Isn’t Ambition Good?
Several weeks ago, over the Fourth of July weekend, my sister-in-law suggested that my family watch Hamilton as a way of celebrating our national history. If you haven’t seen Hamilton yourself, you have probably heard about it. When it originally burst onto Broadway, garnering widespread acclaim, it reignited interest in the story of our nation’s founding. Through its focus on a lesser-known historical figure, Alexander Hamilton, it gave a surprisingly engaging account of our country’s ambitious beginning. It gained particular renown for its appeal to youth of color, as its author Lin-Manuel Miranda casted many of the founding figures as people of color (thus foregrounding the immigrant character of our forebears) and wrote most of the numbers in a sort of plainspoken rap.
I won’t embarrass myself trying to rap, but I would like to share with you in spoken word a portion of the show’s opener, which introduces Alexander Hamilton as an ambitious upstart, a go-getter, a young man who won’t take no for an answer. Here’s how the show begins:
How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a
Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten
Spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?
The ten-dollar Founding Father without a father
Got a lot farther by working a lot harder
By being a lot smarter, by being a self-starter
By fourteen, they placed him in charge of a trading charter
And every day while slaves were being slaughtered and carted
Away across the waves, he struggled and kept his guard up
Inside, he was longing for something to be a part of
The brother was ready to beg, steal, borrow, or barter….[1]
Hearing these words rhythmically and enthusiastically delivered, it’s hard not to feel a sense of pride and optimism for the young Alexander Hamilton, and indeed for our young nation. The hungry and scrappy character that would propel Alexander Hamilton to great heights is the same character that much of our world aspires to today. In a word, we could call it ambition. (In fact, that may be the perfect word for it. Ambition comes from the Latin word ambitio, which just means “going around.” The word originated from when politicians would “go around” to seek votes, to build their following, to proclaim their superiority over against other candidates.
In our world, ambition is widely considered a good thing. Ambition is the drive to achieve, to get ahead, to win, to inch your way forward to the top. We think of ambition as what has propelled so many advances in medicine, technology, engineering, and science. Ambition has given us the telephone, the airplane, insulin, the heart transplant, the internet, tiny phones with the processing power of computers, and so much more.
“Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes
Us Worse”
It may, therefore, be a surprise to hear how James takes ambition to task, twice. First as a trait that is opposite to God’s wisdom (Ja 3:14). Then as a trait that breeds chaos and destruction (Ja 3:16). James clearly does not think highly of ambition.
Miroslav Volf, a professor of theology at Yale University, has a pithy diagnosis for the disease of ambition. “Striving to be better than others,” he warns, “makes us worse.” It’s a tale as old as time itself. Consider Adam and Eve in the garden. The serpent tempts them to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil by telling them, “You will be like gods” (Gen 3:5). But in fact the pursuit of superior knowledge leads to the humans’ downfall. Striving for superiority in fact entails shame and division, hiding the truth and blaming others. The harmony of God’s good creation is broken by the dissonance of ambition.
Miroslav Volf shares how each school year, several thousand new students arrive on Yale’s campus. All of them are excellent students. They have gained admission by being top of their class. You might think their arrival would be cause for celebration and camaraderie. “We made it! All those years of hard work have paid off. Finally, we’re here!” But instead, he says, many of the students become anxious and depressed. Now they are just a small fish in a big pond. He concludes that their ambition contains in its heart a deep insecurity. A doubt or distrust that they are good enough, that they will be loved and cared for just as they are. They are always comparing themselves with others, always implicitly in competition with their surroundings. The striving of ambition is ultimately an insatiable desire to be better. There’s no rest in comparison and competition. Only endless striving.
It is for this reason that I find the story of Alexander Hamilton so fascinating. The musical celebrates him as a hero (albeit a tragic hero). He rose from obscurity to fame, from the rubble to political power. He is held aloft as an example of the American dream, as an example of the greatness that can be achieved by (as the song puts it) “working a lot harder” and “being a lot smarter.” And yet the tragedy of his story—and of his ambition—cannot be denied. First there is the humiliating affair that he engages in when he chooses to stay behind in Philadelphia to pursue his work during the summer instead of traveling with the rest of his family to the countryside. Then there is the brutal fact that both he and his son Philip died as the result of choosing to engage in duels to uphold their honor (despite the fact that duels were illegal). The rewards of Alexander Hamilton’s ambition were indeed high—but were they worth the cost? I wonder what Eliza, his wife, would say.
British philosopher John Gray suggests that whenever ambition results in what we might consider progress, it nearly always follows this same tragic arc. All of the progress that we might celebrate—in technology, in medicine, in engineering, and so on—all of that, he argues, “is an illusion.”[2] “The core of the idea of progress,” he claims, “is the illusion that knowledge enhances human freedom. The reality is that it merely increases human power.”[3] The unfortunate tendency that we tend to gloss over is that much of human progress is accompanied by tragic misuse of the new knowledge and new power. Consider how at the turn of the twentieth century, western civilization was optimistic about the prospects of our scientific advances, predicting that they would usher in a golden age of peace and prosperity. Instead, we got two world wars and several genocides, all of which implemented our new knowledge and power in the worst of ways.
