Walter Wink: Collected Readings

3. Introduction

3 Introduction This book, the first in what has come to be known as the Powers trilogy, was written by Walter Wink following a four-month experience living “under military dictatorship” in several different Latin American countries. He had gone to Latin America to see firsthand the human rights abuses and poverty that afflicted so many. The trip was research; the research was overwhelming. He returned to the United States ill and in despair over the monumental evil he had encountered—evil that his own country largely supported. While recovering from his experience, Wink read a book about principalities and powers in the New Testament. He disagreed with this book, but it drove him to do his own research in the hope that understanding New Testament conceptions of power might open up understanding of the structural and spiritual powers behind the horrors he had witnessed in Latin America. Wink argues against the modern mind’s imposition of materialistic categories of interpretation on biblical notions of power, thereby masking the spiritual aspect of the exercise of power. In Wink’s words: “I will argue that the “principalities and powers” are the inner and outer aspects of any given manifestation of power. As the inner aspect they are the spirituality of institutions. . . . As the outer aspect, they are . . . all the tangible manifestations that power takes.” Source: Wink 1984: Excerpted from the Introduction Power in Its Mythological Context The reader of this work will search in vain for a definition of power. It is one of those words that everyone understands perfectly well until asked to define it. Sociologists and political scientists generally complain that no one (prior to their writing) has ever provided an adequate definition, but the definitions they offer are in turn rejected by others. This is all quibbling. The dictionary definitions 31 of power will do quite well, as long as the word is not pressed to answer for the myth with which it presently keeps company. Our use of the term “power” is laden with assumptions drawn from the contemporary materialistic worldview. Whereas the ancients always understood power as the confluence of both spiritual and material factors, we tend to see it as primarily material. We do not think in terms of spirits, ghosts, demons, or gods as the effective agents of powerful effects in the world. When the typewriter jams, I do not suspect a jinni of having jimmied with it, though I sometimes behave as if I did, nor do I lay on hands and pray for it, though I confess to having friends who do. No, most of us, if we are truly “modern,” look for nonspiritual, material causes. What happens then when we moderns examine the biblical understanding of the Powers? Will we not tend to assume that what the ancients called “Powers” were merely little-understood manifestations of material power: the laws of physical power, institutionalized forms of corporate power, psychological forms of power, perhaps even various forms of psychic power? And whatever residue we cannot force into our material categories, we will tend to regard as “superstition.” The ancients could not help it if they did not understand the physical laws of the universe uncovered by our science. They could deal with these invisible, unknown forces only by personifying them and treating them as if they were conscious, willing beings. There is a fine irony here. We moderns cannot bring ourselves by any feat of will or imagination to believe in the real existence of these mythological entities that traditionally have been lumped under the general category “principalities and powers.” We naturally assume that the ancients conceived of them and believed in them the same way we conceive of and disbelieve them. We think they thought of the Powers quite literally as a variety of invisible demonic beings flapping around in the sky, occasionally targeting some luckless mortal with their malignant payload of disease, lust, possession, or death. This view of their view finds its way into even the best modern translations of the Bible, where words like “spiritual” and “spirits” are constantly being added to the text gratuitously in order to make it clear that spiritual, not material, or material/spiritual, entities are involved. When we read the ancient accounts of encounters with these Powers, we can only regard them as hallucinations, since they have no real physical referent. Hence we cannot take seriously their own descriptions of these encounters—as long as our very categories of thought are dictated by...