Customer Reviews

Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament (The Powers : Volume One)

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When I started this book I was disappointed, but I wasn't when I finished. The first section is a series of word studies on Greek words associated with the powers. The second section consists of expositions of troublesome passages dealing with spiritual powers. I found these sections useful, but rather dry. The third section was a surprise, which caused me to think more highly of the book. Wink takes the language of power in the New Testament and casts it in contemporary language. Now power is not seen as something that is out there in the heavens. It is not something that is primarily refering to disembodied ghouls that ought to give Christians nightmares. Instead, it is found in the material reality of bodies interacting in complex systems that can influence and control others. Wink sees that the language of the New Testament is profoundly true, yet at the same time myth. It is myth that represents an all too real situation. The great value I have found in the book is that it gives us a way to speak about power that makes it more than simply the sum of our social systems, yet is not "spiritual" in a way that gives postmodern thinkers fits. Wink makes it clear that evil is real and even gives some ways to confront it in our world.

This book lists the various words that are used for power in the New Testament and evokes their meaning in the wide variety of contexts in which they are used. It really makes the language of the New Testament come alive. Throughout the book, Wink's warmth and humanity shine through. Speaking of conflict, he says 'I resolved never to embark on a conflict which would not end in my sitting down to a meal with my adversary.' Inspirational - strongly recommended.

This is one of the three best books on understanding Angels, Satan, and Demons. The other two best books on the subject are the other two books in "The Powers Trilogy" by Walter Wink. Read them all.

And then read them again.

If Wink is right, then pretty much everything we think we know about Satan, angels, and demons is completely wrong, everything we think we know about spiritual warfare is wrong, everything we think we know about the separation of church and state is wrong, and everything we think we know about sin and temptation is wrong.

I am going to do a three-part review, one for each book in the Trilogy. This review is on the first volume in the series: Naming the Powers.

Of the three books, this one is both the hardest to read and the most important. It is hard to read because it contains a lot of the Scriptural backgrounds and exegetical research for what is written about in the other two books. Some readers might find such content dry and difficult to wade through. However, since it deals with some of the primary Scriptures about Satan, angels, and demons, this book is the foundation for the other two. If you do not read this book, you may not understand where Wink is coming from in the other two.

So the book is hard to read, but is necessary if you fully want to grasp the argument that Wink makes.

And what is that argument? It is this: The Powers, which are referred to in many different ways throughout the Scriptures, are the spirituality of institutions, the "within" of corporate structures and systems, the inner essence of outer organizations of power (p. 5, 107).

Eh...What?

Exactly.

The idea requires much unpacking and explanation, but once understood, I think his definition fits quite well with our experience in life and with what we read in Scripture.

The bottom line is that every organization and institution--whether political, economic, or religious, from large corporations and entire nations to small country churches and individual households--have a "tenor" or a "way of doing things" that define, characterize, guide, and even justify the actions and attitudes of that particular structure. This spiritual dimension of a physical entity is "The Power" of that organization.

We cannot encounter these "spirits" apart from the physical entities in which they exist.

Think of it as the "mob spirit" or the "team spirit" or the "corporate spirit." All three of these organizations have very different "spirits," but none of them can be experienced apart from the group in which they exist.

This is not to say that these spirits do not exist. They do. They are very real. More real, in fact, than the disembodied, invisible, and undetectable spirits of much modern theology. To the contrary, these spirits are so real, they are incarnated within the organizations and institutions of everyday life. "The satanic is not an abstract force distributed equally throughout the cosmos like a gas. It is the concentrated inner spirituality of idolatrous human structures. And it is as real as they are" (p. 139).

There is great danger in this for the church. While we pride ourselves in being guided and controlled by the Holy Spirit, it may be another spirit which provides greater direction and control. Too often, in order to fight against the power-hungry and destructive spirit of oppression that governs many nations and corporations, the church has adopted the very same ideologies and methods that are used by the organization we fight against. When this occurs, whether we win or lose in the power struggle that follows, the end result is that we become just as evil as that which we fought against (p. 130). We have seen this time and time again in history. The victors become the oppressors, even when the victors are Christians.

So what is the way forward? How can we struggle against the principalities and powers without adopting their methods and goals? Well, that is the subject of the next two books in the series.

