Over the past few weeks, I've turned my attention again to the "principalities and powers" of the New Testament, in their varieties of forms. Earlier this week, I began reflecting on the very nature of the powers. Today, I want to look at our Christian response to them.
If I'm right -- if there are more powers than we might name -- our Christian response will also exist in varieties of ways. If the powers and principalities are legion, so are the means by which they assault, captivate, enslave, and dominate human beings.
In the end, all those strategies seek the death of the specific faculties of rational and moral comprehension which specifically distinguish human beings from all other creatures. Whatever form or appearance it make take, demonic aggression always aims at the immobilization or surrender or destruction of the mind and at the neutralization or abandonment or demoralization of the conscience.
The goal is to morally incapacitate human beings, to so confuse, distract or overwhelm us that we are made passive, docile, conformist, oblivious and obedient.
I think there are primarily 8 strategies used by the powers to accomplish this goal.
- The Denial of Truth
- Doublespeak and Overtalk
- Secrecy and Boast of Expertise
- Surveillance and Harassment
- Exaggeration and Deception
- Cursing and Conjuring
- Usurpation and Absorption
- Diversion and Demoralization
Whatever the specific means, the biblical shorthand for all of them is babel. Think Genesis 11.
Babel does two things. First, babel is moral confusion. Babel means the inversion of language, verbal inflation, libel, rumor, euphemism and coded phrases, rhetorical wantonness, redundancy, hyperbole, such profusion in speech and sound that comprehension is impaired, nonsense, sophistry, jargon, noise, incoherence, a chaos of voices and tongues, falsehood, blasphemy. In other words, babel assaults the intellect and its moral faculties.
Second, babel means violence. Think Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
Let us not forget that violence does not exist by itself and cannot do so; it is necessarily interwoven with lies. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.So much of what I've said applies to our politics. You don't need Orwell's 1984 to get there. Just read the Bible about politics. Though, to be clear, all organizations and institutions engage in lies, distraction, euphemism, harassment, surveillance and secrecy.
If I'm right -- the goal of all the principalities and powers is institutional survival. And yet, that brute fact is rarely discussed candidly and in the open. It's hidden under jargon, mission statements, and euphemism. Cutbacks -- also known as firing people -- are called "budget realignment" or "reinvestment". And in churches you see changes made -- in personnel, programs or presentation -- to put seats in the pews and money in the collection plate. Though that goal is never overtly named. The changes are called being "missional". Euphemism.
Still, the state functions as the preeminent principality and power. I think there is a "hierarchy of principalities" as the powers aren't all equal in life span or capacity for survival or in prominence or influence. The state exists at the top of this hierarchy: Among all the principalities, in their legion species and diversities, the State has a particular eminence.
That's why politics, in the biblical imagination, is so connected to "Anti-Christ". Consequently, in her battle against the Antichrist the church exists in a state of resistance in relation to the state. Those human beings and communities of humans who persevere in fidelity to God and to the gift of their humanity, those who resist death and thus live in Jesus Christ -- whether that be a public formality or not -- do so under the condemnation of the State in one way or another, be it in ridicule and ostracism, in poverty or imprisonment, as sojourners or fugitives, in clandestine existence, as a confessing movement, or, otherwise, in resistance.
How do we resist?
For inspiration I always turn to the resistance movement in Europe during the Nazi occupation. My academic work with Bonhoeffer has deeply informed how I think about a Christian response to evil. How did they resisted the Nazi occupation? How did they maintain their conscience and humanity living within a dehumanizing and oppressive regime?
If we really are "exiles" in a strange land (think 1 Peter), in a world controlled by powers and principalities, what lessons can we learn from the Confessing Church.
