Spirits of the Age

Before his death, William Stringfellow had occasion to read Naming the Powers, the first volume of Walter Wink's in-process trilogy on the principalities and powers. Bill confided succinctly that it was "very good" and added with emphasis, "It's going to be an important book."

Little wonder he would think so. With exhaustive New Testament research, Wink confirms in the main what Stringfellow had intuited over the years through his own Bible study and writing on the powers. Wink indeed tips his hat to Bill Stringfellow periodically in these volumes, and specifically acknowledges conceiving the entire project way back in 1964 under the impetus of reading Stringfellow's Free in Obedience.

In keeping with Wink's identity and vocation, these are decidedly North American books, but not as in a vacuum. The first emerged after a long and depressing tour of Latin America. And he followed their completion with an extended trip to South Africa, where interest in the political import of his analysis is spreading. What remains to be seen is whether the trilogy will have the impact it portends for the biblical community right here in the United States.

That in itself is problematic. There are obstacles to be overcome. As a young seminary professor in New York, Wink published a pointed critique of the scholarly guild of biblical studies. He attacked their idol, the historical-critical method, pronouncing it "bankrupt" and in need of new management. That little book, The Bible in Human Transformation, became the manifesto of a minor Bible-study revival, heralding a dialogical method of communal study which draws on imagination and the assorted charismata of the subconscious (in balanced combination with critical analysis).

For a decade or more, the propagation of that method, mainly among local congregations, has been Wink's pastoral and pedagogical passion. But it can't be said to have won him loads of fans among the academy. And they are at least part of the circle who so desperately need the fruits of this new work.

Principalities and Powers
Virtually since the New Testament, along with the church, was taken captive by empire under Constantine in the fourth century, the principalities have been conveniently read as insubstantial spirits floating about in the cosmos. Any social critique was effectively eviscerated and, by this view, rendered harmless. It evaporated, so to speak, into thin air.

Scholarly opinion has wittingly, or unwittingly, cooperated with this status quo reading, narrowing and "spiritualizing" the texts under consideration. Even a zealous "left-wing" maverick such as S.C.F. Brandon, for example, swallows the argument, castigating St. Paul for obscuring the real political facts of Jesus' trial and execution with an overlay of this esoteric and archaic cosmology. More recently, liberation theology has practiced its "materialistic reading" and thereby recognized in the powers real political entities; but it has often done so at the cost of doing reductionist violence to the texts.

Now comes Wink. He confesses to beginning this study with the naive preconception that the principalities and powers could be "demythologized"; that is, rendered without remainder into modern categories. He expected to find nothing more than institutions, social systems, and political structures, but he was in for an exegetical surprise: Their spiritual dimension wouldn't go away!

In the end Wink has come to argue that the principalities and powers are simultaneously "the inner and outer aspect of any given manifestation of power." He continues in Naming the Powers:

As the inner aspect they are the spirituality of institutions, the "within" of corporate structures and systems, the inner essence of outer organizations of power. As the outer aspect they are political systems, appointed officials, the "chair" of an organization, laws -- in short, all the tangible manifestations which power takes. Every Power tends to have a visible pole, an outer form -- be it a church, a nation, or an economy -- and an invisible pole, an inner spirit or driving force that animates, legitimates, and regulates its physical manifestation in the world. Neither pole is the cause of the other. Both come into existence together and cease to exist together.

Such a view, if correct in scriptures and experience as I believe it to be, is not merely enough to rattle some windows in the ivory towers of the guild. It gets at the very foundations of empire and its kin. These books have the potential of being seminal documents in a new or renewed biblical theory of nonviolent social change. Important, indeed.

NAMING THE POWERS proceeds carefully, mapping out the territory with word studies: archon, exousia, dunamis, thronos, and such. A casual reader might readily skip over this section, as well as the rich and technical footnotes, but readers should recognize these are the very bearings by which Wink's startling conclusions are sighted.

Terms such as "rulers," "powers," "thrones," "realm," and "authorities" are fluid and ambiguous depending on the context. But it is this very ambiguity, this studied ambiguity (now earthly and temporal, now cosmic and spiritual) that apparently served the early Christian communities in comprehending the versatilities of power which they confronted.

Such terms are often paired ("rulers and elders," "principalities and powers") or may be strung into a series, cites Wink, "as if power were so diffuse and impalpable a phenomenon that words must be heaped up in clusters in order to catch a sense of its complexity." (Readers of Stringfellow may remember his exaggerated mimicry of this New Testament style, piling those interminable lists into world-class sentences.)

