George pointed me to this interesting essay by Marc Hauser entitled It Seems Biology (Not Religion) Equals Morality.

In the essay Hauser, author of Moral Minds, suggests that recent psychological and neuroscientific research is reaching the consensus that humans are equipped with an innate and universal moral sense. As Hauser writes:

Recent discoveries suggest that all humans, young and old, male and female, conservative and liberal, living in Sydney, San Francisco and Seoul, growing up as atheists, Buddhists, Catholics and Jews, with high school, university or professional degrees, are endowed with a gift from nature, a biological code for living a moral life.

This code, a universal moral grammar, provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong. It is an impartial, rational and unemotional capacity. It doesn't dictate who we should help or who we are licensed to harm. Rather, it provides an abstract set of rules for how to intuitively understand when helping another is obligatory and when harming another is forbidden. And it does so dispassionately and impartially.

My main critique of this research is that it firmly rooted in the cognitive tradition of ethics. Hauser's research focuses solely on moral judgment, asking people to evaluate moral dilemmas. This is only a small part of the moral life and Hauser does admit the limitations of this research toward the end of the essay.

Many ethicists are now arguing that we need to recover the virtue tradition in ethics. We need to spend less time researching how people make moral judgments and more time on issues of character formation, actually developing a science that helps us become better people. Morality isn't a calculus. It's hard work and sacrifice.

This is where, I think, religion can be helpful. If we grant that Hauser is correct, that due to our shared human nature we already know what is right and wrong, then we don't need to go to church to figure this out. We already know what to do. What we need is some assistance, training, support, encouragement, modeling, motivation and accountability in following through. Church should focus on character formation. And there is nothing biological, natural or easy about any of this. It's why Christians call it spiritual discipline and Buddhists call it practice.

As the parent of a child who loves Pokémon, I found this warning very timely:



Hat Tip The Daily Dish.

Oh, you should also know I played Dungeons and Dragons when I was in High School. That probably explains a lot of what is wrong with me.

Related to this recent post of mine I thought I'd share a quote that profoundly affected some of my students when we were studying in Germany.

We were in Leipzig which was in East Germany before the fall of the Wall. In the days and months leading up to the tearing down of the wall there were massive student protests throughout Germany. In Leipzig every Monday hundreds (and eventually thousands) of protesters would walk downtown to pray for peace at St. Nicholas Church. To this day, St. Nicholas Church holds peace prayer services on Monday nights.

These protests were a part of what is called The Peaceful Revolution in the former East Germany. Much of the power of these protests was focused on Leipzig and what was going on at St. Nicholas Church.

While touring the church the students found a brief history of the peace protests. In this history there was a quote from one of the leaders of the GDR (the Communist regime governing East Germany). Before his death the communist leader said:

We had planned everything. We were prepared for everything. But not for candles and prayers.

In the last post of this series I introduced Walter Wink's analysis of demons and the powers. Keeping with the spirit of using these posts as collections of "notes" I want to capture some of Wink's own words from chapter 5--Interpreting the Myth--from his book Naming the Powers:

Wink's main proposal that "the powers" are the "inner aspect" of existence:

What I propose is viewing the spiritual Powers not as separate heavenly or ethereal entities but as the inner aspect of material or tangible manifestation of power...the "principalities and powers" are the inner or spiritual essence, or gestalt, of an institution or state or system; that the "demons" are the psychic or spiritual power emanated by organizations or individuals or subaspects of individuals whose energies are bent on overpowering others; that "gods" are the very real archetypal or ideological structures that determine or govern reality and its mirror, the human brain...and that "Satan" is the actual power that congeals around collective idolatry, injustice, or inhumanity, a power that increases or decreases according to the degree of collective refusal to choose higher values.

Following the biblical writers in keeping the spiritual tethered to the physical:

None of these "spiritual" realities has an existence independent of its material counterpart. None persist through time without embodiment in cellulose or in a culture or a regime or a corporation or a megalomaniac. An ideology does not just float in the air; it is always the nexus of legitimations and rationales for some actual entity, be it a union or management, a social change group or the structure it hopes to change. As the inner aspect of material reality, the spiritual Powers are everywhere around us. Their presence is real and it is inescapable. The issue is not whether we "believe" in them but whether we can learn to identify our actual, everyday encounters with them--what Paul called "discerning the spirits."

