AST FALL A "DR. PHIL" SPECIAL AIRED ON U.S. television, focusing on families having problems with their children. Two family stories especially captured my interest. One mother could not say no to her 4-year-old daughter. She already owned 140 stuffed animals, and her mother always bought another one when her daughter told her she "wanted" it. In the second family, a father would not set boundaries for his teenage daughter who spent many afternoons in her bedroom with her boyfriend, door shut and locked. He said: "My child does not need my guidance. She can make her own decisions."

Instead of these parents wielding appropriate power over their children, their children wielded power over them. Immature and ignorant people (especially children) who wield too much power almost always become tyrants. These parents, to keep peace, gave in and would not take a stand. Such parental weakness guaranteed that when the children grew up, they would be disempowered and dysfunctional adults. Relinquishing parental power prematurely will corrupt children. In fact, too much power will corrupt anyone.

Lord Acton's famous statement "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" is true for any context and in any relationship. While we all recognize its implications for politics, business, family systems, and culture in general, I believe it may also apply to the church and our understanding of God. For example, can jockeying for power corrupt the operations of the church? Some will say that is a rhetorical question. Of course it does!

Might the corrupting tendency of power corrupt an all-powerful, omnipotent God? If "absolute power corrupts absolutely," is God the one exception? If so, how and why does God escape that corruption?

When Dictators Come to Power
We have seen what happens in nations run by dictators, including those leaders who proclaim that they "love" their people or "love" their country. Often such rulers seize power because, presumably, the situation is desperate. There is neither the time nor the culture for democratic processes. The pattern is so familiar: They acquire power ostensibly to serve the nation; in no time at all, the nation instead serves their lust for power. Once they have power, any threat to it is crushed, even to the point of raping, pillaging, and killing thousands of their own people. While democracies are not tyrannies addicted to power, they are not immune to its abuses. We have seen that in America and other democratic states. We sense that even if desired for the noblest purpose, power tends to corrupt.

Early in my ministry I received some advice from a conference leader. He said, "Jim, if you ever want to be a conference president, don't tell anyone about it!" In our Adventist Church family we believe people should be "called out" of the congregation for leadership. This is a continuation of the prophetic tradition in the Hebrew Bible: God chooses prophets; the people choose kings. Just as you cannot run for the prophetic office, you should not "run" for the office of conference president--or even pastor. We are more comfortable offering the power of a prominent pulpit, even when that power is understood to be "servant" power, to those surprised by the offer than to those who seek it. We also suspect that even those who accept high office for the right reasons may (after occupying that office) come to love it for its own sake and not for the good that can be done through it. Power tends to corrupt.

Yet We All Need It
As the philosopher Nietzsche observed, we are born with the "will to power." We all need a measure of power. Totally powerless people, like slaves, lose their humanity. Plus, we learn very early the good things power can do for us.

Steven Spielberg describes a childhood event that seduced him into his moviemaking career. Because he was small and Jewish, one school yard bully made his life a living hell. Spielberg then acquired an 8mm camera and began making short movies. He asked the bully to "star" in one of them. The next thing Spielberg knew, the bully had become his best friend! That's when the power of moviemaking captured him.

Our need (and desire) for power starts at birth. Every parent has experienced even infants asserting their wills against him or her. Later, as teenagers, our children desire to get out from "under" their parents as soon as possible (though this is not as pronounced in the children of baby boomers as it was in my generation). They want to control their own lives.

Like moths to burning candles, we fly to power.

This "will" or "lust" for power is a major concern in the Bible. It first appears as an issue in the Garden of Eden. The original temptation to Eve (then to Adam) was the suggestion that God withheld power from them: "If you eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil," the serpent told them, "you shall be as gods" (see Gen. 3:5). God does not want any rivals.

The first lie told to the human race was that God does not want us to have power. The God who created us to exercise stewardship for the earth was now being portrayed as the God who wanted to keep us powerless.

Later on in Scripture, when Yahweh decided to select a successor to King Saul, he picked a shepherd boy who had hardly been noticed until that moment. And, as we all know, Saul sought to kill him. Later generations would mirror Saul's lust for power. Israel's kings were often murdered by their children.

These examples bring us back to the question we asked at the beginning: if power can corrupt the best of us, how is God not corrupted by wielding absolute power over everything?

God and Power
A proper understanding of power must explain how God, the all-powerful deity, the one who speaks and it is done, who commands and it stands fast (see Ps. 33:9), relates to His own omnipotence.

In Christian thought, while everything in the universe needs God for its existence, God is self-existent. God is "Being," as philosophers put it, which means that God is the one reality who must exist if anything else is to exist. Take God out of the universe, and everything disappears! God, further, created the universe out of nothing, which means that God did not need preexistent material to fashion the universe.

