Just as sin hampers the expression of God’s kingdom in individual lives, so the effects of the Fall are apparent in what the apostle Paul on several occasions terms ‘the powers’ (Gal. 4; Eph. 6.12; Col. 1.16; 2.15; Heb. 6.5; 1 Peter 3.22). These powers are described using various closely related Greek terms, principally kosmokratoras, archai, dynameis and exousiai. Although sometimes explicitly linked to fallen angelic beings and demons (Rom. 8.38), they are more generally presented as the spiritual forces which drive corrupt social and political institutions. In Ephesians 6, they are very clearly associated with the ‘rulers’ and ‘authorities’ of ‘this dark world’, even as their provenance is identified as supernatural. Thus, they are key components in what is often called ‘structural sin’ or ‘structural evil’.[1] In this sense they have great relevance for civic and public theology. As Melba Padilla Maggay has put it, ‘sin expresses itself not only in personal and individual badness such as adultery or perverted sex, but also in corporate and systemic forms such as apartheid in the old South Africa or economic exploitation in many parts of the Third World by native ruling classes and multinational entities.’[2]
The most prominent western theologians to have reflected at length on ‘the powers’ in this context are the American scholars Stanley Hauerwas and Walter Wink. Of the two, Hauerwas has had greater direct influence on evangelicals, but the sheer comprehensiveness of Wink’s work makes him noteworthy here. Having said this, neither reflects the development of socio-political demonology in that branch of evangelicalism represented by charismatic Christianity. One of the most extensive writers in this area is Gregory Boyd, and it will be helpful also to consider his work in distinction from that done by Wink and Hauerwas.
Wink develops his examination of the powers in a detailed trilogy of volumes: Naming the Powers,[3] Unmasking the Powers,[4] and Engaging the Powers.[5] Through these books Wink systematically defines the powers as they are presented in Scripture, and associates them with the complex ‘domination system’ at work in the world today. Importantly, this same system is seen to possess both societies in general, and the churches which belong to those societies in particular. The call of the gospel, Wink avers, is to break such systems of domination. Thus, the language of power, traditionally expressed in terms of Satan, demons, angels, gods and elements of the universe, is reinterpreted by him to show that these forces manifest today as patriarchy, economic inequality and other structures of oppression which disable the many for the benefit of the few. Thus for Wink one of the major challenges facing the Church is to recognise or ‘name’ such powers, to disempower or ‘unmask’ them, and to take them on or ‘engage’ them in the authority of an alternative counter-power - that is, the power of Jesus and his gospel.
Wink’s critique of these modern-day powers highlights the fact that they operate through a system of violence: those at the top of the pyramid exist solely at the expense of those at the bottom. What constitutes a radical alternative, according to Wink, is to offer a response of non-violence. This Wink develops from Jesus’ teaching and exemplification of non-resistance - of turning the other cheek (forcing the opponent to treat you as an equal rather than as someone beneath you); of giving up your cloak (and your underclothes and thus exposing your opponent as being shameless); and of going the extra mile (and thus turning your opponent into the transgressor of the Roman law). Hence for Wink, the social dimension of the gospel expresses itself in ethical and personal demonstrations of an alternative use of power - the power of non-violence.
