Walter Wink (1935–2012)

The Powers that Be is a digest of Wink's Trilogy on the Principalities and Powers. After years of seeing Wink's name curiously sprinkled through the footnotes of other books I've read, I finally decided to read him for myself.

His big idea is this: spiritual evil does not consist of fallen angels named demons who, as individual entities, drag things south. Instead, every entity on earth—people, churches, corporations, nations—has a spiritual identity. These principalities and powers often show more turn from their God-subjected role and need to be redeemed. This redemption happens through non-violent but often confrontational means.

His description of spiritual evil reminded me of Ellul's view in The Subversion of Christianity where evil is not a distinct entity on its own, but only has power as it aligns itself with humanity.

Wink's theory of Principalities and Powers resonates with our world quite accurately. He often fails, however, on basic exegetical grounds. For instance, in order to encourage people to stand up for themselves non-violently, he interprets the Sermon on the Mount's "turn the other cheek" passage to mean people should proudly assert their defiance to the Powers.

The most disturbing part of the book was the last chapter. In it he used the Daniel account of an angel being delayed to state that God is often powerless to intervene and that it is our job to wake him up! Here are a couple relevant passages:

"We will recognize that God, too, is hemmed in by forces that cannot simply be overruled. ... Prayer in the face of the Powers is a spiritual war of attrition. When we fail to pray, God's hands are effectively tied."

"In our prayer we are ordering God to bring the kingdom near. ... Prayer is rattling God's cage and waking God up and setting God free and giving this famished God water and this starved God food and cutting the ropes off God's hands and the manacles off God's feet and washing the caked sweat from God's eyes and then watching God swell with life and vitality and energy and following God wherever God goes."

In the last chapter in particular ("Prayer and the Powers"), Wink's deity sounds a lot more like Baal than YHWH.

This book is an easy read, and I would encourage you to give it a try if you're interested in this topic. Just make sure (as with any work) to leave your critical apparatus engaged. show less

The author's second volume in his trilogy on the Powers. Whereas Fortress Press has released Kindle editions for volumes #1 and #3, there is no such edition for the all-critical volume #2, which is odd and not a little frustrating, but hey, there's the library, so it's all good.

Having spent volume #1 (Naming the Powers) assessing the Biblical data regarding the use of terms, and drawing a few conclusions, volume #2 focuses on seven distinct types of the Powers: Satan, demons, angels of the show more churches, angels of the nations, gods, elements of the world, and angels of nature.

The trilogy reflects Wink's personal journey from an attempt to analyze what Scripture had to say about the Powers as a detached observer to the unsettling recognition that there is most likely far more going on in the spiritual realm than we can ever understand and that we have attempted to suppress in our post-Enlightenment culture. In the Epilogue he establishes the argument he has tried to make: the spiritual realm is the interiority of earthly existence (p. 172).

This concept informs the discussion throughout: as individuals have both a physical and spiritual existence, and those inter-relate and permeate in many ways, so it is with the environment and all human groupings and institutions. At times Wink seems to buy into the embodiment of such spiritualities in the forms of Satan, demons, or angels; at other times he seems to be calling a collective spirituality by such embodied names; the ambivalence is part of the project as a post-Enlightenment and yet fully modernist man of the late 20th century trying to grapple with a very pre-modern and enchanted perspective.