In one of the "disputed passages" (Colossians 1:16), such a string includes "thrones" (the seat and symbol of institutional power), "dominion" (its sphere of influence), "principalities" (here, the ruler, the person-in-office, the agent-in-role), and "authorities" (the legitimations and sanctions by which authority is maintained). Without presuming their intention to do social analysis thereby, Wink notices "what a neat sociological instrument lay at hand had the ancients chosen to use it."

The "Disputed Passages" section of' Naming the Powers is not to be passed over. The texts include: 1 Corinthians 2:6-8, 15:24-27a; Romans 8:38-39, 13:1-3; Colossians 1:16, 2:9-10, 13-15; and Ephesians 1:20-23, 2:1-2, 3:10, 6:12. These are the ones traditionally subjected to abuse, neglect, or misdirection. Here Wink has wrestled and won a prize that carries over into interpretation.

For my money, however, Wink's best stuff is wrested from the Ephesians passages. For example, he shows the meaning of "the prince of the power of the air" (Ephesians 2:2) to be not some spooky and airy first-century superstition, but as identifying a "world-atmosphere ... the general spiritual climate that influences humanity, in which we live, and move, and lose our beings. We breathe it, absorb it ..." It is the pseudo-environment that influences our choices for sin and death. It is that constellation of forces Wink sees touched on by such contemporary terms as zeitgeist or ideology, cultural expectations, climate of public opinion, and the like. Part of its power, says Wink, is that, like fish in water, we're not even aware that it exists. To seem not to appear is part and parcel of its power. As an example, I heard somewhere that the Pentagon's in-house term for its own military propaganda is "atmospherics."

"Being made alive" then, as in Ephesians 2, means seeing this world-atmosphere and choosing against it. It means violating the very spirit of the age.

I WRITE THESE reflections in a county jail, granted the time to read and think and pray in consequence of a Hiroshima Day trespass action at a Strategic Air Command base. I'm mindful of how white-collar criminals ripping off thousands of dollars, or Watergate conspirators, or perhaps highly placed Iran-contra criminals end up doing their "time," if any, in comfortable "Club Fed" prisons. They break the "law" but not the ruling spirit of the age.

In contrast, Wink points out, scholarly debate flounders about, looking among the accusations at the trial of Jesus and scrutinizing his actions in search of an "adequate" charge for the execution. What did Jesus do that called for the death penalty? Nothing, says Wink! Nothing but violate the spirit of the age:

That is the whole point [Jesus] was innocent and yet executed. But the powers did not err. He had rejected their spirituality, he had shaken the invisible foundations by a series of provocative acts. He was therefore a living terror to the order of things. He had to be removed.

A haunting question runs through Wink's discussion of these texts. In a sense it drives the very trilogy forward. It is a question that surely dogs any sentient Christian alert to the bitter realities of this world: How in heaven's name can the early Christian communities (let alone ourselves) proclaim that Christ has already conquered the powers and testify to a sovereign rule which seems so little in historical evidence? Then, as now, empires rage and expand, violence mushrooms, injustice has its way, and the poor are crushed. Are we talking through our spiritual hats, or what?

None of us are likely to see the question rest this side of the Last Day. Wrestling with it is virtually another name for faith. Still, Wink makes remarkable sense of it. In the analogy of Third World peasants, whose faith and consciousness free them not from struggle but for struggle, he sees summed up in this confession the real and concrete freedom which the early church experienced. It was precisely their experience of the death and Resurrection of Christ.

Evangelism is the spreading of that freedom. But more than that, and of enormous consequence, evangelism also means taking it to the powers: "that through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places" (Ephesians 3:10).

Here Wink's sense-making becomes more precise. By reference to the context in Ephesians which involves a discussion of opening salvation to the ethne (the Gentiles, the nations), he takes the heavenly powers to mean here specifically the "angels of the nations." The angels of the nations? Yes, the angels!

A FULL CHAPTER of the second volume, Unmasking the Powers, is devoted to this crucial nation first developed in the early word studies. Relying on the Hebrew Bible and citing the historical tendency of Israel not to deny reality to the gods of other nations but to subordinate them into the heavenly court of Yahweh (see Deuteronomy 32:8-9), Wink adds evidence from intertestamental and contemporaneous literature to outline this idea which apparently served the New Testament writers so well.

