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Walter Wink
Copyright © 1998 Augsburg Fortress; first published by Doubleday in April 1998; Galilee trade paperback edition published in April 1999
ISBN 978-0-3854-8752-8
This one has been on my shelf for a while before I read it a year or so ago. But at a decade into the “new millennium” that Walter Wink was looking toward as he developed this volume, now seems like an appropriate time to revisit (and review) this readable (and useable!) book by Wink, a well-known theologian and Biblical scholar.
The Powers That Be is a compilation of three previous works by Wink, sometimes referred to as “the Powers Trilogy”: Naming the Powers (1984), Understanding the Powers (1986), and Engaging the Powers (1992). Although primarily a digest version of the third volume, The Powers That Be also incorporates material from the other two. Given the repeated use of the term the Powers, an astute reader asks: What are “the Powers”? Wink explains in the Introduction: the Powers That Be are more than just the people who run things. They are the systems themselves, the institutions and structures that weave society into an intricate fabric of power and relationships. … They are necessary. They are useful. … But the Powers are also the source of unmitigated evils (p. 1). These are the Powers – the systems and people who make things happen. Sometimes useful, necessary, even good things are done by systems. Sometimes terrible, tragic, and even horrifying things are done by these systems. The task for people of faith, Wink asserts, is to recognize the Powers at work, to identify the good purpose for the Powers, to point out where the Powers are falling short of those good purposes, and to call the Powers back to their rightful purposes.
Recognizing the Powers for what they actually are requires an adjustment in how we view the world. The questioning of a given worldview – and the recognition of other possible worldviews – has increased over the last decade or two with the awareness that the age of Modernity is fading and something new is emerging. In his book, Wink identifies five specific worldviews and how each relates (or fails to relate) the physical and spiritual realms to one another. He starts with the ancient view in which heaven and earth are parallel realities or mirrors of each other. Then he describes the Gnostic world view in which the spiritual realm is exalted as good and pure while the physical realm is rejected as inferior and evil. The inverse of that dichotomy is the Materialist worldview in which only the physical is real and a spiritual realm does not exist in any meaningful sense. As a corrective, what Wink terms the Theological worldview developed, holding the physical and spiritual realms completely separate from one another. But this separation has not been helpful as it privatizes faith and marginalizes any activity by God in the physical realm. A better worldview, Wink asserts, is what he refers to as the Integral worldview in which the spiritual and physical realties are seen as intertwined with one another.
Wink observes that “We may be the first generation in the history of the world that can make a conscious choice between these views” (p. 22). Indeed that does seem to be the case and there is evidence we are choosing. When Wink wrote The Powers That Be, the Materialist worldview was the dominant view that shaped our culture. Now a decade into this new millennium, there are indications that this is shifting. Some of the other worldviews, particularly the Integral view, are finding greater and more open acceptance as people recognize their ability to choose their worldview – and the multiple views from which there are to choose. Furthermore, it is by using the Integral worldview that we can best see the Powers as having a spiritual reality in addition to their more obvious expression in the physical realm. Such a perspective also helps us move beyond our cultural conditioning to react personally to the pain and suffering caused by our institutions and systems or to feel insulated from suffering that does not touch us personally. In the Integral worldview, all things are connected. Hence, the suffering of some affects the well-being of all.
When it comes to the Powers, the systems that make things happen in our world, there are three important things Wink wants his readers to bear in mind. First, the Powers are good. God called creation good. In that the Powers are created things, in that they are to serve the purpose of God’s good intentions for the world, they are good. However, as Wink notes secondly, the Powers are fallen. Whenever the Powers put their own interests above the well-being of the whole of society, they fall short of the good purpose for which they were created. Thirdly, given that the good Powers are fallen, the Powers must be redeemed. The Powers are redeemed when their idolatry (the ways in which they serve something other than God’s good purposes) is revealed and when they are recalled to the good purpose for which they were created. Wink frames this task of redeeming the Powers as the proper work of the Church – work which it must do despite its being as fallen and idolatrous as any other institution (Power) in our society.
This is difficult work. As Wink notes: “Unfortunately, [the Powers] are linked together in a bewilderingly complex network, in what we call the Domination System” (p. 36). Because of its size and complexity, it is hard to see the Domination System itself. However, Wink identifies a number of characteristics that are obvious enough: unjust economic relationships, oppressive political relations, biased race/gender relations, hierarchical power relationships, and the use of violence (threatened or actual) to maintain these imbalances. A key piece for maintaining the Domination System is a significant story to explain why things are the way they are, a story that is repeated and seems to be experienced in daily life to such a degree it is taken to be reality. This sacred story for the Domination System, Wink explains, is the myth of redemptive violence. He cites a number of examples from the ancient Babylonian creation saga of Marduk slaying Tiamat through its modern American counterparts including an in-your-face explanation from the old Get Smart television series. No matter the form, the message is the same: order can only triumph over the chaos that threatens through the use of violence.
In contrast, Wink observes that the sacred stories of Scripture carry a different message. It starts with the experience of ancient Israel, the people chosen by God to model what God intends for life to be. The exodus of the children of Israel from the Domination System of slavery under Pharaoh in Egypt starts this people on their pilgrimage toward what God intends for them. Along the way, they lose sight of that calling (even developing their own Domination System in time). Yet the prophets repeatedly call the people back to God’s good intentions. These intentions, as Wink frames them, would result in a domain freed from the ravages of war, domination, oppression, etc. (p. 63). Working from a Christian perspective, Wink sees this prophetic vision reaching its greatest clarity in Jesus who is about the work of inaugurating God’s domination free order.
