Power and the Powers

The Use and Abuse of Power in its Missional Context

Hardy, Whitehouse

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781498273572
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Missio Dei by its very nature requires the church to come to terms with the exercise of power, both internally and externally, as it confronts the world. Tune in to any newscast or glance at the daily newspaper and it immediately becomes clear that the use and abuse of power is a live issue. The more we focus on the twists and turns of current events, the more it appears that uncorrupted exercise of power eludes the human race. All too often we become uneasily aware that there are powers lying behind the power that any of us wields, whether it is in the family, the classroom, on the shop floor, in the boardroom, or in churches. Effective missional leadership involves creative engagement with the powers at work in the world without being debased by them. This book sets out to address the issue of the use and misuse of power from biblical, theological, and practical perspectives. The authors bring their theological, pastoral, missionary, and personal experience to their task in order to inform, challenge, and invite readers into a responsible use of the powers that God has put into the hands of each one of us to achieve his purposes in the world.

1

A Theological Framework

Richard Whitehouse

The Context of Rapid Global Change

It has frequently been observed that we are living in a global climate of rapid and explosive social and cultural change. This global climate calls into question long held presuppositions about the nature of the world around us and the ways in which people respond to it. To take just one example, the very way in which we view political geography and the terminology we associate with it has shifted dramatically. From a political and economic perspective the world is no longer viewed in terms of the east and the west; the axis has shifted toward a division between the northern and Southern hemispheres of the globe in terms of the distribution of wealth and demography. The average age range of southern hemisphere countries is overwhelmingly younger than that of the north. In the main, most of these young people are brought up within a traditional worldview that takes seriously the idea of non-cognitive or suprarational realities. It is at just this time that the center of gravity of the church in the world has shifted to the Sothern Hemisphere.

In this context the church in the northern hemisphere has to reinvent itself in partnership with the South. We live in a post-Christendom—some have argued even a post-Christian—era where a switch to a missional agenda appears to be the only way forward if the church is not to become extinct. We are no longer in a situation where mission can be regarded as a bolt-on activity; rather it is to be seen as the core of the church’s nature. The move from “mission” as an abstract noun to the adjectival form “missional” is intentional. Mission can no longer be an activity of the church, it has to be what defines us and a crucial part of this redefinition will be a rediscovery of the fact that we are in the midst of spiritual conflict of epic proportions.

As far back as 1991, David Burnett traced the growth of pagan spirituality in Britain, an issue that theologian John Drane has also addressed as an evangelistic opportunity. Postmodern questioning of unrestrained post-Enlightenment rationalism suggests a greater openness to the idea of unseen spiritual forces in large sections of contemporary European society. Inward migration from sothern hemisphere countries has accelerated this process to some degree by introducing population segments which do not completely share the modernist world view. As part of this mix, African and Asian inner city congregations have forced the issue of spiritual warfare into greater prominence for the largely dying churches in European culture.

In his 1991 introduction to a monograph on the mission implications of the current theological understanding of the nature of spiritual powers in the New Testament, MARC editor Bryant L. Myers wrote:

In the midst of this climate of rapid change, extreme complexity and almost obsessive pluralism, the Church of Jesus Christ is to be in mission. The good news of Jesus Christ and the claims of his kingdom are needed everywhere . . . Post-Christian Europe needs to rediscover the gospel that was once central to its culture and sense of being.1

The existence of unseen spiritual forces is back on the theological agenda; the issue of what has been termed “spiritual warfare” can no longer be relegated to so-called primitive societies, in the twenty-first century it is being taken seriously by theologians as well as missiologists. In this work we will be considering the nature of spiritual conflict in the context of the kingdom of God and the language of “power encounter.”

Biblical Hermeneutics and the Language of Power

In his 1991 monograph for MARC, the research division of World Vision, Thomas McAlpine surveys a variety of approaches to the classic NT texts dealing with spiritual powers. In it he identifies four theological traditions that handle the texts in very different ways and, as a consequence, come to differing though sometimes overlapping views as to how the church in mission should confront these powers. We will later look at these traditions in more detail noting, as we do so, that new emerging approaches could also be added to McAlpine’s four traditions.

For the moment it is important to note that these differing traditions point to the fact that theology is not conducted in a vacuum. We all bring our own theological and hermeneutical assumptions to the biblical text and we first need to scrutinize these before approaching the text in detail. For instance, as far back as 1984 P. T. O’Brien highlighted the inclination of post-World War II European theologians to discount the idea of the powers as personal spiritual beings in favor of a tendency to identify the powers with the structures of society. He notes:

The problem lies with many contemporary Western theologians and their cultural conditioning; they have allowed the latter to dictate their understanding of the biblical texts with the result that an increasingly fashionable view, viz., that the Pauline powers designate modern socio-political structures, has become the new orthodoxy.2

It may be pointed out that O’Brien may not have entirely escaped his own cultural conditioning in his analysis of Paul’s use of the same texts. This only serves to indicate the difficult nature of the task of coming to terms with the biblical context before we come to apply such passages to our own situation.

The Hermeneutical Task

Hermeneutics may be described as the science or art of textual interpretation. In the case of the biblical text it enjoys a long history of technical debate and of procedures that forms a study in itself. It is not necessary for us to examine these technicalities here, but we do need to flag up a caution that identifying and isolating a group of key NT texts without reference to their literary, historical, and cultural contexts may not be the best way to proceed. This would be the literary equivalent of trying to analyze the events of the 9/11 attack on the twin towers in New York without reference to the culture that produced American foreign policy or at the religious sensitivities of the Islamic groups that produced suicide bombers! It is not possible, or at least, not sensible, to approach the biblical texts with no knowledge of their background (we know it is possible because many groups with a fundamentalist bent do so, but that does not make it a sensible or helpful thing to do).

