For the Theologically Curious

While in seminary, I was introduced to the writings of the piercingly insightful theologian Walter Wink. Like many professional degree programs where there is more reading than time, I had to set Wink aside and catch up with him later.

"Later" arrived last week when I felt the urge to open my copy of his classic work, Engaging the Powers (Fortress Press, MN, 1992), the third in a series of commentaries directed to the Apostle Paul’s ethic of spiritual warfare summarized in Ephesians 6:12:

For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (emphasis added).

Walter Wink would have turned 91 years old yesterday—May 21st, had he not died two days before turning 77 years old—May 19th. I wasn’t aware of these anniversaries until I was finishing this post, due for publication on May 22nd. Perhaps this cluster of timing is all coincidental. Or perhaps Wink is still speaking Truth to Power, particularly as regards the “cosmic power” that is capitalism. If the latter is the case, we're pleased to honor him during his anniversaries by offering this token of his insights and encouraging you to explore more of his writings.

Walter Wink | Image Credit: Penguin Random House

The Origin of the Domination System

Early in Engaging (p. 50), Wink draws on a few lines from a familiar reference to illustrate the domination system he’s discussing, John Steinbeck’s classic American novel, The Grapes of Wrath:

The bank—the monster has to have profits all the time. It can't wait. It'll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size ….

We have to do it. We don't like to do it. But the monster's sick. Something's happened to the monster….

Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good. It's still ours ….

We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't like a man.

Yes, but the bank is only made of men.

No, you're wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in the bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.

Naming the Domination System

In a single paragraph (I reformatted here for easier digital reading), Wink provides a modern snapshot of the cosmic power he wants us to see. From page 54:

The world-atmosphere teaches us what we can value. In the Domination System generally, it teaches us to value power. In any particular society, however, power is given specific shape by the particular conditions of the time. What characterizes our society is the unique value ascribed to money.

People in every age have coveted wealth, but few societies have lionized the entrepreneur as ours does. Aristocratic societies—and most societies that have been aristocratic—have tended to look down on acquisitiveness and to despise merchants.

Modern capitalism, by contrast, has made wealth the highest value. Our entire social system has become an “economy”; no earlier society would have characterized itself thus. Profit is the highest social good. Consumerism has become the only universally available mode of participation in modern society. The work ethic has been replaced by the consumer ethic, the cathedral by the skyscraper, the hero by the billionaire, the saint by the executive, religion by ideology.

The Kingdom of Mammon exercises constraint by invisible chains and drives its slaves with invisible prods. (How rare it is for rich people to say, “I have enough.”) But Mammon is wiser in its ways than the dictator, for money enslaves not by force, but by love.

Wink’s reference here to “love” is to the love of money, which enslaves those who love it.

The Nature of the Domination System

Wink makes an important point about systems being redeemable, which may come as both shocking and liberating to those who think “nothing can be done.” From page 67:

God did not create capitalism or socialism, but there must be some kind of economic system. The simultaneity of creation, fall, and redemption means that God at one end and the same time upholds a given political or economic system, since some such system is required to support human life; condemns that system insofar as it is destructive of full human actualization; and presses for its transformation into a more humane order. Conservatives stress the first, revolutionaries the second, reformers the third. The Christian is expected to hold together all three.

This is the point, and perhaps only this, of Rom. 13:1-7 (“Be subject to the governing authorities”). It does not legitimate blind obedience to an oppressive system. It says, rather, that governments are indispensable for the preservation of social order and protection against criminals and invaders. They are supposed to be a terror not to good conduct, but to bad (vv. 3-4). Oppressive regimes, however, are just the reverse: they reward bad conduct and are a terror to those who do good.

To say that the Powers are created in, through, and for the cosmic Christ, then, does not imply endorsement of any particular economic or political system. What the hymn sings is recognition that it is God's plan for us to live in interrelationship with each other, and to this end God has determined that there will be subsystems whose sole purpose is to serve human needs of the One who exemplifies and encompasses humanity.

