Engaging the Powers: 25th Anniversary Edition

By Walter Wink

In this brilliant culmination of his seminal Powers Trilogy, now reissued in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition, Walter Wink explores the problem of evil today and how it relates to the New Testament concept of principalities and powers. He asks the question, "How can we oppose evil without creating new evils and being made evil ourselves?"

Winner of the Pax Christi Award, the Academy of Parish Clergy Book of the Year, and the Midwest Book Achievement Award for Best Religious Book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781506438542

Book preview

Critical Acclaim for Engaging the Powers

Winner of the Pax Christi Award,

the Academy of Parish Clergy Book of the Year,

and the Midwest Book Achievement Award for Best Religious Book

In his remarkable trilogy on the principalities and powers, Walter Wink has biblically verified what more and more of us have come to realize intuitively; namely, that underneath and within the social, economic, and political crisis we face, there are profoundly spiritual realities which must be confronted. In this newest and final volume Wink offers keen insight into how the ‘powers’ may not only be exposed but actually engaged and resisted. His reflections on the meaning of prayer, both in our lives and in our world, are some of the best I have ever seen. Building on the work of earlier pioneers like William Stringfellow, Wink presents us with the sobering and illuminating truth that movements for social change will simply never succeed unless they come to terms with the existence and pervasive presence of the structural and spiritual forces the Bible refers to as principalities and powers. And there is no better treatment of the biblical and contemporary meaning of the powers than Walter Wink’s.

—Jim Wallis, Sojourners

"Sheer grace, that Engaging the Powers should come forth at this time when world leaders have captured the language of ‘new world order’ and are consolidating the power to enforce a dominating vision of geopolitical reality. How faith confronts these worldly schemes and what conscientious Christians can do to bear faithful and effective witness to a higher order is the prophetic gift of insight found in these pages."

—James Forbes, Senior Minister, Riverside Church, New York City

"Engaging the Powers is a courageous, scholarly, and yet intensely personal attempt to help us better understand the problem of evil. In this third volume of his encyclopedic work on the forces he calls ‘the powers,’ Wink provides an incisive analysis that repeatedly shows the centrality of gender equity to a world of partnership and peace. And he powerfully challenges us to change the social institutions that throughout recorded history, all too often in the name of God and good,  have  abetted  so  much  demonic  energy,  and  to reconceptualize theology so it may serve as a tool for personal and social transformation."

—Riane Eisler, author, The Chalice and the Blade

The Quaker, Elton Trueblood, once commented to the effect, ‘You can accept Jesus; you can reject Jesus; but you cannot reasonably ignore him.’ To agree with everything in this book might be to betray your own power of discernment. To deliberately ignore it would be to betray your very humanity.

—M. Scott Peck, author, The Road Less Traveled and People of the Lie

"Engaging the Powers forcefully drives home one of the impelling truths of our era: the real battle against the evil in today’s world is a spiritual battle. Walter Wink, with exceptional moral and intellectual force, convinces us that the weapons for this battle are not carnal, such as our habitual employment of domination and violence, but rather they are spiritual, among the most effective being prayer. I could not agree more that ‘History belongs to the intercessors.’"

—C. Peter Wagner, Professor of Church Growth, Fuller Theological Seminary

In the third volume of his trilogy on the powers Walter Wink prompts us to reconsider the impoverished character of so much of our theology. In a wide-ranging study with a plethora of insights on familiar biblical texts he reminds us of Christianity’s counter-cultural message and the practice it demands. It is a salutary message for any who would capitulate to the spirit of the age and find that they are in thrall to the Powers.

—Professor Christopher Rowland, Oxford University

"Delivering more than he promised in his first two volumes, this proves to be the most profound in Wink’s trek towards the cultural and personal interior. This book does for the last generation of this century what Barth’s Commentary on Romans did for the first. This is a major contribution, not just to scholarship, but to the planet."

—Arthur J. Dewey, Xavier University

In this extraordinary and seminal book, Walter Wink applies trenchant New Testament scholarship to the growing phenomenon of ‘people power’ uprisings and nonviolent movements across the planet. The result is a challenging examination of just war theories and violent liberation struggles from which the revolutionary power of Jesus’ ‘third way’ is demonstrated in a fresh and bold way.

—Richard Deats, Fellowship of Reconciliation

A masterwork. Combines skillful biblical exegesis with prodigious knowledge of our modern world to produce a radically new understanding of Christianity as victory over the Powers that dominate and enslave.

—Robert T. Fortna, Vassar College

God has blessed the writing of this book. It has been a turning point in my understanding.

—Bishop Stephen Verney, The Abbey, Sutton Courtenay, England

This is the most important and exciting theological work to emerge in a generation. It will have a profound effect on Christian thinking well into the next century. Whether the institutional churches will be able to take it fully on board is an open question. If they cannot, we are in for a new Dark Age.

—Charles Elliott, Cambridge University

A stirring and important work! This is Wink at his best—provocative, insightful, always challenging and prodding with good exegesis, argument, and analysis. You’re not among the living if you have no arguments of your own with the author, but you’ll be much the poorer if you fail to join him where he excels in this volume: engaging the Powers, and ourselves in the process.

—Larry L. Rasmussen, Union Theological Seminary, New York City

No one else has produced such a far-reaching, comprehensive, and incisive understanding of ‘the powers’ as they are disclosed in biblical literature, and no one else has articulated their significance for today through such relevant interpretation. Wink’s book should be read by all Christians and especially by pastors and divinity students as they lead congregants into a more penetrating understanding of the contemporary world. It is ideally suited for adult Bible study.

