Eyre Lines

Here’s a copy of a forum post to an old debating partner who expressed some doubt about the “spiritual” power and principalities having a material referent.

From Richard Beck’s “Experimental Theology” blog, here’s a quote from John Howard Yoder:-

Yoder describing Paul’s theology of the Powers:

[The powers are] religious structures (especially the religious undergirdings of stable ancient and primitive societies), intellectual structures (‘ologies and ‘isms), moral structures (codes and customs), political structures (the tyrant, the market, the school, the courts, race and nation). The totality is overwhelmingly broad. Nonetheless, even here with careful analysis we observe that it can be said of a these “structures” what the Apostle was saying concerning the powers:

(a) All these structures can be conceived of in their general essence as parts of a good creation. There could not be society or history, there could not be Man without the existence above him of religious, intellectual, moral and social structures. We cannot live without them. These structures are not and never have been a mere sum total of the individuals composing them. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. And this “more” is an invisible Power, even though we many not be used to speaking of it in personal or angelic terms.

(b) But these structures fail to serve man as they should. They do not enable him to live a genuinely free, human, loving life. They have absolutized themselves and they demand from the individual and society an unconditional loyalty. They harm and enslave man. We cannot live with them. Looking at the human situation from within, it is not possible to conceive how man once unconditionally subjected to these Powers can ever again become free.

(c) Man is lost in the world, in it structures, and in the current of its development. But nonetheless it is in this world that man has been preserved, that he has been able to be himself and thereby to await the redeeming work of God. His lostness and his survival are inseparable, both dependent upon the Powers.

Beck goes on to state that salvation then involves the redemption not merely of mankind, but of the Powers, i.e. the restoration of our structures of religion, intellect, morals and politics to serve mankind rather than be machines which are served by people (which is very much my experience of them).

Earlier in this series of posts, he also quoted Walter Wink saying (paraphrased) that modern man has extreme difficulty relating to “spiritual” Powers, disembodied spirits of some kind; Yoder says much the same thing, as does Karl Barth. As a result, we discount passages talking of “spiritual powers” as having no referent in the modern world.

You probably don’t do this, but a very substantial slice of my psychology is scientific rationalist, and I am definitely one of those who has almost insuperable difficulty thinking of “purely spiritual” powers as having any reality. Without this kind of thinking, the nearest I can come is to acknowledge that the belief in spiritual powers has an effect in human psychology for those who believe in them.

At that point, however, I note that my own experience has been that those who do have such a psychological effect have universally had a very negative effect, often verging on or crossing the line into paranoia about evil spiritual forces constantly assailing them. I do not think this is healthy, and have, for instance, been known to say “If the Devil existed, it would still be necessary to disbelieve in him”. However, the thinking of Barth, Yoder and Wink seems to me to give me some purchase on what might, after all, not be a completely useless or even poisonous way of thinking.