Confronting the Powers that Be: Introduction (Session 1)

For our struggle is not against enemies of flesh and blood, but against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Ephesians 6:12 NRSV

Readings: TPTB - Introduction ; ETP - Chapter 4;

Walter Wink tells of struggling for years with a spiritual and intellectual trek into an understanding of how our lives are controlled by Powers which are both spiritual entities and sociological systems. All of these Powers, Wink writes, have a vocation from God and yet all are also in rebellion against God's calling, and each of them does both good and evil.

The Powers, Wink says, have too often been thought of as supernatural individual beings in the sky. Or, on the other hand, we've thought of them simply asocial institutions. They are more complex. They are visible and invisible, and have outer manifestations as well as an inner spirituality or ethos.

In New Testament times people sensed the inner spiritual nature of the oppressive systems, but projected them outward and heavenward, and personified them. They spoke of them as angels, demons, principalities, powers, thrones. They intuited that they were under the domination of entities they could not see and which were beyond any individual's control. Wink comments:

I found the implications of that ancient view staggering. It means that every business, corporation, school, denomination, bureaucracy, sports team--indeed, social reality in all its forms a combination of both visible and invisible, outer and inner, physical and spiritual. Right at the heart of the most materialistic institutions in society we find spirit. IBM and General Motors each have a unique spirituality, as does a league for the spread of atheism...We are on the brink of rediscovering soul at the core of every created thing. There is nothing, from DNA to the United Nations, that does not have God at its core. Everything is connected to God. Everything is answerable to God. (TPTB 4-5 )

The Powers are good.

The Powers are fallen.

The Powers must be redeemed. (TPTB 31)

The gospel is not a message of personal salvation from the world, but a message of a world transfigured, right down to its basic structures. Redemption means actually being liberated from the oppression of the Powers, being forgiven for one's own sin and for complicity with the Powers, and being engaged in liberating the Powers themselves from their bondage to idolatry. (ETP 83)

2. Now that the institutions of slavery and "Jim Crow" have been eliminated what institutions/powers in our society perpetuate racism and how?

3. Think of an institution with which you are associated. In what way does it do good? In what ways is it fallen?

4. When our ancestors wrote the Declaration of Independence, they were not just attacking King George III, they were confronting the organized spiritual power behind the institutions of monarchy and colonialism, the unquestioned five thousand year old idea that God intends for kings to have "authority over" peoples regardless of what they might want. Is there a sense in which kings served some purpose of God in history? If so, what changed in the 18th century? What problems of "authority over" remain?

Copyright © 1998 by Vern Rossman