—Herman J. Waetjen, The Christian Century

For years now Wink has been relentlessly Naming, Unmasking, and now Engaging those artful spiritual dodgers, the principalities and powers. . . . One grows lighthearted amid the riches. His social and political analysis of the braggadocio, the sheer, horrid ‘normalizing’ of domination and death in America in the ’90s, is devastating. The exegesis of Revelation 13 is masterfully to the point of our social and political derangement. But there is more, and better: a solid hope of liberation. . . . Extraordinary work.

—Dan Berrigan, Pax Christi

It is without doubt the most crucial work on the theology of nonviolence and its role in overcoming the powers of domination that has been written in this century.

—Bishop Peter Storey, Methodist Church of South Africa

The best and most important book I have read in a long time. . . . He argues persuasively  that  violence  ‘and  not  Christianity,  is  the  real  religion  of America.’

—Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, Sojourners

The most exciting and most important book on theology of our time, perhaps all time.

—David Ray Griffin, Claremont School of Theology

Engaging the Powers

25th Anniversary Edition

Walter WInk

Fortress Press

Minneapolis

ENGAGING THE POWERS

25th Anniversary Edition

Copyright © 2017 Fortress Press. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [e-mail] or write to Permissions, Fortress Press, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN  55440-1209.

Originally published by Augsburg Fortress in 1992.

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches in the USA and used by permission.

Cover image: Pomona Hallenbeck

Cover design: Alisha Lofgren

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-3816-0

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-3854-2

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z329.48-1984.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

With June—

Costing not less than everything

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Fortress Press Books by Walter Wink

Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament (1984)

Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Powers That Determine Human Existence (1986)

Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (1992)

When the Powers Fall: Reconciliation in the Healing of Nations (1998)

My Struggle to Become Human (2017)

Contents

Critical Acclaim for

Engaging the Powers

Dedication

Fortress Press Books by Walter Wink

Preface

Abbreviations and Symbols

Introduction

Part I. The Domination System

1. The Myth of the Domination System

2. The Origin of the Domination System

3. Naming the Domination System

4. The Nature of the Domination System

5. Unmasking the Domination System

Part II. God’s New Charter of Reality

6. God’s Domination-Free Order:

Jesus and God’s Reign

7. Breaking the Spiral of Violence:

The Power of the Cross

8. To Wash Off the Not Human:

Becoming Expendable

Part III. Engaging the Powers Nonviolently

9. Jesus’ Third Way: Nonviolent Engagement

10. On Not Becoming What We Hate

11. Beyond Just War and Pacifism

12. But What If . . . ?

13. Re-Visioning History: Nonviolence Past,

Present, Future

Part IV. The Powers and the Life of the Spirit

14. The Acid Test: Loving Enemies

15. Monitoring Our Inner Violence

16. Prayer and the Powers

17. Celebrating the Victory of God

Notes

Index of Passages

Index of Names

Index of Subjects

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Preface

Awkward as it is to express mathematically, there are really four books that belong to this trilogy. In addition to Naming the Powers, Unmasking the Powers, and this volume, there is also Violence and Nonviolence in South Africa: Jesus’ Third Way.¹ The book on South Africa provides what this one lacks: a practical case study of the relevance of nonviolent  direct  action  applied  to  a  concrete  situation.  Some of the abstractness of this study can be mitigated by a reading of that volume.

The completion of this project causes me a bit of grief. It has absorbed, off and on, almost three decades of my life, has led me into fascinating areas of study that I would not otherwise have explored, and has been the source of tremendous excitement. I hope some of the intellectual and spiritual adventure rubs off on the reader.

This volume was brought to completion during 1989–90, when I was honored to be selected as a Peace Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. The views expressed do not reflect those of the Institute, nor has the Institute attempted in any way to censor anything in this book. It is important for an organization like USIP to be able to support, among other things, serious religious scholarship in a number of traditions that bears on peacemaking. I am grateful for the stimulation of colleagues there and at Oxford University, where part of the year was spent. Parts of this book were presented in workshops on nonviolence in Chile, South Africa, Northern Ireland, East Germany, and South Korea.

This book is immeasurably strengthened by the many friends who were kind enough to read it. Special thanks are due to John Pairman Brown and Robert T. Fortna, who doubled as theological critics and volunteer copy editors—a task they performed splendidly on all three volumes of this series. Others critiqued all of the manuscript or parts of it: Anne Barstow, Brewster Beach, Gil Bailie, Andrew Canale, Richard Deats, Arthur Dewey, James W. Douglass, Tom Faw Driver, Riane Eisler, Charles Elliott, James Forbes, Jane Garrett, Maria Harris, John Helgeland, William R. Herzog II, Robert L. Holmes, Robert Jewett, June Keener-Wink, Bill Wylie Kellermann, Madeleine L’Engle, David Little, Thomas Moore, Larry Rasmussen, Robert Reber, Stephen Verney, Barbara Wheeler, Rebecca Wink, and John Howard Yoder. Pomona Hallenbeck patiently and prolifically painted a whole series of covers from which to choose. I am grateful to Auburn Theological Seminary for its collegial spirit and continuing support. Thanks also to Marshall Johnson, David Lott, and the staff of Fortress Press, who saw the book through publication.

Questions for a Bible study on the Powers can be found in my Transforming Bible Study, 2nd ed. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990).

Abbreviations and Symbols

*

*

*

Introduction

One of the most pressing questions facing the world today is, How can we oppose evil without creating new evils and being made evil ourselves?

