Discussion Questions for Walter Wink, The Powers That Be
This book is unashamedly about things spiritual. It assumes that spiritual reality is at the heart of everything…It sees spirit – the capacity to be aware of and responsive to God – at the core of every [thing]… (13)
Do you share Wink’s assumption? How does this impact your perspective on the world?
The descriptions of the worldviews – I inhabit several of them – contextually. That is, I am in the materialist, theological and integral worldviews in different aspects of my life. How might this be true for you?
How open are you to spiritual reality as Wink describes it. He writes, I prefer to think of the Powers as impersonal entities, though I know of no sure way to settle the question…Do these entities possess actual metaphysical being, or are they the “corporate personality” or ethos of an institution or epoch, having no independent existence apart from the incarnation in a system? (27)
The Powers are at once good and evil, though to varying degrees, and they are capable of improvement. (31) …God at one and the same time upholds a given political or economic system, since some such system is required to support human life; condemns that system insofar as it is destructive of fully human life; and presses for its transformation into more human order. Conservatives stress the first, revolutionaries the second, reformers the third. The Christian is expected to hold together all three. (32).
In our current societal context, does this still ring true?
Meeting time on Zoom: February 24, 6 pm MT / 8 pm ET