Why it might be helpful to retain the spiritual language in speaking about the Powers:

Every organization is made up of humans who make its decisions and are responsible for its success or failure, but these institutions tend to have a suprahuman quality. Although created and staffed by humans, decisions are not made so much by people as for them, out of the logic of institutional life itself. And because the institution usually antedates and outlasts its employees, it develops and imposes a set of traditions, expectations, beliefs, and values on everyone in its employ. Usually unspoken, unacknowledged, and even unknown, this invisible, transcendent network of determinants constrains behavior far more rigidly than any printed set of rules could ever do. It governs dress, social class, life-expectations, even choice of marriage partner (of abstention). This institutional momentum through time and space perpetuates a self-image, a corporate personality, and an institutional spirit which the more discerning are able to grasp as a totality and weigh for its relative sickness or health.

...The institution, however, is the totality of its activities and as such is a mostly invisible object. When we confuse what the eye beholds with the totality, we commit the same reductionistic fallacy as those Colossians who mistook the basic elements (stoicheia) of things for the ultimate reality (Col. 2:8,20). The consequence of such confusion is always slavery to the unseen power behind the visible elements: the spirituality of the institution or state or stone.

How prayer functions as an act of spiritual warfare:

If, then, the church must now make know the manifold wisdom of God to the principalities and powers in the heavenlies, it cannot be content with addressing the material aspect of an institution alone. It must speak to the spiritual reality of the institution as well.

The early church understood this quite clearly. When the Romans archons (magistrates) ordered the early Christians to worship the imperial spirit or genius, they refused, kneeling instead and offering prayers on the emperor's behalf to God. This seemingly innocuous act was far more exasperating and revolutionary than outright rebellion would have been. Rebellion simply acknowledges the absoluteness and ultimacy of the emperor's power, and attempts to seize it. Prayer denies that ultimacy altogether by acknowledging a higher power...prayer challenged the very spirituality of the empire itself and called the empire's "angel," as it where, before the judgment seat of God.

The Powers and the persecution of the church:

..."Jesus is Lord" shook the foundations of an empire; in the "free" world today "Jesus is Lord" bumper stickers mainly occasion yawns...But there are countries where "Jesus, friend of the poor" can get you killed. Fidelity to the gospel lies not in repeating its slogans but in plunging the prevailing idolatries into its corrosive acids. We must learn to address the spirituality of institutions, as well as their physical manifestations...

...Any time the church has chosen to address the spirituality of institutions in their concrete embodiments, persecution has resulted. Far from a show of gratitude at being recalled to the will of God, the Powers explode in a frenzy of rage and retaliation.

The dual focus of the mission of the church:

...the simultaneity of heavenly and earthly events witnesses to the perception, mythically couched, that there is more to events than what appears. The physical actors and institutions are only the outer manifestation of a whole field of powers contending for influence. Real change, consequently, will be only that which succeeds in altering both their visible and invisible aspects. "For we are contending not against flesh and blood"--though we most certainly join the battle precisely at that point--"but against the principalities, against the powers." against the spirituality of institutions, against the ideologies and metaphors and legitimations that prop them up, against the greed and covetousness that give them life, against the individual egocentricities that the Powers so easily hook, against the idolatry that pits short-term gain against the long-term good of the whole--all of which is manifested only in concrete institutions, systems, structures, and persons.

On to Part 9

I've written a bit on this blog about "moral consumption," how Americans try to meet their moral obligations through spending. We buy green, fair trade or red products. The idea seems to be that we get to have our cake and eat it too. We get to spend and consume while also being an enlightened moral person. We help the world through shopping.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow's article in Slate--Buy Local, Act Evil--suggests that the problem might be even worse. Specifically, recent psychological research suggests that when we buy for moral reasons we behave, afterward, more poorly. It seems that having done our duty, morally speaking, when we shopped we feel entitled to let our behavior slip in other areas. From the article:

Why might this happen? According to Monin, now a professor at Stanford, there are two theories. One is that when we've established our rectitude, we interpret ensuing behavior in a different light: I just proved I'm a good person, so what I'm doing now must be okay...

Another, potentially overlapping theory holds that we have a kind of subconscious moral accounting system. We like to think of ourselves as good guys, but sainthood has costs. So when we have done our mitzvah for the day, we cut ourselves some slack. In this model, "moral credits" are a kind of currency we accrue and spend.

Saw this video, which you may have seen already, in church yesterday.

You can read an NPR interview with Matt Harding about his dancing here. My favorite part from the interview, a point, I think, that is poignantly and joyously made in the video:

Well, what I'm doing is fairly universal. It's one of those things that all humans do and all humans enjoy watching. Music and dancing. Those are two big ones. Sex is a third. I left that out.