It is my conviction that any attempt to face the problem of evil in society from a New Testament perspective must be bound up with an understanding of what the Bible calls the Principalities and Powers. I am also convinced that no social ethic can be constructed on New Testament grounds without recognition of the role of these Powers in sustaining and subverting human life.²

The Powers, unfortunately, have long since been identified as an order of angelic beings in heaven, or as demons flapping about in the sky. Most people have simply consigned them to the dustbin of superstition. Others, sensing the tremendous potential in the concept of the Powers for interpreting social reality, have identified them without remainder as institutions, structures, and systems. The Powers certainly are the latter, but they are more, and it is that more that holds the clue to their profundity. In the biblical view they are both visible and invisible, earthly and heavenly, spiritual and institutional. The Powers possess an outer, physical manifestation (buildings, portfolios, personnel, trucks, fax machines) and an inner spirituality, or corporate culture, or collective personality. The Powers are the simultaneity of an outer, visible structure and an inner, spiritual reality. The Powers, properly speaking, are not just the spirituality of institutions, but their outer manifestations as well. The New Testament uses the language of power to refer now to the outer aspect, now to the inner aspect, now to both together, as I have shown in Naming the Powers. It is the spiritual aspect, however, that is so hard for people inured to materialism to grasp.

Perhaps this understanding of the Powers can be clarified by a comparison of worldviews, since our perception of the Powers is colored to a great extent by the way we view the world.

Fig. 1

1. The Ancient Worldview. This is the worldview reflected in the Bible (see fig. 1). In this conception, everything earthly has its heavenly counterpart, and everything heavenly has its earthly counterpart. Every event is thus a simultaneity of both dimensions of reality. If war begins on earth, then there must be, at the same time, war in heaven between the angels of the nations involved on earth. Likewise, events initiated in heaven would be mirrored on earth. There is nothing uniquely biblical about this imagery. It was shared not only by the writers of the Bible, but also by Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Sumerians— indeed, by everyone in the ancient world—and it is still held by large numbers of people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It is a profoundly true picture of reality.³

Fig. 2

2. The Spiritualistic Worldview. What distinguishes this worldview (see fig. 2) from all other types is that it divides human beings into soul and body; one understands oneself as the same as one’s soul and other than one’s body. In this account, the created order is evil, false, corrupted. Creation was itself the fall. Matter is either indifferent or downright evil. Earthly life is presided over by imperfect and evil Powers. When the soul leaves its heavenly bliss and is entrapped in a body, as a result of sexual intercourse, it forgets its divine origins and falls into lust, ignorance, and heaviness. The body is a place of exile and punishment, but also of temptation and contamination. Salvation comes through knowledge of one’s lost heavenly origins and the secret of the way back. This worldview is usually associated with Gnosticism, Manichaeism, some forms of Neoplatonism, and, in regard to sexuality, Puritanism. (Something of the same picture would fit some forms of Eastern religions, except that they would see the world not as evil but as illusion.)

Fig. 3

3. The Materialistic Worldview. This view (see fig. 3) became prominent in the Enlightenment, but is as old as Democritus (ca. 460–ca. 370 B.C.E.), and is in many ways the antithesis of the world-rejection of spiritualism. In this view, there is no heaven, no spiritual world, no God, no soul—nothing but material existence and what can be known through the five senses and reason. The spiritual world is an illusion. There is no higher self; we are mere complexities of matter, and when we die we cease to exist except as the chemicals and atoms that once constituted us. This materialistic worldview has penetrated deeply even into many Christians, causing them to ignore the spiritual dimensions of systems or the spiritual resources of faith.

4. The Theological Worldview. In reaction to materialism, Christian theologians invented the supernatural realm (see fig. 4). Acknowledging that this supersensible realm could not be known by the senses, they conceded earthly reality to modern science and preserved a privileged spiritual realm immune to confirmation or refutation—at the cost of an integral view of reality and the simultaneity of heavenly and earthly aspects of existence. This view of the religious realm as hermetically sealed and immune to challenge from the sciences has been held not only by the Christian center and right, but by most of theological liberalism and neoorthodoxy.

Fig. 4

5. An Integral Worldview. This new worldview (see fig. 5) is emerging from a confluence of sources: the reflections of Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, Morton Kelsey, Thomas Berry, Matthew Fox, process philosophy, and the new physics. It sees everything as having an outer and an inner aspect. It attempts to take seriously the spiritual insights of the ancient or biblical worldview by affirming a withinness or interiority in all things, but sees this inner spiritual reality as inextricably related to an outer concretion or physical manifestation. It is no more intrinsically Christian than the ancient worldview, but I believe it makes the biblical data more intelligible for people today than any other available worldview, including the ancient.

Fig. 5

The integral worldview that is emerging in our time takes seriously all the aspects of the ancient worldview, but combines them in a different way. Both images are spatial. The idea of heaven as up is a natural, almost unavoidable way of indicating transcendence. But in the West, which has been irremediably touched by modern science, few of us can any longer actually think that God, the angels, and departed spirits are somewhere in the sky, as most ancients literally did. (And some people today who disbelieve still do—including atheists. Remember the glee of the Soviet cosmonauts in announcing to the world that they had encountered no supernatural beings in space?)

The image of the spiritual as withinness is not, however, a flat, limited, dimensionless point. It is a within coterminous with the universe—an inner realm every bit as rich and extensive as the outer realm. The psychologist Carl Jung spoke of this rich inner dimension as the collective unconscious, meaning by that a realm of largely unexplored spiritual reality linking everyone to everything. The amazement of mystics at the discovery of this realm within is matched only by the amazement of physicists upon discovering that the final building block of matter, the atom, has an interiority also, and that the electrons and protons they had once thought so substantial are not best described as matter but as energy-events: what we might call, from the perspective of this book, spirit-matter. It appears that everything, from photons to subatomic particles to corporations to empires, has both an outer and an inner aspect.⁴

My thesis is that what people in the world of the Bible experienced and called Principalities and Powers was in fact real. They were discerning the actual spirituality at the center of the political, economic, and cultural institutions of their day. The spiritual aspect of the Powers is not simply a personification of institutional qualities that would exist whether they were personified or not. On the contrary, the spirituality of an institution exists as a real aspect of the institution even when it is not perceived as such. Institutions have an actual spiritual ethos, and we neglect this aspect of institutional life to our peril.⁵

