Quotes About Power

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.

History is written by the victors.

All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

The fact that Jesus weeps and that he is moved in spirit and troubled contrasts remarkably with the dominant culture. That is not the way of power, and it is scarcely the way among those who intend to maintain firm social control. But in [John 11:33-35] Jesus is engaged not in social control but in dismantling the power of death, and he does so by submitting himself to the pain and grief present in the situation, the very pain and grief that the dominant society must deny.

Pharaoh is clearly a metaphor. He embodies and represents raw, absolute, worldly power. He is, like Pilate after him, a stand-in for the whole of the empire. As the agent of the "empire of force," he reappears in many different personae.9

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation. This is not a cry for traditionalism but rather a judgment that the church has no business more pressing than the reappropriation of its memory in its full power and authenticity.

The wonder of the Exodus narrative is that the role of pharaoh continues to be reperformed in many times and many places. "Pharaoh" reappears in the course of history in the guise of coercive economic production. In every new performance, the character of Pharaoh makes claims to be absolute to perpetuity; the character is regularly propelled by fearful greed; the character imposes stringent economic demands on a vulnerable labor force.

The church has a huge stake in breaking the silence, because the God of the Bible characteristically appears at the margins of established power arrangements, whether theological or socioeconomic and political.

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation.

Silence and tacit consensus always, without fail, protect privilege. That is why the privileged are characteristically silencers.

silence is a strategy for the maintenance of the status quo, with its unbearable distribution of power and wealth.

Breaking the silence" is always counterdiscourse that tends to arise from the margins of society, a counter to present power arrangements and to dominant modes of social imagination.

It is no obvious or "natural" matter to resituate our lives with reference to the holy power and purpose of God. But that is what we do in prayer.

history consists primarily of speaking and being answered, crying and being heard. If that is true, it means there can be no history in the empire because the cries are never heard and the speaking is never answered. And if the task of prophecy is to empower people to engage in history, then it means evoking cries that expect answers, learning to address them where they will be taken seriously, and ceasing to look to the numbed and dull empire that never intended to answer in the first place.

The truth that is variously enacted by such agents is not an idea or a proposition. It is rather a habit of life that simply (!) refuses the totalizing claims of power. The governor, on behalf of the empire, will continue to ask, "What is truth?" And the apostles will continue to give answer, uncommonly unintimidated: "'We must obey God rather than any human authority'" (Acts 5:29).14

The news enacted by Elisha is reperformed by Jesus. It is, subsequently, performed in many other venues, sometimes by the followers of Jesus, sometimes by others who stand alongside the faithful followers of Jesus. In every such performance of the news, it is Gospel truth enacted as practical transformation that settled power can neither enact nor prevent.

The royal dynasty of King David, as portrayed in the biblical text, was a tax-collecting, labor-exploiting, surplus-wealth-exhibiting regime.

In our case, we live in a National Security State that is committed to perpetual war, in a consumerism that reduces everything and everyone to a commodity. As a consequence, children become statistics for sales reports, military recruitment, prison population, and debt. It is, among us, all about subordinating the future of children to the success of market ideology wherein the money and power flow to the top of the pyramid while increasing numbers of children are left behind.

A totalizing regime cannot tolerate dissent or subversion. Thus, as is necessary, totalizing regimes must silence dissent, must prohibit subversion, must control artists, must banish poets, and when necessary must kill prophets.

power is not free to disregard truth.

The withdrawal of the king from the narrative exposes the king as an irrelevance. The one with all the power can do nothing to save. Because it is only "my God who saves.

With this phrase he is insisting that his power is not grounded in the usual authority of empire; it is not an authority that comes out of the end of a gun or a cannon in coercive or violent ways. His kingdom, his claim to authority, is indeed "divine" in that it is rooted in and derived from "the will of the father," whose intention for the world is quite unlike the intent of Rome.

The power of King Jesus is intrinsically revolutionary and subversive against every repressive regime.