P = o + i. Remember that simple formula and you can avoid the confusion of centuries about the principalities and powers, and, just possibly, perceive the deeper meaning of the coming election. The powers (P) are not spiritual spooks inhabiting the air and leaping on the unwary. That was an earlier way of putting it. Nor are they merely institutions, political or economic systems, ideologies, or social structures. That has been the modern way of coming at it. Neither is adequate, though both contain some truth.
The powers consist, it turns out, of an outer manifestation (o) and an inner spirituality (i). Every material or tangible manifestation of power has its inner or spiritual aspect, whether it be the spirit of a team, the morale of a business office, the "corporate culture" of a transnational corporation, or the ethos of a nation.
When Ephesians 6:12 asserts that we are not contending against flesh and blood, that is, the mere human agents put forward by the powers as their visible representatives, "but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places," it cannot mean by "heavenly places" the sky. Elsewhere the writer indicates that we have already been made to sit with God "in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus" (Ephesians 2:6).
The "heavenlies" are not, then, a physical location but a spiritual dimension of present reality, in which we already share the suffering and victory of Christ. This spiritual dimension is not a place of peace, either; it is the locale of the spiritual forces that attempt to suck the life out of the world, like a moral black hole in the universe.
Nor are the "spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places" simply spiritual beings, for they are only made manifest in the world through those political parties or demagogues or illegal drug networks or soldiers of fortune who yield themselves to idolatry. When these place themselves and their own ends above God's purpose for the good of the whole, a power becomes demonic. The church's task is to unmask this idolatry and recall the powers to their created purposes in the world—"so that the Sovereignties and Powers should learn only now, through the Church, how comprehensive God's wisdom really is" (Ephesians 3:10).
The spiritual powers referred to in Scripture are not, then, separate heavenly or ethereal entities floating in space, but the inner aspect of material or tangible manifestations of power. A "mob spirit" does not hover in the sky waiting to leap down on unruly crowds at a soccer match. It is the actual spirit constellated when the crowd reaches a certain critical flashpoint of excitement and frustration. It comes into existence in that moment, causing people to act in ways of which they would never have dreamed themselves capable, and then ceases to exist the moment the crowd disperses.
Or take a high school football team. Its team spirit is high during the season, and then cools at the season's close, although it continues to persist to a degree in history (memories) and hope (the coming season).
The spirit of a nation endures beyond its actual rule, in the lasting effects of its policies, its contributions to culture, its additions to the sheer weight of human suffering. And the spirits of things that just last and last, like rocks and trees, appear to be eternal, but they too are inseparable from their material or physical concretions.
These "spiritual" realities have no existence independent of their material counterparts. None persists through time without embodiment in cellulose or a culture or a regime or a corporation or a megalomaniac. An ideology does not just float in the air; it is always the web of legitimations and rationales for some actual entity, be it union or management, a social change group or the structure it hopes to change.
As the inner aspect of material reality, the spiritual powers are everywhere around us. Their presence is real and inescapable. The issue is not whether we believe in them but whether we can learn to identify our actual, everyday encounters with them—what Paul called "discerning the spirits."
This is altogether different from Oscar Cullman's assertion that both spiritual and earthly powers exist, such as demons, on the one hand, and the state on the other. The demonic does not come upon a state, like a seizure. It is the actual inner essence or spirituality of the state itself, when the state has exalted itself to absoluteness. The powers, whether benign or satanic, always consist of an outer, visible form (constitutions, judges, armies, leaders, buildings) and an inner, invisible spirit that provides its legitimacy, credibility, and clout.
Even churches are powers. The letters to the seven churches in chapters one through three of Revelation are addressed, not to the congregations, but to the angels of the churches. These angels are not mere figures of speech for the collective entity as such; they are the actual essence or corporate personality of each particular church. The angel comes into being at the church's foundation and ceases to exist if the church is dissolved. It bears the stamp of the actual life of the congregation, both good and bad. But it also carries the revelation of the divine vocation to which that congregation is uniquely called.
We in the West are so individualistic that we have ceased to regard corporate entities as anything more than the mere aggregates of their parts. But an institution is more than the sum of its visible parts. It has a momentum and trajectory through time and an entire set of unspoken values and goals. It replicates itself by selecting people compatible with its qualities. An institution can even impose on people behaviors that they would not freely choose. It is not a mere personification. It is an actual, palpable force. Our incapacity to recognize the spirituality of institutions has left us tinkering with their parts while ignoring their essence.