When people speak to me about their experiences of evil in the world, they often use the language of the ancient worldview, treating demons and angels as separate beings residing in the sky somewhere, rather than as the spirituality of institutions and systems. When I suggest restating the same thought using the new integral worldview, they often respond, Oh, yes, that’s what I meant. But it is not at all what they have said. In fact, they have just said something utterly different. I can only explain this anomalous behavior, not as woolly thinking (these are generally exceptionally perceptive people, or they would not have discerned these spiritual realities), but as an indication that this new integral worldview has only just come of age, and that the old conceptuality is repeated merely for lack of a better one. When a more adequate language is suggested, it is instantly recognized, not as a new idea to which they capitulate, but as what they wanted to say all along, and simply lacked the vocabulary for saying. People are groping for a more adequate language to talk about spiritual realities than the tradition provides. I conclude that a very rapid and fundamental sea change has been taking place in our worldview that has passed largely unrecognized but is everywhere felt. A new conceptual worldview is already in place, latently, and can be triggered by its mere articulation.

The less-known aspect of the Powers is the spiritual or invisible dimension. It is generally only indirectly perceptible, by means of projection. In New Testament times, people did not read the spirituality of an institution straight off from its outer manifestations. Instead, they projected its felt or intuited spiritual qualities onto the screen of the universe, and perceived them as cosmic forces reigning from the sky.

There were, in the first century, both Jews and Christians who perceived in the Roman Empire a demonic spirituality that they called Sammael or Satan.⁶ But they encountered this spirit in the actual institutional forms of Roman life: legions, governors, crucifixions, payment of tribute, Roman sacred emblems and standards, and so forth. The spirit that they perceived existed  right  at  the  heart  of  the  empire,  but  their  worldview  equipped them to discern that spirit only by intuiting it and then projecting it out, in visionary form, as a spiritual being residing in heaven and representing Rome in the heavenly council.

In the ancient worldview, where earthly and heavenly reality were inextricably united, this view of the Powers worked effectively. But modern Westerners are, on the whole, incapable of maintaining that worldview. What we usually encounter instead is either fundamentalist treatments of the Powers as demons in the air, wholly divorced from their concretions in the physical or political world (the theological worldview), or denials that this spiritual dimension even exists (the materialistic worldview).

What is necessary is to complete the projection process by withdrawing the projections and recognizing that the real spiritual force that we are experiencing is emanating from an actual institution. In the ancient worldview, a seer or prophet was able to sense the diseased spirituality of an institution or state, and then bring that spirituality to awareness by projecting it in visionary form onto the heavenly realm and depicting it (even seeing it) as a demon on high. Our task today, working with a unitary worldview, is to withdraw that projection from on high and locate it in the institution in which it actually resides.

Projection is not a falsification of reality. It is sometimes the only way we have of knowing certain internal things. The demons projected onto the screen of the cosmos really are demonic, and play havoc with humanity; only they are not up there but over there, in the socio-spiritual entities that make up the one-and-only real world.⁷ Thus the New Testament insists that demons can have no effect unless they are able to embody themselves in people (Mark 1:21-28 par.; Matt. 12:43-45//Luke 11:24-26), or pigs (Mark 5:1-20 par.), or political systems (Revelation 12–13).

Visitors to Nazi Germany in the late 1930s spoke of the palpable evil in the air, of a pervading atmosphere that hung over the entire land, full of foreboding and menace. Those who leave South Africa remark on the sense of an enormous weight of anxiety and tension that drops off their shoulders as the plane leaves South African airspace. People who remember the assassination of President John F. Kennedy will still recall a feeling of darkness over the face of the nation that lasted for days. These spirits are real, but they are not independent operatives from on high; they are the actual spirituality of the nations involved, and the sheer intensity of evil renders them, for a brief time, almost visible.

It is merely a habit of thought that makes people think of the Powers as personal beings. In fact, many of the spiritual powers and gods of the ancient world  were  not  conceived  of  as  personal  at  all  (the  Lares,  the  Penates, Virtue, Victory, Providence, and so forth). Even the angels in Judaism were impersonal agents of God. For a long time the Jews resisted naming the angels for fear they would detract from the sole sovereignty of God. The entire interest of early Judaism was in the angels’ function, not in their personal  characteristics,  which  we  see  emerging  only  in  late  apocalyptic literature.

I prefer to think of the Powers as impersonal entities, though I know of no way to settle the question except dogmatically.⁸ It is a natural human tendency to personalize anything that seems to act intentionally. But we are now discovering from computer viruses that certain systemic processes are self-replicating and contagious, behaving almost willfully even though they are quite impersonal. Generally, I have bracketed the question of the metaphysical status of the Powers, and have instead treated them phenomenolo-gically—that is, I have attempted to describe the experiences that got called Satan, demons, powers, angels, and the like. Thus I speak of demons as the actual spirituality of systems and structures that have betrayed their divine vocations. I use the expression the Domination System to indicate what happens when an entire network of Powers becomes integrated around idolatrous values. And I refer to Satan as the world-encompassing spirit of the Domination System.⁹ Do these entities possess actual metaphysical being, or are they the corporate personality or ethos or gestalt of a group, having no independent existence apart from the group? I leave that for the reader to decide.¹⁰ My main objection to personalizing demons is that they then are regarded as having a body or form separate from the physical and historical institutions of which, on my theory, they are the actual interiority.¹¹ Therefore I prefer to regard them as the impersonal spiritual realities at the center of institutional life.¹²

Think, for example, of a riot at a soccer game, in which, for a few frenzied minutes, people who in their ordinary lives behave quite decently on the whole suddenly find themselves bludgeoning and even killing opponents whose only sin was rooting for the other team. Afterwards people often act bewildered, and wonder what could have possessed them. Was it a Riot Demon that leaped upon them from the sky, or was it something intrinsic to the social situation: a spirituality that crystallized suddenly, precipitated by the conjunction of an outer permissiveness, heavy drinking, a violent ethos, a triggering incident, and the inner violence of the fans? And when the riot subsides, does the Riot Demon rocket back to heaven, or does the spirituality of the rioters simply dissipate as they are scattered, subdued, or arrested?

