The Christian Roots of Speaking Truth to Power

In the late modern West, we’re accustomed to hearing the phrase “Speak truth to power.” It implies truth and power aren’t the same thing, that truth can come from the margins of power. But have you ever considered how peculiar that assumption is and how our society is among the first to absorb that principle as a self-evident reality? Why on earth would truth not be the same as power?

In many societies, truth and power are the same. I recently visited an exhibition at the Australian Museum about the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II. It was clear at the exhibition that the Pharaoh’s truth was the nation’s truth. He presented himself as a god. There was no speaking truth to power with Ramses, at least not if you wanted to keep your head.

And yet we in the West have the odd idea that truth most often comes from those at the margins of power, not those at the center. I suggest this is because the Bible is the water we swim in, and it has become so normal to us that we’ve forgotten it’s water at all.

Need for a Standpoint of Critique

For us to truly pass judgment on the way things are, or to critique it with authority, we need an external yardstick. We need some standpoint from outside the status quo from which to judge the status quo, otherwise we’ll be caught in a circular argument that magnifies our existing prejudices. We can’t authoritatively say, “This is unjust,” unless we have a sense of what justice looks like that runs deeper than “This makes me feel bad” or “Everyone around me agrees.”

The stakes are high, for what hangs in the balance is the possibility of social critique—the possibility of saying with authority, “This is unjust” or “That must stop.” Rare is the person happy to say, “Things are just fine as they are.” But if there’s no voice from outside against which to judge society, society itself becomes absolute.

If there’s no voice from outside against which to judge society, society itself becomes absolute.

The problem is that people come up with different ideas of what’s just and unjust by taking a certain part of the natural world and using that as the yardstick for how things should be. For instance, the absolute monarchy of France before the Revolution was sometimes justified by appealing to the solar system: one sun at the center, with all the planets orbiting—just like one king at the center of society, with everything revolving around him. It’s just natural, right?

You can attempt to justify almost any idea about society or freedom by appealing to nature, providing you carefully select what aspect of nature you appeal to. But the question will always haunt you: Why choose this aspect and not another that would justify a different idea? You can’t get an authoritative measure of what should be by appealing to what is.

But we still need a normative voice from outside the status quo. We still need to be able to say, “This is wrong. That is unjust.” Where do we find it?

Marginal Mandate

In our society, we find it in voices that come from below and in voices that come from the margins. This is what I’ll refer to as the “mandate of the margins.” Those to whom we accord the right to critique society are the marginalized, the victims, and the oppressed. They have what philosopher Sandra Harding calls an “epistemic privilege.”^[1] And those on the margins do have a different view of things, a different experience of the world that can provide a powerful critique of the status quo.

I remember a friend of mine once telling me his wife had asked him, “Do you notice how people step out of your way in stores?” He hadn’t noticed, because it was the water in which he’d always swum. But they didn’t step out of the way for her, and she noticed it. Her relative marginality gave her an insight into the world that he lacked.

Although this is a somewhat trivial example, it proves the rule: people have different experiences of the world, and the relatively marginalized can have insights those at the center don’t possess.

There are both liberal and conservative versions of the mandate of the margins in our society today. This is seen clearly if you wade into a cultural debate—the climate or justice debates or the political realm, for instance—and take on the label “outsider,” bringing a voice from beyond the status quo to speak an authoritative word about the status quo. In doing so, you’re both tapping into deep mythical archetypes about how the West views authority and truth and embodying what we might call the “mystique of the margins.”

Biblical Origin of the Marginal Mandate

The notion that the margins have wisdom in them—that critique comes from below—is profoundly Christian.

From the Bible’s beginning, it’s clear the center of a nation’s power isn’t the center of the nation’s truth and that an authoritative critique of the status quo often comes from the margins and from below—that is, from the places one would least expect.

Although Israel eventually had kings like the other nations, their monarchy was a concession and not a crowning glory. In 1 Samuel 8, God only gives the people a king because they demand one, and he warns that the king will abuse his power and exploit the people.

The authoritative voice came not from the potentates but from the prophets, and they were far from central. Elisha was a farmer (1 Kings 19:19). Amos was a shepherd, an occupation at the bottom of society like a street sweeper or office cleaner today (Amos 1:1). Even Moses, the greatest of all Old Testament figures, spent time as a shepherd (Ex. 3:1).

The notion that the margins have wisdom in them—that critique comes from below—is profoundly Christian.

Supremely, Jesus comes from the margins. God’s Son wasn’t born in a palace or in the center of power in Jerusalem but in a borrowed stable. He hails from Nazareth, a town of no notable cultural distinction. Today, if Jesus were from the United States, he wouldn’t be born in New York; he’d be from a small town in Kentucky or Ohio that most people would struggle to find on a map. People would look at his résumé and say, “Oh dear, never mind.”

When Jesus chooses his disciples, he doesn’t assemble a cabinet of politicians, public speakers, and leaders in the creative arts to take forward his message. He chooses fishermen (a common and unremarkable occupation in the ancient world) and a tax collector (an occupation associated with criminality and exploitation—perhaps like a pimp today). Among his friends were tax collectors and prostitutes. Marginal characters, all.

Much of the New Testament isn’t written by orators and wordsmiths but by manual laborers, causing the theologian Richard Bauckham to call it a “history from below”—history as viewed not from the position of privilege but from the perspective of ordinary life.

