ecclesia as counterpolitical activism in relation to the powers

It’s worth saying from the start that what distinguishes my position on the powers from, say, Walter Wink, is that I come out in the open and say without reservation that I take their existence as clusters of actual supernatural entities extremely seriously. I am not at all agnostic about this and am convinced of the existence of the devil and demons. The reasons for this will become clear in this and further posts. On the other hand, as distinct from some of my ‘spiritual warfare’ inclined acquaintances in parts of the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement and the partly overlapping popularly termed Prayer Movement, I take the imperial or sovereign powers of the West deadly seriously too and believe that the testimony and ecclesia of Jesus exist in necessary confrontation with them. In this respect I interpret Jesus’ words “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” and Paul and Peter’s supposed exhortation to submit to the powers that be, or governing authorities, in very different terms to the traditional attitude to human political authorities. Something of how this works out will already be obvious to those familiar with this blog, particularly in my exposition of Jesus’ demonstration in the temple, which is unpacked in some detail in the final chapter of my book “Church, Gospel, & Empire.”

In summary, I like the eschatological impact on the present, of the way that the Hebrew prophet puts it: “It will happen in that day, that the Lord will punish the host of heaven on high, and the kings of the earth on earth” (Isaiah 24:21). So while I will have more to say about the meaning of the word punish in this context, I take it that God and his people are positioned against both demonic and human powers and that these two are intimately connected.

As I have already intimated, the testimony of Jesus clearly takes the political powers of empire seriously from the start. Right away they are positioned as both the context for and the opposition to the kingdom of God. The next few posts will use the first few chapters of Luke’s gospel to examine this in some detail, and to focus in on the way they interface with the supernatural powers too. There is one more matter perhaps shocking to some that needs mentioning. It will be impossible to exegete Luke’s narrative in relation to the powers faithfully without recognising the interplay of the angelic as well as the demonic. While this might seem positively mediaeval to some of who are new to this blog and my work, it is an approach which fits the rejection of both the mediaeval and modern sovereignty view of transcendence and the captivity to immanence to which the resultant horrors imprisoned the modern era. The unapologetically literal approach to a good and bad transcendence and the consequential recognition of good and evil in temporal politics follow naturally from the kenotic configuration of the divine that results from arguing from Jesus to God in the way that this blog attempts. Hopefully this will become clearer in the course of the next few posts.