Soulwork: Powers, Principalities & Walter Wink

Last week, during our Soulwork sessions on Sunday at 9 am and Wednesday at 6:30 pm, we began a four week series investigating questions of how our Christian faith can help us understand the uses and abuses of earthly power.

For these first three weeks of the series, we are focusing on the “Powers Trilogy” by theologian and Biblical scholar, Walter Wink. And for the final week, we will look at The Lucifer Effect, the recent book by Stanford psychologist, Phil Zimbardo, subtitled, “Understanding How Good People Turn Evil” (based upon research that began with the famous “Stanford Prison Experiment” and more recently when Zimbardo studied the abusive behavior of members of the American armed forces at Bahgdad’s Abu Graib prison).

We took a look at the first of Wink’s Powers series, entitled Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament last week. And this Sunday, November 16, at 9 am and Wednesday, November 19, at 6:30 pm, we will be discussing Wink’s second book, Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces that Determine Human Existence. (We will then move on to Wink’s final Powers book, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, before wrapping up the series with Zimbardo’s work.)

From Wink’s second book, click below for a quote we’ll be discussing during this week’s sessions:

Angels, spirits, principalities, powers, gods, Satan – these, along with all other spiritual realities, are the unmentionables of our culture. The dominant materialistic world view (cosmology) has no place for them… A reassessment of these powers…allows us to reclaim, name, and comprehend types of experience that materialism renders mute and inexpressible….Unable to name our experiences of these intermediate powers of existence, we are simply constrained by them compulsively. They are never more powerful than when they are unconscious.

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