Walter Wink: Collected Readings

5. Introduction

5 Introduction In the first volume of the Powers trilogy—Naming the Powers—Walter Wink set out to identify biblical terms for “power,” exegete them within their context, and then make the case that these terms point to the inner or spiritual aspects of concrete manifestations of power in human experience both then and now. He thus sought to recapture a language and interpretive categories for human experience that modern reductionistic materialism had lost. In this volume of the trilogy, Wink continues to argue against the presuppositions of a materialistic worldview. Such a worldview sees the “principalities and powers” of the biblical texts and religious experience as, at best, mere personifications for institutions and systems and the powerful who populate them. At worst, they are “archaic relics of a superstitious past,” not to be spoken of except with derision. But as Wink points out, the psychology of a culture can be discerned by examining what that culture endlessly talks about and what it refuses to talk about. It takes little serious examination to determine that our culture endlessly talks about, practices, and sanctions violence, but adamantly refuses to speak of—and thus give voice to—the spiritual essence of those “principalities and powers” that either promote and sanction violence or seek to subvert or subdue violence. Wink sees the “myth” of materialism collapsing all around us, resulting in a spiritual hunger experienced by many. He has set himself in this volume the task of revitalizing a “powerful counter-myth” capable of accommodating the genuine achievements of the materialistic, scientific worldview while ridding us of its unconstructive reductionism. Source: Wink 1986: Excerpted from the Introduction One of the best ways to discern the weakness of a social system is to discover what it excludes from conversation. From its inception Christianity has not found it easy to speak about sex. Worse yet, it could not acknowledge, even privately, the continued existence of inner darkness in the redeemed. Because Gnosticism attempted, often in bizarre forms, to face sex and the inner shadow, 63 it was declared heretical and driven underground, where it ironically became symbolic of the very repressed contents that it had attempted to lift up into the light. Gnosticism became Christianity’s shadow. Nineteenth-century science could not deal with the “secondary qualities” of objects—color, taste, smell, texture—or the emotions of people, which were merely subjective and not a part of the objective, analyzable world. In reaction to this arbitrary exclusion of soul from the universe, the Romantic movement attempted to redress the balance, only to lend, by its failure, an even greater sense of legitimacy to the ideology it opposed. What does late twentieth-century Western society exclude from conversation? Certainly not sex; at least in more “sophisticated” circles accounts of sexual exploits scarcely raise an eyebrow. But if you want to bring all talk to a halt in shocked embarrassment, every eye riveted on you, try mentioning angels, or demons, or the devil. You will be quickly appraised for signs of pathological violence and then quietly shunned. Angels, spirits, principalities, powers, gods, Satan—these, along with all other spiritual realities, are the unmentionables of our culture. The dominant materialistic worldview has absolutely no place for them. These archaic relics of a superstitious past are unspeakable because modern secularism simply has no categories, no vocabulary, no presuppositions by which to discern what it was in the actual experiences of people that brought these words to speech. And it has massive resistance even to thinking about these phenomena, having fought so long and hard to rid itself of every vestige of transcendence. Why then trouble secular materialism by “the return of the repressed,” these “spiritual hosts . . . in the heavenly places,” and all their ilk, both good and evil? There are several compelling reasons. The first is that materialism itself is terminally ill, and, let us hope, in process of replacement by a worldview capable of honoring the lasting values of modern science without succumbing to its reductionism. In that emergent worldview, spirituality will be perceived as the interiority of material, organic, and social entities, as I have suggested in volume 1 of The Powers (Naming the Powers). Having repressed the spiritual so long, however, we no longer have ready access to it. The wells of the spirit have run dry. We can scarcely rediscover in a few generations what it has taken the race millennia to learn by costly trial and error. So we find ourselves returning to the...