ended and Mandela was elected president of the new South Africa, he made yet another dramatic decision to empty himself of authority, standing down from his position as president after just one term in order to establish a precedent of peaceful, just transitions of power. Of all the powerful things Mandela did, voluntarily giving up power may have been the most transformative and consequential for the nation that had come to call him “Tata Mandela,” the nation’s father.
Dying as Leading
How can we “descend to the dead,” embracing suffering in dramatic and transformative ways?
Dying. In some times and places, we do so by being willing to literally die. As I was preparing this book for publication, a young man entered the basement of “Mother Emanuel” AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, sat through nearly an hour of the Wednesday night Bible study, and then took the lives of nine people, including the church’s senior pastor, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney. Reverend Pinckney was forty-one years old, a respected state senator and belov
ed servant of the church, the embodiment of authority used well. But on that night he became something greater, more holy and more terrible—a martyr for the long-suffering black church and its witness to grace and truth in the face of injustice and racism. Along with him were eight others, ranging in age from twenty-six to eighty-seven. Some of them were ordained ministers with positions of leadership; others were not. But in those awful moments, all of them joined the cloud of witnesses to God’s faithfulness in the face of evil.
Commenting on the martyrdom of the Charleston Nine and the subsequent faithfulness of the surviving congregation, the Episcopal priest and writer Fleming Rutledge said, “They were not ready”—how could anyone be ready for such sudden and gratuitous violence?—“but they were prepared.” When evil came into their midst, the church members in the basement responded instinctively with sacrifice, some of them placing themselves between the killer and his intended victims even while pleading with him to reconsider his plans—and when their surviving family members confronted the killer in a court hearing just two days after the murders, they responded with offers of mercy and even salvation in the face of his impending judgment.
No one of us can be ready for moments like this—instead, we must, long before, train ourselves in the image of Christ to be prepared should such a time come. Because the Charleston Nine, their families and their church were prepared, what was intended for utmost evil became the most astonishing witness to the power of the gospel in American public life in many years and also dealt a powerful blow to the hold of racism over the institutions and symbols of the American South.
It is mercifully unlikely that most of us will face the stark evil that confronted the Charleston Nine that night or that confronts faithful people in many parts of the world today. Yet all of us will come to the end of our lives, and the way we approach that end may give us opportunities to become influential in ways we never imagined, in ways that break the power of idols that hold our communities captive. Indeed, if we are not prepared to die in the presence of others, we are probably missing out on the deep community for which we, and they, are made.
