Few themes in recent New Testament interpretation have “taken off”
in the popular theological culture as has the vision of the rebellious powers. The kind of popularization represented in my original notes by the references (n. 6) to Albert van den Heuvel and William Stringfellow continued to grow in popularity since the 1970s. The vision of a dialectical interlocking of created goodness and rebelliousness, in what makes the world the way it is, has been found illuminating by many.
A simple example: in the major addresses presented at the 1980 Assembly of the Division of World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches, gathered at Melbourne, allusions to “the principalities and powers” were in every major address.” Hendrikus Berkhof updated his booklet (n. 5 above).
The most thorough review of the theme is the trilogy by Walter Wink. Anthony Tyrell Hanson devoted to it an insightful chapter. Jacques Ellul, the prolific French Reformed sociologist and lay theologian, made the dialectic of creatureliness and rebellion the key to his entire oeui/re of critical social thought.” It would not be too much to claim that the Pauline26 cosmology of the powers represents an alternative to the dominant (“Thomist”) vision of “natural law” as a more biblical way systematically to relate Christ and creation.
But for our purposes it suffices to observe that exegetical scholarship has continued to confirm that in the Pauline witness Jesus is confessed as foundationally relevant to the political realm -- not only in the biographical sense which we saw at work above in chapters 2 and 3 of this book, but in the cosmological sense that “cross and resurrection” designates not only a few days’ events in first-century Jerusalem but also the shape of the cosmos.
This is not to say that there is any detailed consensus among scholars on the simplest levels, as to the sense in which the powers are “real.”27 Are they a metaphor for constructs in the human mind? Are they “real super-human spiritual entities” something like angels? Walter Wink tries a new answer of his own to this question; Jacques Ellul seems to have shifted his answer recently from something more realistic to something more metaphorical. None of these debates about nuance would seem to undermine the thesis that this set of passages from the Pauline corpus demonstrates an astoundingly sweeping and coherent “translation” of the political meaning of Jesus into the worldview of the audience of Paul’s missionary witness.
I doubt that our concern to interpret the witness of the apostolic Scriptures in their setting is much served by our importing this kind of modern question into the interpretation of first-century literature, however much we as moderns are driven to ask them. Whether Jesus’ work and witness were and are politically relevant for the witnesses of the first generations does not depend on our answering our contemporary question, “In what sense are the powers real? In what sense are they ‘persons’?" The growing bulk of serious social thought using these concepts, referred to at the beginning of this epilogue, should be sufficient demonstration that the Pauline vision is realistic and illuminating.
If it could be our task here to enter modern conversations about social ethics, the point to make would be that this Pauline vision is far more nuanced and helpful than much contemporary discussion about “the problem of power” in Christian social ethics. For many who use that phrase it designates little more than a sense of guilt about “realistically” having to “take responsibility” for harming some persons in the interest of desirable social ends. The Pauline perspective is far more clear about the intrinsic complexities of institutional and psychodynamic structures, such that basically good creaturely structures can nonetheless be oppressive, and basically selfish decisions can sometimes nonetheless have less evil outcomes. Neither guilt about losing personal purity, nor pragmatism about doing lesser evils to achieve greater goods, is then at the heart of “the problem of power” for “Paul," as they are for our contemporaries.” The challenge to which the proclamation of Christ’s rule over the rebellious world speaks a word of grace is not a problem within the self but a split within the cosmos.