I think people are looking to be reminded that we are all the same and essentially good.

"There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock."
--Author Unknown

(Read this quote today reviewing a student paper on the book Counting Sheep.)

Tracy Witham tells me that he might have posted for the last time on his blog Metaponderance. Tracy graciously comments here from time to time and long time readers will remember that Tracy was a guest blogger here two summers ago when I was in Germany. During that summer Tracy brought out an online book Into the World which can now be found at Metaponderance. I, personally, owe Tracy a great deal because he's the one that finally got me to read Tillich!

Tracy begins his final post with this provocative question:

...a funny thought occurred to me this morning. Theology may well be the most disputed "subject" of all time! How then can one be sure that one's own point of view is the right one with respect to God?

Let's summarize some of the observations from the last few posts in this series:

First, in the biblical witness the language of the Powers conflates the spiritual and the physical. Very often, the Powers are political structures. I've focused on that association but any form of power or influence (e.g., social organizations, social norms, traditions, economic entities) is picked out by the biblical category "principalities and powers."

Second, this association between the physical and the spiritual highlights an aspect of the biblical cosmology: a parallelism between the physical and the spiritual. That is, events on earth are mirrored by events in heaven and events in heaven are mirrored on earth. We used the illustration of the angels of the nations to make this point. Each nation--a physical manifestation of power--had an angel or god that influenced the life of the nation. Further, wars between nations--a physical contest of power--was paralleled by a contest between the two nation gods with the physical and the spiritual battles mutually affecting each other. Here are two other examples of this parallelism in the New Testament:

Matthew 6.9-10
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.

Matthew 16.19
I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

Third, one of the problems with modern conceptions of the Powers is that the parallelism between the physical and spiritual becomes lost. Demons become disembodied spirits floating in the air, disconnected from physical forms of power. This becomes a missional problem for the church because it creates a fractured dualism as opposed to the parallel dualism of the biblical writers. This was the point John Howard Yoder was making in The Politics of Jesus. For the ancients the dualism was parallel. To address the Powers in the "heavenly realms" one had to address the structural physical manifestations of power. And vice versa. By contrast, many Christians have a fractured dualism. They believe in two realms--physical and spiritual--but these realms have little to do with each other. Demons become, as we noted, hyper-spiritualized creatures that have little to do with political or social power structures. Thus, the "spiritual warfare" reduces to prayer about holding off spiritual attacks from Satan, often in the form of moral temptation. Consequently, "spiritual warfare" collapses into an individualistic and pietistic moral effort (being a self-controlled person) or fanciful notions that demons float around trying to "attack" Christians and that our prayers summon angels to protect us. The clear problem with all of this is that this spiritual warfare is too spiritual, it has no physical, social, structural or political referent. For example, "spiritual warfare", due to the fractured dualism, has nothing to do with, let's say, poverty or human slave or sex trafficking. Christians end up praying about ethereal, airy battles between demons and angels, thinking their prayers are contributing to a "spiritual battle," helping angels beat up demons. But according to the biblical writers, the spiritual battle was also a structural and political battle. For the ancients the dualism between physical and spiritual was parallel, not fractured.

Once this is realized there is a tendency, one I'm often tempted by, to swing too far in the other direction, to focus on the physical at the expense of the spiritual. If "spiritual warfare" refers concretely to issues of political and social justice why not just drop the spiritual language? Why use the language of the demonic at all? Why not follow the Enlightenment and approach political, social and structural power issues with the categories of liberal humanism and politics? It seems that we can easily drop the language of religion.

Again, I resonate with this view. As an experimental psychologist I have scientific sensibilities and my day to day work involves trying to measure abstractions. But I think the language of the spiritual is important for two interconnected reasons.

First, as I argued in an earlier post, modern humans continue to have experiences of the residual, that the categories of science fail to do justice to human experience. My concerns here are primarily moral. Spiritual language names aspects of moral existence that cannot be reduced to genetics, medicine, brain science or particle physics. We might try to describe Auschwitz with the language of particle physics, describing the swirl and quantum interactions of massive clouds of particles. At the physical level that is a perfectly legitimate way to describe "what happened" at Auschwitz. But I think most people would feel that something important was missing from such an account. We might, then, scale up the account, using macro-level scientific accounts such as history and sociology to explain the events. This seems more appropriate. But when we do this we start to make appeals to abstractions: beliefs, ideologies, fears, social dynamics, morality, horror, pain, and evil. Although we feel that this account is more appropriate in describing "what happened" at Auschwitz we should note that we've left science behind. Horror isn't a scientific category. It's a category of human consciousness that science just doesn't have the ability to describe. This is the experience of residual I was speaking of, the aspects of human existence that require the language of the spirit, existential and religious language. Which is the better explanation for Auschwitz? A scientific appeal to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? Or the religious response: "Evil."

