Unmasking the powers

The subtitle of this blog is "Unmasking the powers of the age through the Gospel." In engaging in entrepreneurship through the Gospel, I believe that one of the primary outcomes will be to unmask the powers of the age. What does that mean? I know no one more helpful than Lesslie Newbigin. I quote him at length here because a Biblical exposition of 'the powers' is first required in order to understand what is entailed in their unmasking:

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 (38) . . . 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 (39). . . If one can summarize all these as referring to the structural elements of human life, one brings them into relation with the language about the stoicheia [elements]. All human life is lived and has to believed within limits which are set by certain structural features, both of the natural world and of the world of human society. . . [O]ur life in society is structured by law, custom and tradition (42) . . . These structural elements are necessary to guide and protect human life. They serve God's 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 (43). [For example] 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 (44).

In the cross Christ has disarmed the powers. He has unmasked them. . . . 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? (45)

Let me begin with some negatives. It does not mean anarchy. It does not mean an attack on structures as such. . . . 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 that 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 receive in the Spirit, the firstfruit of the new world (Rom 8:19-25). (45-46) . .

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 . . . 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 in 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 martyrs whose robes were washed in blood. It was not that a particular Emperor was discredited or 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 (Lesslie Newbigin: Missionary Theologian 46-47).

The power of capitalism is unmasked when its pretended absoluteness is displayed in exactly the way Newbigin describes: "Only by the power of the gospel itself, announced in word and embodied in deed." When money is dethroned as the reigning god, and the Church submits to Christ her King as her true and great Sovereign, then through the power of the gospel, announced in word, and embodied in deed, the mystique of capitalism may be disarmed and rendered powerless just as was the Roman empire.

Gospel entrepreneurship is not seeking to wrest the power of commerce from evil oppressive businesses by outperforming them in the marketplace. Rather, it is the work of patient revolutionaries, announcing the good news in word and deed, in all sectors, in hope [in the Romans 8 sense of that word] that through the Church, the Spirit will use this to display the manifold wisdom of God in dethroning and disarming the powers.