[The New Testament scholar and peace activist Walter Wink died in 2012. While his books and his thought continue to receive attention, they are not given enough attention in my opinion. As a small effort to try to remedy that problem, I am posting a short essay I wrote about 20 years ago introducing some of Wink’s main ideas. This essay was part of the introduction I wrote to the book of essays on Wink’s thought I coedited with my friend Ray Gingerich, Transforming the Powers.]
Engaging Walter Wink: An Introduction—by Ted Grimsrud—[From Ray Gingerich and Ted Grimsrud, eds. Transforming the Powers: Peace Justice, and the Domination System (Fortress Press, 2006), 1-6.]
Walter Wink is that rare, and much appreciated, cross-disciplinary scholar and committed activist who informs and inspires. Trained as a New Testament specialist, Wink’s first publications in the late 1960s made still-cited contributions to the study of John the Baptist.[1] John the Baptist in the Gospel Tradition remains in print. He began reaching a wider audience with his provocative The Bible in Human Transformation[2] which forecast his broadening his concerns to psychological and ethical ramifications of how we read the Bible. Transforming Bible Study[3] emerged from Wink’s work as Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York, work paying special attention to the study of the Bible among lay people.
The Powers trilogy
Fortress Press published the first volume of Wink’s “Powers trilogy,” Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament in 1984. As Wink recounts in that book’s preface, it originated as a book review, critiquing another book on the principalities and powers in the New Testament that Wink disagreed with. Wink had been working on the theme of the powers for a number of years, originally stimulated by the pioneering work of the notorious Episcopalian lawyer and lay theologian William Stringfellow. What eventually emerged were two additional full-scale books, Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence (1986) and the magisterial Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (1992), and several shorter works fleshing out the trilogy’s core insights.
Wink argues that the “principalities and powers,” in the New Testament (and he uses this term as shorthand for the various other terms that also expresses the idea) refer to the realities of all human social dynamics – our institutions, belief systems, traditions, and the like. All of these dynamics, what he calls “manifestations of power” have an inner and an outer aspect. “Every Power tends to have a visible pole, an outer form – be it a church, a nation, and economy – and an invisible pole, an inner spirit or driving force that animates, legitimates, and regulates its physical manifestation in the world. Neither pole is the cause of the other. Both come into existence together and cease to exist together.”[4]
Peace Theology 