Knowledge Is Not Wisdom
In Genesis, when the serpent promises Eve that eating the forbidden fruit will make the humans like gods, giving them a superior knowledge to what they have, the storyteller reports a curious, minute difference in what Eve perceives. He says that Eve sees that “the tree was to be desired to make one wise” (Gen 3:6). The serpent promises knowledge, but she anticipates wisdom. In other words, she confuses knowledge with wisdom. It is the same mistake made by the optimists at the turn of the twentieth century, and indeed by anyone who lives by selfish ambition.
Wisdom is not knowledge. If you think about it, this is pretty obvious. A teenager might know what it takes to drive a car—first you turn the key to start the ignition, then you take the car out of park and into reverse, and so on. But knowing what it takes to drive a car is very different from knowing how to drive a car. Anyone getting in the passenger seat with a teenager who’s never actually driven better be prepared for an adventure!
Knowledge is about a what; wisdom is about a how. Knowledge is about information; wisdom is about an orientation. When humans learned what nuclear energy was, that was knowledge. When humans decided to use it to make a bomb, well…a Christ-follower might argue that was a tragic, devastating lack of wisdom.
Worldly Wisdom and God’s Wisdom
According to James, “earthly” wisdom is about an orientation that is selfish and ambitious. “Earthly” wisdom is the orientation that we see in Hamilton: a mindset of competition and comparison, a ceaseless striving to be “better.” James is clear that the results of this wisdom are conflict and chaos and destruction.
But God’s wisdom, James says, has a very different orientation. The “wisdom from above” is, paradoxically, about living serenely below; this wisdom is “peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy” (Ja 3:17). We need only think of how Jesus repeatedly teaches his disciples that greatness is not lording it over others, but being last of all and servant of all. Jesus is not teaching the disciples some new knowledge; he’s reorienting their hearts, away from ambition and toward gentle acceptance and cooperation. It’s telling that not long after he teaches this lesson for the first time, James and John come to him in private and demand positions of power in his kingdom (Mark 9:33-37; 10:35-45). This new orientation, this new “how,” is not easy to learn for us who have long been schooled in ambition.
“Imagine…”
Alexander Hamilton’s widow, Eliza, lived over fifty more years after her husband was gunned down. Remarkably, just a few years after losing him, she founded the first orphanage in New York. What gave her the strength—I wonder—not only to keep living, but to live so abundantly? By all accounts, she was a woman of deep and abiding faith. I would like to imagine—although I must stress, I’m not a historian, and I don’t know this for a fact—I would like to imagine that her faith grounded her in a way her husband’s ambition could never do. I would like to imagine that she stood secure in God’s love, knowing herself to be cherished and cared for, just as she was. For this reason, all the scandal that befell her—from her husband’s infidelity to her son’s death in a duel and her husband’s as well—all this scandal could not move the needle on the orientation of her heart. With God’s wisdom, she continually employed her gifts and efforts toward mercy and peace.
Priest and spiritual leader Henri Nouwen writes, “So much of our energy, time, and money goes into maintaining distance from one another. Many if not most of the resources of the world are used to defend ourselves against each other, to maintain or increase our power, and to safeguard our own privileged position.” Here, I think, it’s pretty clear he’s writing about the spirit of ambition and competition that prevails in our world. But he proceeds to imagine more people living like Eliza. “Imagine all that effort being put in the service of peace and reconciliation! Would there be any poverty? Would there be crimes and wars? Just imagine that there was no longer fear among people, no longer any rivalry, hostility, bitterness, or revenge. Just imagine all the people on this planet holding hands and forming one large circle of love. We say, ‘I can't imagine.’ But God says, ‘That's what I imagine, a whole world not only created…in my image [but also living in it].’”[4]
Prayer
You lived secure in God’s love,
Not striving but trusting
…
Inspire us by your faith
And your example
To live not by ambition—
Not by the need to be more, or have more, or do more—
But by a desire for your kingdom of mercy and peace,
Where all might live secure in God’s love.
Amen.
[1] “Alexander Hamilton,” Hamilton
by Lin-Manuel Miranda,
https://genius.com/Leslie-odom-jr-anthony-ramos-daveed-diggs-okieriete-onaodowan-lin-manuel-miranda-phillipa-soo-christopher-jackson-and-original-broadway-cast-of-hamilton-alexander-hamilton-lyrics,
, accessed July 27, 2026.
[2] John Gray, “An Illusion with a Future,”
Daedalus (Summer 2004): 11.
[3] John Gray, “An Illusion with a Future,”
Daedalus (Summer 2004): 15.
[4] Following the Call: Living the
Sermon on the Mount Together (ed. Charles E. Moore; Walden: Plough, 2021),
104.
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