Doubting such a superficial understanding of success includes a challenge to propose a different concept to replace it. Hints about what such a new notion of success might be are found in the critique of the old idea of success. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:
In a world where success is the measure and justification of all things, the figure of Him who was sentenced and crucified remains a stranger and is at best the object of pity. The world will allow itself to be subdued only by success. It is not ideas or opinions which decide, but deeds. Success alone justifies wrongs done. Success heals the wounds of guilt. There is no sense in reproaching the successful man for his un-virtuous behavior, for this would be to remain in the past while the successful man strides forward from one deed to the next, conquering the future and securing the irrevocability of what has been done. The successful man presents us with accomplished facts which can never again be reversed. What he destroys cannot be restored. What he constructs will acquire at least a prescriptive right in the next generation. No indictment can make good the guilt which the successful man has left behind him. The indictment falls silent with the passage of time, but the success remains and determines the course of history. The judges of history play a sad role in comparison with its protagonists. History rides rough-shod over their heads. With a frankness and off-handedness which no other earthly power could permit itself, history appeals in its own cause to the dictum that the end justifies the means.
Bonhoeffer here writes about the macro-level of history, but the lesson applies to the micro-level of our lives. The heavy-handed neighbor or colleague who usually gets his way moves forward in life, generally unaffected by the feelings he has hurt in the process. The conversation partner whose opinion is voiced strongly, and who fails to listen to other views, continues voicing his ideas, ignorant of, or oblivious to, his rudeness. How do people react to these powerful figures, who assert themselves at the expense of others and at the expense of any ethical standards?
So far we have been talking about facts and not about valuations. There are three possible attitudes which men and periods may adopt with regard to these facts.
The fact of worldly success confronts each onlooker with a question: was this right? should he have done this? A student who cheats on a homework assignment may have the success of a good grade from the teacher, but was it good, moral, or right for him to do that? The lure of success tempts many to hesitate in pointing out the evil done to achieve the success. Bonhoeffer writes:
When a successful figure becomes especially prominent and conspicuous, the majority give way to the idolization of success. They become blind to right and wrong, truth and untruth, fair play and foul play. They have eyes only for the deed, for the successful result. The moral and intellectual critical faculty is blunted. It is dazzled by the brilliance of the successful man and by the longing in some way to share in his success. It is not even seen that success is healing the wounds of guilt, for the guilt itself is no longer recognized. Success is simply identified with good. This attitude is genuine and pardonable only in a state of intoxication. When sobriety returns it can be achieved only at the price of a deep inner untruthfulness and conscious self-deception. This brings with it an inward rottenness from which there is scarcely a possibility of recovery.
If one has the courage to see clearly that evil has been done in order to achieve success, then one is forced to face the uncomfortable reality that evil in this world sometimes - often? - triumphs. As the Psalmist cried: "why do the evildoers prosper?" - Bonhoeffer continues:
The proposition that success is identical with good is followed by another which aims to establish the conditions for the continuance of success. This is the proposition that only good is successful. The competence of the critical faculty to judge success is reaffirmed. Now right remains right and wrong remains wrong. Now one no longer closes one's eye at the crucial moment and opens it only when the deed is done. And now there is a conscious or unconscious recognition of a law of the world, a law which makes right, truth, and order more stable in the long run than violence, falsehood, and self-will. And yet this optimistic thesis is in the end misleading. Either the historical facts have to be falsified in order to prove that evil has not been successful, which very soon brings one back to the converse proposition that success is identical with goodness, or else one's optimism breaks down in the face of the facts and one ends by finding fault with all historical successes.
One might attempt to point out that justice eventually prevails, goodness eventually wins. This is true in a cosmic sense - eschatologically. Even when it is true in a shorter timeframe, it is often unsatisfying: Hitler was overcome, but only after causing untold human misery; one's cruel aunt eventually died, but only after causing deep emotional pain to family and neighbors. Such a claim of eventual justice is unsatisfying:
That is why the arraigners of history never cease to complain that all success comes of wickedness. If one is engaged in fruitless and pharisaical criticism of what is past, one can never find one's way to the present, to action, and to success, and precisely in this one sees yet another proof of the wickedness of the successful man. And, if only in a negative sense, even in this one quite involuntarily makes success the measure of all things. And if success is the measure of all things, it makes no essential difference whether it is so in a positive or in a negative sense.
Ultimately, a thought-process centered upon success - as 'success' is defined by the world - will collapse.
The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard. Such thought is a denial of eternal justice. Neither the triumph of the successful nor the bitter hatred which the successful arouse in the hearts of the unsuccessful can ultimately overcome the world. Jesus is certainly no apologist for the successful men in history, but neither does He head the insurrection of shipwrecked existences against their successful rivals. He is not concerned with success or failure but with the willing acceptance of God's judgment. Only in this judgment is there reconciliation with God and among men.
The quest for "success" is brushed aside - the goal is reconciliation. The reestablishing of relation between man and God, and between man and man.
We can view this in two ways: either we abandon the pursuit of success for the pursuit of reconciliation, or we redefine 'success' as reconciliation. In either case, we are changing the paradigm. Bonhoeffer, as the reader will know, lived this question in a concrete reality. Risking and eventually losing his life on the basis of these thoughts, he was forced to wonder if his life had been a failure. Historian Eric Metaxas says of Bonhoeffer's notion:
God was interested not in success, but in obedience. If one obeyed God and was willing to suffer defeat and whatever came one's way, God would show a kind of success that the would couldn't imagine. But this was the narrow path, and few would take it.
We might adjust the wording of Metaxas a bit, and say that if in the course of obeying God one suffers defeat, one experiences a type of success that the world cannot imagine.
