A reflection on human sin and brokenness is always the first stage in any missional presentation of the Christian faith. Read C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity or N.T. Wright Simply Christian, for example.
This is because most of us, I suspect, come to the Christian faith driven by a sense of spiritual need. Would-be evangelists, then, should give careful consideration to what they will say about ‘sin’ in its contemporary manifestations. In the words of Chris Wright, author of Mission of God: ‘If our mission is bringing good news into every area of human life, then it calls for some research and analysis as to what exactly constitutes the bad news’.
Some convincing ‘research and analysis’ (by Chris Wright and others) has rediscovered an understanding of ‘sin’ as idolatry. This strikes me as a very promising development, and one well supported by the biblical evidence. But, for our evangelist, it poses as a matter of great immediate practical concern, the question: What is the prevailing form of idolatry in the world of today?
As Wright himself admits, any response to this question calls for combined biblical and sociological tools, since it involves ‘applying a distinctive biblical category (idolatry) to contemporary cultural phenomena, enabling us to see below the surface and recognize idolatrous or demonic forces at work.’
My own response has involved broaching a famous study which, more than any other, might be considered the obvious first port of call for this enquiry: Walter Wink’s 1984 volume, Unmasking the Powers.
It was only on a second or third reading of the book, and very much against my own initial expectation, that I reluctantly came to the conclusion that idolatry did not, after all, constitute the primary focus of Unmasking the Powers. However, the process of thinking through what Wink’s concept of ‘the ‘powers’ had to do with idolatry considerably developed my own thinking on idolatry in ways that I wish to communicate in this blog.
I shall begin, then, by considering how Wink’s ‘powers’ relate to idolatry, and what that relationship tells us about the author’s own understanding of idolatry. I shall then go on to explore what I now see as the limitations of that understanding, and crucial aspects of idolatry that it seems to me to leave entirely out of account.
What are these ‘powers’?
The spiritual entities to which the New Testament refers variously as powers, principalities, dominions, rulers, thrones, elements of the universe, etc. have a morally ambivalent character. Like the ‘nations’ of the Hebrew Scriptures, they are often, in their present-day actuality, described as ranged against God’s Kingdom and His Messiah. On the other hand, as entities destined one day to ultimate subjection to the Divine purpose, they can be viewed under the aspect of their future positive conversion. The biblical and patristic writers give differing weight to these aspects of past and present, negative and positive. But there is a fundamental ambivalence about their character that prevents any conclusive characterization of the powers as inherently evil.
Wink very much dwells on the positive aspect. For him – as for the early Christian thinker, Origen – the powers constitute a potentially angelic spiritual interiority inhering in a whole range of things that we moderns construe mistakenly in purely materialist terms: social institutions; political institutions; universal symbols; natural types; even the building blocks of created world. Even Satan sometimes represents a positive aspect of the Divine will – as the accuser and, as it were, God’s ‘counsel for the prosecution’. None of the powers, then, are inherently idolatrous – and when they become so it is because we have given them that character. As Wink controversially puts it: ‘We made Satan evil. Only we can restore him to his rightful role at God’s left hand’.
So, where does idolatry come in?
This is not something Wink explains in so many words. But the following draws out the implications of his analysis of the powers for the understanding of idolatry. I am not necessarily replicating Wink’s own thinking, but I don’t believe he would seriously disagree with I am about to say.
How these ‘powers’ relate to idolatry
The continuance of the powers in their angelic aspect depends on us. They are, in the proper order of things, ‘intermediate’ powers – that is to say intermediate between God Himself and human individuals. So, an appropriate attitude towards them on our part requires their subordination to a supreme spiritual being. As Wink would put it, we have to see the ‘God beyond the gods’ – or else the ‘gods’ will take on a ‘demonic’ aspect.
To illustrate this necessary subordination Wink uses the biblical story of Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness. Satan, it will be remembered, prompts Jesus to manufacture bread miraculously out of the stones of the desert, and promises to make him Lord of all the kingdoms of the earth. Wink rightly points out that the possibilities that Jesus rejects are all related to promises associated by Scripture with Messiahship. Satan functions here as a representative of traditional, and not inherently invalid, concepts of the messianic vocation – of goods that will one day all be realized, but from which Jesus, at this point, must distance himself so as not to relinquish that supreme good that can only be grasped through undistracted attention to the word of God speaking through Scripture into his present situation.
