On my desk is Transforming the Powers: Peace, Justice and the Domination System edited by Ray Ginge­rich and Ted Grimsrud, published by Fortress Press, 2006, 227 pages, $20.

Mennonite Weekly Review, 2/19/07

Lapp

For 50 years, a fertile theme in biblical studies has been unraveling the New Testament phrase “principalities and powers.” No one has dealt with this language as insightfully or comprehensively as Auburn Theological Seminary’s Walter Wink. His trilogy — Naming the Powers (1984), Unmasking the Powers (1986) and Engaging the Powers (1992) — are contemporary theological classics. He summarized and extended these ideas in The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium (1998) and When the Powers Fall: Reconciliation in the Healing of the Nations (1998).

In 2001, Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va., held a conference that elaborated some of the themes found in Wink’s writings. This book brings these excellent presentations together in 11 chapters plus an introduction.

In addition to the editors from EMU, other authors are Nancey Murphy and Glen Stassen of Fuller Theological Seminary, Daniel Liechty of Illinois State University, Willard Swartley of Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary and Wink himself.

Topics range from Wink’s elaboration of the “New Worldview: Spirit at the Core of Everything” to Murphy’s exploration of ethics and the social sciences.

In a helpful introduction, Grims­rud summarizes Wink’s contribution. Powers language, he writes, “refers to the realities of all social dynamics — institutions, belief systems, traditions.” Each of these has an outer form and an invisible character, “an inner spirit of driving force that animates, legitimates and regulates.”

In Wink’s well-known summary, “The Powers are good. The Powers are fallen. The Powers need to be redeemed.” Wink then adds, “only by confronting the spirituality of an institution and its concretions can the total entity be transformed, and that requires a kind of spiritual discernment and praxis that the materialistic ethos in which we live knows nothing about.”

The focus on the spirituality of institutions and public life is taking place as the natural sciences, particularly physics and cosmology, have been sensing that a material explanation of these realities is incomplete. Wink and Murphy demonstrate useful comparisons of the biblical worldview and the worldview emerging in our time. Wink uses the term “integral worldview” to describe the universe “suffused with the divine.” God is not only “within us but within everything.”

This means “God will have to be included in our experience of the nature of things.” It also means “everything is interpenetrated with everything else.”

Thus, environmental care is not an option but an obligation for anyone concerned about the dwelling place of God and God’s creation.