His exposition on Satan, the Angels of the Churches, and the Angels of the Nations come with the strongest Biblical grounding. The discussion of Satan is compelling, putting the Biblical evidence at the fore, willing to see Satan as a servant of God in many respects, an over-zealous prosecutor, and in terms of being the Evil One a chameleon, perhaps led to such because of persistent human rebellion: the embodiment of not only the potential but also the actual spiritual consequences of rebellion against God. The warning that Satan can induce to excessive strictures as much as licentiousness is sorely needed to be heard. The Angels of the Churches takes seriously the letters of Revelation 2-3; he pointed out that many of the second person statements to the churches are in the singular, as if truly addressed to the angel of the church. Such takes seriously the idea that a given congregation has its own spirituality above and beyond that of its individual constituent members, whether in reality that spirituality has an embodied form or not, and that the culture/environment of the collective needs to be taken as seriously as the spiritual lives of its individual members. The Angels of the Nations is rooted in Daniel 10, the angel of the prince of Persia hindering an angel from God visiting Daniel, and would speak to the embodied spirituality of a whole nation. In this way Wink can simultaneously affirm the transnational Kingdom of God in Christ while still advocating for God having a purpose for the "angel" of a nation, and to understand and explain how citizens of a given nation share in its spirituality and thus both its benefits and its "sins" (thus Daniel prays a penitential prayer for the nation in Daniel 9; thus Jesus divides all people by nation in Matthew 25; thus the tree of life has leaves for the healing of the nations in Revelation 22). Thus America need not be a "Christian nation" as much as a nation who fulfills the purposes God has established for it in righteousness and justice; it cannot supplant the Kingdom of God but can prove subservient to it.

His discussions of the demonic, the gods, the elements of the world, and the angels of nature do speak often of Scripture but are also more heavily influenced by Jungian psychology and apocryphal/pseudepigraphal literature. This need not mean that Wink is wrong in all such suggestions. The discussion of the demonic also involves a Girardian exploration of the Gerasene demoniac and a helpful contrast between the influence of actual spiritual forces of darkness vs. the dark side of personality traits. The idea of collective possession, a la Jung, that we cast out the idea of individual demonic possession to see whole societies get taken over by demonic forces (and not little demons infesting people as much as whole groups of people falling prey to delusions and collective psychopathologies. The premise that "collective demonism is the abdication of human answerability to God and the investment of final judgment in a divinized mortal" (p. 51) seems eerily prescient. The idea of baptism as exorcism, as a casting off of the demonic of the world to serve the true and living God, has merit. In "the gods" Wink again relies heavily on Jung ("the gods never died; they just became diseases, p. 108), and puts stronger emphasis on the Scriptures which suggest monolatry rather than monotheism, that YHWH is indeed the One True God, while other perceived divinities are actually just lesser divinities appointed by God to rule the nations, and they have often gone their own way in rebellion against Him. In this way he can make good sense of Psalm 82 and a host of other passages but at the expense of the robust monotheism of Isaiah 40-55. He would say the gods are not to be worshiped but they are to be recognized for who they are; he is able to marshal good evidence from early Christianity suggesting that Christians did not deny the existence of many of the gods but considered them as daemons. That there are spiritual forces behind the embodiments named by pagans Ishtar/Aphrodite, Ares, etc., is a much stronger, more robust idea; one could perhaps get behind them as daemons, spiritual authorities over forces, which people mistakenly served as gods; but as "the gods" it seems more difficult to accept.

The discussion of the elements of the universe, the stoicheia, does not come without Biblical rooting (cf. Colossians 2:8-9) but by necessity goes beyond it to discuss how in materialism these things which are to testify to the Creator and provide what Wink calls "theophanies," moments of the realization of God, have instead become atomized and used for the exact opposite purpose than for which they were created. The premise is taken further with the angels of nature: Wink indicts the modern scientific worldview for needlessly disassociating humanity from the cosmos, assuming that we can look at functions and processes atomistically and in isolation as opposed to understanding everything as a coherent whole in which we are inextricably connected, but has confidence based on recent discoveries in science to suggest that the pendulum must swing back (good luck with that). It is a compelling point: why do we presume that most of the material universe is "dead" and we are "alive" if YHWH, in whom we live and move and have our being, suffuses the material universe and is the Existent One? By shifting to mechanism and away from a "living universe," all "nonliving" things can be taken and used and exploited, and has led to our rampant, runaway consumerism and environmental degradation. By killing off most of the universe we have built a culture of death; the fact so many "find God" in the wilderness testifies to the strong power of the Creation (and another concern about worshiping what should instead be pointing us back to God, as Wink himself declares). It would also fit the paradigm that just as there is an oppositional spiritual force as potential/actual disobedience, spiritual forces behind the demonic, and a spirituality of any and every human collective, including nations, that there would be spirituality/spiritualities behind the forces of nature. Again, not to be worshiped, but to point back to their Creator and to praise Him as declared in the Psalms.