Frank Peretti’s best-selling novel, This Present Darkness,¹³ grandly illustrates the hopelessness of trying to repristinate the ancient worldview today. While I appreciate his treatment of the interconnection of heavenly and earthly reality, the role of human freedom, the centrality of prayer, the angels of cities and nations, and the subtle coincidence of demonic promptings and people’s words or thoughts, what we are served up is a consistently paranoid view of reality. With such a worldview one cannot help seeing demons everywhere, even among the saints. Rather than learning from our enemies, this view causes  one  to  dismiss  them  as  possessed  by  Satan.  The  author is welcome to his politics; but it is one thing to regard the United Nations as a dangerous idea, and another to portray it as a conspiracy of the Devil. We have here a case of the total projection of evil out on others. The view of evil is scary but finally trivial; his demons are simply imaginary bad people with wings, and the really mammoth and crushing evils of our day—racism, sexism, political oppression, ecological degradation, militarism, patriarchy, homelessness, economic greed—are not even mentioned. It is simply Pentecostal political naïveté writ large on the universe.

But equally naive is the blind refusal to recognize the reality of the demonic in this most demonic of centuries.

The relevance of the Powers for an understanding of structural evil should by now begin to be clear. Any attempt to transform a social system without addressing  both  its  spirituality  and  its  outer  forms  is  doomed  to  failure. Only by confronting the spirituality of an institution and its concretions can the total entity be transformed, and that requires a kind of spiritual discernment and praxis that the materialistic ethos in which we live knows nothing about.

To put the thesis of these three volumes in its simplest form:

The Powers are good.

The Powers are fallen.

The Powers must be redeemed.

These three statements must be held together, for each, by itself, is not only untrue but downright mischievous. We cannot affirm governments or universities or businesses to be good unless at the same time we recognize that they are fallen. We cannot face their malignant intractability and oppressiveness unless we remember that they are simultaneously a part of God’s good creation. And reflection on their creation and fall will appear only to legitimate these Powers and blast hope for change unless we assert at the same time that these Powers can and must be redeemed.

Hobbes got it wrong when he argued that governments are necessary because people are evil and need to be defended from each other. For governments are also necessary because people are good and need to be organized to assist each other to meet each other’s needs. Rousseau got it wrong when he argued that people are born good and that institutions make them evil. For institutions also socialize them to prevent them from doing harm to one another and to think of the common good. Marx got it wrong when he argued that people are basically good and are alienated by capitalist means of production. For communist means of production have alienated them every bit as much and failed to make good on the promise to produce new, nonalienated human beings.

Perhaps these comments shed light on the title of this volume. I could not name it Confronting the Powers, or Combating the Powers, or Overcoming the Powers, because they are not simply evil. They can be not only benign but quite positive. (One of the friendliest, most helpful people in my community is a bureaucrat—the postmaster.) Thus the title, Engaging the Powers. It is precisely because the Powers have been created in, through, and for the humanizing purposes of God in Christ that they must be honored, criticized, resisted, and redeemed. Let us then engage these Powers, not just to understand them, but to see them changed.

I

The Domination System

E . C. Segar, Popeye the Sailor¹

1

The Myth of the Domination System

Violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world. It has been accorded the status of a religion, demanding from its devotees an absolute obedience to death. Its followers are not aware, however, that the devotion they pay to violence is a form of religious piety. Violence is so successful as a myth precisely because it does not seem to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be the nature of things. It is what works. It is inevitable, the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts. It is embraced with equal alacrity by people on the left and on the right, by religious liberals as well as religious conservatives. The threat of violence, it is believed, is alone able to deter aggressors. It secured us forty-five years of a balance of terror. We learned to trust the Bomb to grant us peace.

The roots of this devotion to violence are deep, and we will be well rewarded if we trace them to their source. When we do, we will discover that the religion of Babylon—one of the world’s oldest, continuously surviving religions—is thriving as never before in every sector of contemporary American life, even in our synagogues and churches. It, and not Christianity, is the real religion of America. I will suggest that this myth of redemptive violence undergirds American popular culture, civil religion, nationalism, and foreign policy, and that it lies coiled like an ancient serpent at the root of the system of domination that has characterized human existence since well before Babylon ruled supreme. In order to get our bearings, however, we have to go back to the mythic source.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

Jesus taught the love of enemies, but Babylonian religion taught their extermination. Violence was for the religion of ancient Mesopotamia what love was for Jesus: the central dynamic of existence. For this early civilization, life was as cruel as the floods and droughts and storms that swept the Fertile Crescent. Recurrent warfare between the various city-states in the region exhausted resources. Chaos threatened every achievement of humanity. The myth that enshrined that culture’s sense of life was the Enuma Elish, dated to around 1250 B.C.E. in the versions that have survived, but based on traditions considerably older.

