17 The Myth of the Secular Society
My previous chapter was about the gospel and culture. This is a very familiar theme in contemporary theological and especially missiological discussion. The World Council of Churches has recently taken it as a major theme. But why should this become a theme for discussion? Why is there not an equally widespread discussion about the gospel and personal behavior? After all, "culture" is simply the word we use for the way in which a whole community of men and women behaves. The very formulation of the theme "Gospel and Culture" indicates (as I suggested in the last chapter) that a dualism has appeared in our thinking. It is a dualism which arises from our tendency to regard individual behavior as something which can be understood, explained, and perhaps changed, apart from the behavior of the society to which the individual belongs. In other words, the dualism arises from the individualism in our culture, and from the resultant privatization of our ethical thinking. It would not occur to people in a traditional African society to develop a theory of personal behavior apart from the way in which this is related to the life of the whole community. And, in accordance with this way of seeing things, the gospel would be seen as something which affects the way in which the whole society behaves and not just the way in which individuals behave. By contrast, one often hears in our Western society such statements as "The gospel is about changing people; it is addressed to the individual conscience, not to societies and institutions. Societies and institutions will only be changed when people are changed. It is therefore the business of the Church to address the individual conscience and to seek conversion there. The reformation of society will follow."
That way of thinking would seem strange to many human societies today. And surely even in our own highly individualistic society we know that the relation between individual behavior and the behavior of societies is not one-way; it is reciprocal. Professor Donnison has given a vivid illustration of this from personal experience in the Navy. He speaks of days spent in a transit camp where men were coming and going all the time and no enduring bonds were formed between them. In that camp, he says, one had to nail everything down or it would be stolen. Then he speaks of life on board ship on active service. The same men are his companions. But now he knows that any of his fellow crew members would without hesitation risk his own life for one of his mates. The same men were involved in both situations: in one they were bound together by a common purpose; in the other they were not. In the two different social contexts, their personal behavior was totally different Gust Sharing, Ed Duncan Forrester and Danus Skene, 1988, pp. 3-4). The society shapes the person as much as the person shapes the society. What exactly we are talking about when we speak of "the society" as distinct from the people who form the society is a matter we must come back to. It is the fundamental matter of this chapter.
Alasdair Maclntyre in his seminal book After Virtue contrasts the contemporary way of discussing ethical issues as though they were simply a matter of how each individual decides, in sovereign autonomy, how to act, with the Greek way of seeing behavior as sharing in the life of a polis, an ordered community. So the question "How shall I behave?" is only to be answered by asking the more basic question, "What kind of a community do I want to share in?" As a vivid illustration of the difference Maclntyre quotes the often repeated saying of E. M. Forster that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying his friends, he hoped he would betray his country. On this Maclntyre comments that a man who can write those words has never had a country. In the Greek sense, he has never been citizen of a city. The only human community he has known is that of his personally, individually chosen friends.
The idea that the gospel is addressed only to the individual and that it is only indirectly addressed to societies, nations, and cultures is simply an illusion of our individualistic post-Enlightenment Western culture. Very plainly when we turn to the Old Testament we find no such separation of the individual from the society which nurtures and forms him and of which he is a part. The Torah, God's gracious instruction of his people, is addressed as much to the life of the nation as to that of the individual. It is as much about law and order, hygiene, economics, social welfare, and politics as it is about personal morals. It is Israel as a whole which is addressed in the Torah. That is obvious; but many would say that this is one of the matters on which the teaching of the New Testament is radically different from that of the Old. In the New Testament, they would say, God's word is addressed to the individual, not to a nation, and the new Israel is not a nation but a community of individuals living in many cities and states but bound together by their individual commitment to Jesus Christ. The New Testament, it is said, does not envisage a social or political reformation of Greek and Roman society; it simply accepts that society as the milieu within which individuals have to work out their own salvation. Is this true? I do not believe that it is, and in order to correct what I believe to be a flawed reading of the New Testament, I want to direct attention to an element in its teaching which has been neglected in the modern period of the historical-critical approach to the Scriptures but is--once you open your eyes to it-extremely prominent.