Wink gives the reader no end of things on which to ponder; it's a massive challenge to anyone who wants to faithfully embody Christianity while living in the shadow of the Enlightenment. Wink persuasively shows how the worldview of the first century and before was pervaded by such ideas of spiritual forces and powers; yet, in himself, as with the rest of us, there must be grappling with how much they really understood, how much was "mere superstition," and how much "we" have rejected, thanks to Enlightenment philosophy and thinking, that the ancients truly understood better than we.

Nevertheless, Wink has done a service by doing the research, putting forth the ideas, and forcing us to grapple with them. show less

The Powers are not confined to the spiritual realm argues Wink. This is a holdover from history when the ancients thought of the material and the spiritual as different realms of being. In the 21st century we must look at reality as an integral whole without separating the two. And then look critically at another ancient holdover that should also be discarded. This is what he terms the “Domination System.” It originated when Eurasians domesticated the horse. Before then, plunder was too show more much of a burden to haul back home. War didn’t pay. But with a beast of burden that changed. It led, the author states, to the “conquest state” in “Mesopotamia around 3000 B.C.E.”

"The horse and the wheel suddenly made conquest fantastically lucrative. And plunder included the seizure of desirable females as slaves, concubines, wives, and sexual toys (male captives were unreliable, and so were generally killed). The numerical excess of females depreciated the value of all females, and the system of patriarchy was either born or sharply expanded. As warfare became the central preoccupation of states, taxation became necessary in order to support a standing army, a warrior class, and an aristocracy."

This new more rigid and brutal hierarchy needed a new myth to justify the way things were. This is what Wink terms “The Myth of Redemptive Violence.” This myth, the author says, “is the real myth of the modern world. It and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today.” He then goes on to point out that X-men, Transformers, Batman, Superman, Popeye, and numerous others socialize children into this way of thinking. Wink traces the pattern back to the Babylonian Myth of Marduk. In order to subdue Tiamat, the Dragon of Chaos, Marduk demands that he , “…must be given chief and undisputed power in the assembly of gods.”

This is preceded by an ugly dysfunctional family conflict. Apsu, the father of the younger gods, and Tiamat, their mother, can’t get any sleep because of the racket their children, Marduk included, are making. Apsu plans to kill them, and when the children hear of this, they make a preemptive strike and kill Apsu instead. Tiamat is out for revenge. But Marduk kills her and from her corpse creates the universe.

"In this myth, creation is an act of violence. … Chaos (symbolized by Tiamat) is prior to order (represented by Marduk, high god of Babylon). Evil precedes good, The gods themselves are violent.

The biblical myth in Genesis 1 is diametrically opposed to all this. (Genesis 1, it should be noted, was developed in Babylon during the Jewish captivity there as a direct rebuttal to the Babylonian myth.) The Bible portrays a good God who creates a good creation, Chaos does not resist order. Good is prior to evil. Neither evil nor violence is a part of the creation, but enter later, as a result of the first couple’s sin and the connivance of the serpent (Gen. 3). A basically good reality is thus corrupted by free decisions reached by creature. In this far more complex and subtle explanation of the origin of things, violence emerges for the first time as a problem requiring a solution."