Now in engaging Jesus in this way, Satan, according to Wink, has the important divine role of bringing into Jesus’s consciousness (and our own) that distinctively ‘creative’ and ‘novel’ possibility in relation to which safer and conventional possibilities must be subordinated. ‘It is this “satanic”-seeming aspect of the divine call that paralyzes our moral nerve when the question is raised about our joining a picket line outside a nuclear weapons plant, or going to jail for our beliefs. For how can we be certain that the voice we call “God” is not rationalized rebelliousness, or an unredeemed power complex, or an egoistic passion for publicity?’
The perspective which Wink opens for us in the words I have just cited – that doing God’s will potentially involves ‘creative novelty’ – at once raises the unsettling possibility of ‘Satan as God’ and ‘God as Satan’. If there can be a “satanic”-seeming aspect of the divine call, there must also be a “messianic”-seeming aspect of Satanic temptation. After all, the voice we call ‘God’ may indeed be our ‘unredeemed power complex’. But there needs to be a conscious process of discrimination – of discernment of spirits – the kind of thing attested in the story of the temptation of Christ. Out of this process, hopefully, will emerge a fuller awareness of the Good beyond goods, and the God beyond the gods. That is, for Wink, our safeguard against the idolatrous confusion of the two, as a result of which some subordinate good is raised to the rank of an ultimate one – a rank it should never have.
Now it is in regard to this process of discernment that our contemporary world has put itself at a disadvantage. Our habitual materialism, partly arising out of purist, anti-gnostic currents in Christianity itself, has sought entirely to evacuate the intermediate powers from our worldview. It refuses to acknowledge the dimension of spiritual interiority that inheres in social, political, religious, and even natural entities. However, outright elimination of these powers is impossible. Why? Because an entirely materialist ‘worldview’ would be defective to the point of leaving us utterly helpless in the face of the moral choices with which life confronts us on a daily basis. So, we don’t eliminate them exactly; we ‘repress’ them. Wink, who is much influenced by psychological discourses, uses this term in the contemporary psychological sense. In reality, the powers are excluded from our consciousness, and return at a collective sub-conscious level. This has various consequences, of which the most obvious is to exclude any possibility of the kind of discernment of spirits we humans need in order to see our way to the ultimate God beyond the gods. In other words, materialism lays us open to that disordered apprehension of goods and gods, as a result of which they become demonized.
So, we can begin to see the relationship of the ‘powers’ to idolatry. The powers are not inherently idolatrous, but through the contemporary incapacity for discrimination brought about by their repression, our lives are condemned to idolatries as numerous and as varied in character as the powers themselves. The source of such idolatries is ultimately materialism. And, perhaps, for Wink, materialism is itself the ultimate idolatry. (Though, as I shall shortly argue, this is not a tenable view). While, for outright materialists, the powers are consciously excluded, for Christians who unwittingly make common cause with this materialism, they are relegated, along with Satan, to a simple expression of cosmic evil. The result? ‘Moralistic tirades of fundamentalist preachers terrifying the credulous with pictures of Satan lurking in the shadows…., while all the time ignoring the mark of the cloven hoof in economic or political arrangements that suck the life out of whole generations of people.’
What are the limitations of this understanding of idolatry?
The problem with Wink’s approach to idolatry, like that of the Bible and most theologians, is the failure to take sufficiently seriously the possibility of competing religious worldviews. Theologians don’t by and large see the idolatrous cults of the OT as rival religious systems possessed of their own ways of attributing meaning and binding community. So, when it comes to the contemporary world, they are no more inclined than their ‘non-religious’ interlocutors to grant the status of an alternative worldview to any contemporary challenge to the Christian faith.
This is understandable enough – because, by admitting the possibility of competing worldviews, both sides would render more complex the task of deciding between them. It is much more intellectually straightforward to make claims on the basis of some criterion of objective ‘truth’ than to explore the value of alternative systems in terms of their capacity to make sense of human experience and further the ultimate human good. So, on the Christian side, the theologians seem reluctant to entertain the possibility that the dominant ‘secular’ worldview they are opposing might be a metaphysically grounded ‘religion’ in its own right. Instead, the case against the secularist position is generally made in terms of its epistemological inadequacy and its lack of metaphysical grounding – in other words, as though it were a defective (Christian?) worldview somehow incapable of supporting the moral practice built upon it. The ‘secularists’, on their side, are happy to go along with the idea of themselves as ‘non-religious’, so placing on their Christian interlocutors the burden of justifying the whole notion of ‘religion’. The very term ‘secularism’ presupposes this way of setting up the argument.