I refer to the whole mass of teaching in St. Paul's letters about what are variously called principalities, powers, dominions, thrones, authorities, rulers, angels, and other names. With these we must also look at what the Gospels have to say about hostile spiritual powers, about Satan, and about what the Fourth Gospel calls "the ruler of this world." If I am not mistaken, most scholarly readers of the New Testament in the past 150 years have regarded all this language as something which we can for practical purposes ignore because it belongs to a thought-world which we have grown out of. We imagine a host of angelic or demonic beings flying around in the air somewhere above our heads, suppose that Paul and his contemporaries believed in these, just as people once believed in fairies and elves, and conclude that we can ignore this part of his writing. The domination of a reductionist materialism, which supposed that when we had discovered the atomic and molecular and biological facts about any phenomemon we had explained it, has prevented us from discerning the realities that Paul and other New Testament writers are talking about, and they are realities.
When we read right through the whole New Testament looking for words which speak of power, authority, rule, dominion, or lordship, we find such words on almost every page. The central phrase of the gospel, the kingdom of God, is obviously about power, authority, rule. In a vast number of cases, of course, the words refer to what we would recognize as human rulers and authorities-magistrates, priests, elders, a governor like Pilate, or a petty rajah like Herod. When Paul writes about "the powers that be" in Romans 13, it is clear that they are human beings, for they wear swords and collect taxes. But what are we to make of the principalities and powers in the heavenly places against which we are to wrestle (Eph. 6:12)? And how on earth is the church to set about making known the manifold wisdom of God to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places (Eph. 3:10)? Are these powers the same as or quite different from the powers that collect taxes on earth? When Paul says that none of the rulers of this world understood the wisdom of God, for if they had they would not have crucified the Lord of glory (1 Cor. 2:8), is he just talking about Herod and Pilate, or about something else? A couple of verses earlier Paul has said that these rulers are doomed to pass away. But Herod and Pilate had disappeared from the scene before Paul wrote these words. Does he mean that these two men are doomed to pass away? If so, it seems hardly worth saying: they are already dead. So does he mean that their roles, their offices, their authority is doomed to pass away? Are we talking about an individual called Herod or Pilate or Smith or Jones, or are we talking about something which is temporarily embodied in these officeholders, about the role rather than the individual who plays it? And when (according to the Fourth Gospel) Jesus speaks of his coming death and says, "Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the ruler of this world be cast out" (John 12:31), he cannot be speaking just of Herod or Pilate; neither of them could be called "ruler of this world." Clearly this language does not simply refer to certain human beings who hold these offices of power and authority for a few years and are then dead and gone. They refer to something behind these individuals, to the offices, the powers, the authority which is represented from time to time by this or that individual. It is these powers, authorities, rulers, dominions which have been confronted in Christ's death with the supreme power and authority of God. That is why it is the business of the Church to make manifest to them the wisdom of God. That is why we are told in the brief, hymnlike words of 1 Timothy 3:16 that God was "manifested in the flesh, vindicated in the Spirit, seen by angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world." What was done in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus confronts the powers before it is preached among the nations. That is why we are told that the risen Christ has been seated at God's right hand with all the principalities and powers under his feet (Eph. 1:21). That is why we are also told that Christ in his cross disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in his cross (Col. 2:14). But what exactly are these principalities and powers?
