JESUS HAS THE first word in Shaking the Gates of Hell: his warning against serving Mammon as master. We are on notice that this book on analyzing and resisting the assaults of global economy will do so by way of biblical spirituality. To put it more precisely, Sharon Delgado’s critique will rest on a foundational theology of the principalities and powers.
The book begins in a jail cell, where she was in lock-up following arrest in 1999 as part of the massive demonstrations known as the Battle in Seattle, which effectively shut down meetings of the World Trade Organization. Shake those gates. Rooted in action, prayers in such places can seed entire volumes. Also to say: This book is punctuated with personal stories, pastoral and political.
That Fortress Press has seen fit to publish this updated edition is testimony to its staying power as a substantive primer. There are new sections on “algobot” market investing, racial profiling, mass incarceration, and the path to permanent war. Climate predictions that seemed dire in the first edition already need to be updated, as timelines shorten and catastrophic realities set in.
Structurally, the first third of the book focuses on “the undoing of creation” (a phrase of William Stringfellow’s defining “the fall”). Much of that is devoted to the wounds of Earth, and then to human wounds by toxification, technology, impoverishment, and violence.
The middle third, equally rigorous, illuminates the structures of power that collude in the domination systems of empire, in finance capitalism, and neoliberal ideology. It is here that the theological work of Stringfellow and Walter Wink on the principalities and the powers-that-be proves so practical. The corporations, the military machinery, the unholy trinity of the WTO, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank are all, with biblical precision, exposed in their demonic spirituality, their fallen self-interest, which not only fails to serve creation and human life, but openly assaults them. Fallen, indeed.
Stringfellow once named the state as pre-eminent among the hierarchy of principalities. However, almost immediately he began to wonder aloud if the commercial principalities in their global aggressions had not in fact superseded the state as prevailing powers, usurping it in decision-making.
If the global powers have a spiritual dimension, then spiritual tactics must be in the mix for resistance and transformation. Here, a return to the life of Jesus, an extended account of his struggle to live humanly, subverting the domination system, serves well. Among recent examples like Occupy, Standing Rock, the Poor Peoples Campaign, and New Sanctuary, one wishes for a look at the Sunrise Movement or Extinction Rebellion, but direct action is urgently pressed, as are the politics of policy, prayer, and preaching.
All in all, the book presents truth to the powers, and to the people of the Spirit.
Bill Wylie-Kellermann is a retired Methodist pastor, nonviolent community activist, teacher, and author. His next book is forthcoming this summer: Celebrant’s Flame: Daniel Berrigan in Memory and Reflection (Cascade, 2021).
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