Army of Priests

Let me first say that I disagree with the fundamental premise in Walter Wink’s book, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium . According to Walker Wink, demons and angels as described in the bible are the spiritual personification of corporate entities. That is, where a country, company, church, or family exists it has its own unique culture, which includes a spiritual element (something that I can agree with). Walter asserts that the ancient Hebrews personified this spiritual element and named a culture as a “demon” or “angel” depending on whether the institution was fulfilling God’s purpose (with most cultures falling in a fuzzy area in between). This is where I disagree with Walter, as too many stories in the bible seem to represent angels and demons as individual entities, distinct from any institutional structure.

But, if you can look past this main idea, the rest of the book is on how to reform ‘the powers’ (Walter’s collective name for angels and demons) to pull them into line with God’s kingdom. The book doesn’t need its spiritual element to work as it offers solid, ‘material’ reasons for the prevalence of The Domination System (see below) and practical ways to interfere with it.

Walter suggests that these different ‘powers’, or institutions form an intricate and impenetrable collective known as the domination system. Speaking of the struggle against apartheid, Walter states that the victims “recognised that all the individual powers in South Africa conspired together, if only by passive consent, to maintain their unjust system. And they sensed that it was a total system, extending into the global economy and world political system. This overarching network of powers is what we call the domination system.It is characterised by unjust economic relations, oppressive political relations, patriarchal gender relations, hierarchical power relations, and the use of violence to maintain them all.” (Pg39) Walter brings up the example of untold millions dying of poverty and points out how no one person or group is individually responsible.

Walter asserts that the mission and gospel of Jesus was to disturb the domination system. Piece by piece the author describes how Jesus fought against the different foundational premises on which domination is based – unfair power hierarchies, economic inequity, chauvinism, religious piety, family, law, sacrifices, and especially violence.

There’s is a chapter on Rene Girard’s ideas that the gospel story attacked the mimetic myth. (That killing a scapegoat would fix people’s problems, a myth Girard asserts is responsible for most of the world’s wars) The rest of the book is mostly about Jesus’ non-violent stance and the ideology of using non-violent direct action to transform society. Walter makes a good argument here (though I was convinced long ago). Unlike other books that I have read his emphasis on the ‘powers’ bought up new points I had not considered before. For instance, he explains that when a revolution uses violence the society it creates is just as susceptible to the powers as it was before, because the domination system runs on violence.

All up it is an interesting read that gave me a different perspective to look from, but I don’t think this book was as enlightening as any of John Howard Yoder’s works or, say, Jesus for President. I also couldn’t follow his discussion on Girard until I looked up the ideas online. The Powers That Be was pulled from Walter’s Powers Trilogy and I feel that this section may have been copied out of context from one of those books (there is a step change in the expected background knowledge of the reader during that chapter).

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