It seems clear from the examples already quoted that these powers do not exist apart from the human agencies in which they are embodied-Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas. Yet they are not identical with these particular individuals. They refer, I suggested, to that which is behind them, to the power which they represent and exercise but which is not identical with them. We are talking about power and authority which is real, which is embodied in and exercised by individual human beings, but is not identical with them. The king dies, but the kingship goes on. Another king steps into the place. But what is this thing that we call "kingship"? I used a spatial metaphor when I spoke of the authority which is "behind" the particular person who holds office and exercises authority for the moment. A spatial metaphor is obviously very inadequate. You do not find a thing called kingship by looking behind the king's back. We say that kingship is a reality which is more than, which transcends the particular exercise of kingship by this man or this woman. But we do not escape the spatial metaphor, for "transcendence" means being above something else. When in contemporary English we speak of the relation of a spiritual reality to its visible embodiment, we tend to think of inwardness-another spatial metaphor. We cannot avoid spatial metaphors but we can be saved from being misled by acknowledging that a variety of metaphors is possible. Shall we speak of the spiritual power within, behind, or above its visible embodiment? We all know very well that long-enduring institutions have something, an inwardness which can be recognized in those who form the institution at any one time, but outlasts and transcends them. This "something" may be benevolent or malevolent. A good school has a spirit, an ethos, which molds the characters of the pupils. It was there before they came, and it will be there after all the present pupils have left. A nation similarly has something which is not just the sum of the attitudes of its individual citizens. And a mob can become an embodiment of evil, an evil which its individual members would never have wished for on their own. Clearly this "something" has reality. But we cannot locate it spatially within, behind, or above its visible embodiment. It is not something which hovers in the air above the heads of living human beings. We have tended to read the New Testament as though this was how its writers conceived of this spiritual reality. We have assumed that "the heavenly places," where the principalities and powers dwell, are above our heads. But Paul is not a victim of his own inevitably spatial lan guage. According to Paul, those who are in Christ are already seated in the heavenly places where Christ is (Eph. 1:20). This "something" which is invisible, and which cannot be located spatially either within or behind or above its earthly manifestations, is nevertheless real-terribly real. When Christians have to fight their battles, they are not just fighting with this or that person, this magistrate or that temple priest, or that angry mob in the theater; they are not fighting against flesh and blood. Their conflict is not against human beings. It is against the spiritual power that is-how shall we say it?-behind, within, and above human beings. It is this that we have to address. So when John the Seer addresses the churches in Asia, he does not address their members as individuals whom he could name; he addresses the angels of the churches, the spiritual reality, the power-good, bad, or mixed-which is embodied in the congregation, which is more than the personal conduct of each individual. And so throughout the Book of Revelation, there is always a correspondence between the war in heaven and the wars and disasters on earth. The happenings on earth are only understood in terms of the spiritual battle between the victorious Christ who is seated on the throne in the heavenly places, and the spiritual powers that challenge his rule.
Paul's use of words in relation to these unseen realities is extremely flexible. Such words as principalities, powers, dominions, thrones, angels, authorities, and others are used without any apparent attempt to distinguish between their meanings if indeed there is any difference. Just as no one spatial metaphor can describe the relation between these invisible entities and their visible embodiments, so no one word is adequate to denote them. There is, however, one other word which Paul uses in this connection and which helps us to get to the heart of his meaning. It occurs in the passage of Colossians where we are told that Christ in his cross has disarmed the powers (Col. 2:15). This is the word stoicheion, used always in the plural, stoicheia. It is variously translated in our versions: "rudiments," "elements," "elementary spirits," "ruling spirits of the universe." Its basic meaning is simply expressed in the word "elements." It is very frequently used in contemporary Greek writing for the four elements-air, earth, fire, and water. It is used for the letters of the alphabet. It is used in the Letter to the Hebrews (5:12) for the first principles, the elementary matters of the gospel. It may seem strange that Paul brings this word into close relation with his language about principalities and powers, as he does in two places. In Galatians Paul seems to identify it with the law. He tells his readers that before Christ came they were like children under the law which was their custodian, but that now in Christ we have been set free from this control so as to live in the freedom of the Spirit. And to those who want to creep back again under the protection of the law, by receiving circumcision, he says, "Formerly you were in bondage to beings that by nature are no gods; but now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly stoicheia, whose slaves you want to be once more?" (Gal. 4:89). In the Letter to the Colossians his readers are warned against becoming a prey to "philosophy and empty deceit, according to human traditions, according to the stoicheia of the universe and not according to Christ," and later on they are told that having died to the stoicheia, they should not live as if they belonged to this world, submitting to all sorts of rules and regulations (Col. 2:8, 20). In both passages it is the work of Christ which has delivered Christians from the power of the stoicheia and in the Colossians passage it is stated that this is because Christ has disarmed the principalities and powers.
