Glenn Myers's Reviews > The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium

This is a fascinating book, even when you disagree with it, and even when it seems a little dated, and its examples, good and bad, seem either rendered small by distance (Iran-Contra seems less of a thing after an actual US president is convicted of sexual assault, impeached twice, and accused of trying to fix an election); or tarnished by time (when peace-loving opposition leaders gain power, it can be disappointing).

Nevertheless. Wink's unfashionable exploration of 'Principalities and Powers' leads him to see a spiritual element to every institution. He sees these elements as created, fallen, capable of redemption, and destined to become complete and fulfilled at the eschaton. He doesn't successfully relate these unearthly 'Powers' to the earthly demons that Jesus seemingly encountered in his ministry and never seeked to redeem. So between earthly and irredeemable 'demons' and unearthly and redeemable 'powers' there's a gap that, like the gap between relativity and quantum theory, may mean successful partial descriptions but no overall coherent system of thought.

His strategy for us to oppose and even disarm 'The Powers that Be' is non-violence; this being the opposite of the violence-backed domination system by which the Powers control humans. His reading of Jesus as a kind of apostle of non-violence and of bottom-up submission and subversion is striking and powerful. It seems to offer a route to real change in a society, rather than a change from one lawless autocrat to another. This is fine stuff. I loved his quote from Gandhi that the aim of non-violence was not mere victory but a redemptive relationship with the victimizer. (That isn't quite the way Gandhi said it but it will do.)

Then, one hesitates to criticize a former theology professor, but I thought his reading of Paul could be improved on. I read Wink as looking down on Paul from his twentieth-century eyrie and chucking out the bits (quite a lot of really central bits) that he didn't like. Surely we can do better than this. Paul lived in the tension between between the astonishing liberty of the gospel (neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, that stuff) and the willingness of love to suffer and put up with stuff. Paul wanted the gospel to be the foundation of society, respectable, not some loopy Greek mystery religion, so its radicalness and its love of decency and order coexisted in his head and in his practice.

This was better than any number of theology books that tell you mostly what you already know. It set me a-buzzing. It shows how we might change the world. Highly recommended.