Jesus expresses this new order in ways that demonstrate economic equity, full acceptance and inclusion of women, holiness as being more contagious that uncleanliness, a new family system in which God alone has the authority of a father, and the restoration of the law to its proper humanizing purpose. Jesus rejects the ways of domination that involve any type of ranking. He also rejects the ways of violence. As Wink frames the crucifixion, “Jesus endured the cross rather than prove false to his own nonviolent way” (p. 69). Death is the ultimate sanction the Domination System has, but it failed to silence Jesus because God raised him from the dead, demonstrating an even greater power to be at work: non-violent love. “What Jesus envisioned,” writes Wink, “was a world transformed, where both people and Powers are in harmony with the ultimate and committed to the general welfare – what some people prefer to call the ‘kindom’ of God” (p. 81). Jesus’ expectation for his followers is that they live as though this new order has already come into being.
For much of the book, Wink discusses the practice of this nonviolent love in great detail. To engage the Domination System directly, to meet power with power and strength with strength, is futile. We cannot, Wink argues, use the very tools of the system in an effort to defeat it; such moves will only keep us stuck and trapped with the system. The only way out is the way Jesus shows: dying to the Powers in order to break free of them. Otherwise, we only perpetuate the spiral of violence. The nonviolent way of Jesus is not some impossible ideal, nor is it blind capitulation to evil. It is simply a refusal to oppose violence on its own terms, “a third way that is neither cowardly submission nor violent reprisal” (p. 103).
The practice of nonviolence, as Wink observes, “is a way – the only one I know – of not becoming what we hate” (p. 112). He identifies two key principles from nonviolent struggle: means that are consistent with the ends and respect for the rule of law. Practical examples from the work of Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King, Jr. here in this country are offered to demonstrate how these ways can and do work in the real world. (Indeed they have worked and have significantly reshaped our world.) In a most timely and significant exploration of the ways of nonviolence, Wink takes a hard look at Just War Theory and how it is so often misapplied. However, he also sees classic pacifism as a departure from Jesus’ “third way.” What faithfulness to the teachings of Jesus requires, Wink suggests, is action that “forces oppressors to make choices they would rather not make” (p. 143), which is hardly a call to sit on the sidelines and do nothing. Wink further develops this approach through a number of “what if” scenarios that are often used to demonstrate violence is justifiable and appropriate in certain instances. However, as Wink repeatedly shows, there are always other options.
Perhaps the most helpful effect from choosing Jesus’ third way, this way of nonviolent opposition, is how our perception of our enemy changes. The Domination System with its myth of redemptive violence would have us regard our enemy as an opponent who must be destroyed in order that we be saved from destruction. However, by living in love as Jesus calls us to do (love that includes love for our enemies), we can see our enemies as gifts, rather than threats. As Wink notes, our enemies reflect the shadow sides of our own selves. By learning to love ourselves, even our shadow sides (the enemy within), we also learn to love the enemy without. The real target of our anger must always remain the System itself because our enemies are as much victims and products of the Domination System as we are.
Wink concludes his summation by noting the importance of prayer in engaging the Powers. After looking at the practice of prayer through the five worldviews identified early on, he notes that in the Integral worldview, prayer is central and essential. It is how we recognize and connect with the spiritual reality that is at the core of every single thing. Prayer is the path by which God and God’s people engage the Powers to challenge their falseness, to call forth the potential for good, and work to redeem the Powers. “This is the goal,” Wink writes, “not only to become free from the Powers, but to free the Powers. … We seek not only to break the idolatrous spells cast by the Powers, but to break the ability of the Powers to cast idolatrous spells” (p. 199).
So ten years into the new millennium, how is Wink’s vision faring? It seems to be needed now as much as ever. In this decade, we have entered into a pre-emptive war and twisted the Just War doctrine to give this action legitimacy. Even now the war drums beat for similar pre-emptive strikes at Iran and possibly North Korea, despite the open recognition that our military forces are insufficient to support such actions. We have seen the American flag draped around the cross of Christ, fusing the national cause and the myth of redemptive violence with the message of our salvation – and it is a confusing image indeed.
One of the questions that occurred to me in reading Wink’s book was how much has the myth of redemptive violence is involved in the heavy emphasis that Anselm’s understanding of the atonement has received in recent years. Anselm’s satisfaction theory is often summed up as “We owed a debt we could not pay so Jesus paid that debt, which he did not owe.” Lately, this understanding seems to have been pushed beyond anything Anselm likely imagined into a notion that God had to vent all of God’s wrath at the whole of human sinfulness and thus took it all out on the innocent victim of Jesus. This is claimed to be necessary to satisfy the demands of justice. But is it? In Anselm’s time, Abelard countered that if the problem were indeed one of justice, how could so great an injustice as the innocent being punished for the guilty make everything right? Such a counterargument is needed more than ever now. Walter Wink provides such a helpful voice.
Back in 1998, when Wink compiled The Powers That Be from his earlier writings of the eighties and the nineties, he subtitled it “Theology for a New Millennium.” A decade into that new millennium, this theology is definitely needed. It’s worth getting off the shelf and reading again, especially as we face questions regarding the use of military might, the intersection of faith life and civic life, and a narrow definition of social justice as “good Christian charity”. This particular book is very readable, even for non-theologians or lay people. Wink’s book will generate discussion among those already inclined to agree with the author as well as those who may find his positions difficult to accept. In a time of increasing polarization on just about everything, Wink offers a clarion call to a third way, to God’s ways, to a way out of Domination and Control and back to the way of love … costly, risky, powerful love.
 Author: Walter Wink
Manufacturer: Galilee Trade
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