A second reason for holding onto the language of the "spiritual" is that it creates a platform for moral and political critique. In Christianity this is called prophecy. Prophecy is needed as it proclaims the emancipation of God from the status quo. God is often captured and enslaved by the Powers-That-Be who use God as a warrant for preserving current power structures--with the Big people on top and the Little people on the bottom--and to justify violence. Prophecy is residual language, proclaiming that God is larger than the current power structures. God is outside the power, God cannot be reduced to the political. The prophet, thus, stands in this margin, proclaiming God's judgment against the Powers. "God isn't FOR you," the prophet cries, "God is AGAINST you."

Without this prophetic space the religious collapses into the political. Most of time I'm perfectly happy with this. It keeps my faith relevant, politically engaged and ethically charged. But I'm keenly aware of the fact that my political engagements are myopic, morally confused and parochial. I don't want to reduce my spiritual life to a vote for a political party. I feel the residual, that God stands outside of my political and social justice efforts. And that location--the place of God--is a constant source of moral criticism and evaluation. God provides me a perch to step out of the moral confusion of my personal crusades and allows me to take in the prophetic view. Is God for me or against me?

Moral philosophers might see in all this the universalizing impulse of ethics, Kant's categorical imperative, the Golden Rule, Rawls' veil of ignorance. God is the vantage point of the universal ethic, what I've called my prophetic perch. So, yes, much of what I've just said could be translated into secular, liberal moral categories. But what Kant's or Rawls' systems tend to leave out are the existential and absolute facets of moral life. Pathos is often missing. The passionate moral life isn't about rational moral calculation ("Can I will that my actions will become the universal law of human conduct?") or haggling behind the veil of ignorance. The passionate moral life is seen in the lives of Mother Teresa or Mahatma Gandhi, people whose moral lives were grounded in the religious. Passionate moral engagement demands devotion and worship.

So here we are. To summarize, we need these three things for our understanding of the Powers:

1. A way of capturing the parallelism of the ancients, of keeping the spiritual harnessed to the physical (socially and politically). No more fractured dualism. Demons and angels are no longer allowed to float in the air fighting each other.
2. A way of keeping the language of the spiritual from collapsing into the political. Religious categories need to be preserved to speak honestly about human experience (e.g., What happened at Auschwitz?), to provide a prophetic space (so God is not "captured" by power as endorsement and warrant), and to provide moral life with an object of pathos (devotion and worship).
3. Our means of speaking about the conflation of the physical and the spiritual needs to be coherent to modern people. As noted in the first post, the mythological background of the bible just cannot be entertained by many modern people. And yet, any "updating" of the language of the demonic needs to avoid a demythologizing that simply scrapes off a superstitious religious barnacle.

So, can any understanding of the Powers be found that meets these three requirements? Drumroll please....

Probably not.

But the one that comes closest, for me at least, comes from Walter Wink.

Wink's suggestion is that we reframe how we understand "heaven" and "earth." In the biblical witness these locations were framed in an Up versus Down metaphor. Heaven was above us and earth below. As Bultmann reminded us in the first post, this cosmological arrangement isn't tenable for modern persons. Wink's suggestion is that we reframe the situation using an Inside versus Outside metaphor. The "spiritual" or "heavenly" realm is the "inside" aspect of physical arrangements, the "spirituality" (inner life and logic) of nations, political parties, businesses, institutions, markets, churches, and ideological movements. In Wink's model when we think of the "angel of a nation" we are talking about the inner life of the nation, the spirituality of its inhabitants and political structures. For example, socialism has a spirituality as does capitalism. America has a spirituality different from, let's say, France, Canada or Iran.

So when we talk about "fighting against powers in the heavenly realm" we are talking about waging a war against the spirituality of America or capitalism or other sorts of power arrangements. In this light, for example, consumerism is seen as a demonic power, a form of spirituality, an object of worship, a location of idolatry or spiritual enslavement. Thus, as Paul says, we don't fight against "flesh and blood", the people shopping in the malls this Christmas season, we fight against the Power, the spirituality that enslaves American hearts and minds.

