Podcast: When Authority Fails to Reflect God’s Good Design (Jonathan Leeman)

November 27, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Abusive Authority vs. Godly Authority

In this episode, Jonathan Leeman calls on parents, husbands, pastors, managers, and anyone else with some kind of authority to think carefully about how they're using that authority, encouraging them to embrace a posture of humility and repentance as we seek to use our God-given authority to build others up.

Authority

Authority

Jonathan Leeman

Through Scripture and engaging stories, Jonathan Leeman shows that godly authority is essential to human flourishing and presents 5 attributes of biblical authority.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:22 - What You Think about Authority Reveals What You Think about God

Matt Tully
Jonathan, thanks for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Jonathan Leeman
Thank you, Matt.

Matt Tully
You’ve written this new book on the topic of authority, not just spiritual authority in the church, not just parental authority at home, but on the issue of authority more generally, whether that’s at church or in the home or at work or at school. I’d love for you to expand on something provocative that you say in the book. It’s this: “What you think about authority reveals quite a bit about what you think about God.” How so?

Jonathan Leeman
God, as our creator, is also our ruler. The author has author-ity, just to think about those two words. And not only that, he created us to rule, to exercise authority: “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.” And, “What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.” What’s the connection there? Well, we’re created in God’s image. And we are created in God’s image in order to image God and in order to do what God does, which is create and rule. So authority goes right to the very heart of human existence. If you have a problem with authority, there’s a sense in which you have a problem with human existence and, since human’s existence is to image God, you have a problem with God. What is your view of God? Is your view of God that he is big, mean, scary, oppressive, stingy, small, weak, ineffectual? Well, whatever your view of God is, I can tell you something about what your view of authority is. There is a link in that regard. And I can also tell you not just what your view of authority is, but I can tell you how you probably exercise authority. If you have a big, compassionate, powerful, loving God, my guess is that you exercise authority in your home, in your workplace, wherever you have it in those kinds of ways. Whereas if you have an oppressive, tyrannical God, I’m afraid that you may be exercising authority as well in some of those ways. So there’s just this built into the very fabric of human existence a hardwired connection between who God is and who we are; how God exercises authority, how we exercise. So it’s a crucial and central to our existence topic.

03:55 - Is Authority a Necessary Evil?

Matt Tully
Yeah, foundational. But in many secular quarters, and probably also among some Christians, there can be the sense, though, that authority, that human hierarchies (another way to talk about this) are at best a necessary evil. And maybe at worst, though, they are this oppressive result of the fall, an oppressive function of human brokenness, and they’re mostly just used and wielded by people in power over people that they subjugate and control and use for their own benefit. And actually, progress as humans entails the systematic dismantling of these hierarchies that we see all around us all the time. What do you make of that?

Jonathan Leeman
Three things. Number one, I disagree with it being a necessary evil. That’s a wrong perspective because, again, it goes right to the heart of existence. We are created to rule, and in the consummation of all things, we’re told we will reign with Christ. And the Greek there in 1 Timothy is literally “be kings with” Christ.

Matt Tully
Some might respond that that passage, and even other passages in Genesis like you mentioned about the idea of the creation mandate and ruling over creation, is relating to the human-creature-animals distinction—the rest of the creative world. But what we’re talking about are hierarchies within humanity; those are the problem.

Jonathan Leeman
Any time two human beings want to get together and complete a project—farm a piece of land bigger than an acre, build a skyscraper, fly to the moon, run a country, whatever—it’s going to take some sort of, Hey, I’ll guide the cow, guide the plow sort of thing. And for human beings to work together, for groups to exist, a group of any kind—a soccer team, a school classroom, a nation—for groups to exist, there has to be some rule that says, Okay, this is what we are as a soccer team, and this is how you play the game. So to get rid of all rule, all authority is to get rid of all human cooperation and companionship—anything other than a quick, whimsical, spontaneous, Hey, let’s go to the beach together! A society of perfect beings, angels, still need some sort of order to their existence. Even in an unfallen world—do we drive on the right side of the road or the left side of the road?