In the beginning, according to this myth, Apsu and Tiamat (the sweet- and saltwater oceans) bear Mummu (the mist). From them also issue the younger gods, whose frolicking makes so much noise that the elder gods cannot sleep and so resolve to kill them. This plot of the elder gods is discovered, Ea kills Apsu, and his wife Tiamat pledges revenge. Ea and the younger gods in terror turn for salvation to their youngest, Marduk. He exacts a steep price: if he succeeds, he must be given chief and undisputed power in the assembly of the gods. Having extorted this promise, he catches Tiamat in a net, drives an evil wind down her throat, shoots an arrow that bursts her distended belly and pierces her heart; he then splits her skull with a club, and scatters her blood in out-of-the-way places. He stretches out her corpse full length, and from it creates the cosmos.²

We are indebted to Paul Ricoeur for his profound commentary on this myth.³ He points out that in the Babylonian myth, creation is an act of violence: Tiamat, mother of them all, is murdered and dismembered; from her cadaver the world is formed.⁴ Order is established by means of disorder. Creation is a violent victory over an enemy older than creation. The origin of evil precedes the origin of things. Chaos (symbolized by Tiamat) is prior to order (represented by Marduk, god of Babylon). Evil is prior to good. Violence inheres in the godhead. Evil is an ineradicable constituent of ultimate reality, and possesses ontological priority over good.

The biblical myth is diametrically opposed to all this. There, a good God creates a good creation. Chaos does not resist order. Good is ontologically prior to evil. Neither evil nor violence is a part of the creation, but both enter as a result of the first couple’s sin and the machinations of the serpent. A basically good reality is thus corrupted by free decisions reached by creatures. In this far more complex and subtle explanation of the origins of things, evil for the first time emerges as a problem requiring solution.

In the Babylonian myth, however, there is no problem of evil. Evil is simply a primordial fact. The simplicity of its picture of reality commended it widely, and its basic mythic structure spread as far as Syria, Phoenicia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Germany, Ireland, and India. Typically, a male war god residing in the sky—Wotan, Zeus, or Indra, for example—fights a decisive battle with a female divine being, usually depicted as a monster or dragon, residing in the sea or abyss.⁵ Having vanquished the original Enemy by war and murder, the victor fashions a cosmos from the monster’s corpse. Cosmic order equals the violent suppression of the feminine, and is mirrored in the social order by the subjection of women to men. Male supremacy and contempt for the womanly is explicit in the Enuma Elish: What male is this who has pressed his fight against thee? It is but Tiamat, a woman, that flies at thee with weapons!⁶

At the same time, Marduk’s accession to supremacy over the gods means the ascendancy of Babylon over earlier city-states like Nippur and Eridu. Heavenly events are mirrored by earthly events, and what happens above happens below.⁷

After the world has been created, the story continues, the gods imprisoned by Marduk for siding with Tiamat complain of the poor meal service in their jail. Marduk and Ea therefore execute one of the captive gods, and from his blood, Ea creates human beings to be servants to the gods.⁸

The implications are clear: humanity is created from the blood of a murdered god. Our very origin is violence. Killing is in our blood. Humanity is not the originator of evil, but merely finds evil already present and perpetuates it. Our origins are divine, to be sure, since we are made from a god, but from the blood of an assassinated god.⁹ We are the consequence of deicide. Human beings are thus naturally incapable of peaceful coexistence; order must continually be imposed upon us from on high. Nor are we created to subdue the earth and have dominion over it as God’s regents; we exist but to serve as slaves of the gods and of their earthly regents. The tasks of humanity are to till the soil, to produce foods for sacrifice to the gods (represented by the king and the priestly caste), to build the sacred city Babylon, and to fight and, if necessary, to die in the king’s wars. Such a myth reflects a highly centralized state in which the king rules as Marduk’s representative on earth. Resistance to the king is treason against the gods. Unquestioning obedience is the highest virtue, and order the highest religious value. The king’s word is right; his utterance, like that of a god, cannot be changed!¹⁰

In their ritual the Babylonians reenacted the original battle by which world order was won and chaos subdued. This victory was celebrated liturgically in the New Year’s Festival, when the king ceremonially played the part of Marduk, reasserting that victory and staving off for another year the dreaded reversion of all things into formlessness and disorder.

This ritual is not only cultic, therefore, but military. As Marduk’s representative on earth, the king’s task is to subdue all those enemies who threaten the tranquility that he has established on behalf of the god. The whole cosmos is a state, and the god rules through the king. Politics arises within the divine sphere itself. Salvation is politics: identifying with the god of order against the god of chaos, and offering oneself up for the holy war required to impose order and rule on the peoples round about. And because chaos threatens repeatedly, in the form of barbarian attacks, an ever-expanding imperial policy is the automatic correlate of Marduk’s ascendancy over all the gods.

Do you begin to sense where all this is leading?

An added dimension of depth was given the myth when Marduk (represented by the king) was pictured as undergoing ritual humiliation at the New Year’s Festival. The priest strikes the king’s face and pulls his ears. This action may have been associated with death and lamentation as the god descends into the underworld. The people, thrown into confusion, weep for him as for a suffering and dying god. Creation reverts to chaos (winter). With the aid of the ritual the god is revived, liberated, and released (spring). His enthronement is reenacted and the people celebrate the victory over chaos in a magnificent feast. Finally, a sacred marriage revives all the life-giving forces in nature and humanity.¹¹ This motif of the suffering of the hero is central to our own contemporary depictions of the myth, as we shall see.

The ultimate outcome of this type of myth, remarks Ricoeur, is a theology of war founded on the identification of the enemy with the powers that the god has vanquished and continues to vanquish in the drama of creation. Every coherent theology of holy war ultimately reverts to this basic mythological type.¹² The relation of King versus Enemy becomes the political relation par excellence. According to this theology, the Enemy is evil and war is her punishment. Unlike the biblical myth, which sees evil as an intrusion into a good creation and war as a consequence of the Fall, this myth regards war as present from the beginning.

