#262: Mayday Monday – “Engaging the Powers”

“What we see instead is a mounting impatience with the laborious processes of civilized life and a restless eagerness to embrace violent solutions. Better to mete out instant, summary justice than risk the red tape and delays and bumbling of the courts.26 The yearning for a messianic redeemer who will set things right is thus, in its essence, a totalitarian fantasy.”*

“In the service of one's country, the spy is permitted to murder, seduce, lie, steal, commit illegal entry, tap phones without a court order, and otherwise do anything necessary to protect the values of Christian civilization (the James Bond movies, "Mission: Impossible," etc.).”** ____________________________________
*Walter Wink. Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Kindle Locations 337-338). Kindle Edition.
**Ibid (Kindle Locations 344-346).

#260: Mayday Monday – “Unmasking the Powers”

“Angels, spirits, principalities, powers, gods, Satan—these, along with all other spiritual realities, are the unmentionables of our culture. The dominant materialistic worldview has absolutely no place for them. These archaic relics of a superstitious past are unspeakable because modern secularism simply has no categories, no vocabulary, no presuppositions by which to discern what it was in the actual experiences of people that brought these words to speech. And it has massive resistance even to thinking about these phenomena, having fought so long and hard to rid itself of every vestige of transcendence.”*

“Held up against the divine Logos, Satan here would represent the lesser lures and promptings that appear alongside the lure of the highest. Some of these lures are flagrantly evil; most are not intrinsically evil but merely trivial, less than best: a diversion, a waste.”**

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*Wink, Walter. Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence .[Vol 2] Fortress Press. (Loc. 126+) Kindle Edition.
**Ibid., . (Loc. 513+).

#258: Mayday Monday – “Naming the Powers”

"[E]ven the good, made absolute, becomes evil. Even the best can be perverted by idolatry (the Law, the Temple, religion itself). None is immune to apostasy. None is able, however apostate, to negate the work of Christ.'*

"When a particular Power becomes idolatrous, placing itself above God's purposes for the good of the whole, then that Power becomes demonic. The church's task is to unmask this idolatry and recall the Powers to their created purposes in the world-"so that the Sovereignties and Powers should learn only now, through the Church, how comprehensive God's wisdom really is."**

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*Walter Wink. Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament (The Powers : Volume One) (Kindle Locations 551-552). Kindle Edition.
**Ibid., (Kindle Locations 115-117).