It lays the foundations for the series. This it does well. It could be observed that the book is overly technical, and if it were the whole enchilada that would be so. I makes you want to read the rest of the series, and that is what a volume one should do. For a digested version of this series "The Powers That Be" by this author is a great book. For an in depth treatment, the trilogy is excellent. I would suggest both.

Wink writes from a perspective that takes what would almost have to be considered a liberal approach to the gospel. Although there are defintely moments when his scholarship and spirit shines, it must be kept in mind that he is writing from a world view that sometimes implies that the disciples may have misunderstood Jesus's message. His view of the Powers as mere spirits of organizations and his denial of their independent conscious existence is not convincing. Liberal Christians who do not consider the Bible the literal word of God will have a much easier time dealing with this Carl Jung inspired rendition of Christianity than those with more fundamental leanings.

Walter Wink is an author whose name I first came across in N. T. Wright's magnum opus on the New Testament, and whom I finally decided to read after I saw him quoted in a few of Stephen R. L Clark's books (two Protestant sources, that'll teach me.) The idea of a multi-volume work devoted to an understanding of the mysterious language of the powers in the New Testament sounded very appealing, and I decided to give the author a chance, however suspicious of him I might have been in the first place.

Much of the volume is a rather meticulous exegesis of the passages of the New Testament that refer to powers and principalities, and I did find some of it useful, because it uses a very exhaustive database which shows that Paul is far from being the only author to use such terms. Unfortunately, for the Catholic reader, the constant use of non-canonical sources (such as the Gospel of Thomas and other Gnostic works) makes it very difficult to get a clear picture of what the actually inspired sources say.

But Wink's exegesis is not what I found the most debatable about this book. What I find most worrying is that nobody seems to be bothered by the fact that Wink poses as a Christian exegete while actually expounding pure, undiluted Marxist doctrine. Indeed, his book looks like a test to determine how thin the sheep's clothings need be and still fool the sheep.

To put it simply, Wink interprets the scriptural (and non-scriptural) language of the powers as having two dimensions : it can be both concrete, referring to actual forces in this world (like governments and corporations), and abstract, referring to what he calls the spirituality of these powers, but seems to boil down to their ideology.

Nobody seems to have noticed that Wink is using here a variant of the Marxist concepts of superstructure and infrastructure, and though in some places he claims to have an enlightened, monistic understanding of those two dimensions (based on spurious new-physics notions, p107), he often betrays his true materialistic reductionism, as when he says (p134) that "the actual spiritual quality [is] exuded as it were from the value systems and power relations in the existing state." In other words, as in Marxism, reality is basically a clash of material forces, and spirituality so-called just an outgrowth of those forces.

Wink's Marxism is further demonstrated in his repeated attacks on capitalism as an economic system which holds people in subjection (p125) ; his attribution of the evils of Russian Communism to habits inherited from Tsarism (p117), while a "true humanism" lies at the based of Communistic ideology (p116) ; and more especially his description of his own current effort as an attempt to "synthesize the valid elements" of both "classical" Christianity and Marxism (though given the predominance of matter in his ontology, it is easy to see which element of the mixture will have the upper hand.)

That Wink is a pantheist he admits himself, though he does so under the cover of "process theism." Here is the full text of his confession : "If there is no spirit without its concretion ... then classical theism is wholly inadequate as a metaphysics, for God could not be conceived of as existing apart from God's concretion in the physical universe. God, on this view, would be something akin to the Soul of the universe, and conversely the universe could be spoken of as the body of God." (p124) That so-called "God", by the way, seems to be primarily interested in "maximizing the total situation" in which his creatures exist (p119), whatever that means.

And of course, if God Himself is thrown out of the system (Wink's pantheism being just a thinly veiled atheism), the soul cannot be expected to survive as an eternal, spiritual entity. Indeed, as he claims, "Today almost everyone (sic) agrees that ... the soul or self is the active awareness of the entire living body itself."

"Naming the Powers" appears to me to be just another attempt to dechristianize the Christians and turn them into full-fledged, this-wordly Marxists with just a smattering of Biblical (and pseudo-Biblical) references, as filtered though such deviants as Teilhard de Chardin or Elaine Pagels. I cannot see how reading it can do anyone much good, unless the reader is further left than Wink himself (which should be rare outside of North Korea, Cuba or France.)