Unmasking the Powers

The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence

Walter Wink

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 1993
• Print ISBN:
  9780800619022
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506453835
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Angels, Spirits, principalities, powers, gods, Satanthese, along with all other spiritual realities, are the unmentionables of our culture. The dominant materialistic worldview has absolutely no place for them. But materialism itself is terminally ill, and, let us hope, in process of replacement by a worldview capable of honoring the lasting values of modern science without succumbing to reductionism. Therefore, we find ourselves returning to the ancient traditions, searching for wisdom wherever it may be found. We do not capitulate to the past and its superstitions, but bring all the gifts our race has acquired along the way as aids in recovering the lost language of our souls. In Naming the Powers I developed the thesis that the New Testament's principalities and powers is a generic category referring to the determining forces of physical, psychic, and social existence. In the present volume we will be focusing on just seven of the Powers mentioned in Scripture. Their selection out of all the others dealt with in Naming the Powers is partly arbitrary: they happen to be ones about which I felt I had something to say. But they are also representative, and open the way to comprehending the rest. They are: Satan, demons, angels of churches, angels of nations, gods, elements, and angels of nature.

1

Satan

Nothing commends Satan to the modern mind. It is bad enough that Satan is spirit, when our worldview has banned spirit from discourse and belief. But worse, he is evil, and our culture resolutely refuses to believe in the real existence of evil, preferring to regard it as a kind of systems breakdown that can be fixed with enough tinkering. Worse yet, Satan is not a very good intellectual idea. Once theology lost its character as reflection on the experience of knowing God, and became a second-level exercise in knowing about, the experiential ground of theology began to erode away. “Although mythologically true,” Morton Kelsey writes, “the devil is intellectually indefensible, and once it was realized that the conception of the powers of evil was ‘only’ a representation of peoples’ experience, no matter how accurate, the devil began to fade. . .”

With only sense experience and reason to go on, and with no rational place for an evil first cause, enlightened people simply dropped the devil from consideration. With direct psychic experience no longer admissible as evidence of his reality, the devil was as good as dead.^[1]

Nor is this picture essentially altered by polls that show belief in Satan to be sharply on the increase. As we shall see later, such belief is most frequently a component of neurotic religion, and the remarkably subtle character of Satan is collapsed into a two-dimensional bogeyman that has only vague similarities with the biblical devil. The Satan image, even where it lingers on, has been whittled down to the stature of a personal being whose sole obsessions would seem to be with sexual promiscuity, adolescent rebellion, crime, passion, and greed.^[2] While not themselves trivial, these preoccupations altogether obscure the massive satanic evils that plunge and drive our times like a trawler before an angry sea. When television evangelists could try to terrorize us with Satan and then speak favorably of South African apartheid, we should have sensed something wrong. When the large evil went undetected, when the symbol no longer attracted to the fact, when evil ran roughshod through corporate boardrooms and even churches, unnoticed and unnamed, while “Satan” was relegated to superego reinforcement and moralistic scare tactics, then we should have caught the stench—not of brimstone, but of putrefaction. Not that we had progressed beyond evil. On the contrary, the evil of our time had become so gigantic that it had virtually outstripped the symbol and become autonomous, unrepresentable, beyond comprehension.

We had killed Satan. For those who never mourned his passing, who even met it with relief, I offer this awkward and perhaps unwelcome parody, pilfered (satanically) from any number of poets:

Killed Satan!
Hardly the words are out
before we notice the sky has darkened,
not into perpetual night,
but into unending grey.

Satan dead!
and we scarcely even missed him,
that old tempter with whom we toyed
and lost, enjoying the thrill of transgressing
something that could be transgressed.
Now, without Satan,
Where’s the thrill?

So Satan is gone!
And now how will we recognize evil
before it has us already in its maw?
How will we know we have crossed the boundary,
beyond human return,
without Him there to say,
Oh, come on across.”

Every point gives vertigo,
we reel, dizzy and sick,
every spot on earth a mount of temptation,
without a tempter, without bounds,
with no stakes left, nor obedience,
nothing but survival into that grey,
never-ending, dawnless day.

While the symbol may have fallen on hard times, the reality to which it gave expression has become all the more virulent. Satan did not begin life as an idea, but an experience. The issue is not whether one “believes” in Satan, but whether or not one is able to identify in the actual events of life that dimension of experience the ancients called “Satan.” Nor is the metaphysical question, Does Satan really exist? of any real urgency, unless the question is asked in the context of an actual encounter with Something or Someone that leads one to posit Satan’s existence.

Without a means of symbolization, however, evil cannot come to conscious awareness and thus be consciously resisted. Like an undiagnosed disease it rages through society, and we are helpless to produce a cure. Evil must be symbolized precisely because it cannot be thought.^[3] Is there any way we can resymbolize evil? Thought cannot resuscitate Satan, but only committed persons consciously making choices for God, as we will see. But thought can perhaps roll away the stone. Then perhaps, if we can live through that dark interval between Satan’s death and resurrection, we may yet see Satan functioning again—as a servant of the living God!