I am suggesting, in short, that the spiritual and material aspects of the powers are the inseparable but distinguishable components of a single thing—power in its manifestations in this world. P = o + i. This means that the church cannot be content with addressing just the material aspects of unjust institutions. It must speak to the spiritual reality of the institution as well.
That is why the issue of the current election cannot be reduced to Mondale/Ferraro vs. Reagan/Bush, Democrats vs. Republicans. They are merely "flesh and blood," and while I believe that the difference between the two is enormous, and that sitting out this election would be morally indefensible (even an administration only one percent less callous than Reagan's would improve the lot of more than two million people), the more important issue continually goes unaddressed: what is the spirit of America today, and how does each party pander to its worst aspects?
I would argue that the prevailing spirit of America is one of messianic imperialism, and that both parties equally and blindly prostitute themselves to it. The election will be a lost opportunity if Christians merely line up on one side or the other, debating personalities, and miss the opportunity to make the electorate conscious of the spirituality of the nation and its idolatrous defection from the call of God.
In this election year it is worth considering how the early church dealt with its own, far different political situation. There was no possibility of involvement in the political process. But this seems to have done little to prevent the church from impacting the Roman empire with devastating force. When the Roman magistrates ordered the early Christians to worship the imperial spirit or genius, they refused, kneeling instead and offering prayers on the emperor's behalf to God. This seemingly innocuous act was far more exasperating and revolutionary than outright rebellion would have been.
Rebellion simply acknowledges the absolute and ultimate nature of the emperor's power, and attempts to seize it. Prayer denies that ultimacy altogether by acknowledging a higher power. Rebellion focuses solely on the physical institution or its current incumbents, and attempts to displace them by an act of superior force. Prayer, on the other hand, challenges the very spirituality of the empire itself, and calls the empire's "angel," as it were, before the judgment seat of God.
Such sedition could not go unpunished. With rebels the solution was simple. No one challenged the state's right to execute rebels. They had bought into the power game on the empire's terms and lost, and the rules of the game required their liquidation. The rebels themselves knew this before they started.
But what happens when a state executes those who are praying for it? When Christians knelt in the Coliseum to pray as lions bore down on them, something sullied the audience's thirst for revenge. These Christians were, even in death, not only challenging the ultimacy of the emperor and the "spirit" of empire, but demonstrating the emperor's powerlessness to impose his will even by death.
The final sanction had been publicly robbed of its power. Even as the lions lapped the blood of the saints, Caesar was stripped of his arms and led captive in Christ's triumphant procession. His authority was shown to be only penultimate after all.
And even those who wished most to deny such a thing were forced, by the very punishment they chose to inflict, to behold its truth. It was a contest of all the brute force of Rome against a small sect that merely prayed. Who could have predicted that the tiny sect would win?
This is not to suggest that in most circumstances prayer is enough, but in that situation it was the most radical response imaginable. Then, "Jesus is Lord" shook the foundations of an empire because it eroded its claims to absolutism. In the free world today, "Jesus is Lord" bumper stickers mainly occasion yawns. Cars adorned with them are not stopped at police roadblocks or firebombed by paramilitary saboteurs.
But countries exist where "Jesus, friend of the poor" can get you killed. Fidelity to the gospel lies not in repeating its slogans but in plunging the prevailing idolatries into the gospel's corrosive acids. We must learn to address the spirituality of institutions, as well as their visible manifestations, with the ultimate claim of the ultimate human, Jesus Christ.
The failure of the second-century Gnostics to maintain the material pole of this task constituted their great apostasy. As a result of their almost pathological hatred of matter, they spiritualized the powers altogether. Without a base in materiality, the powers lost all mooring on the earth.
Boundless speculation about heavenly hierarchies replaced careful strategizing about real power in the one and only real world. The powers no longer represented the inner, spiritual reality of earthly entities. Instead, they vaporized into guardians at the gates of the successive spheres of heaven, whom the soul encountered only after death in its attempt to ascend to God.
Therefore life on earth could, correspondingly, be depoliticized. Gnostics were notoriously loath to suffer persecution. The world in its physical and spiritual dimensions was abandoned for a split reality to be experienced serially, the material episode to be despised in order that the later, heavenly episode might be secured.
The orthodox church, for its part, rigidly cleaved to materiality, but soon found itself the darling of Constantine. Called upon to legitimate the empire, the church abandoned much of its social critique. The powers were soon divorced from political affairs and made airy spirits who preyed only on individuals. The state, freed from Christian scrutiny, was thus freed of one of the most powerful obstacles to its own idolatry, though prophetic voices continued to be raised now and again.