Two Basic Hermeneutical Principles:

Read the Text in Light of the Wider Biblical Context

The mistake that is often made is to see the biblical texts relating to the powers in isolation from each other and with little regard for the settings that gave rise to them and that they are meant to answer. We need to step back from the classic texts on spiritual warfare in order to consider the general context of spiritual conflict in the Bible. Greg Boyd, after briefly surveying notions of spiritual conflict in a variety of different cultures, concludes that handling such perceived conflict in these cultures is based on a spiritual warfare worldview. He suggests that this worldview is an assumption in biblical literature and he adds:

The way in which Scripture portrays this warfare world view differs significantly from that of most other cultures. For the biblical worldview is predicated on the assumption that there is only one eternal God whose character is perfect and who is the omnipotent Creator and sustainer of all that is. It is nevertheless clear the biblical authors do espouse a warfare worldview that demonstrates many similarities to the warfare worldviews of other cultures.3

We will consider the issue of worldviews later in the context of anthropological and missiological approaches to spiritual conflict and their uses of the language of power. For the present, a worldview may be defined as “a set of basic cultural assumptions that govern individual and societal perceptions about what is real.” Boyd contends that such a worldview conditions the way in which the biblical authors approach spiritual realities. Thus, a basic hermeneutical consideration is to take into account the overall thrust of biblical literature as it forms part of the background or stream of thought that moulded the writers of individual texts. This is not only true of the biblical literature itself, but also of the way that this literature has been interpreted throughout the history of the church in the West.

Interpret Passages according to the Light of Their Cultural Milieu, Not Our Own

The second hermeneutical task is not an easy one and it raises a great deal of theological debate. In order to adequately understand the context of particular passages or the thought of a particular thinker, for example, Jesus or Paul, it is necessary to arrive at some determination of the predominant influences on their thought. This is not always straightforward. Both Paul and Jesus lived in cultures that were influenced by Greek, Roman, and Judaic streams of ideas each of which in itself was subject to complex undercurrents, variations, and traditions. The tendency until relatively recently has been to discount the depth of the influence of both the Old Testament literature and intertestamental Judaism on their thinking and thus on the way they chose to express perceived truths.

Only as we attempt to grapple with these issues will we avoid importing our own presuppositions into the text. The tendency of theologians like Bultmann to assume that the language about the powers used by Paul is naïve and mythological, is based on the assumption that it represents an outmoded prescientific worldview that needs to be “demythologized.” This is to misunderstand the term “myth”; it does not indicate, as is popularly supposed, a made-up story to explain reality—something that is not true—but, rather, takes the form of a controlling metaphor that explains reality, often in the shape of a story. Opponents of attempts to “demythologize” Paul’s terminology have noted:

(a) that “myth” is not to be understood as part of an outmoded primitive worldview, but characterizes humanity in any epoch;

(b) that belief about supernatural interventions in the affairs of human beings is neither mythical, naïve, nor pre-scientific (as the Enlightenment view would imply);

(c) and that belief in demons is not specifically mythical.

O’Brien comments, “Further, it is most important to note that certain third world theologians have often claimed that a biblical, and especially Pauline, perspective on the powers is perfectly intelligible in their own cultural contexts.”4

The point here is that we cannot avoid bringing our own cultural understandings to the text, but as far as possible we should seek to lay these aside in order to ask, “What was the situation for those who wrote and received the text?” Once we get as close as we reasonably can to their cultural milieu, we will be able to understand what they were saying in their day and then begin to apply their terminology to our own contexts.

Before considering the biblical approach to spiritual conflict and its use of the language of power we will first take a look at some historical approaches to this issue. This will further clarify the way that the church’s understandings of the kingdom of God and the language of power have been socially and culturally mediated in the past.

The Early (Post-Apostolic) Church and Spiritual Conflict

Before we attempt an exegesis of any passage in the light of our present circumstances it is necessary to tackle the hermeneutical task of seeking to grapple with the original meaning of the text. Each of the four traditions of interpretation identified by McAlpine in his monograph has, to some extent, avoided this important first step. This is an issue to which we will return later since it is important if we are to ground our practice of spiritual warfare in the Bible. Too many popular approaches to engaging in this important missional task have foundered at this point and have only succeeded in creating misunderstandings and poor practice. What follows is a brief and selective historical survey of ways that the issue of spiritual conflict has been treated since the close of the NT canon of Scripture. The object of this survey is to explore how successive generations of the church have contextualized spiritual warfare.

Each understanding is grounded in a particular historical and cultural context by which it is to some extent conditioned. This simple observation should help us reflect on what is happening when we approach this topic and may help us to avoid importing our own contextual presuppositions into the biblic...

Table of contents

• Power and the Powers
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: A Theological Framework
• Chapter 2: More Recent Approaches to Spiritual Conflict
• Chapter 3: The Bible and the Powers
• Chapter 4: Cultural Analysis of Western Spiritual Power Encounters
• Chapter 5: Ethnography and Understanding Power Encounters
• Chapter 6: Deliverance & Exorcism
• Chapter 7: The Signs, Symbols, and Meanings of the Language of Power
• Chapter 8: The Psychology of Power Encounter and Counseling the Overpowered
• Chapter 9: The Religion of Power: Engaging the Abuse of Power in the Church
• Chapter 10: Incarnational Missional Community: Transforming the Use of Power in Society
• Bibliography