On
the Powers
December
22, 2021
The Scripture
quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible,
copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council
of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights
reserved.
There is a
concept in the Bible that few Americans know of or understand. Perhaps you’ve
heard or read some of the texts that use the concept. If so, you’ve probably
just dismissed them because you didn’t understand them. If you have worked with
them and come to understand them, God bless you. Still, most Americans haven’t
done that. The concept I’m talking about is however a powerful one that is
powerfully relevant in our contemporary context. It is the concept of “the Powers,”
though sometimes we give them other names. Here’s a passage from Ephesians that
expresses the concept using several different names for it: “For our struggle
is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the
authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the
spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Ephesians 6:12. I’m not quite
sure what to make of the notion of there being spiritual forces of evil in the
heavenly places, but I’ll let that problem slide for now.
The leading
American theologian who wrote on the Powers, the late Walter Wink, introduces
the Powers this way (and I capitalize Powers because that’s what Wink does):
All of us deal with the Powers The Be. They staff our
hospitals, run City Hall, sit around tables in corporate boardrooms, collect
our taxes, and head our families. But the Powers That Be are more than just the
people who run things. They are the systems themselves, the institutions and
structures that weave society into an intricate fabric of power and
relationships. These Powers surround us on every side. They are necessary. They
are useful. We could do nothing without them….But the Powers are also the
source of unmitigated evils.[1]
Wink also says that the Powers “include
the spirituality at the core of…institutions and structures.”[2]
Then he makes this telling statement: “[E]very business, corporation, school,
denomination, bureaucracy, sports team—indeed social reality in all its forms—is
a combination of both the visible the invisible, outer and inner, physical and
spiritual.”[3]
Wink explains
that the Powers can be and often are evil. He explains that reality by first
positing that a Power is a created spiritual entity. God creates the Powers,
and each of them has a vocation to be beneficial to life. Wink says that they
become demonic when they cease to pursue that vocation. He has a saying that
functions as a sort of mantra in his book: “The Powers are good, the Powers are
fallen, the Powers can be redeemed.” He’s right about that of course. Perhaps
an illustration from contemporary American life will help make the concept of
the Powers more understandable. The example that follows is mine not Winks. It
is the Power of American racism and white supremacy.
Racism and white
supremacy are this country’s original sin. They have been at the core of
Euro-American culture from the very beginning. Before 1865 the economy of a
large portion of the nation depended on the forced, unpaid labor of enslaved
Africans and African-Americans. That portion of the country seceded from the
union and began the deadliest war in American history to defend slavery that
the people of that part of the country feared the nation might abolish. After
the Civil War the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution did abolish
slavery, but it most certainly did not abolish American racism or American
white supremacy. The former Confederate states adopted what came to be called
Jim Crow laws that mandated racial segregation. White terrorist groups like the
Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Councils enforced segregation and white
supremacy through extra-legal means up to and including lynching. Whites in the
north practiced racial segregation too. The difference there was that
segregation in the north was de facto not de jure as it was in the south, but
it was only slightly less effective in enforcing racial segregation and white
supremacy than were the Jim Crow laws of the south if indeed it was less
effective at all. American racism and white supremacy affected more than Black
Americans. White Americans oppressed Native Americans, whom the whites often
considered to be less than human or at least less than the whites were so badly
that what white Americans did to Native populations amounted to genocide
against Native Americans.
The civil rights
movement demanding the end of Jim Crow and a real right to vote picked up speed
after World War II, but whites in the south opposed it by illegal means up to
and including murder. In 1954 the US Supreme Court ruled that legally enforced
racial segregation in schools and other public institutions was
unconstitutional. The US government enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and
the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those measures have had some salutary effect, yet
racism and white supremacy are still very much with us. Today however they
mostly appear in a form that is harder to discern and to combat than was the
legal segregation in the south and practices like redlining in the north. There
still are Americans who are overt racist and white supremacists, but most white
Americans today deny being racist. The law of the land prohibits racial
discrimination everywhere in the country. Most if not all states have their own
anti-discrimination laws alongside the federal statutes mentioned above.
Yet for all that
racism and white supremacy are still with us. The difference between today’s
racism and racism in the American past is that it appears primarily as
institutional racism not the overt racism of individual people. Institutional
racism shows up not in overt acts of discrimination but in the statistics from
our nation’s institutions that show that racism continues to oppress American
people who aren’t white. One place where institutional racism is apparent is
the criminal law system.[4]
The statistics from that system undeniably show that our courts impose more
severe sentences on Black defendants than they do on white defendants for the
same crime though few if any judges would admit to being racists. Unless
they’ve read the research, judges today are probably mostly unaware that they
treat Black and white defendants differently, but they do.
So what explains
the persistence of institutional racism in the United States? Walter Wink
answers that question for us. American racism is a Power in Wink’s sense of the
word. It is a spirit, an invisible but real spiritual force that permeates
virtually every American institution. This Power, like all Powers, was
originally a constructive one. It’s mission was to bring people together in
constructive ways and to create just social, political, legal, and economic
systems. But like virtually every other Power among us this Power of social
formation is fallen in Wink’s sense of that term. It has been corrupted, or it
has corrupted itself. It is still a spiritual Power among us, but in its fallen
state it functions to create unjust institutions and practices not just ones. It has turned people against people. More
specifically, it has caused white people to invent the artificial category we
call race. It has caused white people to believe that they are superior in
every way to people of color. It has become a spirit not of positive social
organization but of the sinful notion called racism. Today the Power racism
mostly though not entirely functions beneath the surface of life. It works
within institutions like our criminal law system to produce unjust, disparate results
tied to a person’s race. It influences people’s decisions and actions though
the people through whom it does its demonic work are unaware, consciously at
least, that the Power racism is at work in them and in the systems in which
they are involved.
