Dying to
the Powers
A Critical
Reflection of Walter Wink’s Engaging the
Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (The Powers:
Volume 3)
Where my first essay on Walter
Wink’s third and final installment of The Powers Trilogy focused on
understanding the form of power in the world through the Domination System,
this second essay considers the Christian response to the Domination System.
Where my first essay was quite critical of Wink’s hermeneutic, this second
essay is written with the idea that we need not begin from the exact same
foundation in order to come to similar responses.
The question Wink presents in the latter half of his
book is, “How do we live in response to the reality of the Powers?” In other
words, how do we engage the idolatrous Powers of the world in a way that moves
us beyond the Domination System? Wink posits that “insofar as we have been
socialized into patterns of injustice” we are dead, echoing Paul’s words in
Ephesians 2:1-2.[1] In
our own acquiescence and complicity to violence we are killed, swallowing the
poison we were only too glad to concoct. “And by a kind of heavenly homeopathy,
we must swallow what killed us in order to come to life.”[2]
Wink seems to say that it is not
because of original sin or our proclivity to violate God’s law—he makes no
mention of God’s law whatsoever—but only in our societally-conditioned
propensity to violence we are dead. We do agree that enslavement is an apt metaphor
for our condition. Furthermore, we agree that our enslavement is idolatry. We
must die to the very things that hold us in bondage. He utilizes Jung’s concept
of the unconscious will and our need to have that will (based in our ego)
annihilated.[3] While
housed in the ego, according to Wink and Jung, this is indeed a heart issue.
Where liberal focus on changed ideas, systems, and structures, fundamentalists
correctly aim for the heart, where “the whole gestalt of the ego, ideas,
emotions, beliefs, and myths” reside.[4]
The fundamentalists stop woefully short, however, failing to recognize the
broader dimensions of the Powers. “As a consequence, the genuinely converted
person is reinstated into the old, unchanged world with little understanding of
the social dimensions of sin, which are kept mystified by blaming everything on
‘Satan,’ who is conceived as a bugaboo rather than the spirit of the Domination
System.”[5]
Wink is here making some genuine
connections to a very Calvinist understanding of the faith and our union with
Christ. It is only in our union with Christ that we are truly and fully human.
Would not Calvin, if he had the vocabulary, suggest the same as Wink?
What
is required is the crucifixion of the ego, wherein it dies to its illusion that
it is the center of the psyche and the world, and is confronted by the greater
self and the universe of God.”[6]
Only by dying to the self/ego are we free from the Domination System. As Paul
wrote, “For our sake he made him [Christ] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in
him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus
defeated sin and death through sin and death. The Domination System seemed to
win the decisive victory in the death of Jesus Christ, only to find that the
love of God triumphs in the end. Dying and rising, Christ unmasked the Powers
and stripped them of their power. So, too, in our baptism we are dying to the
Powers (the domination system etched in our ego) and rising to new life in
Christ. This new life in Christ, according to Wink, is a life of non-violence
and freedom from the Domination System.
Wink’s point in dying to the
Domination System and rising to new life reoriented to God is to say that this
new life is the truly human life. Anything less is sub-human. The Domination
System projects sub-humanness upon us. We are only too happy to oblige and go
along with the “spirit of the age.” Christ introduces us to something
else—abundant life. Our responses are acts of reorientation to God and
testimony to our liberation from the Domination System. Worship, confession,
prayer, and suffering lead us to remember who we are and whose we are.
In regard to confession, Wink posits
an interesting thesis, but once again seems to be predicating his argument on a
humanistic utopian vision of non-violence with nary a mention of God’s glory,
holiness, or justice (in fact, one comes away again convinced that God’s glory,
holiness, and justice, perhaps even his identity, is simply a world of
non-violence). “We tend to confess infractions of the rules the Powers
themselves have established.”[7]
He argues that this takes us right back into the Domination System, as opposed
to liberating us from it. Is that the point of confession? And are we not
indeed confessing infractions against rules? Not of the Domination System but
those instituted by a holy and righteous God? Here Wink seems far too narrow in
his understanding of sin. It is rather limited by his own understanding and
definition of the Domination System, and its culturally-charged rules regarding
racism and sexual stereo-typing.
We celebrate our dying to the Powers
in the sacrament of baptism. The church’s special task in engaging the Powers,
then, is to administer the sign of our “death” to us and to the prevailing
powers of world. Our work is to continue to engage the Powers with the reality
and truth of Christ’s victory. “So that through the church the manifold wisdom
of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly
places” (Ephesians 3:10). Because of Christ’s victory on the cross, the Powers
are in subjugation to Him. “We simply have to remind them that they exist in
and through and for God.”[8]
Wink’s most compelling chapter in
the entire series is on “Prayer and the Powers.”[9]
He demands that Christians must pray, and to not pray is a confirmation of “the
effectiveness of the Powers in diminishing our humanity.”[10]
His basic premise for the necessity of prayer is as follows:
Those who pray do so not because they believe certain
intellectual propositions about the value of prayer, but simply because the
struggle to be human in the face of suprahuman Powers requires it. The act of
praying is itself one of the indispensable means by which we engage the Powers.
It is, in fact, that engagement at its most fundamental level, where their
secret spell over us is broken and we are reestablished in a bit more of that
freedom which is our birthright and potential.”[11]
Wink
even acknowledges that without the protection of prayer, all of our best and
most well-meaning action eventually tends towards self-justifying good works.
Unsupported by love, our wells of love run dry.
Where once again Wink drifts off
into something resembling heresy, he insists that history belongs to those who
pray. “The future belongs to whoever can envision in the manifold of its
potentials and a new and desirable possibility, which faith then fixes upon as
inevitable.”[12]
My questions to this are “Will any earnest intercession do?” and “Is God’s
reign here defined simply as any generic hoped for future?” Wink’s major
problem is ontological. He insists, even as he writes of “full humanity,” that
said humanity is determined by standards outside of Scripture. Humanity is the
ultimate. God’s being and glory are manifest in human fullness and all of its
creative potentialities. This is a man-centered doctrine in the end. God’s
righteousness, justice, holiness, and standards are established for him on a
human scale of shalom, according to Wink. There is no God-standard—or at least
not one predicated on Scripture. In truth, the essence of our being is always
to be determined by God’s standards as revealed in Scripture. All that is to
say, while I agree that prayer is what we do in response to the Powers, however
they are defined, the foundation and goal of prayer is, to me, quite different.
Worship, confession, suffering, and
prayer are indeed our responses to the Powers. Wink lacks a nuanced
understanding of the depth of our fallenness, however, and our full humanity
exercised only in our union with Christ—the participation of which we celebrate
through the Sacraments, worship, confession, suffering, and prayer. To
illustrate, when I pray, I can only do so in Christ by the Spirit, who prays
for me that the will of God be done in my life and in the world. Our dependence
is on the prayerful intercession on our behalf by Christ and the fulfillment of
the sovereign God’s good purposes in the world—purposes that, indeed, lead to
shalom.
[1]
Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers:
Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1002), 157. “You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you
once walked, following the course of the Domination System (kosmos).”
[2]
Ibid.
[3]
Ibid., 158.
[4]
Ibid.
[5]
Ibid., 158-159.
[6]
Ibid., 159. Perhaps Calvin wouldn’t understand “the greater self” and “universe
of God” any better than I do, but I think on the basic premise he would be in
agreement.
[7]
Ibid., 160.
[8]
Ibid., 167.
[9]
Chapter 16, pages 297-317.
[10]
Ibid., 297.
[11]
Ibid.
[12]
Ibid., 299.
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