Wink’s characterization of contemporary culture as ‘materialist’ suffers from all the same weaknesses, and I remain unconvinced by his claim that a contemporary ‘materialist’ culture has somehow ‘repressed’ spiritual interiority because it lacks the means to bring it into consciousness. The claim of modern culture to be materialist is, in my view, as questionable as that of non-Christians to be ‘without religion’. True, people rarely adopt Wink’s (and the Bible’s) terminology of ‘powers and principalities’. But I would suggest modern culture has found other ‘names’ for its spiritual interiorities. To remind ourselves what these ‘names’ are, we have only to return to the passages of Wink’s text where they are mentioned in explanation of whatever power it is Wink is describing.
For example, Wink explains his ‘angels of the nations’ as spiritual entities corresponding to contemporary notions of ‘nation’, ‘culture’, ‘identity’, or ‘community’. But, for me, this raises the question whether the contemporary notions of ‘culture’ etc. are really any more ‘materialist’ than Wink’s notion of ‘angels of the nations’. There can be little doubt that neither of these practices of naming are properly consistent with thorough-going materialism. Both evoke cultural constructs rather than objective, ‘scientific’ realities. Does the identification of human institutions with ‘angels’ really recognize their spiritual interiority in the way that the conventional modern names do not? Or are the angels just decorative attributes, like the allegorical images of young females representing the virtues on the pediments of our public buildings?
The same applies to the powers. Take the ‘gods’, for example. These, says Wink, can be Jungian archetypes, psychological entities like Eros or Thanatos. To these we could no doubt add the whole gamut of concepts like ‘subconcious’, ‘superego’ – even ‘self’. Whatever such entities may be, they are clearly not the kind of entities any thorough-going materialism would recognize – despite the pseudo-scientific nature of the terminology. So, here again. one asks what a gallery of anthropomorphized deities contributes to ideas that are already sufficiently non-materialist – if not downright mystical! After all, ask yourself what could be less amenable to objective analysis, more purely ideological, than the notion of ‘self’. Even those ‘angels of nature’ and elements of the universe’ contribute little to the reverence in which the ‘diversity’ of natural and human phenomena is treasured and revered by a culture apparently eager to enshrine the whole phenomenal world in its museums, its commitment to art and conservation.
Supposing, then, we substitute ‘cultures’ for ‘angels’, ‘archetypes’ for ‘gods’, and the preciousness of phenomena for angels of nature. What does modern culture lose through these substitutions? Not, I would suggest, the spiritual interiority of the things it cherishes. Notions like ‘identity’, ‘repression’, ‘diversity’ are scarcely less mystical than Wink’s ‘principalities and powers’. But something is nevertheless lost, I suggest. Not, of course, ‘spiritual interiority’ itself or the capacity to name it. Rather the possibility of ordering these phenomena in relation to a transcendent supreme Being. The positive contribution of the terminology of ‘powers and principalities’ is to bring the phenomena of spiritual interiority – gods, angels, powers, etc. – into a single totalizing – and meaning-giving – whole; namely, that of Christianity.
But does not each and every religion attempt to construct its own totalizing system in much the same way? Ethnographies by social anthropologists today demonstrate that this is indeed so. In each religion, the named spiritual entities and their inter-relationships, will differ, because such entities are not objective realities in the world beyond culture, but cosmological projections of social and cultural realities as experienced by specific community of belief. So, while it may be the case that the worldview of Judaeo-Christian monotheism is divinely sanctioned in a special way (and I personally believe this to be so), this is not because it enjoys a unique correspondence to some supposed trans-cultural truth of the world. Every religion, including Christianity, will have its own ‘principalities and powers’. What constitutes it as religion is the way it brings them into a totalizing structure – its systematizing character. And that is its real importance.
So, when we attempt to characterize the idolatrous challenge in the contemporary context, what we need first to be looking for is a totalizing system of this nature – a rival system to Christianity capable of re-forming and re-ordering our spiritual interiorities in order to give them an alternative – non-Christian – meaning. ‘Materialism’ is evidently not that alternative totalizing system. And there is little reason to believe that our idolatrous impulses are simply the ‘return’ of repressed spiritual interiorities, which are presumably, on Wink’s analysis, repressed Christian spiritual interiorities. Much more plausible is the idea that such ‘idolatrous’ impulses correspond to spiritual priorities of an alternative religious system – and are only ‘idolatrous’ from a Christian perspective.
At all events, this is a possibility that needs to be taken seriously into consideration by any research and analysis of contemporary idolatrous practices.
PART TWO: CAN WALTER WINK HELP US ‘UNMASK THE POWERS’?