Satan as a Servant of God

We are not accustomed to thinking of Satan as God’s servant. But when Satan makes his late appearance in the Old Testament, that is precisely what he is.

The faith of early Israel actually had no place for Satan. God alone was Lord, and thus whatever happened, for good or ill, was ascribed to God. “I kill and I make alive,” says the Lord, “I wound and I heal.”^[4]

So it was not inconsistent to believe that Yahweh might call Moses to deliver Israel from Egypt and then, on the way, attempt to murder him. The text, much neglected by preachers, is Exod. 4:24-26a. “On the journey, when Moses had halted for the night, Yahweh came to meet him and tried to kill him. At once Zipporah, taking up a flint, cut off her son’s foreskin and with it she touched the genitals of Moses. ‘Truly, you are a bridegroom of blood to me!’ she said. And Yahweh let him live” (JB). Perhaps Moses had fallen critically ill, or had been almost killed by an attack or fall or avalanche, or had somatized his terror at the enormity of his task. In any case, the attack was ascribed, not to natural causes, but to God.^[5]

The God who led Israel out of Egypt, however, was a God of justice. How then could God demand justice, be just, and still cause evil? Had not Abraham challenged God with the question, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Gen. 18:25)? This problem was the terrible price Israel had been forced to pay for its belief that Yahweh was the primary cause of all that happens. Morally, the cost was unbearable. Gradually Yahweh became differentiated into a “light” and a “dark” side, both integral to the Godhead, with Yahweh transcending both as the unity that encompasses multiplicity.^[6] The bright side came to be represented by the angels, the dark by Satan and his demons.

Yet this process of differentiation was completed so late that Satan makes only three appearances in the Old Testament.^[7] In 2 Sam. 24:1 Yahweh in anger against Israel had incited David to carry out a census (the basis of taxation and military conscription). But in Chronicles, a postcaptivity revision of Samuel and Kings, this same passage is changed to read, “Satan stood up against Israel, and incited David to number Israel” (1 Chron. 21:1). The Adversary has assumed the function of executor of God’s wrath. Satan is an agent provocateur who plants oppressive ideas in a mortal’s mind. He does not represent disorder, chaos, or rebellion here, but rather the imposition of a suffocating bureaucratic order (the census). Satan furthers God’s will by visiting wrath on disobedient mortals, and in so doing carries out the will of God.

In Zech. 3:1-5 we find “the satan” in the role of accuser or prosecuting attorney.

Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan (ha satan) standing at his right hand to accuse him. And the Lord said to Satan, “The Lord rebuke you, O Satan! The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is not this a brand plucked from the fire?” Now Joshua was standing before the angel, clothed with filthy garments. And the angel said to those who were standing before him, “Remove the filthy garments from him.” And to him he said, “Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with rich apparel.” And I said, “Let them put a clean turban on his head.” So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him with garments; and the angel of the Lord was standing by.

The scene is set in the heavenly council, with the accuser at the right of the accused, Joshua.^[8] The high priest, representing the whole people of Israel, is dressed in filthy garments, symbolic of the sins that Israel’s prophets had identified as the cause of Israel’s exile in Babylon. The vision is dated around 520 B.C.E.; this means that upward of three generations of Jews had lived with the belief that they had gone into captivity in 585 as punishment for their infidelity to Yahweh. Joshua bears all that collective guilt.^[9] The Adversary merely reiterates what the accusing conscience of the people has been affirming all along. The guilt is real, and it is deserved. Only God’s undeserved grace causes the case to be quashed.

Satan is clearly not demonic here. If anything, Satan echoes what everyone knows to be the attitude of God toward Israel, prior to God’s unexpected reversal of the judgment. Satan merely repeats what the prophets had been saying all along! Nevertheless God intervenes. Israel is a “brand plucked from the fire”; it will be consumed by guilt and succumb to hopelessness unless it experiences forgiveness soon. Satan is thus not merely a mythological character invented out of whole cloth; the “adversary” is that actual inner or collective voice of condemnation that any sensitive person hears tirelessly repeating accusations of guilt or inferiority. And indeed, there is often a degree of truth in the charges. But Satan’s demand for strict justice, untempered by mercy, can crush the spirit of a person or a people. This “voice” is a phenomenological fact;^[10] its mythic conceptualization makes it possible to isolate it, lift it to consciousness, and ask whether it is indeed the voice of God.

The final Old Testament reference to Satan is in the prologue to Job. “Now there was a day when the sons of God (bene elohim) came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan (ha satan) also came among them.” Here again, Satan is not a fallen angel but a fully credentialed member of the heavenly court. “The Lord said to Satan, ‘Whence have you come?’ Satan answered the Lord, ‘From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.’ ” His role is somewhat like that of a district attorney, zealou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Fortress Press Books by Walter Wink
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Satan
• The Demons
• The Angels of the Churches
• The Angels of the Nations
• The Gods
• The Elements of the Universe
• The Angels of Nature
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index of Authors
• Index of Passages