This ancient mythic structure has been variously called the Babylonian creation story, the combat myth, the ideology of zealous nationalism, and the myth of redemptive violence. The distinctive feature of the myth is the victory of order over chaos by means of violence. This myth is the original religion of the status quo, the first articulation of might makes right. It is the basic ideology of the Domination System. The gods favor those who conquer. Conversely, whoever conquers must have the favor of the gods. The mass of people exists to perpetuate that power and privilege which the gods have conferred upon the king, the aristocracy, and the priesthood.¹³ Religion exists to legitimate power and privilege. Life is combat. Any form of order is preferable to chaos, according to this myth. Ours is neither a perfect nor a perfectible world; it is a theater of perpetual conflict in which the prize goes to the strong. Peace through war, security through strength: these are the core convictions that arise from this ancient historical religion.

This myth also inadvertently reveals the price men have paid for the power they acquired over women: complete servitude to their earthly rulers and heavenly gods. Women for their part were identified with inertia, chaos, and anarchy. Now Woman is to man as nature is to culture—the ideology that rationalizes the subordination of women in patriarchal societies by presenting their subordination as if it were a natural fate.¹⁴

This primordial myth is far from defunct. It is as universally present and earnestly believed today as at any time in its long and bloody history. I will now suggest that it is the dominant myth in contemporary America (more influential by far than Judaism or Christianity), that it enshrines a cult of violence at the very heart of public life, and that even those who seek to oppose its oppressive violence often do so using the very same means.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

in Popular Culture Today

The myth of redemptive violence inundates us on every side. We are awash in it yet seldom perceive it. We will look presently at its impact on foreign policy, nationalism, the Cold War, militarism, the media, and televangelism, but first we must identify its simplest, most pervasive, and most influential form, where it captures the imaginations of each new generation: children’s comics and cartoon shows.

Here is how the myth of redemptive violence structures the standard comic strip or television cartoon sequence. An indestructible good guy is unalterably opposed to an irreformable and equally indestructible bad guy. Nothing can kill the good guy, though for the first three-quarters of the strip or show he (rarely she) suffers grievously, appearing hopelessly trapped, until somehow the hero breaks free, vanquishes the villain, and restores order until the next installment. Nothing finally destroys the bad guy or prevents his reappearance, whether he is soundly trounced, jailed, drowned, or shot into outer space.

I am not referring to programs that do not feature violence, but to what I would call the classic type of cartoon, where the mythic pattern of redemptive violence is straightforward.¹⁵ Examples would include Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Superman, Superwoman, Mighty Mouse, Captain Marvel, Captain America, Green Hornet, Lone Ranger, Superfriends, Courageous Cat, Submariner, Batman and Robin, Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, Darkwing Duck, and Tom and Jerry. A variation on the classic theme is provided by humorous antiheroes, whose bumbling incompetence guarantees their victory despite themselves (Underdog, Super Chicken, the Banana Splits, Super Six, GoGo Gophers, Wackey Racers). Then there is a more recent twist, where an evil or failed individual undergoes a transformation into a monstrous creature who—amazingly—does good (Spider Man, The Hulk, Iron Man, the Herculoids). It is almost as if people believe that heroes of sterling character can no longer arise in our society, and that goodness can be produced only by a freak of technology (such as electrocution or chemicals). All these cartoons, however, adhere rigidly to the mythic structure, no matter how cleverly or originally it is re-presented.

Few cartoon shows have run longer or been more influential than Popeye and Bluto. In a typical segment, Bluto abducts a screaming and kicking Olive Oyl, Popeye’s girlfriend. When Popeye attempts to rescue her, the massive Bluto beats his diminutive opponent to a pulp, while Olive Oyl helplessly wrings her hands. At the last moment, as our hero oozes to the floor, and Bluto is trying, in effect, to rape Olive Oyl, a can of spinach pops from Popeye’s pocket and spills into his mouth. Transformed by this gracious infusion of power, he easily demolishes the villain and rescues his beloved. The format never varies. Neither party ever gains any insight or learns from these encounters. Violence does not teach Bluto to honor Olive Oyl’s humanity, and repeated pummelings do not teach Popeye to swallow his spinach before the fight.

Only the names have changed. Marduk subdues Tiamat through violence, and though he defeats Tiamat, chaos incessantly reasserts itself, and is kept at bay only by repeated battles and by the repetition of the New Year’s Festival, where the heavenly combat myth is ritually reenacted. The structure of the combat myth is thus faithfully repeated on television week after week: a superior force representing chaos attacks aggressively; the champion fights back, defensively, only to be humiliated in apparent defeat; the evil power satisfies its lusts while the hero is incapacitated; the hero escapes, defeats the evil power decisively, and reaffirms order over chaos.¹⁶ Willis Elliott’s observation underscores the seriousness of this entertainment: Cosmogony [the birth of the cosmos] is egogony [the birth of the individual person]: you are being birthed through how you see ‘all things’ as being birthed. Therefore, "Whoever controls the cosmogony controls the children."¹⁷

The psychodynamics of the television cartoon or comic book are marvelously simple: children identify with the good guy so that they can think of themselves as good. This enables them to project onto the bad guy their own repressed anger, violence, rebelliousness, or lust, and then vicariously to enjoy their own evil by watching the bad guy initially prevail. (This segment of the show actually consumes all but the closing minutes, and thus allows ample time for indulging the dark side of the self.) When the good guy finally wins, viewers are then able to reassert control over their own inner tendencies, repress them, and reestablish a sense of goodness. Salvation is guaranteed through identification with the hero.