Matt Tully
If we all make up our mind independently—

Jonathan Leeman
It’s just not going to work. That’s right. And again, I just want to go back to if your view of authority is that it’s a necessary evil, you don’t understand what the thing is. Authority and creating work together. Authority exists to grow those under your rule. So why does a parent have authority? It’s to grow and to encourage you. Why does a coach coach? Why does a mother mother? Why does a teacher teach? Well, it’s to grow those beneath him or her. That’s the objective, and to draw them up into yourself. So, necessary evil? No. I said three things; the second thing I would say is I agree. It is terribly abused. It is misused. It is used to oppress and destroy and annihilate and snuff out and all the bad things you can come up with. That is the fall. And Christians, of all people, who believe in the doctrine of total depravity and who believe in original sin should be some of the first people in line to say, Yes, authority is terribly abused and used. We’ve got to talk about that. We’ve got to warn again against that. We’ve got to find ways not to do that. Then the third thing I would say is there is a kind of a quality that is beautiful and built into human existence. Go back to the first thing I said a moment ago: What are you seeking to do in the authority you exercise? What is the parent doing with a child? To draw the child up into the parent’s own knowledge and wisdom and maturity and freedom. What is the pastor trying to do? The pastor is trying to draw the members of the church up into their own knowledge, maturity, wisdom, and freedom. What are the governors of a state trying to do? They’re trying to teach people to live in an orderly fashion, and with a productive capacity. And so there is something beautiful about equality as well. We should have a conversation about equality, but even there I’m going to jump in and say, listen, just as there is a godly form of rule and a demonic form of rule, so there is a godly form of equality and a demonic form of equality. Hey, you can be like God, knowing good from evil. Cast off his rule because you are his equal. We don’t spend much time talking about the demonic, perverted forms of equality. And that’s another conversation we could have. As you can already tell in my first point, second point, third point, it’s a complex issue. And the bottom line, I would say, is Christians have to have both eyes open: one eye on authority and creation and redemption, which is good, and one eye on authority in the fall, which is dangerous.

09:13 - Why Is There Resistance to the Idea of Authority?

Matt Tully
That’s one thing that I found so unique and even fresh about your book is the way that you do look hard at the corrupt authorities that we see all around us. I want to get to that in a minute, but before we get there, I think it’s probably fair to say that culturally speaking, in the broader American secular culture that we live in, that there tends to be this resistance to authority. There’s a resistance to at least external authorities in our lives. People want to be individualistic. We hear a lot about expressive individualism, where the priority is given to the individual to determine who they are, what they do, what their life looks like. How does the fact that this authority is built into the universe, as you say, that this is something that God is built into creation itself, how does that fit with the way that we see our culture acting, where there is such a resistance to even the idea of authority?

Jonathan Leeman
Back to Genesis 3, which I mentioned a moment ago: Listen, you can be like God if you cast off his, as it were, rule over you, his law on you. So the contest against authority is nothing new. Second, it’s been especially contested since, I would say, the Enlightenment. What the Enlightenment did was give philosophical legitimacy to our questioning of authority. Can you really trust what the church says? Can you really trust what even science says? Can you really trust what your dad and grandpa say? Can you really trust the king? And all of these “natural authorities” in our lives suddenly came into suspicion, and that worked its way out through several centuries of philosophy and literature and, in these days, even popular culture. These days, we can’t even trust the authority of our XX or XY chromosomes—the authority of gender and biology. You are who you want to be. So number one, since the fall; number two, since the Enlightenment; and these days, I think even in the church we are suspicious of authority insofar as we’ve often seen it misused and abused.

Matt Tully
So it is connected to both our sinful proclivities, going back to the garden, but there is also this connection to the ways that it’s abused, that we see, and that can lead people away.

Jonathan Leeman
And legitimate suspicions. Just a few days ago I was watching a documentary talking about Bill Gothard and the movement of churches that leaned hard into a sort of fundamentalism. And you know what Bill Gothard loved to talk about? Authority. And he used language that I’ve realized, Oh, sometimes I use that language. And when I look at that movement and some of the fruits of the movement, it’s sad, and I think to myself, Oh gosh, I hope I’m not creating something like that. I think the bottom line there is just because something has been misused and abused, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a proper use at all. You don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. So there have been real grievances, real abuses in the church in the name of God and the name of Christ that are worth studying and considering and learning from and not following in that way. At the same time, as I just said, a misuse doesn’t rule out a legitimate use. And so that’s why we need to think about this topic.

Matt Tully
And that’s one of the ironies that you bring out in the book at one point, where so oftentimes in response to abuse—the misuse of authority—the initial reaction is, Cast off all authority! We don’t want any authority. But quickly we realized that’s actually not the best way to deal with abuse of authority.

