On Warfare and Weakness: Part 3, About Those Angels and Demons...

In Part 2 I argued that a warfare worldview--a theology of revolt against evil--is a vision that can infuse progressive Christianity with energy, excitement and popular appeal. A great depiction of this warfare worldview is found in Greg Boyd's book God at War.

And yet, progressive and liberal Christians are going to have a lot of questions and objections about God at War. The vision of a battle against all the manifestations of evil is exciting, but some issues need to be resolved if the warfare worldview of God at War is going to be palatable to progressive Christians.

These questions swirl around how Boyd tries to explain the origins of evil. Again, in the warfare worldview creation, at a deep structural level, is in revolt, warring against God. God isn't controlling everything. The situation is more chaotic, unpredictable, fluid and free. The vision here flirts with dualism, something that Boyd wrestles with and we'll have to wrestle with. And yet, the benefits of shifting toward this dualism is that evil is fully extracted from the actions and character of God. God is no longer seen as the ultimate cause of evil. God is that which opposes, resists and fight evil. That is something I think progressive Christians can get on board with. Death? God is waging war against that. Disease? God is waging war against that. Injustice? God is waging war against that.

Again, God is that which opposes, resists and fights evil.

And yet, this shift toward dualism--good against evil--creates some theological pressures given the belief that God created the world.

Basically, how did this warfare come about?

According to Boyd, the origin of evil is to be found in the rebellion of angelic beings exercising their free will. Creation is structurally corrupted and infected because there was an angelic fall from grace, a fall the pre-dated human history.

Theologically, the benefit of that view--an angelic fall that corrupted and now oppresses the world--is that it draws a bright line between God and the forces of evil waging war against God. The practical upshot of this theological move is that it sets up a theology of revolt for the church. When we walk out the door we will encounter evil--deaths, diseases, injustices. This is a given. And God is whatever is opposed and in opposition to that evil. Simple as that. So to join the fight you join in the Kingdom of God, you join up with the resistance movement to fight and rage against evil in all its satanic manifestations.

And yet, in order to pull off this vision of warfare you have to accept some things that progressive and liberal Christans might be uncomfortable with. Specifically, you have to accept the literal existence of supernatural creatures--demonic and angelic beings.

If you struggle, as I think many progressive Christians do, with belief in the existence of angelic beings constantly interacting with our world, God at War can be tough to swallow. The theology of revolt is exciting and energizing, but it rests upon some metaphysical assumptions that many will find difficult to accept.

But I don't think this is going to be too much of a problem. I think--if we rely on the work of people like Walter Wink and William Stringfellow--that we can recast the theology of revolt in more acceptable terms. My ruminations about the demonic and the principalities and powers on this blog have been forays in this direction. And rather than repeat all that material here in this post, if you are wholly unfamiliar with the work of Wink, Stringfellow and Yoder regarding the Powers, start with this post and click through each post in my series "Notes on Demons and the Powers" (which can also be found on the sidebar). In fact, my post last week "On Anarchism and Assholes" is a pretty good one-post summary of how Wink helps us think about the Powers.

So going forward in this series I'm going to assume that when I talk about demons, satan or the Powers that you and I have this body of ideas in mind. So if you need to catch up, read those posts and keep following along in this series.

No doubt that Boyd is going to disagree with this move (i.e., Wink, Stringfellow et al.) and strenuously object. He's aware and appreciative of Wink's work, but Boyd ultimately rejects Wink's attempt to describe, for example, the demonic as the "interiority" and "spirituality" of power arrangements. Yet that's the direction we'll be going. This move should help rehabilitate God at War for liberals and progressives. And while I think Boyd is going to hate this move, I think God at War is too interesting and exciting to be left on the shelf by progressive Christians.

The point being, I think we can use people like Wink and Stringfellow to retain a robust theology of the demonic and the satanic in order to create a theology of revolt acceptable to progressive Christians.

So that part seems easily done. At the end of this series we'll talk more specifically about spiritual warfare, a vision that will be greatly informed by Boyd's exegesis in God at War but theologically recast by the work of Wink and Stringfellow. If you are a regular reader you likely know how all that will look.

But before we get there, with a vision of spiritual warfare for progressive Christians, we need to lay some theological groundwork. Before we get practical we need to step back and wrestle with the big question: Where did evil come from in the first place? And why is God not stopping it? 

In the next few posts we'll start trying to answer those questions.

Part 4