First, I think, we learn that humanity, sanity and conscience are preserved by small, daily actions of resistance and subversion. Acts so small that they seems nearly pointless, even foolhardy given the risk/reward ratio involved. The Resistance, undertaken and sustained through the long years of the Nazi ascendancy in which most of Western Europe was conquered and occupied, consisted, day after day, of small efforts. Each one of these, if regarded in itself, seems far too weak, too temporary, too symbolic, too haphazard, too meek, too trivial to be efficacious against the oppressive, monolithic, pervasive presence which Nazism was, both physically and psychically, in the nations which had been defeated and seized. Realistically speaking, those who resisted Nazism did so in an atmosphere in which hope, in its ordinary connotations, had been annihilated. To calculate their actions -- abetting escapes, circulating mimeographed news, hiding fugitives, obtaining money or needed documents, engaging in various forms of noncooperation with the occupying authorities or the quisling bureaucrats, wearing armbands, disrupting official communications -- in terms of odds against the Nazi efficiency and power and violence and vindictiveness would seem to render their witness ridiculous. The risks for them of persecution, arrest, torture, confinement, death were so disproportionate to any concrete results that could practically be expected that most human beings would have despaired -- and, we remember, most did. Yet these folks persevered in their audacious, extemporaneous, fragile, puny, foolish Resistance
I'm thinking of movements like the White Rose. When I speak about "spiritual warfare", about resistance to the principalities and powers, I'm speaking about what the White Rose martyrs exemplified. Spiritual warfare is about learning to live humanly in the Fall. Spiritual warfare consists of small, even symbolic, daily acts of resistance and subversion within systems -- organizational, political, economic and ideological -- to resist the dehumanizing effects of living with and among the principalities and powers.
And yet, these small acts of defiance seem pointless and even hopeless. Nothing will change! Regarding the resistance to the Nazis, those involved were engaged in exceedingly hard and hapless and apparently hopeless tasks. If nothing changes, the question must be asked: "Why would human beings take such risks?"
Here's my answer: It isn't, I think, because they were heroes or because they besought martyrdom; they were, at the outset, like the Apostles, quite ordinary folks -- whose lives were just like ours.
No, it wasn't because they were unique. It was because of their resistance. The act of resistance to the power of death incarnate in Nazism was the only means of retaining sanity and conscience. In the circumstances of the Nazi tyranny, resistance became the only human way to live. To exist, under Nazism, in silence, conformity, fear, acquiescence, obeisance, collaboration -- to covet "safety" or "security" on the conditions prescribed by the State -- caused moral insanity, meant suicide, was fatally dehumanizing, constituted a form of death. Resistance was the only stance worthy of a human being, as much in responsibility to oneself as to all other humans, as the famous Commandment mentions. And if that posture involved grave and constant peril of persecution, imprisonment, or execution, at least one would have lived humanly while taking these risks. Not to resist, on the other hand, involved the certainty of death -- of moral death, of the death of one's humanity, of death to sanity and conscience, of the death which possesses humans profoundly ungrateful for their own lives and for the lives of others.
Or, to put it another way, such resistance is "living in the truth of who and whose we are". Resistance is not living in a lie. The way you do that is in small acts of dissent and subversion in the face of the propaganda produced by the powers that be.
Spiritual warfare is learning to live humanly in a dehumanizing and violent world, learning to live within the truth in the face of the lies, propaganda and babel that justify and support the violent and dehumanizing systems of the world.
Here's the second lesson: Bible study.
For many within the resistance movement the Bible gave them a story to narrate their experience, a source of prophetic and apocalyptic critique that allowed them to recover their humanity in the face of dehumanizing forces attempting to strip them of dignity. The Bible became alive as a means of nurture and communication; recourse to the Bible was in itself a primary, practical, and essential tactic of resistance. Bible study furnished the precedent for the free, mature, ecumenical, humanizing style of life which became characteristic of those of the confessing movement. This was an exemplary way -- a sacrament, really-- which expounded the existential scene of the Resistance. That is, it demonstrated the necessities of acting in transcendence of time within time, of living humanly in the midst of death, of seeing and forseeing both the apocalyptic and eschatological in contemporary events. In Bible study within the anti-Nazi Resistance there was an edification of the new or renewed life to which human beings are incessantly called by God -- or, if you wish to put differently, by the event of their own humanity in this world -- and there was, thus, a witness which is veritably incorporated into the original biblical witness.
Just look at Bonhoeffer's leadership at the seminary at Finkenwalde. Read his account of Bible Study in his Life Together.
Those two acts -- small resistances guided and narrated by Scripture -- shape how we Christians can respond to the powers that be.
But those two acts also assume others -- like discernment -- that I want to talk about next.