Jonathan Leeman
The solution to bad authority is not no authority but good authority. So you think of something like the Civil Rights movements. You had African Americans, in the South especially, experiencing the abuse of county authority, the local sheriff, even the governor of the state and so forth. And so what did they do? Well, they appealed to the President. They appealed to federal authorities. Or think about a child in a home who’s being abused. What’s the solution to that? Is it to cast all authority off in the child’s life whatsoever, or is it to call Child Protection Services? Well, again, it’s to appeal to a different authority. So, bottom line, the solution to bad authority is not no authority but good authority. Just speaking to the listeners, how much time have you spent thinking about, Okay, what exactly is good authority? How am I using the authority in my life? You mentioned this as an abstract topic at the beginning—I don’t want this to be an abstract, because it’s not. Because everybody who’s listening to this conversation right now has some authority somewhere in their life. And so it is an opportunity, and I hope the book is an opportunity, for a person to stop and do a little self-examination so that we’re not like the Pharisee who says, I thank God that I’m not like that tax collector over there. Rather, we do a little self-examination and say, Okay, Lord, how have I misused the authority you’ve given me? And so something I try to make very clear, even at the beginning of the book, is I’m going to write better than I am.

Matt Tully
I noted that the book opens with a confession, where you almost get in the confessional booth.

Jonathan Leeman
I start with a prayer of confession.

Matt Tully
You acknowledge the ways in which you have actually misused your authority at times. So why start that way? Why is that such an important thing to emphasize?

Jonathan Leeman
Number one, I just felt like it was honest. I read a number of books, obviously, in preparation for writing this book, and some of them were very helpful, good books. But I noticed that, on the whole, they just said, Okay, here’s bad authority, don’t do this. And, I don’t know, maybe I have an extremely sensitive conscience, but I’m looking at my life, I’m talking to my wife, I’m talking to my daughters, I’m talking to people at work who I manage and I’m like, I can’t do that and say I’ve done this perfectly. And so before writing the book, I talked to people over me, around me, and under me in the various hierarchies, as it were, of life and just said, Okay, how have I used authority well? Have I not used it well? Be honest. I tried to invite that sort of feedback.

Matt Tully
That’s kind of a painful thing to ask people to speak into.

Jonathan Leeman
You ask the question, and you’re in your heart you’re thinking, I hope they say nothing. But rather it’s, Okay. Yeah, I hear that. Yep. Okay. Hmm. I see what you mean. I can see how I do that. And in my doing that, I didn’t want to make it a book about me. That’s not the point. But I felt like I needed to do that right at the beginning in order to invite the reader into that same process—that same willingness to examine self, confess, look to Christ, repent, and follow after him and how he perfectly used his authority. “The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many,” he says. And he does that right in the context of, “Don’t lord it over those others like the Gentiles do.”

16:25 - Have We All Misused Our Authority?

Matt Tully
As I’ve said before already, the book does spend a lot of time focusing on the misuse of authority and even some of the principles of good authority that you provide are in response to the misuse and the abuse of authority that we often see around us. You’re very honest. You tell some stories that are very hard to read, to be honest, where you see authority being abused. I can imagine there might be some Christians listening right now, Christians even in our camp who want to uphold godly authority. They want to uphold the idea of authority in a culture that often spurns it. They might see that about this book and about your emphasis here and think, Why are you doing that? Why are you spending so much time talking about the abuse of authority? That’s just throwing fuel on the fire of the anti-authority crowd that’s constantly looking for examples of the ways that complementarians or Reformed pastors abuse their people in the name of God. So what was behind the decision to be so brutally honest about this?