What is clear in these as in other passages is that the powers have been disarmed but not destroyed. They are put under the supreme dominion of Christ by what he has done on the cross, but they still exist. We have to wrestle with them. And the Church has to make manifest to them the wisdom of God as revealed in Jesus (Eph. 3:10). Moreover, in the letter to the Colossians it is explicitly stated that the powers were created through Christ and for Christ and in him alone they have their coherence (Col. 1:15-17). So these things, whatever they are, have a good purpose. They are intended to serve the purpose of God as manifest in Christ. And yet it is these things, these principalities and powers, which crucified the Lord of glory. There has been a rebellion of these powers against their proper sovereign Lord. The rebellion has been put down. The rebellious powers are not destroyed; they are disarmed. They still have a function to perform in God's ordering of the universe, but they must now subserve their Lord They are under his feet, and in the end they will disappear when (according to 1 Cor. 15:24) Christ destroys them and hands over the kingdom to his Father.
How do we interpret this language? Simply to ignore it as some sort of outdated mythology would be a disastrous mistake. It is obviously an extremely important element in Paul's teaching. Nor are we without clues to its meaning.
Let us begin with the matter which is at issue in Galatians, namely the law. Paul has repeatedly affirmed that the law is a good gift of God. Yet it has become a power that enslaves, from which Christ had to deliver us by his death. It was the representatives of the law who put Jesus on the cross. But Caiaphas and his colleagues were not just a few wicked men. They were acting as the temporary agents and embodiments of something more fundamental and more enduring than their own individual opinions. The Colossians passage speaks of "human traditions" about eating and drinking and the observance of seasons and festivals. The passage in Romans 13 refers to the state authorities. The passages in 1 Corinthians 2 refer simply to "the rulers of this age," which no doubt includes all those elements which had a hand in the decision to destroy Jesus-legal, political, ecclesiastical, and other. If one can summarize all these as referring to the structural elements in human life, one brings them into relation with the language about the stoicheia. All human life is lived and has to be lived within limits which are set by certain structural features, both of the natural world and of the world of human society. In the former category belong the fundamental elements of the physical universe (the original meaning of stoicheia), the invariances which are the subject of natural science and which make it possible for us to behave rationally in the world. If we could not rely on these invariances, on the fundamental stability of the natural world, we could not live a human life. So also our life in society is structured by law, custom, and tradition. Without these we could not develop into responsible beings. No one lives and no one could live a rational life if there were no given norms (which may be different in different places and times) which govern behavior. Most of the time even the most eccentric human being does from moment to moment what the normal customs and traditions of his or her society indicate. Nor can we function without the help of accepted roles. A person appointed to a public office, or ordained to the Christian ministry, may in course of time develop very fresh and original ways of interpreting his role. But she has to begin by accepting the guidance of the tradition. One cannot begin by a sort of creatio ex nihilo, developing a totally original model of behavior unrelated to the expectations of the society which has appointed her to this role. A person who tried to do this simply could not function in her role. So also with our life in larger political units. There has to be some kind of ordered structure of power. Without it, human life would dissolve into anarchy. These structural elements are necessary to guide and protect human life. They serve God's purpose. But, as we well know, they can also become demonic. The God-given authority of the state can be used for tyranny. Roles can become dehuman izing so that even our best efforts at goodness can become-as Jesus said -play-acting, hypocrisy.
I have been speaking of entities which are not just individual human beings, flesh and blood in Pauline language, but which yet exist and have power. I have been speaking of norms, roles, and structures. We have to acknowledge the reality and the power of these things, and we have to ask what the gospel has to do with them. And we have seen that a great deal of New Testament writing is addressed exactly to that question. These things, says Paul, are good creations of God. They have a part to play in his purpose. But they can come to usurp the place to which they have no right, the place which belongs to Christ and to him alone. They can be, as we say, absolutized, and then they become demonic. The power ordained by God of Romans 13 becomes the Beast of Revelation. The Torah, that loving instruction which God gives his people and the beauty of which is celebrated in Psalm 119, becomes a tyrant from which Christ has to deliver us. Tradition, the handing on of good practice from parent to child as it is so beautifully described in Deuteronomy, becomes an evil power which comes between human beings and the living God.
These are examples from the New Testament itself of the ways in which the powers, created in Christ and for Christ, become agents of tyranny. One could give many more examples from outside the New Testament. Number is one of the stoicheia which has fascinated thinkers of various schools. Numbering enables us to measure and quantify. It is an element of order in the universe. But it can become a tyrant when, as in modern reductionist thinking, it is absolutized and nothing is valued except what can be measured and quantified.