Knowing what we now know about the size and complexity of our universe, we realize that God possesses power that's truly inconceivable. This is not the power of God as "persuasion." This is raw power that will have its way, that no one or no thing can resist. God commands, and it happens. "Let there be light: and there was light" (Gen. 1:3). "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth" (Ps. 33:6).

And yet Genesis remarks that when God was finished with the creation, God saw that "it was very good" (Gen. 1:31) and delighted in it. This language injects a moral dimension into the Creation. God is not satisfied with galaxies, black holes, quasars, pulsars, and atoms: something "good" must also be born, something with moral and spiritual integrity. God creates not to wield power, but to give it away.

Sin, as Genesis describes it, perverted the creation and our perception of the Creator. The irresistible physical power of God in creation was no longer seen as a manifestation of divine love, only divine arrogance. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

By populating the earth with free human beings capable of love and trust, God intentionally limited His power over us--and at the same time increased His power for us. It's the difference, for example, between the power of Saddam Hussein and the power of Mahatma Gandhi, the difference between Stalin wanting power to rule over Russia, and Churchill wanting power to rule for Britain in its hour of greatest peril. Churchill was elated at his election to prime minister, for now he had the power to do what was essential if England was to defeat the Nazi threat.

These contrasts offer us a fundamental insight into how God wields power. The human race was not created so God would have people to push around. If that were true, God's power would isolate Him from us, even as masters are isolated from their slaves. On the contrary, God created beings who could resist God if they wished. It is a contradiction for God (therefore impossible for God) to create free beings who are coerced by divine power. For us who are free, there is only the power of persuasion through example.

And that became very clear with Jesus. God seldom exercises divine power over us (there are biblical examples, and some might argue that the final judgment is one of them), only for us. Power over us would take power from us; power for us enhances our own power (and God's power with us). What greater power can an all-powerful God give us than that of resisting His will and threatening His universe? Even the power to execute His Son?

So strongly does God want us to feel empowered, that Jesus told the disciples He would no longer call them servants, but "friends" (see John 15:15). The one who created all things, the one in whom we live and move and have our being, calls us "friends"? This is not the language of domination.

To Make Us All Powerful
Power can be wielded one of two ways: either it operates within the master-slave relationship or the teacher-student (or parent-child) relationship. In the master-slave relationship the master does everything possible to keep the slave a slave--powerless. If the slave's power increases, the master's power decreases.

In a teacher-student (or parent-child) relationship the teacher's goal is to empower the student to become the teacher's equal as quickly as possible. More and more power for the student is the mark of success. Does this lessen the teacher's power? Yes, it does, if you mean power over the student. But it increases the teacher's power for the student and creates a bond of affection between them that gives both of them the power "over" ("for") each other that arises from love.

Let me explain: To love someone gives them power over you because they now have the power to hurt you. But this power "over" is not taken by force as it is in the master-slave relationship; it is given joyfully.

This is (put awkwardly) the most powerful kind of power. It is the "power of God unto salvation," as the apostle Paul put it in Romans 1:16. God, the all-powerful one, uses power for the purpose of making us all powerful.

Because I believe this, I was troubled for some time by the notion of surrender in the Christian life. It sounded like giving one's freedom and power back to God. If we are not careful, language about allowing God's purpose to "control" our lives can give the impression that we are to be powerless in relation to God, that we are to let God "run" our lives almost as if we were puppets: God will tell us where to go to school, whom to marry, and so on. We just need to pray to learn God's will.

This concept did not sound like empowerment to me. It felt like the master-slave, not the teacher-student, relationship. However, I now see that it can be the teacher-student relationship if we understand that in the beginning the student (or child) does need to be told what to do in almost every particular. But the process of maturity means that such direction is less and less required, that we can decide for ourselves what is or is not within the will of God.

Power is like love: it is self-replenishing. God does not lose love by loving; it replenishes itself. Nor does God lose power by empowering; it only increases God's power to relate and persuade. Giving us the power to choose gives God the power to persuade.

Now for an insight I have received from the Adventist understanding of the judgment: Even those who turn their backs on God will ultimately admit (without coercion) that God is just and full of truth. The judgment is the event that gives God ultimate power over everything He created, for it is the final proof that God deserves to be God. It is one thing to be God in fact (the Creator); it is another thing to deserve to be God (the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ). "We love him, because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19).

Power over others for its own sake is by definition evil. No exceptions.

Power for others is always good. No exceptions.

This too is good news: the Lord of all creation does not lord it over all creation.

Even for God, being all-powerful is empty if we are not all powerful.

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James Londis currently serves as the director of ethics and corporate integrity at Kettering Medical Center Network in Kettering, Ohio.