Jonathan Leeman
It’s that word you just said: honest. It’s being honest. I’ve misused it. You’ve misused it. My friends have misused it. We all have misused it. Now, here’s the thing: I obliquely refer to the “Western philosophies” of this world which want to draw a distinction between the oppressor and the oppressed, the abuser and the abused, the racist and the victim, as it were. And in some ways, those theories are right, they just don’t go far enough. They do what the townspeople did in The Scarlet Letter—they put a scarlet letter “A” on Hester Prynne’s bodice as the adulteress, and they cast her out of the village. She’s an adulteress! And we all read that and we think, What hypocritical, terrible townspeople. Well, there’s a sense in which the Western philosophies (obliquely referred to of the day) are doing precisely that. They are declaring themselves holy, and those who don’t adhere to their philosophies as unholy. And I want to say, no, we’re all unholy. We’re all under indictment. And that’s where we need to begin is in the gospel. And the gospel begins with, I’m a sinner. I need a savior. So why do I focus on the abusive part? Because that’s the gospel. The gospel begins on the abusive part, as it were. But then, the gospel offers us something better and more beautiful. It looks back in creation and says there once was something beautiful and that’s worth attending to. We are created for something beautiful in how we use our rule. And then it points to something forward that’s beautiful again. Can I give you two passages that sort of capture this? First, you have David speaking his final words in 2 Samuel 23, “Now these are the last words of David . . .”—and then skipping down a couple of verses—“When one rules justly over men ruling in the fear of God, he dawns on them like the morning light, like the sun shining forth on a cloudless morning, like rain that makes grass to sprout from the earth.” So here’s this king talking about when one rules justly in the fear of God, he’s this rain, he’s the sun that gives life to the earth. Now, that’s what authority is supposed to be. Call that authority in creation. But did even David do that? No, not quite. He didn’t. But that is the ideal. But then if you jump forward to—that’s the first text I wanted to point to—then if you jump forward to Psalm 72, David’s son, Solomon, is writing this. He’s also an imperfect authority, but he’s pointing towards this future messianic king. And it kind of picks up on some of these same things: “Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the royal son!” It’s this messianic prophecy. “May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice! Let the mountains bear prosperity for the people, and the hills, in righteousness!” So you see the prosperity of the mountains and the hills. “May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the children of the needy, and crush the oppressor!” So here’s this king coming in, he’s bringing justice, and here’s the really interesting bit. All the way down in verse 15 the psalmist says, “Long may he live; may gold of Sheba be given to him! May prayer be made for him continually . . . . May there be abundance of grain in the land, and on the tops of the mountains may it wave, may its fruit be like Lebanon and may people blossom in the cities. May his name endure forever, his fame continue as long as the sun! May people be blessed in him, all nations call him blessed!” Just a few observations. You have a king saying about another king, “Long may he live. May gold of Sheba be given to him.” When does one king say about another king, Give him the gold! Let him live forever? Well, whoever that is must be amazing in how he’s kinging. Well, how is he kinging? He’s kinging, he’s ruling, in a way that there is abundance of grain in the land and on the tops of the mountains may it wave. Mountaintops are filled with rock and ice, but this king’s rule is so good—

Matt Tully
So fruitful.

Jonathan Leeman
So fruitful that you have flourishing even there. Such that a king like Solomon would say, Give him the gold. Give him the rule. I want more of it. Now, there’s the authority and redemption. So we saw it in creation, a picture of it with David there in 2 Samuel 23, and then in Psalm 72 a pointing forward to this beautiful picture and redemption. Oh, and Christian, don’t you want that?

22:28 - The Misuse of Spiritual Authority

Matt Tully
One of the primary misuses of authority that you spend time on in the book is the misuse of spiritual authority, whether that’s in the home with a husband and a wife and their children, or at church with a pastor or elders. And you don’t mince your words. At one point you write, “Satan can use the Bible too.”

Jonathan Leeman
Matthew 4.

Matt Tully
Unpack that for us.

Jonathan Leeman
Well, Satan quotes Scripture to Jesus. He quotes Psalm 90 or Psalm 91. So we know that Satan can use the Bible. That’s the basic point. Well, the reason I said that is a woman, an abused wife, was telling me the story about how she had a pastor husband who was physically abusive, and he would quote Scripture at her. And she would then kind of try to coach herself with Scripture: “Do everything without complaining” or, “Wives, submit to your husbands.” So you have this tyrannical husband/pastor saying, “Wives, submit to your husbands” and saying things like, “Do everything without complaining or arguing” and “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” What is that? That to me feels like Satan using the Bible to justify his power. And she, the dutiful Christian wife, is doing her best to submit to this husband who is tyrannical in his exercise of rule. So what is she slowly learning to do?

Matt Tully
But also cloaking it in spiritual language.

Jonathan Leeman
Yeah. So if abuse is using your authority to harm others, spiritual abuse I define in the book as abusing in the name of God, under the name of God, cloaking, as you just said, in the name of God, with Bible, with Scripture, with God’s name. “God told me.” Then it becomes spiritual abuse. So there’s a sense in which when I say a father abuses his daughter, that’s misrepresenting God all by itself.

