© 2000 Meredith J. Sprunger
© 2000 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
Galilee Doubleday, New York, 1998, 207 pp.
Walter Wink is Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City. His book, The Powers That Be, is an attempt to show how the “Domination System” that has controlled the policies of social institutions for the last five thousand years can be changed. The social systems that governed human institutions have been rigidly hierarchical, authoritarian, and patriarchal.
Human experience is interpreted through the lens of our worldview of reality, our spiritual paradigm of meaning. Professor Wink suggests that our most creative frame of reference is an “Integral Worldview” — a panentheism view of God where everything is in God and God is in everything, but the self-identity of God is independent of particular things. Using this inclusive worldview Wink sees the “Myth of Redemptive Violence” as the key belief that keeps the spiritually deficient Domination System in power. The belief that we achieve justice through violence, peace through war, and security through strength is the bedrock on which the Domination System is founded. “The myth of redemptive violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has ever known. Furthermore, its orientation toward evil is one into which virtually all modern children (boys especially) are socialized in the process of maturation.”(p. 55)
We must redefine nonviolence and understand its spiritual power. Jesus urges us to transcend both passivity and violence by pointing to a third way-one that is assertive and yet nonviolent. The injunction to turn the other cheek and to walk the second mile are examples of doing something positive to protest an injustice. Professor Wink devotes an entire chapter describing the practical effectiveness of this kind of nonviolence in our society. In using assertive nonviolence, the means must be consistent with the ends, and show respect for the rule of law. Wink distinguishes between force and violence. “Force signifies a legitimate, socially authorized, and morally defensible use of restraint to prevent harm being done to innocent people. Violence would be a morally illegitimate or excessive use of force.” (p. 159)
Professor Wink has written a brilliant and helpful book. The limitations of the book, in my judgment, are that he tends to center on social action and the Domination System rather than the process of spiritual transformation that results in social action. His emphasis gravitates toward politics and institutions rather than the spiritual transformation of the individual and the evolutionary process which eventually results in social, political, and institutional change. These deficiencies may be the result of the incompleteness of Wink’s Integral Worldview: the recognition that God’s primary relationship with our world is through God’s indwelling spirit in individuals and the evolutionary process. Social action and change in politics and institutions are the end result of this individual spiritual transformation.