Why “Powers” and “Principalities” Still Hold Sway

ALTHOUGH MOST OF THE TIME MOST OF US DON’T RECOGNIZE IT, organizations have souls.

Our ancient ancestors felt the presence of spirits everywhere, animating everything. Plato abstracted that ancient intuition into a theory of ideal heavenly archetypes standing behind all material forms. By Roman times, St. Paul and other early Christian writers could talk about angels, demons, principalities, powers, gods, and other spiritual realities without explanation, knowing their audiences would understand.

According to theologian Walter Wink, the ancient worldview was half right. It accepted the experience of spiritual presence, but naïvely projected that reality into the heavens. Spirit and matter interacted, but this enchanted, magical world couldn’t last.

As Christianity and Neoplatonism developed in the late Classical world, the timeless, interconnected unity of the ancient worldview split into dualism. Spirit and matter separated, and the material world was rejected as irredeemably evil. When scientific and critical thinking took hold in Western culture some 1,500 years later, the dualism flipped. Now, the spiritual world was denied and materialism became the ruling view.

After Darwin and Freud, many modern people fell into what can only be called a neurotic, dissociated worldview in which spirit and matter both were affirmed, but they lived in separate compartments. The spiritual world, still projected into heaven, remained real in church and in one’s “devotional” life while empirical materialism held sway in one’s “everyday” life. Spiritual life had little to do with life in the material world. A devout church member could be a ruthless executive during the work week, and his or her dissociation would remain mostly unconscious. This produced a neurotic society with ever increasing social tensions.

Wink, however, saw a way forward. Through his life’s work on the powers and nonviolent resistance to the “domination system,” he discerned the emergence of a new, integral worldview. The powers do influence the world, but they are inner realities, which should not be projected into the outer world. Every outer material entity has an inner spiritual center. As in the ancient worldview, matter and spirit, “earth” and “heaven,” interact again in a re-enchanted world. Now, however, the spirit is metaphorically located within, not projected somewhere into outer space.

In this view of things, outer entities include not only physical things and individuals, but also social structures. Families, clans, social groups, organizations and corporations, institutions, nations all have souls. Each incarnates the spirit in its own way. Organizational theory speaks of corporate “culture” and organizational “environment” and the like, but it could just as well speak of the soul.

The soul of a social structure may be judged “angelic” or “demonic” or even a bit of both. If our goal is to transform and redeem a domination system, however, the transformation of individuals will never be enough. For deep change to take hold, the souls of the system’s social structures also need to be recognized, engaged, and called to metanoia.