Matt Tully
Right, because the father is meant to be inherently, creationally representing God.

Jonathan Leeman
That’s right. But then when he invokes the name of God himself or the Bible in some sense to justify what he’s doing, there’s sort of a double abuse going on there. I call it, again, a spiritual abuse—“I’m doing in the name of God,” in which case you’re lying doubly about God and what he is like. And that’s where I think it’s important for pastors and Christians generally to recognize that the abuse of authority is an especially heinous sin. Go back to the thing I said at the beginning about us being connected to God by virtue of being made in his image, and what we do represents him or images him. When we abuse those God has placed under us—say, a child—we are saying, This is what God is like. God is going to abuse you as well if you don’t do whatever I’m asking. And we are lying about our creator.

25:36 - Authority of Counsel vs. Authority of Command

Matt Tully
So broadening out a little bit to this idea of authority in general, a pretty important concept undergirding your approach to this big issue is a distinction between authority of counsel and authority of command. And that colors and that applies in the different spheres in which we are under authority, or have authority over other people. Explain those two ideas.

Jonathan Leeman
Well, let me first say there’s a temptation to treat authority as just one kind of thing.

Matt Tully
A monolithic thing.

Jonathan Leeman
A monolithic thing. It’s hierarchy: I have control. You don’t have control. That’s it. I’m the father. I’m the king of this little household. And we treat the king’s authority like a father’s authority, when it’s not. When you look at how Romans 13 talks about a king’s authority as “be afraid,” but then you look at how Scripture talks about a father’s authority—“Fathers do not exasperate your children”—it’s different. It’s got a different texture. It’s got a different feel. There’s a different jurisdiction. There’s a different sort of control that you would assert. And so what we need to do is start looking at the Bible and say, Okay, what exactly is a king’s authority? How does the government’s authority work? What is its jurisdiction? Okay, what about a parent’s authority? A father’s authority? What about a husband’s authority? What about the church? So we’ve got to pay special attention to exactly what the Bible says in these different spheres, as you said, of authority. One of the biggest differences I see the Bible making is between an authority in which you have the ability to exercise discipline, and those in which you don’t. Those in which you have an enforcement mechanism of discipline—government as a sword, a parent has the rod, a church has the keys—all of these are disciplinary enforcement mechanisms; and those authorities in which you don’t have that enforcement mechanism. So stop and think for a moment. Can you think of any verse in the Bible—scan your mind’s eye through the Bible—any place where you see a husband has the right to “discipline” his wife?

Matt Tully
It’s hard to think of an option.

Jonathan Leeman
Yeah. I just let the long silence ensue. Can you think of it? I can’t. Now, does a husband have authority? I think he does. He’s given headship, and wives are told to submit, but it’s a different kind of authority. It’s what I would call authority of counsel. What does that mean? Well, it means he has the right to say to his wife, Sweetheart, I think we should do this. And she’s called to submit. And there is an enforcement mechanism. Jesus has it. On the last day he will say to the wife, I told you to submit, and you didn’t. But the husband doesn’t hold that enforcement mechanism. I would say the same thing about pastors/elders. I think the church holds the enforcement mechanism. As a Congregationalist, I don’t think the pastor does. We can debate that later for my Presbyterian and Anglican friends. But leave that one to the side. Why is this distinction between authority of counsel and command important? Well, because it radically changes the nature of how that authority is exercised. With an authority of command—government, parent of young children, church—I can insist on something right now. I can say to my three year old, It’s time to go to bed. No, you need to go to bed now. A police officer can say, You need to slow down your car now and expect immediate results. Whereas a husband is to live with his wife in an understanding way. A pastor is to teach with all patience. There’s a sense in which husbands and pastors, who I would argue have this authority of counsel, are seeking to woo, to win, to love, to draw people towards, in an evangelistic fashion, oneness, Christ-likeness, and so forth. They don’t insist on now. It’s not for that. You’re seeking to help your wife love you and follow you with the Song of Solomon-like beauty that you’re trying to compel her with. And in the same way, an elder is trying to draw people towards the righteousness of Christ—Follow me as I follow Christ—with the beauty of a Christ-like example. So you’re not threatening with an enforcement mechanism; you’re instead seeking to compel with something beautiful.

Matt Tully
Playing devil’s advocate, someone might respond to that and say, Well, that sounds nice, but then that’s not really authority. That’s wooing, that’s hoping, that’s trying to incentivize some kind of adherence to what you want. But how is that authority in any meaningful sense?

