On
the Powers of the World
May 5, 2023
Sometimes in the Bible answers to questions pop up for me
that are not the answer the author of the question intended. I recently came
across a good example of that phenomenon at 1 Peter 3:13: “Now who will harm you
if you are eager to do good?” It’s clear that the author of this epistle (who
certainly was not Saint Peter) intended his question to be rhetorical. He
clearly thought the answer was, “no one.” He seems to be operating on the
frankly naïve assumption that no one would have any reason to harm a person who
is eager to do good. Why would they, after all? Good is good, and everyone
wants what is good, right? Well, it would be nice if that were right, but my
immediate answer to the text’s question was: How about the Powers of the world?
They don’t maintain their power by applauding or even just tolerating what is good.
They maintain their power by getting people to support and even participate in
their evil. If they reward someone for having done good, and even if they do
some good themselves, they do it for cynical political reasons not because they
simply desire to do good. Who will harm you if you are eager to do good? The
corrupt Powers of the world, that’s who.
I find it hard to understand how a Christian can ask the question
1 Peter asks and intend it as rhetorical. Christians, after all, ground their
faith in the story of Jesus of Nazareth. Surely we all confess that Jesus was
eager to do nothing but good. He proclaimed God’s love for the “least of these”
and called all people to work to establish the kingdom of God on earth. That’s
a kingdom without war. It’s a kingdom with justice for all achieved
nonviolently. It is a kingdom in which everyone has enough because no one has
too much. All of that’s good, right? Of course it is.
And what happened to Jesus? An occupying foreign power,
Rome, arrested him, tortured him, and executed him by crucifixion, one of the
most brutal, inhuman ways of killing a person the sinful mind of humankind has ever
dreamt up. Jesus wanted nothing but good for all people (though his idea of
what was good for the rich and powerful was certainly different from their idea
of what was good for them). In his world, the Powers that were couldn’t tolerate
his demands for such a radical transformation of the world they ruled. So they
snuffed him out. Crucifixion is no euthanasia. A crucified person suffers,
sometimes for days, before finally dying. Crucifixion wasn’t just a means of
capital punishment for the Romans. It was an instrument of terror. They did it
all the time, and they did it where everyone could see a condemned man (I don’t
know that they ever crucified women) suffering horribly and then dying. Jesus
wanted only good. Who harmed him? The Powers of the world harmed him. The Powers
of the world have harmed women and men who have wanted only good innumerable
times throughout human history. They still do it today.
Now, to understand what I mean here you have to understand
what I mean by “the Powers.” I mean by that term what Walter Wink means by it
in his book The Powers That Be,[1]
and in his more scholarly books on which The Powers That Be is
based.[2]
For Wink, the Powers are both spiritual and physical. It is their nature as
spirit that makes them hard for most people today to understand. Wink says that
the Powers are “simultaneously an outer, visible structure and an inner
spiritual reality.”[3]
The closest Wink comes to a concise definition of the Powers is this: The
Powers are “the impersonal spiritual realities at the center of institutional
life.”[4]
It is not hard for us to understand human institutions. We deal with them all
the time. We all know about things like “corporate culture.” Institutions of
all sorts have a way of being and operating that can remain largely the same
though the people staffing the institution change. What for the most part we
don’t understand is that all institutions have that “impersonal spiritual reality”
of which Wink speaks. Those inner, impersonal, spiritual realities lie behind
everything that is. They, together with their outer, physical manifestations,
are the Powers.
The Powers have a reality identical in many ways with our
individual personal identities. The Powers are God’s creation just as much as
we people are. The dynamic of fall and redemption that we so often apply to
humanity is true of the Powers too. Wink says, “The Powers are good. The Powers
are fallen. The Powers must be redeemed.”[5]
He believes that not only must the Powers be redeemed, he believes that they
can be redeemed.
It is the Powers’ fallen nature that leads me to answer the
question in 1 Peter of who will harm you if you are eager to do good. The
answer is, the Powers will. Wink may be right that the Powers can and must be
redeemed. The reality with which we live, however, is that the Powers are
fallen. That means that they operate to assert and preserve the influence they
have in human life for their own benefit not for the benefit of society or the
world at large. They certainly don’t
operate for the benefit of “the least of these.” No Power acts alone. The
Powers of the world act together to create what Wink calls Domination Systems. Those
Systems function to preserve and assert the Powers in the world. They do not
preserve and assert the Powers beneficently. They will do whatever is necessary
for them to maintain and even strengthen themselves. They are, thus,
responsible for all of the violence, injustice, and poverty in the world.
