Faithful Witness

Chapter 9 opens with the power of naming. God has Adam name the creatures. God renames Abram, Jacob, and Simon. Woodward adds that naming an emotion can tame it, citing Matthew Lieberman's work on putting feelings into words. Then he turns the same dignity toward the Powers. It takes spiritual discernment, he writes, to identify, analyze, and articulate them so their subversion can be unmasked. Wink, Girard, and Stringfellow help him do that naming. Stringfellow is the one who translates the principalities into words a present church can hear: image, institution, and ideology.

Chapter 4 shows why the naming has to include systems, not only a villain in a headline. Shortly after Woodward moved to Los Angeles in 2002, he watched a local news crew take a maintained car through eight stores of a national chain for an oil change. The stores upsold work that had just been done. Employees who failed to get a customer to spend, on average, at least $68 more faced termination. Staff with families became accustomed to lying. He calls it a minor example of systems that push people to oppress or be oppressed. Wink's line, which he sets beside it, is that the Powers staff hospitals, run City Hall, sit in boardrooms, collect taxes, and head families. They are the systems themselves. They are necessary. They are also the source of unmitigated evils.

Naming, in this theme, is how a congregation learns to say racism and nationalism out loud as principalities, and to say when an ideology is asking for the allegiance that belongs to Christ. The baptized, he writes in chapter 9, swear allegiance to a different kind of King and a different kind of kingdom.

ing is the work of showing what the name was hiding. In chapter 4, Wink's second book takes up the invisible forces that determine human existence, including the angel of a nation. Nations can bond a people. Nationalism, Wink says as Woodward reports him, has an irresistible tendency toward idolatry. Wink calls the most believed myth in contemporary American culture the myth of redemptive violence, and Woodward records Wink's view of it as nationalism becoming absolute. In that myth the survival of the nation is lifted up as the highest earthly and heavenly good.

Chapter 10 brings the unmasking into the leader's reading of Scripture. The devil quotes the Bible at the temple and tells Jesus to throw himself down. Jacques Ellul calls it an ideological-religious temptation. Woodward says this is how an ideology shapes a leader's interpretation. The Scriptures have been used to justify slavery and violence. The text meant to release leaders to love and liberate is used to dominate. He cites Richard Twiss on colonization and the work of decolonizing the gospel, and David Koyzis and Bob Goudzwaard on ideology as a false revelation of creation, fall, and redemption. Capitalism, liberalism, nationalism, and communism, he writes, carry their own aim and ask for ultimate allegiance. Every ideology has a scapegoat. The founding of America, he says, was intertwined with the principality of racism. He quotes Eduardo Bonilla-Silva: "Racism now exists without racists."

The churchly form of the unmasking is the paragraph that gives this page its name. If others look to us as models, they imitate malformed desires, until churches scapegoat "the other" and segregate by ideology. Some Christians in America seem captivated by nationalism and conservatism. Progressive liberalism mirrors those actions and scapegoats the people captive to conservatism. A church in that captivity mimics the world. It no longer remains a faithful witness to God's kingdom. When life in God and the kingdom of God is the telos, there is room for everyone at the table.

Wink chooses the word engage, Woodward notes, and sets it apart from confront, combat, or overcome, because the Powers were created good, have fallen, and must be redeemed. They are to be honored, criticized, resisted, and redeemed. The question Wink poses, and Woodward keeps, is how we oppose evil without creating new evils and being made evil ourselves. Chapter 10 quotes N. T. Wright: the victory of the cross will be implemented through the means of the cross. The Powers hope a leader will imitate them. Through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, Woodward writes, the Powers have been exposed, unmasked, and disarmed. They have as much power as we choose to give them.

Chapter 9 puts the engagement on a block. Christ has destroyed the dividing wall of hostility. The false gospel postpones the kingdom and accepts the status quo. The good news is that the kingdom of God is at hand. Pray it, then act, so the congregation becomes a sign, foretaste, and instrument in its own community. Violence is not one of those actions. The tactics he names on the alt-right and the alt-left promote violence and hold the myth that peace can come through violence. Jesus gives another way. He was willing to die and never willing to kill. People with privilege lay down rights in solidarity with the other. People without that privilege are called into mutuality, one new family, one new humanity.

The human heart must be changed by Jesus, but it doesn't end there. Institutions have a visible life and an inner spirituality, and both need redeeming. Evangelism and social justice, as he reports Wink, go hand in hand. Persistent prayer is a prerequisite. And the local call is specific. Some people must work at policy. Christ-followers seeking a tangible kingdom are all called to the grassroots, especially for people the system has targeted unfairly. Posting on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram does not replace being locally rooted and joining God where we live. Stringfellow, as Woodward tells him, calls the church to live as a contrast society, practicing the politics of Jesus, free from service to race, class, political system, or ideology.