Jonathan Leeman
Great question. It’s the natural question to ask. Two ways: number one, God has established a structure, and he’s called the wife and he’s called the church member to submit. Which is to say, second, there is, as I said a moment ago, an enforcement mechanism. It’s just that Jesus holds that enforcement mechanism. The pastor and the husband do not hold it. So she really is called to submit. “Wives submit to your husbands in everything.”

Matt Tully
And in the church, people are called to submit to their pastors.

Jonathan Leeman
“Submit and obey the leaders over you” (Heb. 13:17). And so there is an ability of the pastor and the husband to “bind the conscience” and say, You must do that. But the thing is—*

Matt Tully
If they don’t . . .

Jonathan Leeman
Well, okay. There it is. I trust Jesus will have words with you, but there’s nothing else I can do here.

Matt Tully
And that’s where we go wrong—pastors, husbands, and others in this domain of authority of counsel—when we don’t accept that limit on our authority. We try to enforce it.

Jonathan Leeman
That’s when things go wrong. And the reason I think it’s worth highlighting this distinction between the authority of command and the authority of counsel is to say to those with an authority of counsel—husbands and pastors—hey, brother, you’ve got to earn it. You got to lean in and you’ve got to work hard for it. Now, a parent, in a sense, doesn’t have to. A parent, again, can say to the three year old, You must do this because I’m your dad, and I said so. Don’t ever talk to your wife that way. Don’t ever talk to your church member that way. You got to lean and say, Hey, sweetheart, I know this is going to be challenging for us to sell this house and yada, yada. And in fact, most of the time when you come to those impasses with your wife or with a church member, you’re not going to try to force the decision. What are you going to do? Hopefully you’re going to slow down and seek to persuade and wait and listen to their wisdom. Maybe you got it wrong. Absolutely. And work towards a consensus insofar as you can. Now, when you have to, there’s a sense in which I would say you have, as a husband, the final call. But if you understand that your job there is not to get your way and to force a decision, as with the child who you’re trying to get to bed, rather your job is to lead her towards oneness—“And the two became one flesh.” How do you lead her towards oneness? You do that with a different set of tools: an evangelistic, winsome I love you. Come with me. I’m going to prove to you that I’m trustworthy and that I care about you more than I care about myself. And this isn’t just about you cleaning the house while I watch football. No, this is about you seeing me and doing all I can pouring myself out to draw you towards a life together in godliness. That is a different kind of authority. It’s beautiful.

32:54 - Good Human Authority Is Always Limited

Matt Tully
This is a great segue into a conversation on a few of the key characteristics of authority that you lay out in the book. You emphasize that good human authority is always limited. What do you mean by that?

Jonathan Leeman
Human authority is not native to us in the way it’s native to God. God has authority by necessary right, by virtue of being the Creator. All authority humans have must be given to them. No human has natural authority over another human. God must give it to us. He must authorize it. We don’t self-authorize. He authorizes us. To be in authority, then, you have to be under God’s authority at all times. And we begin to terrorize others when we think we’re self-authorizing and we don’t put ourselves under the authority of God. I could give you a bunch of Scripture examples. I think of Deuteronomy 17 and the king of Israel and so forth.

Matt Tully
You say in the book at one point that authority and submission are two sides of the same coin. Unpack that for us. How does that work?

Jonathan Leeman
Well, think about Jesus. Think about the incarnate God-man. He comes along and he says, I do nothing except what the Father tells me to do. I don’t speak anything other than what the Father tells me to say. He submits himself perfectly to the law of God and the rule of God, and in so doing wins all authority in heaven and on earth by putting himself under the law of God. He put himself in the law of God. Really simple illustration: think about a classroom, and the teacher says to one student, I’m going to be out of the classroom. Make sure the class does everything they’re supposed to and everybody keeps working on their assignments while I’m out of the classroom. Well, that student is then authorized by the teacher to step into a position of authority over the classroom, but the student does that only insofar as the student submits precisely to what the teacher told him or her to do. To be in authority, you have to be under authority. You cannot lead until you submit. Very practically, what does that mean? For instance, in the domain of pastoring we do not make a man an elder in our church unless that man proves that he’s willing and happy to submit to the other pastors in the church. Hey brother, if all the elders vote this way and you vote that way, what are you going to do? If he is unwilling to submit, that guy’s not ready to lead. And so it is in any business place that you’re working in. If you have an employee who won’t submit to you as the head manager, you’re probably not going to put that person into a position of authority. You want to know that they can submit to you before you’re going to elevate them and promote them. And so just in general we can use example after example that submission, ironically, leads to growth and life and authority and rule.