Chance seems to be a fundamental element in this contingent universe which God has created. In past times it was made into a goddess and named Fortuna. And, though not given a personal name, the same power rules wide swathes of contemporary thought. Chance mutations in the transmission of genes becomes the sovereign power governing the emergence of life. The chance workings of the free market become the "Invisible Hand" of Adam Smith which mysteriously converts private selfishness into public good. This particular example of an invisible power ruling over human affairs is particularly relevant at present, since it is one of the key arguments of the religious Right against the religious Left that one cannot speak of justice or injustice when describing the huge differences between rich and poor in our society. These, on this view, cannot be called unjust because they are not the work of conscious human agency but the result of chance. Thus in our economic life we are no longer responsible to Christ; we are not responsible at all, for economic life has been handed over to the goddess Fortuna. It is not difficult to recognize that as one of the principalities and powers of which Paul speaks.
Race is another element in the structuring of human life. Family, kinship, tribal community-these are all parts of the structure of human life which play a vital part in the nurturing the developing of authentic humanity. It was therefore with good intention that missionaries in South Africa insisted that African Christians should be able to organize their churches and conduct their worship in their own traditional ways and using their own languages. But when this good provision was given an absolute status as part of the order of creation, not subject to Christ, it became the demonic power of apartheid. No one who lives in South Africa can doubt its reality and power, and the task of Christians in that country is not to wrestle against flesh and blood, not to attack the Godfearing Afrikaners, but to wrestle against the demonic power which is as real as it is invisible.
Money is perhaps another example of the principalities and powers of our time. As is well known, Marx used the word "fetishism" to speak of the attitude to money which he found in capitalist society. Money, which is a useful means for facilitating exchange, has become a power in itself, so that we do not measure human wealth in terms of real goodness and happiness but in terms of cash. Money has truly become a fetish, a power which demands and receives absolute devotion. In the vision of Marx the proletariat was to be a sort of corporate Messiah which would overthrow the power of this false god and create a society of free and responsible human relationships. Alas, the proletariat is not Christ. The Marxist ideology has itself become a power in the Pauline sense, which controls human behavior and forces those under its power to crush the free expression of the human spirit. The wrestling of men and women like Solzhenitsyn is not against flesh and blood, not against particular human beings, but against the invisible but terribly powerful spiritual force that controls their actions.
The principalities and powers are real. They are invisible and we cannot locate them in space. They do not exist as disembodied entities floating above this world, or lurking within it. They meet us as embodied in visible and tangible realities-people, nations, and institutions. And they are powerful. What is Christ's relation to them? To recapitulate briefly: they are created in Christ and for Christ; their true end is to serve him; some do-for the New Testament speaks of good angels who perform his service; but they become powers for evil when they attempt to usurp the place which belongs to Christ alone. In his death Christ has disarmed them; he has put them under his feet; they must now serve him; and the Church is the agency through which his victory over them is made manifest and is effected as the Church puts on the whole armor of God to meet and master them. The language is pictorial, mythological if you like, because we have no other language. But the things described are real and are contemporary. They are at the heart of our business as Christians. Let me try to spell this out in terms of contemporary Christian duty.
In the cross Christ has disarmed the powers. He has unmasked them. He has not destroyed them, but-in Johannine language-has cast the ruler of this world out of his usurped throne. What I have called the structural elements in the world as we know it, from the basic structure of the physical world to the social and political structures of the nations, to the customs and traditions by which human beings are normally guided, to what the sociologists call the "plausibility structures" by which all human thinking is guided: all of these are part of God's good ordering of his creation. Yet it was these things which at the decisive denouement, the moment when they were confronted by the living God in person, by him in whom the fullness of Godhead was present bodily, were found ranged in unanimous and murderous hostility against him. The death of Christ was the unmasking of the powers. Caiaphas and Herod and Pilate were not uniquely wicked men; they were acting out their roles as guardians of the political and moral and religious order. They acted as representatives of what the New Testament calls the world, this present age. When God raised the crucified Jesus, this present age and its structures was exposed, illuminated, unmasked-but not destroyed. Cross and resurrection seen together mean both judgment and grace, both wrath and endless patience. God still upholds the structures; without them the world would collapse and human life would be unthinkable. But the structures lose their pretended absoluteness. Nothing now is absolute except God as he is known in Jesus Christ; everything else is relativized. That is the bottom line for Christian thinking and the starting point for Christian action in the affairs of the world. What does it imply in practice?