The rest of the book, and a critique of the national security state, nationalism, and any other current isms that depend on the myth of redemptive violence stats with chapter 3: “Jesus’ Answer to Domination,” which is nonviolent individual and collective action. Wink confesses his initial hesitation to embrace nonviolence, until he could see the wisdom of Jesus’s practice, and return to the basic message of the gospels that the church held before it became the official religion of the Roman Empire. It is, he argues, the only way to repair the ills of the world that works in the long run. It will, however, take conviction, action, and the potential of self-sacrifice. It will also produce results. If the reader still doubts the effectiveness of nonviolence, he concludes the book with historical examples of where it worked. show less

I picked up this slim volume at a used bookstore in B'ham only to discover the book in its entirety is available for free online at religion-online.org. Here is the link: http://www.religion-online.org/showbook.asp?title=652

I have appreciated Wink's critique of the institution and powers over the years and since I have an interest in hermeneutics and what the Bible means I happily scooped this up to see what Wink would contribute to this discussion. Bearing in mind that this book is almost show more 40 years old, I expected it to be someone dated and not up to speed on the various directions the discussion has gone. This is true, but in a lot of ways Wink was a shaper of the dialogue.

Wink begins this book with an assertion that the Historical Critical Method is bankrupt. By this he doesn't mean that is of no value, but he proposes new management, allowing it to serve a different end. he sees as problematic the fact that Biblical criticism ignored the intention of texts,retreated to the false consciousness of objectivism, only asks questions which its discipline (and disciples) can answer, has been cut off from the wider community, and harkens back to polemical context which no longer exists.

On each of these points, Wink's critique seems to be incisive, though he does seems to speak of "biblical criticism" in absolute terms which goes beyond warrant with particular practitioners (a face he will circle back to in conclusion when he addresses the academic guild as 'a power' that scholars have to oppose).

Wink proposes an alternative paradigm, which owes something to Ricouer's naivety, suspicion, second-naivety. Wink's schema is as follows:

1. Fusion
N(1) negation of the fusion through suspicion of the object
2. Distance
N(2) Negation of the negation through suspicion of the subject
3. Communion (p.19-20)


Phase 1 involves moving beyond the unity of western culture and traditions and the Bible to the objectification of the text. It is here that Biblical criticism does its work of getting us behind creedal statements and dogma, so that we can examine the text dispassionately and discover what it really meant.

Phase 2 involves applying our critical lens to ourselves where we confront 'our own emotional predisposition not to be unsettled, our easy acquiescence to contemporary questions, languages and perspectives.(34)"

Phase 3 involves bringing these two phases into critical dialectic to discover what the biblical world in its particularity has to say to our human condition. The end result which Wink envisions is a sort of post-critical reading of scripture which transforms individuals and their communities.

In order to accomplish this Wink draws on the insights of psychotherapy and a sociological and ideological lens to help us identify the places in which the Bible confronts us and our world.

What I appreciated most about this book was Wink's critique of where Biblical criticism has brought us. As mentioned above, he does cast this critique in absolute terms. This means his claims are exaggerated in some quarters, but he names issues that every Biblical scholar of faith must wrestle with.

In his positive program, he correctly addresses the two horizons of interpretation: text and reader (here given the names of object and subject, respectively). Where I am uneasy with Wink's program is that he seems to critique the tradition, more than his own starting point. Wink is a theologically liberal New Testament scholar who taught at Union. He expects human transformation in the text. He does not necessarily expect to encounter God. Traditional beliefs about God are redefined in physchological and sociological terms (Wink buys in to Bultmann's demythologizing program after all). In one fascinating account of a group bible study session, the Holy Spirit is redefined as 'life-transformative process' (59).

This antithesis to the tradition and traditional theology is exasperated by the fact that Wink fails to recapture a theology of church. It is true that he wants to bring his training in Biblical criticism back into the service of the church, but he doesn't advocate reading the Bible by the rule of faith. He wants to get behind doctrinal and creedal statements and not impose them on the Biblical account. In a sense, this is a guild concern. Biblical studies exists to study the Bible not theologize, but the theological tradition does frame our understanding of texts and shouldn't be so easily cast aside.

Still Wink is insightful about how the Biblical text can challenge individuals, social and political institutions. I would be pleased if more Biblical scholars of whatever theological bent were as committed to listening to the personal and structural implications when we allow ourselves to be encountered by the Biblical text. show less