The Powers and Imitation

Woodward's brief definition in chapter 1 is the sentence a congregation needs before it reaches for a remedy. The Powers are Satan, the demonic, and the principalities and powers mentioned in Scripture. He hopes that as people read, they will see the unseen forces at work in the world and become able to name, unmask, and engage them. He lists the passages a theology of the Powers has to make sense of, including Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 2 and 15, Ephesians 1, 2, and 6, and Colossians 1 and 2. Power in the Spirit, he says, birthed the church, made disciples, and carried the gospel. Destructive power has damaged the witness, crippled the mission, and aided the decline.

Naming, as chapter 4 presents it through Wink's first volume, is the refusal to treat that language as nonsense. Wink writes, and Woodward stays with him, that many modern readers find it as hard to believe in demonic or angelic powers as to believe in dragons. The work of naming is to hear the New Testament's power language in its own world and then say what it still names. Woodward records Wink's rules in plain terms a pastor can use: the language of power runs through the whole New Testament; the terms are fluid; the Powers are heavenly and earthly, spiritual and political, invisible and structural; they are both good and evil. He agrees with the distinction he has already drawn in chapter 1. The devil and the demonic are one reality. The principalities and powers are another. The principalities seem redeemable in Colossians. The devil and the demonic, as he reads Matthew 25, have a different end.

For a church, the names get more local in chapters 8 and 9, where William Stringfellow gives Woodward a vernacular: image, institution, and ideology. Image is the public self that can possess a person who still bears that name. Institution is the structure that can outlast a good intention and begin to demand survival. Ideology is the account of what is wrong and what will save us, an account that starts to read Scripture for us. Woodward lines those three up with the contours of leadership he has been using: identity, praxis, and telos. To name the Powers in a staff meeting is to say which of those is operating, out loud, before a resignation forces the vocabulary.

Unmasking, in chapter 4, is Wink's second book: the invisible forces that determine human existence, rendered for people who have no room for Satan, demons, and angels. Woodward reports the material that touches leaders. Satan, in Wink's later language, is the spirit of the Domination System, "an entire network of Powers becoming integrated around idolatrous values." Demons show up as outer personal possession, collective possession, and the inner personal demonic, and the remedy depends on which one is in front of you. The angel of a church, as Wink reads the letters in Revelation, is the spirituality of that congregation, inner and outer together. Leaders can change while the personality of the church stays. Woodward keeps the warning. An angel becomes demonic when a congregation turns from the task God set and makes another goal its idol.

He does not leave the unmasking inside Wink's categories. Chapter 6 says each of us is a model to someone, a child, a coworker, a church. Leaders have all heard that more is caught than taught. His own assumption is that people learn from instruction, immersion in mission, and imitation, and that imitation is the greatest of the three. Girard's discovery, as Woodward uses it, is that people who look to us as models imitate our desires. Woodward's sentence is direct: we imitate the desires of those we look up to, our models. He calls that mimetic desire.

The congregational picture is in chapter 7, and it is the one to keep. Emerging leaders look to the lead pastor. If that pastor desires the title of lead pastor, and the structure will not share the role, the pastor becomes a scandal, an obstacle, to the people who caught the desire. Disciples start to want the title and the prestige. The pastor feels the wanting and wants the title more. Rivalry follows, often with real bewilderment, because the two had been at peace. Tension in the congregation looks for release. A person on the margin, or the person at the top, becomes the scapegoat. Woodward says Girard's counsel is that we escape this mimesis by understanding the laws that govern it. The alerts he lists for leaders are concrete. Concern for status, prestige, and honor. The temptation to scapegoat someone made in the image of God. Envious desire or selfish ambition in the heart. Dissension and chaos in the congregation. Pride that hides the desire behind self-justification.

Stringfellow, in chapter 8, names the same captivity as the ubiquity of the fall. Fallenness, as Woodward takes him, covers people and institutions, principalities and powers, estranged from their vocation of serving God. The principalities now rule the people who were meant, under God, to rule them. When a church is in survival mode, Woodward flags it, with Stringfellow, as a yellow flag: that church is more likely to imitate the Powers. His own summary sentence belongs here: "when we fail to name and unmask the Powers, we end up imitating them in their submission to death, which is bondage to idolatry and leads to dishonoring God and dehumanization."

Engaging, in chapter 4, is the question Wink asks and Woodward keeps: "How can we oppose evil without creating new evils and being made evil ourselves?" Wink chooses the word engage, Woodward notes, because the Powers were created good. Though fallen, they are to be redeemed. The line Woodward carries is that the Powers must be honored, criticized, resisted, and redeemed, precisely because they were created in, through, and for the humanizing purposes of God in Christ. Wink's concrete path is the way of Jesus: discerning the spirits, prayer, praise, life in the Spirit, and nonviolent direct action. Woodward's correction sits beside that path. He will not fold Satan and the demonic into the same redeemable story as the principalities. In chapter 10 he says the telos of Satan, the cosmic body of sin, is destruction, and the God of peace will crush Satan under the feet of the church. The telos of the principalities and powers is redemption in the new creation. A church that engages by technique, trying to beat domination with a sharper form of domination, has already started to imitate the thing it meant to resist. Wink's warning, as Woodward repeats it, is that people who want to eliminate evil are likely to mimic the evil they oppose unless their identity is grounded in God.

The engagement he asks of leaders is imitation of Christ. Chapter 10 states the captivity in a line: if we choose not to imitate Christ, by default we are choosing to imitate the Powers. We are captive to imitation. The scandal of leadership runs in two directions. It is negative when we become obstacles to the people who take us as models. It becomes what he calls a positive scandal when we imitate the way of Christ, because that way leads to a cross. Fallen leadership imitates the principalities in submission to Satan. Redeemed leadership, which he also calls missional leadership, imitates Jesus in submission to the Father.

Chapter 12 gives the path a shape from Philippians 2. The kenotic way, as he lists it, is refusing to exploit our status, regularly emptying ourselves, and revolutionary humble obedience. Paul, he notes, does not use the title apostle in that letter. He calls himself a slave. The question Woodward sets down for each leader is whether I have become possessed by my image, or whether I possess the identity I receive from the triune God. Chapter 10 puts the same engagement in Jesus' wilderness, after the baptismal word of belovedness. The economic temptation hunts identity through image, what we produce and what we have. The political temptation hunts security through institution, the urge to take control. The religious temptation hunts the reading of Scripture through ideology. The remedies he sets beside them are abiding in the life of God, surrendering to the Spirit and joining the kingdom in the way of Christ, and living with a true view of that kingdom. James, as he takes McKnight's reading, tells leaders to humble themselves, submit to God, resist the devil, and repent in a way that is drastic and complete. Information, he says with James K. A. Smith, does not form desire. A leader worthy of imitation is a leader whose desires have been caught by Christ, close enough that other people can catch them too.