Consider also the church’s history. Christianity most often takes root among those at the margins and the bottom of society. In the first century, it was women; in antebellum America, it was the slaves with their deep faith and spiritual songs; today, the parts of the world showing the fastest growth in Christianity aren’t the rich nations of privilege but places like China, India, Nigeria, and Indonesia. Christianity has its center of gravity, so to speak, at the margins.

Evaluate the Modern Marginal Mandate

There’s some insight in the secular version of the idea that wisdom comes from below and from the margins.

People from the margins see what those at the center often cannot, and people from the margins can identify blind spots in the groupthink of the privileged center. Boardrooms with greater diversity have been shown to make better decisions than those filled with a narrow range of people.

But there’s a difference between the biblical archetype and its secular imitations. The voices from the margins and from below in secular late modernity are ultimately caught in the same logic of choosing one aspect of what there is in order to judge the rest of what there is.

If Christian influence is removed from the picture, why should the voice of the oppressed provide an authoritative critique of the status quo? What in nature dictates that the voice of the marginal should be normative? At the end of the day: nothing. Just ask Ramses. The norm historically and geographically is that might makes right and the fittest survive. Why should the victim suddenly be listened to when, for hundreds of thousands of years, the pattern has been that the victims die and the strong get to reproduce, that history is written by the winners?

There are two further problems with our modern version of the voice from the margins. First, it easily leads to a fractured society of hardened and opposing identity-based interest groups, all clamoring for the right to be the critics of the status quo and to be accorded the privilege of being more oppressed than others. Second, no voice from the margins is free of its own blind spots and prejudices, and those who critique the status quo risk replacing one set of biases with another. As scholar Rita Felshi and others have noted, those in subordinate groups are just as capable of manipulating others as anyone else.^[2]

Why the Bible’s Voice from the Margins Is Different

The Bible is the model for the modern mandate of the margins, but the biblical voice from outside is different for two reasons.

First, God truly is outside the contemporary cultural status quo in a way no human voice from the margins can be. This is nowhere more vividly demonstrated than in a strange encounter in Joshua 5. Joshua is the warrior leader conquering the promised land for the Israelites. Here’s what happens to him:

Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you for us or for our enemies?” “Neither,” he replied, “but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come.” Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in reverence, and asked him, “What message does my Lord have for his servant?” The commander of the LORD’s army replied, “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.” And Joshua did so. (vv. 13–15, NIV)

What a remarkable encounter. This is clearly an authoritative voice, and it critiques Joshua’s status quo. He’s leading God’s people into the promised land: if anyone is doing God’s own work, surely Joshua is. So he reasonably sees the world in black and white—you’re either for us or for our enemies. It’s a logic not foreign to our own cultural moment.

But the man’s reply pulls the rug out from under Joshua’s tidy logic: “Neither.” Or, in the original Hebrew, a blunt “No.” This is a voice genuinely from the outside. Not one more player in the game, not the winner in the race to the margins, but a position outside the entire situation—something qualitatively different from all human marginality.

This unexpected answer radically reorients Joshua. He shifts from a posture of accusation to one of receptivity and worship, asking, “What message does my Lord have for his servant?” and taking off his sandals.

Second, God’s voice from the margins is different is because of the extraordinary way the Bible messes with power structures. The biblical voice from outside is both a voice from the margins and a voice of power.

The biblical voice from outside is both a voice from the margins and a voice of power.

A voice from the margins is of little use unless it has the power to bring about change. This is what the critique of the status quo really requires: a marginal voice that’s also a powerful voice. But as a voice gains in power, it loses its marginality. What we need is the insight of the margins combined with the power of the center, and that’s the very thing we cannot have.

But this is precisely what Christianity claims: Jesus Christ embodies both the insight into change that comes from the margins and the power to change that comes from the center. Listen to how Paul describes this dynamic in Philippians:

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil. 2:5–11, NIV)

The first part of this passage—Christ humbling himself to death on a cross—fulfills the modern paradigm of the marginal mandate. By itself, however, it leaves Christ powerless to do anything about the injustices he can see. He died as a victim, and in so doing he lost all power.

But the second half of the passage gives Christ all the power that comes from being at the center. And here’s the astonishing thing: in the Bible, Christ always retains marks of his crucifixion, even in eternity future. In Revelation 5, John sees “a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the center of the throne” (v. 6). This is a paradigm-shifting reality if we’ll let it sink in. Christ in glory is the marginal center, the vindicated and victorious victim, the One from below who’s above all but in a way that doesn’t erase his marginality.

This whole articulation of Christ’s story messes profoundly with the paradigm of the margin and the center. It shows the limits of that dynamic, how the very structure of margin and center is the problem and not merely who happens to be at the center in a particular cultural moment.

Our instinct that truth is spoken from the margins and from below is a good one, and one shaped by the Bible. But no human individual, group, or “outsider” can deliver on the promise of providing an authoritative critique of the status quo.

For that, we need a voice truly from the outside, truly from the margins. Those criteria can only be fully met by God’s voice. So if we want what the early 20th-century Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno calls a “standpoint of redemption”^[3] from which to critique the status quo, what we’re crying out for is the insight that only Jesus can bring. He’s both the model of speaking truth to power and its richest fulfillment.

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[1] Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Cornell University Press, 1986).

[2] Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 78.

[3] Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (Verso, 2005), 247.