Playing God
Cultivating Reality
by Andy Crouch InterVarsity Press
by Ragan Sutterfield Cascade (Wipf & Stock)
reviewed by Tim Høiland
reviewed by Rusty Pritchard
Lord Acton’s dictum about the link between power and corruption is well known. But the provocative claim made in Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power is that power is also a blessing. It’s a gift easily abused and in need of redemption, certainly, but a gift nonetheless. Building on his earlier work, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, Andy Crouch argues that at its best, power is creative—it makes something of the world for the good of all. This concept of creative power is rooted in the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:28, in which God instructs Adam and Eve, his image bearers, to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.”As we reflect on human history and as we deal honestly with the failures that so often characterize our own lives, it is apparent that we haven’t always “subdued the earth” in God-honoring and others-serving ways. Indeed, this is the dangerous nature of our God-given power. When twisted by sin, power becomes destructive. This is why we instinctually decry power as inevitably evil or why we do what we can to avoid it altogether. But if Crouch’s thesis is right—that power is a gift entrusted to us by God for the common good—it would be wrong to eschew our power, even if such a thing were possible. The title of the book comes from Jayakumar Christian, national director of World Vision India and author of God of the Empty-Handed. As Crouch tells the story, during a visit to India, Christian helped him to see that injustice is the direct result of “god-playing” in the lives of the poor. From malevolent slave owners at brick kilns to benevolent Western teenagers going to “save” slum dwellers on a two-week mission trip, god-playing is what happens when power is used to dehumanizing effect in the lives of God’s image bearers. In a key insight that bears further reflection, Crouch makes the case that idolatry and injustice are inseparably linked because both mar the image of God in the lives of others and ourselves. Made to “play God” as beings imbued with culture-making “creative love,” we dishonor God and others when we use the power entrusted to us for selfish, destructive means. Christians of pietistic and activist persuasions especially—prone as we are, at times, to lopsided emphases—would do well to ponder the interrelatedness of idolatry and injustice. Crouch also urges us to take the power of institutions seriously. It is not enough to consider power in merely individual terms; after all, power is most insidious and destructive at an institutional level. But it’s also through healthy institutions that injustices can most thoroughly and sustainably be corrected. Activists may not be known as individualists, but many have strong anti-institutional biases—preferring grassroots movements. Though movements are valid in their own right, we would do well to consider how we can contribute to the creative power of well-ordered institutions. In the end, power is for human flourishing, and it takes the shape of the cross. As Crouch says, “. . . we are meant to pour out our power fearlessly, spend our privilege recklessly, and leave our status in the dust of our headlong pursuit of love,” like Christ, who loved us and gave himself up for us. That is our calling. That is what it means to play God in the truest sense.
Ragan Sutterfield’s new book, Cultivating Reality: How the Soil Might Save Us, challenges readers to think relentlessly about the activities we implicitly commission when we buy food and dispose of waste. In so doing, the farmer-scholar offers his theological manifesto for Christian agrarianism. At the core of Christian agrarianism is a faith grounded in reality that is both spiritual and material. It invites us to consider the material world in the light of the Scriptures, starting with our own persons and what we consume and extending out to our communities. Sutterfield starts with farming, but like all agrarians he draws out lessons that apply even to our harried urban existence and our socially networked selves. The author isn’t in the business of popularizing science. He’s in the business of taking us behind the scenes of things we would prefer to keep hidden. He lifts the toilet lid and bids us confront the subject of taboos and social proscriptions that keep us from talking about soil formation. He asks why some forms of knowledge are forbidden and why some practices are secret. He extols localism and sustainable agriculture not just because they have good results but also because they are visible to the public.
Tim Høiland is a writer, editor, and content strategist at changegoat and is codirector of communications for Lemonade International. Follow him on Twitter @ tjhoiland.
A natural resource economist, Rusty Pritchard is the CEO of Flourish (FlourishOnline.org), a ministry that equips Christians to engage the world of environmental science and action.
The ideal of the agrarian economy is a farmers’ market where farmers and customers are in close communication….Questions are encouraged, and openness and transparency are ideal. “How are animals slaughtered?” is answered with “Come see.” “How are crops grown?” is answered with “Come help.” When we live our lives through proxy, as participants in modern market economies largely do, it is our responsibility to uncover the violence we commission. Like Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma), he writes of the idea of slaughterhouses with glass walls, letting meat eaters in on the secrets of the provision of meat. Still, knowing may not result in caring, and Sutterfield spends several chapters showing us the virtues of living within limits, the tensions in managing commonwealths, the tragedies of unintended damage to places we love, the recovery of time and season, but the rhythm of his writing is the same—going from land to Scripture to reason to lifestyle and back again. This could have been a very big book. The slim-but-dense volume reveals wide reading and experience, but more than that it betrays the rigorous integration that is occurring in Sutterfield’s mind. The work has a few errors and oversimplifications that a fact-checker might have caught (he bashes Monsanto for the wrong reasons), and he insists on using a few words in idiosyncratic ways that a good editor might have challenged (praising “idleness” instead of “rest,” interpreting “stewardship” too narrowly). He interprets a few scriptures in ways that will irk Bible scholars. These might be fixed one day when he writes his magnum opus or publishes his collected essays. But we can be glad that he didn’t make us wait. This is a book that will merit multiple re-readings.
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