Let me begin with some negatives. It does not mean anarchy. It does not mean an attack on structures as such. Many people are tempted this way. There are those for whom Christian freedom means a rejec tion of institutions, traditions, laws, and structures. And they can always show good reasons, for all human traditions, institutions, and structures are prone to evil-including religion and including Christianity and the Church. They are all part of this present age. They are all prone to make absolutist claims. They are all ambiguous. There are always good reasons for attacking them. But human life is impossible without them, and God in his mercy preserves them in order to give time for the Church to fulfill its calling to make manifest to them the wisdom of God. Our relation to the structures has to contain both the judgment that is inevitable in the searing light of the cross, and also the patience which is required of us as witnesses to the resurrection. We are not conservatives who regard the structures as part of the unalterable order of creation, as part of the world of what we call "hard facts" beyond the range of the gospel, and who therefore suppose that the gospel is only relevant to the issues of personal and private life. Nor are we anarchists who seek to destroy the structures. We are rather patient revolutionaries who know that the whole creation, with all its given structures, is groaning in the travail of a new birth, and that we share this groaning and travail, this struggling and wrestling, but do so in hope because we have already received, in the Spirit, the firstfruit of the new world (Rom. 8:1925).
But, second, as Paul tells us, our wrestling is not against flesh and blood but against the principalities and powers in the invisible world (Eph. 6:12). What are we talking about when we speak of confronting the institutions of state and market economy and culture with the gospel? We are not fighting against the individuals who perform their roles within these institutions. We know well that when we get a chance to talk intimately with them, they feel themselves powerless. To the outsider they appear to wield great power, but they know that they are under the control of forces greater than their own and that their freedom to change things is very narrowly limited. Those who call for a Christian assault on the worlds of politics and economics often make it clear that the attack belongs to the same order of being as the enemy to be attacked. The aim of the attack is to seize the levers of power and take control. We have seen many such successful revolutions, and we know that in most cases what has happened is simply that the oppressor and the oppressed have exchanged roles. The structure is unchanged. The throne is unshaken, only there is a different person occupying it. How is the throne itself to be shaken? How is the power to be disarmed and placed at the service of Christ? Only by the power of the gospel itself, announced in word and embodied in deed. As Walter Wink reminds us, the victory of the Church over the demonic power which was embodied in the Roman imperial system was not won by seizing the levers of power: it was won when the victims knelt down in the Colosseum and prayed in the name of Jesus for the Emperor. The soldiers in Christ's victorious army were not armed with the weapons of this age; they were the martyrs whose robes were washed in blood. It was not that a particular Emperor was discredited and displaced; it was that the entire mystique of the Empire, its spiritual power, was unmasked, disarmed, and rendered powerless. A conversion of individuals which failed to identify, unmask, and reject that spiritual, ideological power would have been as futile as an attempt by Christians to wrest that power from its holders. Evangelism which is politically and ideologically naive, and social action which does not recognize the need for conversion from false gods to the living God, both fall short of what is required.
The principalities and powers are realities. We may not be able to visualize them, to locate them, or to say exactly what they are. But we are foolish if we pretend that they do not exist. Certainly one cannot read the Gospels without recognizing that the ministry of Jesus from beginning to end was a mighty spiritual battle with powers which are not simply human frailties, errors, diseases, or sins. And one cannot read St. Paul, or the other books of the New Testament, without recognizing that this drama of Christ's disarming of the powers is central to their meaning. If we dismiss this as merely outworn mythology, we shall be incapable of grasping the central message of the New Testament. If we try to systematize the diffuse and flexible language of the writers and develop a sort of systematic demonology, we shall also go astray. But if we live in the real world and take the Bible as our clue for understanding and coping with it, we shall certainly know what it means that our wrestling is not against flesh and blood but against the invisible principalities and powers, and we shall learn what it means to put on the whole armor of God for the conflict.