The Foolishness and Weakness of God

Originally published here.

Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is a wonderful book, a classic of science fiction and fantasy. I read it first a long time ago, but I decided to re-read it a couple months back when I saw it mentioned in Walter Wink's The Powers That Be. In Powers, Wink had written much about the Myth of Redemptive Violence, the dominant (and false) theme in literature that violence can save us, and had described how it seeps into every aspect of our culture and is an unquestioned assumption in most art and media. Wink had mentioned L'Engle's work as a rare challenge to this meta-narrative: a story wherein hate, violence, and oppression can be overcome only through the power of love. Reading A Wrinkle in Time again, I found this to be exactly true. L'Engle's story utilizes totally different archetypes than those conditioned within the Myth of Redemptive Violence, presenting an utterly opposing view of the nature of violence and how to counter it.

In Chapter 12, the protagonist, Meg, is preparing to return to a "dark planet" where her brother is entrapped within hatred and oppression. Meg is a teenage girl; she is "weak", woefully unprepared by any normal standards to face up against evil. But another character encourages her with these words:

"The foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called, but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are."

The words come from 1 Corinthians 1.26-28. Reading them in the context of A Wrinkle in Time was like seeing them for the first time, and I suddenly understood them in a way I never had before.

The foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For as long as I can remember, I had taken that statement as metaphor or hyperbole, intended merely to emphasize God's total superiority. It was as if Paul had written, "Look guys, God has no weakness and no foolishness...but if he did, he'd still be SO STRONG and SO WISE that even his relatively weakest and most foolish aspects would be stronger and wiser than we are!" But Wrinkle showed me that Paul meant something else entirely, and the true clue to this is contained in what comes immediately before the passage above. In verse 18 Paul says (ESV), "For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God".

The cross is folly. This means that when Paul speaks of God's foolishness or weakness, he is not speaking of aspects of God that aren't the "most amazing" (but still surpass us) -- he's talking about aspects of God that are foolish and weak by all traditional human standards. He's talking about stuff that people hear about and respond to with "Well that's dumb!" or "You're crazy!" or "wtf dude?!"

Paul's talking about stuff like Jesus' bizarre suggestion that we should "bless those who persecute us". He's talking about stuff like "love your enemies", like "turn the other cheek", like "overcome evil with good". Among other things, he is talking about nonviolence.

After all, pacifists are widely considered to be idiots; nonviolence is popularly dismissed as an ineffective tool of action. It is "naive". It is foolish and weak. And yet, judging from the words of Christ, it is God's chosen means of advancing his kingdom.

Nonviolence is a central part of God's foolishness and weakness. And true to the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians, the weakness of God is indeed "stronger than men". Look at the civil rights era, the liberation of Poland, the Indian independence movement of Gandhi. The methodologies employed were utterly counterintuitive, striking not so much at oppressive structures as at the systems of violence that kept those structures in place. These methodologies embodied all the things we traditionally consider to be "weak" and "foolish".

Yet they triumphed. They brought about transformtion, not destruction. Human wisdom and strength has time and again been turned on its head by the Kingdom of Heaven, demonstrating that God has indeed chosen "things which are not, to bring to nought things that are".