Winks says the
Powers are fallen, using an image from the hoary Christian notion of original
sin. But Wink also says that the Powers can be redeemed. They can be turned
back to their original constructive purposes much like the Spirit of God can
redeem a sinful woman or man—and that of course includes all of us. In this way
Wink is even a bit hopeful though demonic Powers function in every aspect of
our lives. The Powers can be redeemed, but saying that they can immediately
raises the question of how they can be redeemed, of how we can return them to
their original function in human life. Just how do we go about the sacred task
of redeeming the Powers?
The answer to
that question, it seems to me, is a combination of increased awareness of the
dynamics of the Powers and a great deal of prayer. To continue with our example
of American racism, most Americans believe that racism is only a personal
issue. There is racism, people think, because many people are still racists. There
are still racists of course, but, as I’ve already said here, institutions
infested with the Power of racism produce racially disparate results though the
people who work in those institutions have no intention of producing those
unequal outcomes. The first necessary step in redeeming the Power racism is to
make people aware that it is real and that it is at work in the institutions in
which they participate and quite probably in their own spirits. Nearly everyone
today denies being racist, but we have all been formed by a culture that is racist
to the marrow of its bones. It always has been. Perhaps I’m projecting here,
but I believe that most Americans who deny being racists are simply in denial. It
is not possible to grow up in the United States without being influenced by racism.
We take it in from our first breath to our last. We can’t avoid it. So we need
not only to educate people about the Powers in institutions, we must convince
people to do some serious self-analysis, and we must do that analysis
ourselves. It is not necessarily sinful for an American to have racist thoughts
and racists reactions to people. It is sinful to act on those thoughts and
reactions, and it is sinful to deny being racist without have done a great deal
of introspection and personal analysis. Most people today don’t want to be
racists, and that desire makes us trick ourselves. We believe that a glib
denial of being racist settles the matter. Wink’s theology of the Powers shows
us that it doesn’t settle the matter at all. The Power of racism will never be
redeemed as long as we keep denying its dominance in our institutions and its
presence in our own souls.
The powers are spiritual
entities albeit fallen ones. We must approach them as such, and we Christians
have before us a teacher and a model for how to do it. That teacher and model
is of course Jesus Christ. Before he was or did anything else, Jesus opposed
the Powers. He opposed the domination system within which he lived, and he
opposes the domination system in which we live. A domination system, Wink says,
is the result of all of the demonic Powers working together to create systems
of oppression and violence. Jesus teaches us first of all to be aware of the
Powers and the systems they create, then to resist them through creative,
assertive nonviolence. Opposing a Power of violence with violence just
perpetuates the Power of violence. As Christians our unavoidable call is to
speak out powerfully against the Powers, including of course the Power racism.
We are called to resist demonic manifestations of the Powers constantly though always
nonviolently.
It’s easy for me
to say that that’s what we’re called to do. I know however that it’s a whole lot
harder to do it than to say it. The Powers are strong, and they are firmly
entrenched in every aspect of our lives. They do not yield easily. They resist
resistance. It is impossible for anyone or at least for most of us to engage in
resisting them without becoming exhausted and frustrated. It’s almost
impossible for most of us not to become disillusioned. We may well even become
jaded and cynical.
That’s where
faith comes in. Our Christian faith doesn’t just call us nonviolently to resist
the Powers. It is also a source of courage and renewal. It can be a refuge for
us when the Powers have battered our spirits in our struggle against them. Part
of our call is to pray without ceasing for the redemption of the Powers, but we
can and should pray for more than that. We can pray to God for strength,
courage, and hope when our spirits, strength, and courage are failing us and our
hope has become very, very thin. Those who have devoted their lives to the
struggle against the Powers know that we all need times of respite. We all need
sabbath time. We all need sabbaticals from the struggle. Even Jesus tried at
times to get away for some peace, solitude, and prayer. We all need to envelope
our lives in prayer and openness to the renewal that God the Holy Spirit offer
us every day of our lives.
The work of
redeeming the Powers is holy work. It is work God does through us. We resist
the spiritual Powers by constantly renewing our own spirits for the work.
Resisting the Powers isn’t easy. It got Jesus crucified, and it has cost many
saints of all spiritual traditions their lives as well. It’s not easy, but it
is our call. With God’s help we can continue the sacred work of calling all of
the fallen Powers in the world back to their original, sacred nature and work.
May it be so.
[1] Wink,
Walter, The Powers That Be, Theology for a New Millennium (Galilee
Doubleday, New York, 1998, 1.
[2]
Id., 4.
[3]
Id.
[4] I used
to be a lawyer. I know that our judicial institutions are about law not
justice. There’s a famous story, perhaps apocryphal but nonetheless telling, about
a crusty old law school professor who said to a first year law school class,
“You came here because you want to do justice. This is a law school not a
justice school! If you want to do justice, go to seminary.” That of course is
what I and many other former lawyers have done.
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