35:48 - Good Authority Is Teachable

Matt Tully
Another characteristic that you emphasize is that good authorities are teachable. And I think teachableness is one of those virtues that few of us would outright reject and say, I don’t want to have that. I don’t want to be teachable. And yet my sense is that, and you draw this out a little bit, that it can be really hard as we grow in our authority, and grow in our power even, to maintain this teachable spirit because we do know a lot, we’re used to getting our way, and we think we’re doing a good job. We are trying to help other people with our authority. How do we hold onto that teachable spirit as people in authority and as we mature into that authority?

Jonathan Leeman
Insofar as you are getting old and you are growing in wisdom and the young people seem to keep getting younger, I understand the temptation. Nonetheless, you are only going to grow and win as a leader the more you double down in seeking humility of listening and growing, even as you age.

Matt Tully
I think sometimes we can equate authority with the senior guy in the room has to always have the right answer.

Jonathan Leeman
Yeah. It’s tempting to feel that way when you’re the authority in the room. And I think good authorities stop and listen and learn as much as they can before they finally have to make a decision. I can tell the illustration in the book of how hard NASA worked after the Columbia and Challenger disasters at vetting every single program and doing all they could to listen to their astronauts and listen to everybody in the building before they sent another space shuttle into space—these long hours of listening.

Matt Tully
They had identified that was part of what happened and what led to the disasters.

Jonathan Leeman
They hadn’t listened.

Matt Tully
Yeah, they hadn’t listened to the warnings.

Jonathan Leeman
That’s exactly right. Somebody recently told me the illustration of what happens when you get an NFL football coach who wins a Super Bowl early in his career, and then after that can’t seem to repeat it. Well, because the first time he wins a Super Bowl, he’s working together with his defensive coach and his offensive coach and his passing coach and his special teams coach, and they’re working hard and they’re scrappy and they’re trying to figure out how they win the Super Bowl. And then they win, and then suddenly he’s the expert, and that defensive coach and offensive coach and passing coach go off to other teams, and he gets a new set of assistant coaches alongside of him. But he’s the expert now, and he doesn’t listen to them.

Matt Tully
That’s a catch-22 situation when success and good work can often lead to more authority in whatever sphere we’re operating within. And then ironically, that can then lead to a lack of teachableness and pride that then prevents us from having success going forward.

Jonathan Leeman
Brother, honestly, I’ve seen that again and again. And I’ve seen it, sadly, among evangelical leaders as they age. And I suppose I’m aging now. Especially if you’ve known some success, it’s just so easy as humans to stop listening. I’m determined in my own life and around those people with whom I work to keep encouraging us, Brothers, we have to keep listening even as we get old and get complacent and get lazy, not to rest on the laurels of our success but continue to humble ourselves. You think of Uzziah. Uzziah saw great success, and then he got proud, and then he fell towards the end of his life.

Matt Tully
One other thing that you draw out is how Scripture itself can sometimes be more honest and more attuned to the dangers of authority than we often want to be. Certainly, in our crowds and in our circles there are so many examples like that of authority gone bad, authority late in life gone bad, that we would do well to pay attention to.

Jonathan Leeman
Well, it’s literally every character in the Bible save one. You cannot name somebody of whom that is not true. And that’s why, back to your earlier question, Why is the abuse of authority worth mentioning? I think it’s the lesson of the Bible. We all abuse it apart from the One who did not. So let’s begin with repentance and faith, and then follow after that One.

40:01 - Good Authority Is Transparent

Matt Tully
Why should those in authority be willing, even doggedly committed, to sharing, within reason, their own shortcomings and failings? That’s something that you emphasize in the book, that there’s a confessional element that you even, again, modeled at the beginning of the book. What might that look like for a church or an organization for the leaders to do?