Non-violence is also a hall-mark of Hauerwas’ ethics. As a pacifist rooted in an alternative churchmanship and motivated by embrace of the ‘post-Christendom’ world, Hauerwas insists that the God we meet in Jesus Christ calls human beings to a counter-culture, set clearly apart from the structures of domination to which states, nations and other civic powers are subject in a fallen world.[6] Here, we may identify two key dimensions of his thought that touch on our present concerns. On the one hand, Hauerwas insists on the development of Christian virtues that are active and transformative.[7] Invoking Jesus’ own example, he will not allow the gospel to be reduced to a set of doctrines or principles alone. This is because neither in and of themselves change peoples’ characters. Indeed, if the Christian faith is to be reduced to such principles, then it is these, and not Jesus himself, that we should worship. There is, however, no ethical convertive power in them alone. It is only in personal relationship to Jesus Christ that we are transformed, thus becoming resident aliens whose very existence reveals that there is indeed an alternative to the powers that threaten to enslave us.[8]
While Wink and Hauerwas’ definitions of the powers in terms of earthly domination systems have proved influential in Anabaptist and more radical evangelical circles,[9] others have questioned their readiness to link such powers so negatively to civic and commercial institutions. Perhaps revealing his strong commitment to establishment, Wesley Carr asserts that at least in Ephesians and Colossians the powers are angelic and not demonic: thus in Colossians 2.15 it is not the powers which are ‘disarmed’ or ‘stripped away’ in Jesus’ cross and resurrection, but Jesus’ own flesh, as he attains a new ‘spiritual body’. Thus, too, Carr has Jesus not making a public spectacle of the powers, but with them.[10] By contrast, Gregory Boyd affirms the corrupting nature of the powers, but is wary of Wink’s attempts to ‘translate’ them to earthly structures of domination. Indeed, he detects in this a desire to ‘demythologize’ the personal and apocalyptic dimensions of the powers, and to construe them in essence as ‘impersonal aspects of God’s good creation.’ Furthermore, although they have now gone bad, Boyd contends that Wink does not assign this to a cosmic Fall, but rather to ‘the volition people who are under them give them’.[11] In stark distinction from this, Boyd insists that Paul’s social and religious milieu was replete with personal and apocalyptic demonologies, that Ephesians 6.11 explicitly relates the powers to ‘the wiles of the devil’, and that Paul had at his disposal a number of terms (‘the world’, ‘the flesh’, ‘sin’, ‘things on earth’ rather than ‘in heaven’) which would have more clearly suggested a purely material, contingent form of oppression. Hence, for Boyd, ‘as much as Paul might see demonic activity in structural societal evil, he does not equate the demonic powers with structural societal evil.’[12]
While the exact ontology of structural evil might be problematic, Boyd is surely right to reserve some apocalyptic orientation for the powers, in the same way that various evangelicals challenged the over-realised eschatology of the Social Gospel. As Nigel Wright has put it, ‘the day when ‘the kingdom of this world will become the Kingdom of our God and of his Christ’ (Rev. 11.15) is yet future, but is being anticipated in the Spirit’s work in the Church and the world. A great hope for the future therefore gives rise to a modest hope for the present, that the fallen structures of human social and political existence might no longer dominate and imprison people but rather serve their needs and provide a supportive and humanizing context in which they might seek after God.’[13] In the same way, the biblical end-time promises of Jesus’ return, cosmological renewal and final victory should provoke Christians to present-day action for justice and peace as a sign of the coming kingdom, rather than to complacent contentment in their own salvation. (Mt. 25.31-46; Jas. 2.14-26; Rev. 20.11-15).
[1] Hendrikus Berkhof, Christ and the Powers Trans. John Howard Yoder (Scottdale, Penn.: Herald Press, 1967); Graham Gordon, What if You Got Involved? Taking a Stand against Social Injustice (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2003), 58.
[2] Melba Padilla Maggay, Transforming Society (Oxford: Regnum, 1994), Cit. Graham Gordon, What if You Got Involved? Taking a Stand against Social Injustice (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2003), 59.
[3] Walter Wink, Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1984).
[4] Walter Wink, Unmasking the Powers: the Invisible Forces that Determine Human Existence (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1986).
[5] Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992).
[6] Stanley Hauerwas, In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Revised Edition) (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).
[7] Hauerwas outlines what this might mean in concrete terms in a series of articles in A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001).
[8] Stanley Hauerwas (with William Willimon), Where Resident Aliens Live: Exercises for Christian Practice (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996); A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
[9] Nigel Wright, The Radical Evangelical: Seeking a Place to Stand (London: SPCK, 1996), 113; Stuart Murray, Post-Christendom: Church and Mission in a Strange New World (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2004), 245-285.
[10] Wesley Carr, Angels and Principalities: The Background, Meaning and Development of the Pauline Phrase hai archai kai exousiai (Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 104-10.
[11] Gregory A. Boyd, God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict (Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 1997), 273.
[12] God at War, 276.
[13] Nigel Wright, The Radical Evangelical (London: SPCK, 1996), 113.
