Walter Wink: Collected Readings

10. The Nature of the Domination System

10 The Nature of the Domination System At the beginning of this penultimate chapter of Part One of Engaging the Powers, Walter Wink makes three significant assertions regarding the Powers: they are good; they are fallen; they can and will be redeemed. These assertions are corollary to the assertion that God created the Powers and thus they cannot be inherently evil and beyond redemption. The Powers function as the necessary structures and systems that make social life possible; when, however, they are raised through idolatry to the level of ultimacy, evil results. The notion that all created beings, including the Powers, are created good, but have fallen, allows Wink to affirm that neither humankind nor the Powers—the social structures and systems that order life for good or for ill—are intrinsically evil. Therefore both persons and social structures and systems can be redeemed. This conviction, which Wink carefully grounds biblically, is at the heart of his insistence on aggressive nonviolent resistance to evil and “tough love” of enemies. It is counter to the gospel to seek the extermination of created beings capable of being redeemed. Evangelism, then, for Wink, is two-pronged in that it seeks both the conversion/transformation of individuals and the conversion/transformation of society. Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom or reign of God was a denunciation of the Domination System of his time and all times, while simultaneously pointing to their transformation from self-idolatry to the humanizing processes of God for which they were created. Source: Wink 1992: Excerpted from Chapter 4 The greatness of Christianity lies in its being hated by the Domination System (kosmos), not in its being convincing to it. –Ignatius of Antioch, TO THE ROMANS 3:3 167 The good news is that God not only liberates us from the Powers, but liberates the Powers as well. The gospel is not a dualistic myth of good and evil forces vying for ascendancy, as in the myth of redemptive violence. It is a sublimely subtle drama about the intertwining of good and evil in all of historical reality. The Powers are not simply evil. They are a bulwark against anarchy, and a patron, repository, and inspirer of art. They inculcate values that encourage interdependency, mutual care, and social cohesiveness. They encourage submission of personal desires to the general good of everyone. Their evil is not intrinsic, but rather the result of idolatry. Therefore they can be redeemed. The New Testament presents this insight as a drama in three simultaneous acts: The powers are good The powers are fallen The powers will be redeemed The Powers Are Good In the hymn of the cosmic Christ in Col. 1:16-17, the Powers are described as having been created in, through, and for Christ. “For in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” The Colossians hymn is the brash assertion, against the grain of human suffering, that the Principalities and Powers that visit the world with so much evil are not autonomous, not independent, not eternal, not utterly depraved. The social structures of reality are creations of God. Because they are creatures, they are mortal, limited, responsible to God, and made to serve the humanizing purposes of God in the world. In the verses that precede the hymn of Colossians these Powers are referred to collectively as “the dominion of darkness” from which believers have been delivered (Col. 1:13). Ernst Käsemann has argued that this hymn was sung at the liturgy of baptism, and that it marks a change of spheres of influence, from the sphere of darkness (Col. 1:12-14 being added to give the hymn a “liturgical introduction”) to the sphere of light. Believers are delivered from the Domination System and freed from the enslaving power of the old aeon. “In 168 | Walter Wink baptism the Christian changes from one jurisdiction to another. Henceforth he belongs not to the cosmos, but to the Cosmocrator.”1 Following the hymn, likewise, Paul reminds his readers that they were “once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds” (1:21). The context therefore makes clear, whereas the hymn itself does so only by allusion (v. 20), that these Powers are or...