PETER KREEFT1Peter Kreeft is the author of Knowing the Truth About God’s Love (Servant).
When I am weak, then I am strong.” “Power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9–10). We have heard these words from the apostle Paul many times, but have we understood them? Can anyone ever understand this great mystery?
By definition, a mystery is something we cannot understand wholly, but it is not something we cannot understand at all. The key to this mystery of strength in weakness is the Cross of Christ. Without the Cross, it is not a mystery but an absurdity, darkness. With the Cross, we can begin to shed light on how weakness becomes strength.
The Cross is not a freak occurrence but a universal truth incarnated, not merely a once-for-all event outside me in space and time, in Israel in A.D. 29, separated from me by 8,000 miles and 2,000 years, but also a continuing event within me, or rather I within it. What we really want to know when we ponder this mystery is how to live with weakness: How should we enact the Cross in our lives?
Paradoxical Doubleness
There are two equal and opposite errors in trying to respond to our weaknesses: humanism and quietism, activism and passivism. Humanism says that all is human action, that we must fight and overcome weakness—whether it be failure, defeat, disease, death, or suffering. We must overcome our cross. But, in the end, we never do. Humanism is Don Quixote riding forth on a horse to fight a tank.
Quietism, or fatalism, says simply, Endure it, accept it. In other words, don’t be human. Go gentle into that good night; do not rage against the dying of the light.
Christianity is more paradoxical than the simple no of humanism or the simple yes of fatalism. We can see this paradoxical doubleness in the Christian answer to three particular weaknesses: poverty, suffering, and death.
Poverty is to be fought against and relieved, and yet it is blessed. Helping the poor to escape the ravages of their poverty is one of the essential Christian duties; if we refuse it, we are not Christians, we are not saved (Matt. 25:41–46). Yet it is the rich who are pitied and pitiable, as Mother Teresa so startlingly told a Harvard audience: “Don’t call my country a poor country. India is not a poor country. America is a poor country, a spiritually poor country.” It is very hard for a rich man to be saved (Matt. 19:23), while the poor in spirit—those willing to be poor, those detached from riches—are blessed (Matt. 5:3).
The same paradoxical doubleness is found in Christianity’s view of death. Death is on the one hand the great evil, the “last enemy” (1 Cor. 15:26), the mark and punishment of sin. Christ came to conquer it. Yet Christians have also viewed death as the door to eternal life, to heaven. It is the golden chariot sent by the Great King to fetch his Cinderella bride. “Thou hast made death glorious and triumphant,” wrote Jean Pasquel and William Charles MacFarland, “for through its portals we enter into the presence of the living God.”
The same is true for suffering. On the one hand it is to be relieved; on the other hand it is blessed. We honor saints mainly for two reasons: they heroically and compassionately give their all to relieve others’ sufferings, and they love God so much that they accept and offer up their own sufferings heroically and even joyfully. They both fight and accept suffering. They are more active than humanists and more accepting than quietists.
Second Fiddle
Before we can begin to understand the mystery of strength out of weakness, we need to give some thought to the nature and variety of our weaknesses themselves.
First, there is the weakness of being second, playing second fiddle, responding rather than initiating, following rather than leading, obeying rather than commanding.
In the world, power rules, and the strong impose themselves on the weak; obedience is a mark of inferiority. But not in the church. Here, everything is different: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them.… It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave; even as the Son of man came not to be served but to serve” (Matt. 20:25–28).
Our resentment against being second is totally foolish, for God himself includes this “weakness”! From all eternity the Son obeys the Father. No one was ever more obedient than Christ. Therefore obedience is not a mark of inferiority. To respond, to play second fiddle, to sing alto, is not demeaning, for the Christ, who is Very God of Very God, was the perfect Obeyer.
Jesus was equal to the Father, yet obeyed. Difference in role does not mean difference in worth. If that simple but revolutionary fact were understood and appreciated, we would have a new world: not the ancient world of slavery and oppression, nor our modern world of uprootedness and disorder, of unnatural leveling and resentful competition. We would have, instead, love.
Love makes strength. The “weakness” of Christ in obeying the Father made him strong because it was the obedience of love. Had Christ disobeyed the Father’s will, as Satan tempted him to do in the wilderness, he would have lost his strength, as Samson did, and succumbed to his enemy. His obedience was a mark of his divinity, not his humanity. In the same manner, if we obey the Father completely, accepting the “weakness” of being his followers, we are transformed into participants in the divine nature. For repentance, faith, and baptism, the three instruments of that transformation, are all forms of obedience. We are commanded to repent, believe, and be baptized.
Living With Limits
A second form of “weakness” is proper only to us, not to Christ, but this second form too is not to be resented. It is our finitude, our creatureliness. We were created. We are therefore dependent on God for everything. Nothing we have is our own, because our very being is not our own. God owns us.
How silly to resent this “weakness.” And how silly to resent God’s and nature’s compensation for that weakness—namely, mutuality, cooperation, solidarity, interdependence, unselfishness. When we bear one another’s burdens, Paul says that we fulfill the law of Christ (Gal. 6:2). I think “the law of Christ” is operating here more like “the law of gravity” than like “the law of the land.” Falling apples fulfill the law of gravity, and bearing one another’s burdens fulfills the law of Christ.
Marriage is a prime example of bearing one another’s burdens. Men need women, and women need men. Both often resent that need today. That is rebellion against the law of Christ, which is inscribed in the law of human nature (the very image of God is identified in Genesis 1:27 as both “male and female”).