In both volumes a provoking story from the 10th chapter of Daniel figures prominently. In the remarkable events narrated in that chapter, Daniel, a Babylonian Jew, is now ensconced by providence as a political seer in the court of the conquering Persians. He begins to fast and pray on behalf of his captive community. After 21 days, a messenger angel arrives explaining that he'd been dispatched from God on the first day of the fast with a prophecy of Persian destruction and defeat, but had been held at bay all this time by the angel of Persia (who apparently wanted such news suppressed). The messenger was able to slip through only with the aid of the chief angel, Michael, who is even now holding the Persian to a heavenly standoff. Excuse him now if he rushes off quickly to rejoin Michael in that fight.

What portends all this?

Either it is a grand way of speaking about Daniel's struggle against the internalization of the imperial program, foreign interests occupying his heart. Or, as Wink concludes, the angel of Persia is the actual spirituality of the nation that, in pursuit of its "self-interest," effectively resists for a time the will of God.

In either case the implications for prayer as a form of combat are far-reaching. This third party of the powers is a new element in the perennial mix of prayer. There are mighty, sometimes monolithic and overpowering, forces that block the way between God's will and the cry of the poor for justice. However, says Wink:

The point here seems to be that Daniel's intercessions have made possible the intervention of God. Prayer changes us, but it also changes what is possible for God. Daniel's cry ... opened an aperture for God to act in concert with human freedom. It inaugurated war in heaven.

Wink contends that as the spiritual interiority of any given nation, its angel represents the nation's personality in both the aspect of its identity as constituted but also its vocation, that which it is called to be. There are admittedly dangers with the idea of national vocation. Thoughts of manifest destiny, world police, and "Aryan super-race" flash to mind, though these are better understood as idolatries that may twist and inflate and distort a calling.

But if you buy the idea of the angel's vocation, it is certainly a corrective to the temptations of a facile and dogmatic anarchism. It also means that a nation, properly loved and discerned, may be called to repentance, which is to say challenged to recover its vocation under the sovereignty of God. Wink would say this is exactly the work of evangelism that the church has neglected.

Occasionally Wink turns to the example of Martin Luther King Jr., whose national and international work is especially pertinent here. Not content with simple material change, or even a restructuring of the legal system, he discerned and preached to the "soul of America." Couldn't much of his public work (speaking and acting, even the local campaigns) be analyzed under Wink's rubric as ministering to the American angel, rebuking and healing its heart? In a risky and admittedly personal attempt, Wink tries his own hand at discerning the vocational voice of America. Under the layers of imperialism, nuclearism, and idolatry, he hears a servant of God poignantly pleading for help.

The implication (a significant concession) is up front: These powers, the angels of the nations, are not necessarily demonic. Though, God knows, they can be. And, I'd hasten to add, they nearly always are. But Wink is properly careful to see this capacity, that which makes them idols (demonic after the manner of empire of the national security state) to be vested in human freedom and choice.

I HAVE DWELT, however sketchily and briefly, on the angels of the nations because they are perhaps the more accessible and have the most obvious political import. However, the second volume of the trilogy, Unmasking the Powers, is really a set of interlocking essays on aspects of power addressed as the phenomenal categories developed in the first book. They are intellectual reflections on topics long banished from the vocabulary of the secular city -- Satan, the demons, angels of the churches, the gods, elements of the universe, and the angels of nature.

These essays are polemical insofar as they make frontal attacks on the ideology of materialism. But they are a Christian apologetic insofar as they use sociological analysis, a heavy dose of Jungian depth psychology, and a touch of the new physics to make these biblical persona comprehensible.

The chapter on Satan is notable for the sweep of its biblical research, but also as another instance of reconnoitering enemy territory and coming back with a qualified "friend." He finds Satan not only the needful figure of irreducible malignancy (nearly outstripped by the enormous magnitude of evil in our day; think of the nuclear arms race) but also the trickster and tester servant of God who may provoke us to knowledge of ourselves and God. How Satan is constellated, says Wink, is again determined by our human choices. I confess he has made me a reluctant convert to the view.