Jonathan Leeman
Transparency in positions of leadership is difficult and takes a lot of wisdom. I’m not calling you as a leader to confess any and every sin and shortcoming that you might have to those who you’re trying to lead. One always needs to do that with discretion and wisdom. Nonetheless, I think there’s a necessity in demonstrating some measure of transparency. And I think where I really discovered this in my own life was with my daughters. I have four daughters. When they were young, I had a hard time apologizing to them or confessing sin to them when I parented in a way that I knew to be sinful. Because on the whole, by God’s grace, I’m pretty self-controlled on the outside. I’m not given to fits of anger and temper and so forth. I’m more of a Pharisee. My sins, you’re not going to be able to see it as clearly, but I know it’s there. So my girls, I remember when they were little they used to say, Oh daddy, you’re such a good Christian! You never sin, daddy! And I remember feeling like, I can’t let them down. I need to let them continue to see me as an awesome dad who’s walking uprightly. And so there was a reluctance in my heart to confess sin to them. But then somewhere along the way, I think maybe either my sin was just too obvious and I knew I needed to confess it, but also, frankly, it was because of my wife’s example. I remember seeing her confess sin one time, and it became clear to me that what my daughters need is not just a picture of moral perfection; they need pictures of humility and repentance, and then the receiving of forgiveness of grace. Because you know what? My daughters are not and never will be morally perfect. So the model they need is not, Look at me, this perfect, righteous man! that they’ll never be. Rather, what they need is, Look at me. I’m a sinner. I need a savior. I need forgiveness. So for me to draw them up into my “maturity” means bending down and confessing, Sweetheart, daddy sinned against you just now when I did this or said that. I’m sorry. Will you forgive me?

Matt Tully
And that would apply at a Christian organization or a secular organization as well, where we can acknowledge our mistakes, our failings, our shortcomings. You’ve mentioned the importance of discretion, and it strikes me that it probably isn’t appropriate to tell all your direct reports about the fight that you had with your wife the night before. That’s not relevant for them. But when you sin against them, or when you make mistakes that affect them, that’s an obvious place where authority can acknowledge that.

Jonathan Leeman
That’s well said. I’m in accountability relationships, and my accountability relationships are going to be with fellow elders. I think there’s a certain safety and wisdom in confessing certain sins and kinds of sins to those who aren’t directly under you, as it were. At the same time, I’m going to hold that truth together with another truth, a compatible truth, of it’s good to be transparent with those “under me”—as an elder, the members of the churches. God gives us wisdom to know how to do those two things well.

43:44 - Good Authority Is Not Self-Protective

Matt Tully
A last characteristic of good authority that I wanted to hit on today is that it’s not self-protective—this connects to what we just were talking about—but it instead bears the costs on behalf of others.

Jonathan Leeman
Yeah. I tell the story in the book that I remember one time I was sitting in a chair comfortably in the family room, and my eight-year-old daughter, my youngest daughter, was sitting in a chair on the other side of the room. And I said, Sweetheart, will you get up and get me a drink? And I knew that eight-year-old would be happy to do it. But I also knew what was going on in my heart in that moment. I was comfortable and I did not want to get up. I was passing on the cost of getting out of my comfortable chair and passed it over to her because I knew she would willingly bear the cost. Now, there may be good reasons for a father to ask his daughter to get him a drink. I’m not saying there’s not ever good reasons.

Matt Tully
It’s not always wrong to ask for a favor.

Jonathan Leeman
That’s right. I just knew in that moment there was a kind of selfishness and there was a passing on the cost to those under me because I could. And again, there’s a time and a place for that. The Roman centurion comes to Jesus and says, I too am a man of authority. I say to this one go, and he goes; to that one come, and he comes. And Jesus says, Yeah, you got awesome faith. So there’s a right place to do that in positions of authority, but there also should be an impulse for those in authority to draw the costs up into themselves—God has given me power. God has given me strength. God has given me size. God has given me learning. Why? So that I can spend them for your sake. Let me take the cost so that you might benefit and gain, for the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many. Isn’t that what Jesus did? Jesus’s act on the cross was a priestly act, yes, but it was also a kingly act. The King ruled by sacrificing himself to win a people and conquer death and pay the penalty they deserved. It was a kingly, ruling, authoritative act, in addition to being a priestly act. So, mother, father, workplace manager, army officer, how are you using your authority? Are you using it to push costs down? Or are you using it to pull costs up into yourself so that you might win life and growth and opportunity for those you are leading?

Matt Tully
What a good word. Jonathan, thank you so much for taking the time today to talk to us about this big, important topic that, as you said, when we think about it, it does touch every facet of our lives. We appreciate it.

Jonathan Leeman
I appreciate it, brother. I hope it was helpful.

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