East Of Eden
Finally, there is a third form of weakness, which it is right to rail against: the weakness of sin and its effects. It is good to be finite, but not to be fallen. Our dissatisfaction with this weakness implicitly testifies to our knowledge of something better, of a standard by which we measure ourselves and our world, and find them wanting. It is our memory of Eden that causes our present lover’s quarrel with the world, with this wilderness world “east of Eden” (Gen. 3:24).
Weakness is one effect of sin. We are all morally weak: easily tempted and easily succumbing to temptation. We are all commanded to pray, “Lead us not into temptation.” We are all spiritual cripples. Religion is indeed a crutch. That is why it is so “relevant.”
We are not only morally weak but also intellectually weak—ignorant and foolish. Sin is not mere foolishness, and certainly its cause is not only ignorance; but while sin is not the effect of ignorance, it is the cause of ignorance.
We should accept our first two weaknesses (being followers and being finite). But should we also accept our third weakness, our sinfulness? Yes and no. Sin is like cancer. When we have cancer, we should “accept that fact” with our intellect but not with our will. We should accept the truth but not the goodness of the cancer, because canceris not good. Thus we should fight it. The same is true of sin.
People are often confused about this simple point. Even a great mind like Carl Jung seems to descend into this deadly confusion when he tells us to “accept our own dark side, our shadow.” No! God had to die and suffer the horrors of hell to save us from that dark side; how dare we “accept” it when the Holy One has declared eternal war against it? How dare we be neutral when God takes sides? Only one fate is proper for such spiritual wimpiness; look it up in Revelation 3:16. What God has vomited up, let no man try to eat.
The Substance Of Nothing
I now venture into deeper, more perilous areas of our problem.
Our weakness becomes our strength when God enters into our weakness. Like a doctor anesthetizing a patient so that he does not hop about on the operating table, God weakens us so that he can operate on our souls. In order to be healed, we need the weakness of death. The heart into which God wants to penetrate must, so to speak, stop beating for that operation to take place.
The same principle works in lesser ways before death. God has to knock us out first in order to rescue us from drowning, for we flail about foolishly. He has to slap our hands empty of our toys to fill them with his joys.
So far, so good. We have found that we must both accept and rail against our weakness, that God uses our weakness to perform redemptive surgery. These principles are well known. But is there more we can say about living with weakness?
I think the Christian mystics have something to teach us here. When we read the mystics, we hear their strange language about “becoming nothing,” the consummation of weakness. We shake our heads in incomprehension and suspicion. Yet the mystics’ “nothingness” is strength through weakness taken to its logical conclusion. If God’s strength fills us when we are weak, and God’s greatness fills us when we are little, then God’s all fills us when we are nothing.
We are not here talking about the “nothingness” of the Oriental mystics where the soul is nothing because it is not real, being only an illusion of individuality. Rather, the “nothingness” of the Christian mystic is the nothingness of no self-will and no self-consciousness. “Thy will, not mine, be done” is a fundamental formula for all sanctity, not just that of the mystics. There is nothing particularly mystical about it. But when, ravished by God in a foretaste of heaven’s beatific vision, these graced mystics lose all consciousness of themselves, they see themselves as nothing because they are no longer looking at themselves, only at God.
The Christian mystic experiences a bliss in this total weakness to the point of nothingness, for it is total trust, total relaxing in God’s arms, being grasped by Abba, Daddy. All worry and self-concern melt away. This is total humility. As pride is the first sin, the demonic sin, so humility is the first virtue.
Pride does not mean an exaggerated opinion of your own worth; that is vanity. Pride means playing God, demanding to be God. Søren Kierkegaard once said, “If I had a humble servant who, when I asked him for a glass of water, brought instead the world’s costliest wines perfectly blended in a chalice, I would fire him, to teach him that true pleasure consists in getting my own way.” That is the formula for pride: “My will be done.”
Humility is “thy will be done.” Humility is not an exaggeratedly low opinion of yourself; humility is self-forgetfulness. The humble person never tells you how bad he is; he is too busy thinking about you to talk about himself. That is why humility is such a joy and so close to the beatific vision, where we will be so fascinated with God that we forget ourselves completely.
Combining the will’s “not my will but thine be done” and the mind’s total self-forgetfulness, we can begin to understand how the mystics find joy in becoming nothing, in being weak.
The Omnipotence Of Love
“Thy will, not mine, be done” is not only the hardest thing we can do (what sin has done to us), but it is also the most joyful, liberating thing we can do (what grace has offered us). A trillion experiments have proved that whenever we aim at happiness by exerting our power and control, we end up in unhappiness, whether we get what we wanted or not. But whenever we become nothing, become utterly weak, whenever we say and mean, “Not my will but thine be done,” we find the greatest happiness, joy, and peace that is ever possible in this world. Yet despite the trillions of experimental confirmations of this truth, we keep trying other experiments with happiness outside of God and outside of submission to God, thereby repeatedly selling our birthright of joy. In other words, we are insane. Sin is insanity.
How is the Cross related to this? In addition to saving us from sin, the Cross manifested the nature of God’s Trinitarian ecstasy, the Spirit of self-giving love between Father and Son, the very secret of God’s inner life. The weakness of the Cross is the very power of God, the secret of God’s true omnipotence. God is not omnipotent merely because he can create a universe or perform miracles; God is omnipotent because he is love, because he can yield to himself, because he can be weak. If Godwere only One, as in Islam, he could not be totally omnipotent. Only the Trinity, only the God who can continually empty himself to himself, can be omnipotent.
Omnipotence arises only through the Spirit, who is the love binding Father and Son to each other. When this Spirit enters us, the whole Trinity enters us, and lives the divine life in and through us. The glorious Cross of the eternal Trinity and the bloody Cross of Calvary mingle in our souls and lives as we participate in the joy of divine love and in the suffering of divine redemption.