That is not to absolve the people who function within the
institutions the Powers control of responsibility for the evil in the world. We
all have a moral responsibility to work for the redemption of the Powers that
Wink says can and must come. That human institutions are controlled more by
their Powers than by the individuals who run them does, however, explain how
people collectively can do things they would never do as individuals. A nation’s
military is a good example. As individuals, very, very few of us would ever
kill another human being. We might do it in self defense, but we would never do
it out of anger or hatred. When we become part of our country’s military, all
of that changes. People who would never kill on their own kill on orders from
superior officers without compulsion. Their society, which might well execute
them for killing on their own, doesn’t condemn them for doing it as soldiers.
It honors them for doing it. How is that possible? The answer: The Powers. The
spiritual reality, that is, the Power, behind a nation and its military control
what happens in the military not the conscience of individual people. And those
Powers persevere though the particular people in the military change all the
time.
So why will the Powers harm you for doing good? Because your
good is not good for them. Your good contradicts their evil and tries to blunt
or even overturn their power. The Powers maintain their grip on society by
causing people not to care about anyone but themselves. In nominally democratic
countries like ours, the Powers maintain themselves in power by inducing people
in their millions to vote against their own self interest. How else can we
explain American voters continuing to vote for Republican candidates when the
primary intent of Republican politicians is to benefit the wealthy not most of
the people who vote for them? The Powers induce people to care only about paying
lower taxes and not to care at all about what the lack of a meaningful social
safety net means for millions of their fellow human beings. The Powers convince
people to accept the absurd proposition that life begins at conception, then
convince them to vote based only a candidate’s position on abortion. Or they
convince people of the absurd assertion that more guns mean more safety and to
become one issue voters concerned only with opposing meaningful gun
regulations. The result is that the rich get their taxes slashed, environmental
regulations get repealed, the budget for the military gets increased, and
millions of people suffer without adequate medical care, education, housing, or
any of the other things we need for life. No superficial explanation can
account for this tragic reality. An explanation of the role of the Powers in
producing such results can. The Powers are fallen, and they function every day
to produce evil results in the world.
Combating the Powers is never as simple as merely replacing
individuals. An institution’s Power perseveres and maintains itself despite
changeovers in personnel. After all, the Democrats may advocate better policies
than the Republicans, but they are a long way from effecting the radical
transformation our country needs if it is ever to live up to its expressed
ideals of freedom and true equality. They too are a long way from what is
needed. They are that because of the influence of the Powers of our national
government, of our national government’s inner spirituality that functions
through the outer reality of political institutions and structures. Electing
Democrats is better than electing Republicans, but it is nowhere near what this
country really needs.
So how do we combat these and other Powers? By getting
people to see that there is a spiritual reality that is every bit as real as
material reality. By educating people in the spiritual reality of the Powers behind
everything that is and of their influence on human life. By making people aware
of the baleful consequences of their continuing to live under the Powers’
control. By convincing people that the moral thing is to care about their
neighbors, including their needy and marginalized neighbors, as much as they
care about themselves. By somehow getting people to operate from a broader view
of what is right, to transcend the view of narrow self interest from which most
people operate. By convincing people that violence is sinful regardless of the
context in which it occurs. By organizing people into mass movements aimed not
at accomplishing whatever a few Evangelical leaders concerned mostly with their
own power say must be accomplished but at making our country truly more
peaceful and just.
It isn’t easy. It will never be easy. The Powers are
powerful, and they are deeply entrenched among us. They resist meaningful
change with all of their spiritual power, a power that easily overcomes the
worldly power that is the only kind most people assert against them. Some
people, Christians and others, have been battling the fallen Powers for
millennia, but those fallen Powers are still in control. Yet we must never lose
hope that the Powers can be redeemed. Hope that they can become the influences
for good that God intends them to be. Who will harm you if you are eager for
good? The Powers will, and they will continue to do it until they are at long
last redeemed. None of us alive today will live to see that goal finally
accomplished. Our call, however, is to do what we can to continue the
nonviolent battle against fallen Powers and for their ultimate redemption. May
it be so.
[1] Wink,
Walter, The Powers That Be, Theology for a New Millennium (Galilee
Doubleday, New York, 1998).
[2]
These are primarily Wink’s extensive, scholarly three volume series, all
published by Fortress Press. They are Naming the Powers: The Language of
Power in the New Testament (1984), Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible
Powers That Determine Human Existence (1986), and Engaging the Powers:
Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (1992).
[3]
Wink, The Powers That Be, p. 24.
[4]
Wink, Engaging the Powers, p. 9.
[5]
Id., p. 10.
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