Walter Wink - Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (The Powers, Volume 3)

WINNER!

1993 Pax Christi Award

1993 Academy of Parish Clergy Book of the Year Award

1993 Midwest Book Achievement Award-Best Religious Book

"In his remarkable trilogy on the principalities and powers, Walter Wink has biblically verified what more and more of us have come to realize intuitively; namely, that underneath and within the social, economic, and political crisis we face, there are profoundly spiritual realities which must be confronted. In this newest and final volume Wink offers keen insight into how the 'powers' may not only be exposed but actually engaged and resisted. His reflections on the meaning of prayer, both in our lives and in our world, are some of the best I have ever seen. Building on the work of earlier pioneers like William Stringfellow, Wink presents us with the sobering and illuminating truth that movements for social change will simply never succeed unless they come to terms with the existence and pervasive presence of the structural and spiritual forces the Bible refers to as principalities and powers. And there is no better treatment of the biblical and contemporary meaning of the powers than Walter Wink's."

-JIM WALus, Sojourners

"Sheer grace, that Engaging the Powers should come forth at this time when world leaders have captured the language of 'new world order' and are consolidating the power to enforce a dominating vision of geopolitical reality. How faith confronts these worldly schemes and what conscientious Christians can do to bear faithful and effective witness to a higher order is the prophetic gift of insight found in these pages."

-JAMES FORBES, Senior Minister, Riverside Church, New York City

"Engaging the Powers is a courageous, scholarly, and yet intensely personal attempt to help us better understand the problem of evil. In this third volume of his encyclopedic work on the forces he calls 'the powers,' Wink provides an incisive analysis that repeatedly shows the centrality of gender equity to a world of partnership and peace. And he powerfully challenges us to change the social institutions that throughout recorded history, all too often in the name of God and good, have abetted so much demonic energy, and to reconceptualize theology so it may serve as a tool for personal and social transformation."

-RIANE EISLER, author, The Chalice and the Blade

"The Quaker, Elton Trueblood, once commented to the effect, `You can accept Jesus; you can reject Jesus; but you cannot reasonably ignore him.' To agree with everything in this book might be to betray your own power of discernment. To deliberately ignore it would be to betray your very humanity."

-M. SCOTT PECK, author, The Road Less Traveled and People of the Lie

"Engaging the Powers forcefully drives home one of the impelling truths of our era: the real battle against the evil in today's world is a spiritual battle. Walter Wink, with exceptional moral and intellectual force, convinces us that the weapons for this battle are not carnal, such as our habitual employment of domination and violence, but rather they are spiritual, among the most effective being prayer. I could not agree more that 'History belongs to the intercessors.' "

-C. PETER WAGNER, Professor of Church Growth, Fuller Theological Seminary

"In the third volume of his trilogy on the powers Walter Wink prompts us to reconsider the impoverished character of so much of our theology. In a wide-ranging study with a plethora of insights on familiar biblical texts he reminds us of Christianity's counter-cultural message and the practice it demands. It is a salutary message for any who would capitulate to the spirit of the age and find that they are in thrall to the Powers."

-PROFESSOR CHRISTOPHER ROWLAND, Oxford University

"Delivering more than he promised in his first two volumes, this proves to be the most profound in Wink's trek towards the cultural and personal interior. This book does for the last generation of this century what Barth's Commentary on Romans did for the first. This is a major contribution, not just to scholarship, but to the planet."

-ARTHUR J. DEWEY, Xavier University

"In this extraordinary and seminal book, Walter Wink applies trenchant New Testament scholarship to the growing phenomenon of 'people power' uprisings and nonviolent movements across the planet. The result is a challenging examination of just war theories and violent liberation struggles from which the revolutionary power of Jesus' 'third way' is demonstrated in a fresh and bold way."

-RICHARD DEATS, Fellowship of Reconciliation

"A masterwork. Combines skillful biblical exegesis with prodigious knowledge of our modern world to produce a radically new understanding of Christianity as victory over the Powers that dominate and enslave."

-ROBERT T. FGRTNA, Vassar College

"God has blessed the writing of this book. It has been a turning point in my understanding."

-BISHOP STEPHEN VERNEY, The Abbey, Sutton Courtenay, England

"This is the most important and exciting theological work to emerge In a generation. It will have a profound effect on Christian thinking well into the next century. Whether the institutional churches will be able to take it fully on board is an open question. If they cannot, we are in for a new Dark Age."

-CHARLES ELUOTT, Cambridge University

"A stirring and important work! This is Wink at his best-provocative, insightful, always challenging and prodding with good exegesis, argument, and analysis. You're not among the living if you have no arguments of your own with the author, but you'll be much the poorer if you fail to join him where he excels in this volume: engaging the Powers, and ourselves in the process."

-LARRY L. RASMUSSEN, Union Theological Seminary, New York City

"No one else has produced such a far-reaching, comprehensive, and incisive understanding of `the powers' as they are disclosed in biblical literature, and no one else has articulated their significance for today through such relevant interpretation. Wink's book should be read by all Christians and especially by pastors and divinity students as they lead congregants into a more penetrating understanding of the contemporary world. It is ideally suited for adult Bible study."

-HERMAN J. WAETJEN, The Christian Century

"For years now Wink has been relentlessly Naming, Unmasking, and now Engaging those artful spiritual dodgers, the principalities and powers.... One grows lighthearted amid the riches. His social and political analysis of the brag- gadacio, the sheer, horrid 'normalizing' of domination and death in America in the '90s, is devastating. The exegesis of Revelation 13 is masterfully to the point of our social and political derangement. But there is more, and better: a solid hope of liberation.... Extraordinary work."

-DAN BERRIGAN, Pax Christi

"It is without doubt the most crucial work on the theology of nonviolence and its role in overcoming the powers of domination that has been written in this century."

-BISHOP PETER STOREY, Methodist Church of South Africa

"The best and most important book I have read in a long time.... He argues persuasively that violence `and not Christianity, is the real religion of America.' "

-JACK NELSON-PALLMEYER, Sojourners

"The most exciting and most important book on theology of our time, perhaps all time."

-DAVID RAY GRIFFIN Claremont School of Theology

WALTER WINK