Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination

Walter Wink engages the powers with brilliant exegesis and a profoundly creative nonviolence, revealing the way to the powers' and our own transformation. This book will be an inspiration to many people, and particularly helpful to those who have come into nonviolence intuitively or through a painful experience.

The conclusion to the trilogy on the powers featuring an exploration of the Domination System.

Wink's central thesis features the existence and perpetuation of the Domination System: he sees the kosmos of this world as the Domination System, the Powers over this age and the people whom they empower who themselves justify their behavior according to the myth of redemptive violence (a phrase Wink coined, apparently). Wink uses Enuma Elish as the archetype, demonstrating how so many stories of redemptive violence are essentially retelling the Marduk vs. Tiamat narrative and all that requires.

Against the Domination System would be nonviolent resistance; Wink spends much time discussing what nonviolent resistance would look like, using many show more contemporary examples, and exegeting Jesus' actions and exhortations in terms of turning the other cheek, etc., displaying how Jesus would have His people resist the Domination System yet not as passive non-resisters, exposing the injustice and fraud in the system in creative ways.

The author speaks highly of the value of prayer as a means of resisting the Domination System. The concluding chapter focusing on the "positive attitude" of the New Testament, based on Jesus' victory over the Powers, proves essential and encouraging.

There is much with which to grapple. Wink certainly seems to be onto something with the theme of the myth of redemptive violence and its ultimate failings; while it is an interpretive translation, it's possible to get behind "kosmos" as referring to the present world system in something akin to Wink's use of the Domination System. His handling of nonviolent resistance has much to commend it; his handling of the passages regarding Jesus and nonviolence proves strong.

Unfortunately, the author doesn't let Biblical data or evidence get in the way of a good theory; he has no qualms considering the Apostles and early Christians as having departed from Jesus' intentions in terms of gender relations and similar such things, all to keep consistency in his particular views of what constitutes the Domination System. There's not nearly as much discussion about the Powers here; it's mostly about the Domination System and nonviolent resistance in a very late Cold War context.

Nevertheless, worth considering in terms of the principalities and powers. show less

awesome!

Discernment, Resistance, Quaker Activism, 1990s

from Jim Mead