The Influence and Impact of Walter Wink’s Engaging Powersthe

Walter Wink was an American theologian, pastor and activist of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. Ordained in the Methodist Church in 1961, he later became a Professor focussing on the New Testament and Biblical Interpretation. He taught at Union Theological Seminary and later Auburn Theological Seminary in New York. He died in 2012, leaving a profound legacy.

Wink was especially known for his work on power structures, culminating in a trilogy of works – Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament, Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence, and Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination. In these three books, Wink challenged the notion of conceptualising the Powers of the New Testament as an order of angelic and demonic beings in heaven. Rather he proposed that Paul’s framework of Powers as presented in Ephesians 6:12 was concerned with structural, social, political, and state Powers. In Engaging the Powers, Wink writes:

"In the biblical view they are both visible and invisible, earthly and heavenly, spiritual and institutional. The Powers possess an outer, physical manifestation (buildings, portfolios, personnel, trucks, fax machines) and an inner spirituality, or corporate culture, or collective personality. The Powers are the simultaneity of an outer, visible structure and an inner, spiritual reality. The Powers, properly speaking, are not just the spirituality of institutions, but their outer manifestations as well…what people in the world of the Bible experienced and called “Principalities and Powers” was in fact real. They were discerning the actual spirituality at the center of the political, economic, and cultural institutions of their day. The spiritual aspect of the Powers is not simply a “personification” of institutional qualities that would exist whether they were personified or not. On the contrary, the spirituality of an institution exists as a real aspect of the institution even when it is not perceived as such. Institutions have an actual spiritual ethos…"

Engaging the Powers celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2022. This work explored the question “How can we oppose evil without creating new evils and being made evil ourselves?”

One of the evils that Wink explores in depth is what he has called the myth of redemptive violence. Violence, he contends, is “the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world.” It is so much a part of contemporary life that it does not appear mythic at all. Rather, it is understood as the nature of things, as inevitable, and it appears to work. Wink sees its history from the creation myths of the ancient world, the history of war around the world, through to its use in children’s cartoons.

Wink does not, however, see this as the last word. He posits that the Powers are good, but they are fallen and, as such, must be redeemed. To this end, Engaging the Powers explores a number of ways of Biblically and Christianly honouring, criticising, resisting, and redeeming the Powers. This includes exploring how God’s domination-free reign works, non-violent engagement, pacifism, loving enemies, prayer, and celebrating God’s ultimate victory.

The impact and influence of Wink’s works, and especially Engaging the Powers, where he is exploring the practical aspects of resisting and redeeming the Powers in the world, cannot be underestimated.

Scottish activist and Quaker, Alistair McIntosh, writes in Engaging Walter Wink’s Powers – An Activist’s Testimony that one of the most important things that transformed him from teenage agnostic activist was encountering Wink’s works while at a Quaker and Iona Community event at Peace House led by Helen Steven. Wink’s work, she believed, “was of profound importance to activism, and especially nonviolent activism, because it took the understanding of power into realms deeper than she had ever previously encountered in theological writing.”

Teacher and advocate Ken Butigan sees Wink’s greatest contribution to activism as his work on reinterpreting Biblical texts used for teaching submission and complicity. By investigating passages about turning the other cheek, giving up one’s cloak, and going the extra mile, Wink offered an active, courageous, and creative third way exists between passivity on the one hand and counter-violence on the other. This alternative seizes the moral initiative, explores a creative alternative to violence, asserts the dignity and humanity of all parties, seeks to break the cycle of dehumanisation and faces the consequences of one’s action.