An institution may place its own good above the general welfare. A corporation may cut corners on costs by producing defective products that endanger lives. Union leadership may become more preoccupied with extending its personal advantages than fighting for better working conditions for the rank and file. The point of the Colossians hymn is not that anything goes, but that no matter how greedy or idolatrous an institution becomes, it cannot escape the encompassing care and judgment of the One in and through all for whom it was created. In that One, “all things hold together (Col. 1:17—lit., “receive their systemic place”—synistēmi, the source of our word “system”). The Powers are inextricably locked into God's system, whose human face is revealed in Christ. They are answerable to God. And that means that every subsystem in the world is, in principle, redeemable (emphasis added).

To Wink’s point that a system is redeemable, we invite you to further explore our earlier series Redeeming Capitalism with Rev. Dr. Kenneth Barnes of Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, beginning here.

Some Examples

With two examples, Wink neatly illustrates both the need and difficulty of redeeming a system, like capitalism, but rejects the suggestion that difficulty equates to impossibility. From pages 78-80:

Even the moral concern of a few is usually insufficient to change an oppressive system. The owner of a business, for example, may undergo an experience of spiritual rebirth, and genuinely desire to humanize the conditions under which her employees work. But she encounters immediately a fixed constraint: cost. If she deviates too much from the general norm for wages and benefits, the cost of the product will price her out of business. So she must be extremely cautious in introducing fundamental change, because her business is dependent on a world economic system that is utterly indifferent to her ethical concerns.

This is not to diminish the value of that one business person's attempt to be more humane. That attempt, within the narrow range of her freedom, may be the thin margin between making work pleasant for her workers or miserable. Her free choices can have a limited effect on her employees’ satisfaction in life. And that is by no means negligible. New management styles have helped to humanize existence in some workplaces. But she cannot raise salaries sharply and still remain competitive when a factory owner in Taiwan or South Korea is making the same product with teenage girl laborers paid one-tenth of the salary and working twelve or fourteen hours a day six days a week. The system is greedy on her behalf, and if she rejects the system’s values she may be ejected by the system. It is not just that people are making choices about how they will behave in the economic system: the system is also making choices about who will remain viable in the system. We do not contend against flesh and blood, but against the world rulers of this present darkness.

That example is rather simple. Consider now the more complex case of an agricultural researcher at a state agricultural experiment station. He typically hails from a farm or at least a small-town agricultural service community. The researcher has a genuine desire to serve the farmer by making farming easier and more profitable. Let us even imagine that the researcher feels this is a genuine vocation from God, as my Chilean friend would put it.

But now watch how the Powers strip from his hands the very capacity to fulfill his vocation. The researcher responds directly to the needs of the farmers. But these needs are imposed on the farmer by the system of production and marketing for farm products. That means he virtually has to use a tractor instead of a horse to plow and cultivate. He must till more acres to ensure profitability and justify the cost of the tractor. He must buy commercial fertilizer because he can no longer produce enough manure locally, and he must buy a harvesting machine because he is farming more acreage, and an adequate labor force is costly and undependable.

So the farmer calls on the researcher to develop seeds with higher yields, and herbicides to kill the weeds. The researcher responds with a will, determined to serve the farmer. But all these demands are dictated, not by the farmer, but by the technological innovations that must be used in order to maintain profitability in a market in which competitors are taking advantage of these technological innovations also.

And our researcher? With the best will in the world, he perseveres in producing a hybrid corn seed that will increase yields for the farmer. But this backs the farmer into an even greater dependency on the four seed companies that supply most of the U.S. corn belt. Since hybrids do not breed true, the farmer must now buy new seed each year instead of harvesting his own seed from the choice stock of his own crop. All this takes money; in the past seventy-eight years the average farmer’s indebtedness increased eightyfold. The agricultural researcher does not intend to drive his clients into debt, yet this is the unintended result of his endeavors on the farmers' behalf. And since all such highly mechanized farmers can now produce tremendous yields, the price of corn drops, they cannot pay off their debts, and the bank forecloses.

The tragedy is that many farmers blame themselves entirely for what is in large part a systemic catastrophe. They feel shame for a failure that has all the inevitability of an avalanche. Our individualistic blinders cause us to seek private causes for public malfunctions. It is easier, for them and us, to blame bankrupted farmers for their own personal incompetence than to unmask the system that is doing them in. (And we have not even considered the role of agribusiness and the U.S. Congress in the farm debacle!)

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