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Sunday, April 26, 2009

Wink, W. (1992). Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (The Powers, Vol 3). Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishe 

My main objection to personalising demons is that they then are regarded as having a 'body' or form seperate from the physical and historical institutions of which, on my theory
, they are the actial interiority. Therefore I prefer to regard them as the impersonal spiritual realities at the centre of institutional life. pp9

Frank Peretti's best selling novel, This present darkness, grandly illustrates the hopelessness of trying to repristinate the ancient worldview today. While I appreciate his treatment of the interconnection of heavenly and earthly reality, the role of human, the centrality of prayer, the angels of cities and nations, and the subtle coincidence of demonic promptings and people's words or thoughts, what we are served up is a consistently paranoid view of reality. pp9

Worldviews
Ancient worldview every earthly thing has it's eartly countrpart

Spiritualistic wotlview creation itself is the fall. Matter Is evil

Materialistic worldview no heaven nobspiritual world it is an illusion.

Theological supernatural realm invented. Immune to confirmation or refutation

Integral worlvuew - everything has outer and inner aspect. Seeks to take seriously the spiritual insights of the ancient worldview by affirminng a withiness in all things.

Domination system marked by the myth of redemptive violence and subjecture. Is the converse to god's dream for domination free order.

Domination chr by
Superiority
Power
Domination
Competition
Conquest
Autocracy
Authoritarian
Bureaucratic
Exploitation
Greed
Privilege
Inequality
Violence
Force
Suppresion
Self centred
Indoctrinating
Subordination

Domination inspired sustained and presided over by Satan chr by self assertion self protection self rxpansion Formation of seperations isolation alienation the represdion of thought feeling and impulse David Balkan pp 57

Kosmos - world ( domination system )
Jc came into the syrtem to save those who have missed the point of living 1 tim 1.15.

When 1 John 5:19 says that "the whole kosmos lies under the power of teh evil one'nthis obviously does not refer to the world as God's good creation. It can only mean that the Domination System is inspired, sustained, and presided over by Satan. The psychologist David Bakan characterises the satanic as self- assertion, self-protection, and self expansion; the formation of separations, isolation, alientaion, the repression of thought, feeling, and impulse. 57

The fall is not temporal event, the reach of whose effects we migt someday by sheer perseverance, outrun. It is mythic, which means it is always present. 76

First fall is that of the man and the woman Gen 3
Second fall is that of the angels - there is a rupture in the very spirituality of the universe (Gen 6:1-4) Human sin cannot therefore account for all evil. There is a withiness or spirituality in things that is capable of covetousness and insatiable greed.
The third fall is that of teh nations Gen 11 pp77

The gospel is not a message of personal salvation from the world, but a message of a world transfigured, right down to its basic structures. 83

Evangelism and social struggle are the twin pincers of a single movement for world transformation pp85

The gospel vision has been clouded and at times totally eclipsed by transferring God's reign to a heavenly afterlife of individual resitution 'pie in the sky when you die bye and bye 107

Evangelicals go for the heart - the whole gestalt of the ego, ideas, emotions,beliefs an dmyths. Their chief failing is ignoring the dimension of the powers. As a consequence, the genuinely converted person person is reinserted into the old, unchanged world with litle undersatnding of the social dimension of sin, which are kept mystified by blaming everything on 'satan' who is conceived as a bugaboo rather than the spirit of the domination system. 159

Jesus' third way luke 6:29

Turn the other cheek - strike me as an equal.
Give the undergarment - get naked!
Go second mile - Romans could ask someone to carry only one mile

Sieze the moral initiative
find a creative alternative to violence
assert your own humanity and dignity as a person
meet force with ridicule or humour
break the cycle of humiliation
refuse to submit to or accept the inferior position
expose the injustice of the system
take cotrol of the power dynamic
shame the oppresor into repentnce
stand your ground
make the powers make decisions for which they are not prepared
recognise your own power
be willing to suffer rather than retaliate
force the oppresor to see you in a new light
deprive the oppresor of a situation where a show of force is effective
be willing to undergo the penalty of breaking unjust laws
die to fear of the old order and its rules
seek the oppresors transformation 187

Jesus could not have said be perfect. there was no such word, or even concept. Mat appears to have taken teleios from deut 18:13 where hebrew tamim - whole, complete, fnished, entire, to have inegrity 268

before an unchangeable God, whose whole will was fixed from eternity, intercession is ridiculous. There is no place for intercession with a God whose will is incapable of change. This is the God of Stoicism 301

No doubt our intercessions sometimes change us as we open ourselves to new possibilities we had not guessed. No doubt our prayers to God reflect back upon us as a divine command to become the answer to our prayer. But if we are to take the biblical understanding seriously at all, intercession is more than that. It changes the world and it changes what is possible to God. 302

For intercession to be Christian, must be prayer for God's reign to come to earth. It must be prayer of God over disease, greed, oppression, and death... In our intercessions we fix our wills on the divine possibility latent in the present moment, and then find ourselves caught up in the whirlwind of God's struggle to actualise it. 303

All this about our role as intercessirs in creating history is arrogant bravado unless we recognize that it is god rather than ourselves who initiates prayer, and that it is god's power, not ours , that answers the world's needs. We are always preceded in intercession. God is always praying within us. When we turn to pray it is always the second step of prayer. We join with god in a prsyer already going on in us andin the world.

304

Jesus teaches us to command god, in the imperative mood, when we pray. Thecsxandal thatvsuch audacious in indecorous behaviour evokes among so many Christians us mitigated, however, if god is the intercessor. It is god who is crying out within us , god who is seeking to find in us a voice of command and who thus prompts us to complete the circuit.

307

Dan 10 - we do not know why God could not do better, why Michael is not sent to the aid of the messenger sooner. what does it say about the omnipotence of God? About God's ability to redeem? God's sovereignty over history. The principalities and powers are able to assert their will against the will of God and for a time prevail! The wonder then is not that our prayers are sometimes answered but the they are answered at all!310

Nuclear reduction treaty between USSR and USA

We have long accepted that God is limited by our freedom. The new insight from Daniel is that God is limited by the freedom of institutions and systems as well. 311.

Prayer is not magic it does not always 'work'. It is not something we do, but a response to what God is already doing within us and the world. Our prayers are the necessary opening that allows God to act without violating our freedom. Prayer is the ultimate act of partnership with God 312

What troubles me however is that by attempting to fight the demons 'in the air' evangelicals and charismatics will continue largely to ignore the institutional sources of the demonic. By doing so they will fail to do the hard political and economic analysis necessary to name, unmask and engage these powers transformitatively. 314

The greatness of Christianity lies in its being hated by the world (domination system), not in being convincing to it Ignatius of Antioch

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