Monday, September 3, 2007

Exercise of power resides at least partially in letting other people act

“Drama offers a sort of parable of the fact that the exercise of power resides at least partially in letting other people act. The secret is not to suppose that your agency is incompatible with the agency of others – that there is competition for a limited ‘space’ of agency. Your agency does not need to push the agency of others aside in order to triumph…. Just so, in dealing with the Christian God, we ought not to be in the business of identifying which actions are our achievements, and which God’s puppetry, in order to attribute relative quantities of power respectively…. The highest instance of power we have been given to know in the God of Jesus Christ does not compete for a limited arena so that it can exercise itself in brute solitude over against us.” — Ben Quash,The Play Beyond the Play,” in Sounding the Depths: Theology through the Arts, ed. Jeremy Begbie (London: SCM, 2002), pp. 102-3.

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