Wink's reframe comes very close to meeting the requirements I listed above. First, it keeps the parallelism of the physical with the spiritual. Second, it retains a robust use of religious language that is coherent to modern people. Even atheists could assent to the assessment that "Americans worship at the altar of capitalism." Or that "The shopping mall is the church of America." Finally, this model resists collapsing the spiritual into the physical. It is difficult for science to describe the demonic power of consumerism. I'm not saying it can't do this, just that the language of religion is often better in this regard. Recall last year's Black Friday incident where customers lined up at Walmart were worked up into such a frenzy that they crashed through the doors and killed a Walmart employee. Sure, the psychology of crowds could be used to "explain" the Walmart incident. But the causes of that death go way back, back to the foundations of the free market and how the media and society create pressures upon us. The causes of the Walmart incident can't be reduced to any single scientific explanation. But when I say that the "spiritual climate of American consumerism" caused the Walmart death we immediately understand this religious explanation to be both cogent and parsimonious.

On to Part 8

I wrote this morning about my take concerning our fascination with Tiger Woods' moral failings. Over at Slate Jack Shafer has his own take on why we are drawn to stories like Tiger Woods and the Salahis, the White House party crashers.

Shafer's take on our Schadenfreude about Tiger Woods:

So now that the "real" Woods has been revealed as a wild bone-daddy who behaves more like your out-of-work, alcoholic brother-in-law than an object of worship, we feel cheated. Aside from the hundreds of millions he's earned from golf tournaments and endorsements, turns out he's a lot like the rest of us. Our hunger for salacious news about him isn't necessarily about voyeurism. We're embarrassed by the gap between who we believed Woods to be and who he really is; and, having put Woods on that pedestal, we want to bring him down where he belongs—with the rest of us sinners. We're like the kid who, upon learning that there is no Santa Claus, conducts a wide-ranging investigation to determine how such a fraud was perpetrated on him. And we'll keep consuming Woods news until our picture of him more closely conforms with reality. We love to crown kings and cultivate messiahs. And then kill them.

Shafer's analysis about our fascination with the Salahis:

Prior to his fall, damn few of us were conceited enough to imagine that we were Tiger Woods. But we all recognize a bit of the Salahis in our day-to-day conduct: our striving, our fudging, our expensive attempts to dress for success, our endless bragging and other attention-grabbing, our attempts to "friend-up," and finally our obsessing about our children's social status (Right private school? Right social manner? Right social network?).

We can't get enough of the Salahis because they do in maximum what we do in miniature every day.

A moment from my day...five minutes ago...

As an experimental psychologist I teach an undergraduate class in statistics. The last test of the semester is tomorrow and a student came by to ask a question about Analysis of Variance. We sat in my office. She asked her questions and I explained, in as many innovative ways as I could, the logic of the F-ratio. Finally, the light goes on and she gets it. Ready for the test.

As she leaves she just keeps saying over and over, with tears in her eyes, "Thank you so much. Thank you so much."

I respond, "No thanks required. It's what I do. I'm a teacher."

You might have noticed that Tiger Woods has been in the news recently. Did he have an affair? Or even affairs?

I think a lot of us are a bit sickened at how the media and our culture swarms around scandals of this sort. No excuses, but I think it's just human nature. Our minds are attuned to gossip with a moral slant. It makes adaptive sense. In the small hunting-gathering cultures, the place where the brain evolved, sharing gossip about our neighbors' moral lives was important. We need to know who we can trust or depend on. Who keeps their promises? Who will cheat us?

The trouble is, like with pornography, the modern media world hits the brain in this soft spot. We are drawn to tales of moral failing but this time it's about people whom we will never meet or interact with. I'll never need to trust or rely on Tiger Woods. So I don't need a lot of information about his moral consistency. But my brain doesn't know that. I have this virtual relationship with Tiger Woods and, thus, am irrationally drawn into a story that doesn't concern me.

But here's a good side about the Tiger Woods gossip. We want the people we cheer for to be good people. Of course, that doesn't make any sense. If Tiger Woods is unfaithful to his wife (and I have no idea if he was or not) what does that have to do with my admiration of his golf swing?

But, in an odd way, the two are linked. We don't want to root for people who are morally suspect. True, we can separate the two domains, but the shine of these people is dimmed somewhat.

