Amazon.com Review
"Perhaps we are not accustomed to thinking of the Pentagon, or the Chrysler Corporation, or the Mafia as having a spirituality, but they do," writes Walter Wink. In
The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium, Wink returns to the ancient view of a world filled with angels and demons, powers and principalities, and reinterprets these notions for contemporary people. Wink's book is a challenge for Christians to wake up and become dangerously different, by objecting to the Darwinian games of domination that prevail in many of our governments, corporations, and churches. The book also offers stunningly gracious comfort, by showing that we are all caught up in this game, that the game is even a part of our gift, and that as long as we live in the world, not a single one of us can be pure, but we're called, all of us, to be holy.
--Michael Joseph Gross
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Inside Flap
In our fast-paced secular world, God and theologyare second-class citizens. Money, politics, sports, and science seem better suited to thehard realities of our world. As the church steeple has been eclipsed by the skyscraper as the centerpiece of the urban landscape, so has the divine realm been set aside in favor of more immediate human experience. One sad consequence of this shift is the loss of spiritual and theological bearings, most clearly evident in our inability to understand or speak about such things. If the old way of viewing the universe no longer works, something else has to replace it.
The Powers That Be reclaims the divine realm as central to human existence by offering new ways of understanding our world in theological terms. Walter Wink reformulates ancient concepts, such as God and the devil, heaven and hell, angels and demons, principalities and powers, in light of our modern experience. He helps us see heaven and hell, sin and salvation, and the powers that shape our lives as tangible parts of our day-to-day experience, rather than as mysterious phantoms. Based on his reading of the Bible and analysis of the world around him, Wink creates a whole new language for talking about and to God. Equipped with this fresh world view, we can embark on a new relationship with God and our world into the next millennium.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.