This structure cannot be altered. Bluto does not simply lose more often—he must always lose. Otherwise this entire view of reality would collapse. The good guys must always win. In order to suppress the fear of erupting chaos the same mythic pattern must be endlessly repeated in a myriad of variations that never in any way alter the basic structure.¹⁸

Cartoon strips like Superman and Dick Tracy have been enormously successful in resolving the guilt feelings of the reader or viewer by providing totally evil, often deformed and inhuman scapegoats on whom one can externalize the evil side of one’s own personality and disown it without coming to any insight or awareness of its presence within oneself. The villain’s punishment provides catharsis; one forswears the villain’s ways and heaps condemnation on him in a guilt-free orgy of aggression.¹⁹ No premium is put on reasoning, persuasion, negotiation, or diplomacy. There can be no compromise with an absolute evil. Evil must be totally annihilated or totally converted. As Dick Tracy said on the day following Robert Kennedy’s assassination (quite by coincidence; the strip had already been drawn earlier), Violence is golden when it’s used to put evil down.²⁰

Cartoon and comic heroes cast no shadows. They are immortals; they cannot be killed. They are not beset by the ordinary temptations, never take advantage of damsels and accept no bribes, usually receive no remuneration, and generally live above the realm of sin. Repentance and confession are as alien to them as the love of enemies and nonviolence. As Ariel Dorfman puts it, The Lone Ranger himself contains not a single internal contradiction.²¹

Superman, for his part, intervenes in the lives of the people he encounters without ever challenging them to evaluate their beliefs and values or expose themselves to the anguish of transformation. He merely manipulates the environment. Villains are relegated to outer darkness but not redeemed from their bondage to evil or restored to true humanity.²²

Batman, who lacks the godlike qualities of Superman, compensates with commitment. To avenge the murder of his parents he swears to spend the rest of my life warring on all criminals. He will, in short, be a vigilante. He communicates well with the police commissioner, to be sure, but the Caped Crusader is answerable to no one in his role as a self-appointed crime-stopper. His is a sacred vow, binding him to holy war on all the vermin of evil. His motives are not generous at all. He wants revenge.²³

In this respect Batman parallels the classic gunfighters of the western, who settle old scores by shoot-outs, never by due process of law. The law, in fact, is suspect, too weak to prevail in the conditions of near-anarchy that fiction has misrepresented as the wild West. The gunfighter must take matters into his own hands, just as, in the anarchic situation of the big city, a beleaguered citizen finally rises up against the crooks and muggers and creates justice out of the barrel of a gun (the movie Dirty Harry and, in real life, Bernard Goetz).

As Robert Jewett points out, this vigilantism betrays a profound distrust of democratic institutions, and of the reliance on human intelligence and civic responsibility that are basic to the democratic hope. It regards the general public as passive and unwise, incapable of discerning evil and making a rational response (as in the film High Noon). Public resources are inadequate, so the message goes; we need a messiah, an armed redeemer, someone who has the strength of character and conviction to transcend the legal restraints of democratic institutions and save us from an evil easily identifiable in villainous persons.

These vigilantes who deliver us by taking the law into their own hands will somehow do so without encouraging lawlessness. They will kill and leave town, thus ridding us of guilt. They will show selfless and surpassing concern for the health of our communities, but they will never have to practice citizenship, or deal with the ambiguity of political decisions. They neither run for office nor vote. They will reignite in us a consuming love for impartial justice, but they will do so by means of a mission of personal vengeance that eliminates due process of law.²⁴

The possibility that an innocent person is being executed by our violent redeemers is removed by having the outlaw draw first, or shoot from ambush. The villain dresses in dark clothing, is swarthy, unshaven, and filthy, and his personality is stereotyped so as to eliminate any possibility of audience sympathy. The death of such evil beings is necessary in order to cleanse society of a stain. The viewer, far from feeling remorse at another human being’s death, is actually made euphoric.²⁵ Such villains cannot be handled  by  democratic  means;  they  are  far  too  powerful,  for  they  are archetypally endowed with the transcendent qualities of Tiamat. So great a threat requires a Marduk, an avenger, a man on a white horse.

Rather than shoring up democracy, the strongman methods of the superheroes of popular culture reflect a nostalgia for simpler solutions. They bypass constitutional guarantees of legal procedure in arrest, or the tenet that a person

Reviews for Engaging the Powers

[deusvitae · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The conclusion to the trilogy on the powers featuring an exploration of the Domination System.Wink's central thesis features the existence and perpetuation of the Domination System: he sees the kosmos of this world as the Domination System, the Powers over this age and the people whom they empower who themselves justify their behavior according to the myth of redemptive violence (a phrase Wink coined, apparently). Wink uses Enuma Elish as the archetype, demonstrating how so many stories of redemptive violence are essentially retelling the Marduk vs. Tiamat narrative and all that requires.Against the Domination System would be nonviolent resistance; Wink spends much time discussing what nonviolent resistance would look like, using many contemporary examples, and exegeting Jesus' actions and exhortations in terms of turning the other cheek, etc., displaying how Jesus would have His people resist the Domination System yet not as passive non-resisters, exposing the injustice and fraud in the system in creative ways. The author speaks highly of the value of prayer as a means of resisting the Domination System. The concluding chapter focusing on the "positive attitude" of the New Testament, based on Jesus' victory over the Powers, proves essential and encouraging.There is much with which to grapple. Wink certainly seems to be onto something with the theme of the myth of redemptive violence and its ultimate failings; while it is an interpretive translation, it's possible to get behind "kosmos" as referring to the present world system in something akin to Wink's use of the Domination System. His handling of nonviolent resistance has much to commend it; his handling of the passages regarding Jesus and nonviolence proves strong.Unfortunately, the author doesn't let Biblical data or evidence get in the way of a good theory; he has no qualms considering the Apostles and early Christians as having departed from Jesus' intentions in terms of gender relations and similar such things, all to keep consistency in his particular views of what constitutes the Domination System. There's not nearly as much discussion about the Powers here; it's mostly about the Domination System and nonviolent resistance in a very late Cold War context. Nevertheless, worth considering in terms of the principalities and powers.