A christian community that coheres in Jesus Christ, and in connection with the pentecostal powers released by Jesus, is in itself the ultimate revolutionary political act. To be in a faith community is the ultimate claim on every life which is grasped by Jesus Christ. There are many calls and a great variety of gifts, but one clear, inescapable, central commitment: to be a new people, a community undergoing interior transformation and witnessing to the ultimate power of the kingdom.
One doesn’t come into the faith community to get into the order of the world and do battle there. One becomes a part of the new reality, that revolutionary force, the new power. The fact that this new society exists is a witness that the powers of death are doomed. The revolutionary faith community is a context in which one undergoes interior transformation--the inner revolution in which one is freed from the dominating, victimizing powers, and thereby becomes a humanizing revolutionary force in whatever institution one serves.
Now what’s the main task of the faith community, if the central claim of Jesus Christ upon a person is to become a part of a faith community? The task of the faith community is to witness to the ultimate power in the universe, which is the power released by Jesus Christ at Pentecost--the power of weakness, the power of love--dunamis. And the reverse side of this task is to debunk every other power-the powers of darkness and death-the principalities and powers.
The biblical understanding is that there is a desperate struggle going on between the power of the kingdom and the powers of darkness and death. The power of God versus anti-God. The power of Christ versus the power of antichrist. The power of Christ liberates and brings a whole created order to fuller freedom. Antichrist restricts, oppresses, victimizes and ultimately destroys.
The images used in St. John’s gospel are those of light and darkness. In Christ the light breaks. In him the light was shining in the darkness and the darkness was unable to put it out. In the scripture, darkness and light are locked in deadly combat, and nothing lens than God’s own personal involvement in the incarnation in the death of his Son was able to defeat the powers and make a spectacle of them. Though all the demonic powers embodied in the institutions of his time focused in rage against him, they were unable to deflect him from his perfect filial obedience to his Father. And his obedience was the defeat of the powers. He, in the power of his Father, scoffed at the powers, and through his obedience made a spectacle of them.
You remember that time when he was standing there, having been scourged? In the presence of Pilate he was not answering accusations, and Pilate said to him, “You’d better respond to me. You’d better cooperate with me. I have the power of life and death over you.” This helpless creature was standing in front of Pilate, who had all of the accoutrements of worldly power, and he said, “Pilate, I’d like to tell you something… I’d like to tell you you have no power at all except the power that’s been given you by my Father.”
And it was through his obedience that a spectacle was made of the powers. His dying cry was a cry of victory. He cried out, “It is finished. I finished the work that you gave me to do. Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. I refuse to use any power other than the power of love. I will die rather than use any power to oppress. I have loved them, those that you gave me, even unto death.”
But though the decisive battle in the conflict has been won and one has been raised from the dead, the struggle continues. The final liberation is not yet. We are up against the principalities and the powers if we accept the biblical view.
William Stringfellow, in a book titled An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, has this to say:
The substantive questions here become who or what are the principalities and the powers? How are the principalities related to the moral reality of death? There are two sources of insight for these questions which complement and significantly verify one another. Those sources are the biblical references to the principalities… and empirical observation of the principalities.
According to the Bible, the principalities are legion in species, number, variety, and name. Just about the time you think you get hold of them and can identify them by name, there’s another species and your’re in trouble all over again. They are designated by such multifarious titles as powers, virtues, thrones, authorities, dominions, demons, princes, strongholds, lords, angels, gods, elements, spirits. Sometimes the names of other creatures are appropriated for them: serpent, dragon, lion, beast.
They include all institutions, all ideologies, all images, all movements, all causes, all corporations, all bureaucracies, all traditions, all methods and routines, all conglomerates, all races, all nations, all idols.
Thus the Pentagon, or the Ford Motor Company, Harvard University or the Hudson Institute, Consolidated Edison or the Diner’s Club, or the Olympics, or the Methodist Church, or the Teamsters Union are all principalities. And so are Capitalism, Maoism, Humanism, and Mormonism, Astrology, the Puritan work ethic, science and scientism, white supremacy, and patriotism. Sports, sex, profession or discipline, technology, money, the family. Beyond all prospect of full enumeration, the principalities and the powers are legion.
Now, what the scripture says, and increasingly I come to know it, is that there is no power that can confront and conquer these fallen creatures who intend us and the whole creation to be their victims, other than the name and the power of Jesus Christ. To go up against these powers in our own human power is extremely naive. It is to be torn to shreds by a power that is utterly beyond our capacity to understand and to cope with. It is pathetic to watch people try again and again and to watch all that they do and build and spend their lives constructing die.
There is one power of life and that is the power of the God of Abraham, the power of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In that power there is life. And it is in the fuller release of that power that there is life and freedom and liberation. It is that power that constitutes the only revolution that there is.
And the task of the faith community is to affirm, to declare, to point to, to rejoice in, and to praise that ultimate power. Surely this is what the Lord’s Prayer is reminding us of: Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, hallowed by thy power which is the only ultimate power. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. No other kingdom has the power to give life. Give us this day our daily bread, that is, look after the necessities of life as long as you need us to declare the nature and reality of your power. There is no reason to live except for that. So you give to us your faith community--the bread that we need--as long as you need us to make declaration of the nature and reality of your power. Deliver us from evil because we are apt to be caught by the principalities and powers which are out to get us. And they are the powers of death. Deliver us from this evil. Then it ends with the ascription, for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever.
As I am truly in the revolutionary faith community, enamored by the pentecostal power, then I become detached from all of these enslaving powers. I will no longer be impressed by the seeming power of the politicians, certainly not awed. So if I am called to go to the ministry of a politician, I can go as a human being to a fellow human being, and I’m not awed by the seeming power. Nor am I awed by big corporations, multinational or otherwise. And no longer do I need to be so mesmerized by the state that I’m unable to stand against it when I’m commanded to by God. And no longer am I bound to the orders of necessity; I am freed from the necessity of a high level of consumption and I’m freed from the tyranny of work and the tyranny of time and I can begin to enjoy some sabbaths, some sabbaticals, and the totality of my life because I am no longer bound by work. I do not feel that the kingdom is coming because of my work, and I’m no longer bound by the tyranny of time and any of its orders and necessities.
No longer do I have to separate myself from the victims of society, whether they are in prisons or mental institutions, or the economically poor, unable to buy time, health, space, leisure, education for their children or a host of other things. I know myself to be victimized, because I am the victim of these powers. I can be at home with other victims. And I need no longer to be bound by the hurt of ancient wounds in my own life because the penetrating light of Christ can pierce the darkness-the deepest darkness. And no longer need I fear the aging process. It has no destructive power over me. My diminishing powers and your diminishing powers in certain areas are the preparation for a new depth of communion. with God, for which I was destined. Death, which believes that I am its victim, will be as thwarted with me as it was with my Lord Jesus Christ who slipped out from under its control.
The ultimate call on the life of the Christian is to build a faith community. That’s the revolutionary act. And to let its own interior life be changed and nurtured and increasingly freed from the principalities, institutions, from antichrist against which the human being in his own and her own power is totally and absolutely impotent. It’s the power of Jesus Christ which is the power to save.
When this article appeared, Gordon Cosby was pastor of Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C. His article, “A sermon on power and servanthood,” appeared in the June/July 1975 issue of the Post-American.
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