I think this is a good thing. We want to admire goodness. We seem to crave it. I think this is why we feel disappointed in people like Tiger Woods (if any of it is true). Yes, it's irrational to expect goodness from celebrities or athletes. Why in the world would we expect any of these people to act like saints? And yet we feel disappointment and disillusionment. Why? I think it's because we crave goodness in the world. We want to cheer it. And if the people we've been cheering for turn out to be morally despicable then, well, we feel that our praise has been wasted or misplaced. And I think that feeling is a good thing. It suggests that we want nice guys to finish first. And that desire seems diagnostic of a moral sense deep in every human heart.

Before getting to the issue about the "spirituality" of the powers I'd like to post some material from of John Howard Yoder from his book The Politics of Jesus.

This is familiar ground for theologians as The Politics of Jesus is required seminary reading. But as these posts are "notes", a loose collection of material that can be mined for bible classes or sermons, I thought I'd quote some of Yoder's stuff as his analysis parallels the one I've outlined in the last two posts. Here are some relevant excerpts from chapter 5--Christ and Power--from The Politics of Jesus:

Yoder on how the language of the demonic, previously dismissed as superstitious, is useful in naming horrendous evil in the modern experience:

Since the onset of critical New Testament studies it has practically been taken for granted that when the Apostle [Paul] speaks about angels or demons or powers this is a dispensable remainder of an antique world view, needing not even to be interpreted or translated, but simply to be dropped without discussion...[But] driven by the events that shook Europe between 1930 and 1950, Protestant theology sought a more adequate theological understanding of the power of evil which had been breaking through the crust of the most civilized of societies. No longer can it be taken for granted that man and his institutions can solve his problems.

Yoder describing Paul's theology of the Powers:

[The powers are] religious structures (especially the religious undergirdings of stable ancient and primitive societies), intellectual structures ('ologies and 'isms), moral structures (codes and customs), political structures (the tyrant, the market, the school, the courts, race and nation). The totality is overwhelmingly broad. Nonetheless, even here with careful analysis we observe that it can be said of a these "structures" what the Apostle was saying concerning the powers:

(a) All these structures can be conceived of in their general essence as parts of a good creation. There could not be society or history, there could not be Man without the existence above him of religious, intellectual, moral and social structures. We cannot live without them. These structures are not and never have been a mere sum total of the individuals composing them. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. And this "more" is an invisible Power, even though we many not be used to speaking of it in personal or angelic terms.

(b) But these structures fail to serve man as they should. They do not enable him to live a genuinely free, human, loving life. They have absolutized themselves and they demand from the individual and society an unconditional loyalty. They harm and enslave man. We cannot live with them. Looking at the human situation from within, it is not possible to conceive how man once unconditionally subjected to these Powers can ever again become free.

(c) Man is lost in the world, in it structures, and in the current of its development. But nonetheless it is in this world that man has been preserved, that he has been able to be himself and thereby to await the redeeming work of God. His lostness and his survival are inseparable, both dependent upon the Powers.

Given that the destiny of humanity is intimately associated with the power structures of human existence, salvation, for Yoder, is both structural (I've used the word "political") and personal (or moral). Salvation isn't simply being "forgiven" for having sex or cheating on your taxes. Salvation is cosmic in scope, the redemption of both Man and the Powers. This vision is best captured in Colossians 1.15-20:

[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

Of course, this vision is yet-to-be, the eschatological hope of the church. In between the times the church exists to declare Christ's victory over the powers in the cross as a foretaste of the eschaton:

Yoder on the relation of the church to the Powers:

For Paul...the very existence of the church is her primary task. It is in itself a proclamation of the Lordship of Christ to the powers from whose dominion the church has begun to be liberated. The church does not attack the powers; this Christ has done. The church concentrates upon not being seduced by them. By her existence she demonstrates that their rebellion has been vanquished...

We are now ready to affirm that the biblical understanding of the powers in history can give us a more adequate intellectual framework for the task of social discernment to which we are especially called in our age. This discernment is not simply a way of helping the needy with their social problems, a kind of updated philanthropy, nor does it mean simply to guide individual Christians by helping them to do good deeds or to avoid sin. In is rather a part of the Christians' proclamation that the church is under orders to make known to the Powers, as no other proclaimer can do, the fulfillment of the mysterious purposes of God (Eph. 3:10) by means of that Man in whom their rebellion has been broken and the pretensions they had raised have been demolished...

That Christ is Lord, a proclamation to which only individuals can respond, is nonetheless a social, political, structural fact which constitutes a challenge to the Powers.

On to Part 7

Advent Conspiracy:

[Worship Fully]

[Spend Less]

[Give More]

[Love All]