Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – The Conundrum of the Power of Integrity

By Jonathan Bonk
August 2011

“Surely you desire truth in the inner parts; you teach me wisdom in the inmost place.” – Psalm 51:6

To write about the power of integrity is not easy. In conjunction, these two terms are jarring. They are categorically worlds apart, evoking different linguistic and moral spheres.

Integrity derives from the Latin integritas, from integer, meaning “intact or complete.” To lack integrity is to be somehow deficient, to have parts missing, to be unable to function optimally.

Power, on the other hand, is associated with hubris and the delusion of relative invincibility. It is marked by getting one’s way most, if not all, of the time by vanquishing the weak—by being louder, faster, stronger, smarter, larger, and more influential than neighbors and enemies. Individuals, families, sports teams, universities, corporations, political parties, armies, and nations can all be powerful. In attaining, maintaining, and imposing power, ethical scruples are a huge disadvantage, and integrity is compromised or abandoned altogether.

It is no surprise, then, that powerful people and nations have not been generally noted for integrity. Conversely, those with integrity have seldom aspired to or wielded power. The Gospels suggest that power and integrity are inversely proportional. Our story from Genesis to Revelation persistently reminds us that incumbent power inevitably finds genuine integrity difficult to tolerate. “Men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil,” Jesus observed as he summed up the history of God’s chosen people in his conversation with Nicodemus (John 3:19).

Power seems to be unavoidably corrosive, corrupting those who wield it, however well-intentioned they might be. Power corrupts because we human beings are self-serving individually—and by extension, ethnically, communally, and nationally—justifying whatever it takes to promote, sustain, and advance self-interest, even to the point of taking the lives and possessions of those who stand in our way. Such self-seeking is antithetical to obedience to Jesus, who modeled and advocated self-giving—what he called taking up our cross and following him (Matthew 16:24)—as the only sure evidence of kingdom life.

In its conventional usage, then, power should not apply to Christians. Power to witness after the Holy Spirit comes upon us, yes (Acts 1:7). But witness—literal translation of the Greek word martyr—is more about relinquishing human power than wielding it or benefiting from it.

For followers of Jesus, his Sermon on the Mount serves in ways analogous to the United State’s perpetual self-correcting or self-justifying recourse to its Constitution. But these two defining documents could not be more dissimilar in intent, means, or outcomes. In Jesus’ “Kingdom Charter,” the powerful are never “blessed”—although they are tellingly castigated. Throughout his short life, Jesus steadfastly rejected conventional power as a means to advancing God’s will on earth. He chose, advocated, and modeled weakness, not power.

Dr. Jonathan Bonk is executive director of the Overseas Ministries Study Center in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. He is editor of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research and a member of the Lausanne Theology Working Group.