Beginning with a fine analysis of the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:1-20), the chapter reflecting on demons is remarkable not merely for the sense it makes but also for the caution it observes. Wink is wary of the dangers inherent in a revival of demon talk. Exorcism may be a form of psychic violence, and many are alert to its abuse as the hallmark of power-tripping in various charismatic communities. He sorts through this turf with the care of a pastor and scholar distinguishing three types: collective possession, outer personal demons,and inner personal demons (where an alienated and denied aspect of a person needs not to be cast out, but integrated and embraced).

The most eclectic, and sometimes downright weird, section of Unmasking the Powers is devoted to the "angels of nature." These compatriots in the defense and preservation of creation deserve a hearing in the lively theological debate which is raging within the ecology movement. Wink will likely be accused of neo-pantheism, but he has not wandered entirely off the biblical map.

I have reserved for last the "angels of the churches." Having their most vivid expression in the first chapters of Revelation, these servants of Christ bring us squarely back to the work of the church, but also to that work of nonviolent social change more commonly called "pastoral ministry." A church angel is the inner spirit of a congregation and functions to convey, over time, its personality and vocation.

Any pastor who has wrestled over sermon preparation will likely recognize that, unspoken and unnamed, discerning the angel is a fundamental work of homiletics. And any congregation which has of necessity merged with another will know the resistance angels can put up. There is in this chapter, it seems to me, the seed of an entire book on pastoral theology, and some energetic and enterprising scholar will surely write it.

ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, it all suggests discernment to be the pastor's pre-eminent charismatic gift. In the same way, these books commend discernment as the necessary charismata of the nonviolent activist. They identify a unique place for the Christian community in real social change. By no means is this to suggest that hard analysis -- pastoral or political -- is to be supplanted by something fuzzed-out and spooky. Discernment needs analysis as much as analysis needs discernment.

The wider community of nonviolence has long held that a materialist approach to social change is naive, half-blind, and even "ineffective." We can change the leaders, we can oust the ruling class, we can seize the means of production, we can restructure the society, but if we haven't engaged a spiritual transformation, the new leaders and the new structures will be simply more of the same. As Ground Zero in Washington state and other nuclear resistance communities say, "We must face the Trident submarine being put to sea, and we must face the Trident in our hearts."

Walter Wink's gift is to offer some renewed biblical handles on those fundamental realities. The third volume of this trilogy may be anticipated enthusiastically, though we should grant in advance that proposing a biblical praxis will likely be the most difficult work of the series.

Whether we're talking about confronting, rebuking, transforming, redeeming, or otherwise triumphing over the powers and leading them off in procession, it remains to be fully written.

It is my own predisposition, but I'll look for more on the liturgical work of nonviolent change. Wink has already identified the cleansing of the temple as the "paradigmatic collective exorcism in the New Testament." He points to the contemporary examples of explicit Franciscan exorcisms at the Nevada nuclear test site and the Eucharist gatherings of Caesar Chavez. He adds the Catonsville draft board raid and even the march across the Selma bridge to confront the demon of racism. In a telling and ultimately hopeful remark, he says:

Waving holy water and a crucifix over Buchenwald would scarcely have stopped the Nazi genocide of Jews, but think about it -- what if the church in Germany had staged ritual acts of protest outside the gates? What if, in churches and pulpits all over the land, pastors had read from their pulpits prayers exorcising the spirit of Satan and Wotan from the national psyche? It could not have happened of course, because the prior understanding of collective possession and the church's task in unmasking the Powers was not in place.

But perhaps now it is coming to be.

A portion of what was first intended to be in volume three has been rushed into publication by the urgent needs of contemporary church struggle. Jesus' Third Way: Violence and Nonviolence in South Africa (New Society Publishers, 1987) is an uppity, activist reading of the Sermon on the Mount, set in the South African context. It has been published in a plain brown-cover edition and distributed free to all English-speaking pastors in that country. Would that the same deal could be worked out with these earlier Powers books for all the clergy in our own country.

Here, as there, the role of Christians needs to be lending our eyes, hearts, and lives to that nonviolent struggle which our first-century ancestors called "war in heaven." One suspects the difficult third volume of Wink's trilogy would write itself collectively if the first two were carried into combat by biblical evangelists, trying the insights, experimenting with the truth.

Would the scholarly guild then take the work seriously? Who knows? But by then its importance would have been tested and verified in the fire of action and love.

When this article appeared, Bill Wylie-Kellermann was pastor of Cass Community United Methodist Church in Detroit and a Sojourners contributing editor. Naming the Powers (1984) and Unmasking the Powers (1986) by Walter Wink are available from Fortress Press.