These deviations from the New Testament view of the powers were not simply the result of wrong thinking, but of powerful political pressures. Any time the church has chosen to address the spirituality of institutions in their concrete embodiments, persecution has resulted. Far from a show of gratitude at being recalled to the will of God, the powers explode in a frenzy of rage and retaliation.
What is required of us, then, in making known the manifold will of God to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places? Surely prayer is not enough. But our struggles over the past decades also have proven decisively that social action alone is not enough either. If there is any theological task that has emerged as the agenda for the '80s, it is recovering the unity of spirituality and engagement with injustice, of evangelism and social action.
Seen from the perspective provided by our hypothesis, evangelism and social action are the inner and outer approaches to the same phenomenon of power. Many modern Christians have unfortunately understood injustice in simply materialistic terms and have not recognized the need to "convert" people from the spirituality through which they are bound to a particular material expression of power.
It is not enough merely to change social structures. People are not simply determined by the tangible material forces that impinge upon them. They are also the victims of the very spirituality that those material means of production and socialization have fostered. In a new structure they will continue to behave on the basis of the old spirituality, as they have to varying degrees in every communist regime, unless not only the structures but also their own psyches are reorganized.
Evangelism is always a form of social action. It is an indispensable component of any new world. Unfortunately, Christian evangelism has all too often been wedded to a politics of the status quo, and merely serves to relieve distress by displacing hope to an afterlife and ignoring the causes of oppression.
But whenever evangelism is carried out in full awareness of the powers, whether in confronting those in power or liberating those crushed by it, proclaiming the sovereignty of Christ is in itself a critique of injustice and idolatry. And as the churches of South Korea and Brazil and Chile and around the world have learned, such evangelism inevitably sparks persecution. In sum, structural change is not enough; the heart and soul must also be freed, forgiven, energized, given focus, reunited with their source.
The converse is equally true: social action is always evangelism, if carried out in full awareness of Christ's sovereignty over the powers. Jesus did not just forgive sinners, he gave them a new world. And for those who could not go back to what or where they had been, he created a new structure: his vagabond, sexually mixed, scandalous band of followers who shared all they had in common.
Too often our social action has been as devoid of spirituality as our evangelism has been politically innocuous. Too often we have told the powers they were wrong, but not Whose they are. Too much of the time we have drawn on secular models of social change without drawing as well on our own rich fund of Christian symbolism and imagery, liturgy and story.
Many dismissed the hymns and gospel songs, the Eucharists and prayers of Martin Luther King Jr. or Cesar Chavez as merely shrewd accommodations to the subcultures with which they worked. Such critics did not perceive that these were essential forms of struggle in themselves, that the enemy is not always self-evident. They did not see that engaging a power on its own terms guarantees that the victor, whichever it is, will perpetuate the same terms. They did not address themselves to the transcendent One who alone could work changes which do not themselves bear the seeds of new evils.
How would it change the shape of social struggle if we understood that we wrestle not just with flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places? What are the practical implications of putting on the whole armor of God and praying at all times in the Spirit (Ephesians 6:10-20)? How would it change the nature of our wrestling if we did so in the context of continuous Bible study, and singing, and worship?
For those still working their way out from under the weight of an oppressively pious upbringing, that probably does not resound as good news, but it is. It is how increasing numbers of others have learned they must live, in order to keep on struggling against the Beast without being made bestial.
The struggle is both physical and spiritual, and for the long haul we need waybread that can replenish hope. We have perhaps forgotten how to use our tradition this way, but our sisters and brothers in the black churches, in the Latin American base communities, and in the disarmament movement have known all along—or are relearning fast.
Our tradition bears within it, neglected but recoverable, a whole vocabulary about the powers, models for their confrontation, and wisdom concerning their stratagems. It preserves a structure by which evil in all its depths can be discerned. It mobilizes awareness and catalyzes action, calling us to recognize our own complicity with and determination by the powers, and offering us liberation. Christianity is not merely a human creation, but a revelation of the nature of ultimate reality, humanly mediated. Our tradition—our story—is unique, and never has the time been more right to tell it.
When the Roman Empire executed those who were praying for it, it betrayed awareness that its claims to absolutism were a lie. For Christians today, the crucial issue of the U.S. elections in Orwellian 1984 is whether we can find, at the heart of our own tradition, the means to unmask the arrogant idolatry of American messianic imperialism. And whether—regardless of who gets elected—we can do it in time to spare the world the inevitable suicidal crash brought on by our inflated and overheated national spirit.
Walter Wink was a professor of biblical interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City when this article appeared.
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