Walter Wink deals with many ways that the powers of evil infiltrate our lives. This book is important for anyone who would understand the seductive and destructive aspects of evil which are so much a part of human life.

The author's second volume in his trilogy on the Powers. Whereas Fortress Press has released Kindle editions for volumes #1 and #3, there is no such edition for the all-critical volume #2, which is odd and not a little frustrating, but hey, there's the library, so it's all good.

Having spent volume #1 (Naming the Powers) assessing the Biblical data regarding the use of terms, and drawing a few conclusions, volume #2 focuses on seven distinct types of the Powers: Satan, demons, angels of the churches, angels of the nations, gods, elements of the world, and angels of nature.

The trilogy reflects Wink's personal journey from an attempt to analyze what Scripture had to say about the Powers as a detached observer to the unsettling recognition that there is most likely far more going on in the spiritual realm than we can ever understand and that we have attempted to suppress in our post-Enlightenment culture. In the Epilogue he establishes the argument he has tried to make: the spiritual realm is the interiority of earthly existence (p. 172).

This concept informs the discussion throughout: as individuals have both a physical and spiritual existence, and those inter-relate and permeate in many ways, so it is with the environment and all human groupings and institutions. At times Wink seems to buy into the embodiment of such spiritualities in the forms of Satan, demons, or angels; at other times he seems to be calling a collective spirituality by such embodied names; the ambivalence is part of the project as a post-Enlightenment and yet fully modernist man of the late 20th century trying to grapple with a very pre-modern and enchanted perspective.

His exposition on Satan, the Angels of the Churches, and the Angels of the Nations come with the strongest Biblical grounding. The discussion of Satan is compelling, putting the Biblical evidence at the fore, willing to see Satan as a servant of God in many respects, an over-zealous prosecutor, and in terms of being the Evil One a chameleon, perhaps led to such because of persistent human rebellion: the embodiment of not only the potential but also the actual spiritual consequences of rebellion against God. The warning that Satan can induce to excessive strictures as much as licentiousness is sorely needed to be heard. The Angels of the Churches takes seriously the letters of Revelation 2-3; he pointed out that many of the second person statements to the churches are in the singular, as if truly addressed to the angel of the church. Such takes seriously the idea that a given congregation has its own spirituality above and beyond that of its individual constituent members, whether in reality that spirituality has an embodied form or not, and that the culture/environment of the collective needs to be taken as seriously as the spiritual lives of its individual members. The Angels of the Nations is rooted in Daniel 10, the angel of the prince of Persia hindering an angel from God visiting Daniel, and would speak to the embodied spirituality of a whole nation. In this way Wink can simultaneously affirm the transnational Kingdom of God in Christ while still advocating for God having a purpose for the "angel" of a nation, and to understand and explain how citizens of a given nation share in its spirituality and thus both its benefits and its "sins" (thus Daniel prays a penitential prayer for the nation in Daniel 9; thus Jesus divides all people by nation in Matthew 25; thus the tree of life has leaves for the healing of the nations in Revelation 22). Thus America need not be a "Christian nation" as much as a nation who fulfills the purposes God has established for it in righteousness and justice; it cannot supplant the Kingdom of God but can prove subservient to it.

His discussions of the demonic, the gods, the elements of the world, and the angels of nature do speak often of Scripture but are also more heavily influenced by Jungian psychology and apocryphal/pseudepigraphal literature. This need not mean that Wink is wrong in all such suggestions. The discussion of the demonic also involves a Girardian exploration of the Gerasene demoniac and a helpful contrast between the influence of actual spiritual forces of darkness vs. the dark side of personality traits. The idea of collective possession, a la Jung, that we cast out the idea of individual demonic possession to see whole societies get taken over by demonic forces (and not little demons infesting people as much as whole groups of people falling prey to delusions and collective psychopathologies. The premise that "collective demonism is the abdication of human answerability to God and the investment of final judgment in a divinized mortal" (p. 51) seems eerily prescient. The idea of baptism as exorcism, as a casting off of the demonic of the world to serve the true and living God, has merit. In "the gods" Wink again relies heavily on Jung ("the gods never died; they just became diseases, p. 108), and puts stronger emphasis on the Scriptures which suggest monolatry rather than monotheism, that YHWH is indeed the One True God, while other perceived divinities are actually just lesser divinities appointed by God to rule the nations, and they have often gone their own way in rebellion against Him. In this way he can make good sense of Psalm 82 and a host of other passages but at the expense of the robust monotheism of Isaiah 40-55. He would say the gods are not to be worshiped but they are to be recognized for who they are; he is able to marshal good evidence from early Christianity suggesting that Christians did not deny the existence of many of the gods but considered them as daemons. That there are spiritual forces behind the embodiments named by pagans Ishtar/Aphrodite, Ares, etc., is a much stronger, more robust idea; one could perhaps get behind them as daemons, spiritual authorities over forces, which people mistakenly served as gods; but as "the gods" it seems more difficult to accept.

The discussion of the elements of the universe, the stoicheia, does not come without Biblical rooting (cf. Colossians 2:8-9) but by necessity goes beyond it to discuss how in materialism these things which are to testify to the Creator and provide what Wink calls "theophanies," moments of the realization of God, have instead become atomized and used for the exact opposite purpose than for which they were created. The premise is taken further with the angels of nature: Wink indicts the modern scientific worldview for needlessly disassociating humanity from the cosmos, assuming that we can look at functions and processes atomistically and in isolation as opposed to understanding everything as a coherent whole in which we are inextricably connected, but has confidence based on recent discoveries in science to suggest that the pendulum must swing back (good luck with that). It is a compelling point: why do we presume that most of the material universe is "dead" and we are "alive" if YHWH, in whom we live and move and have our being, suffuses the material universe and is the Existent One? By shifting to mechanism and away from a "living universe," all "nonliving" things can be taken and used and exploited, and has led to our rampant, runaway consumerism and environmental degradation. By killing off most of the universe we have built a culture of death; the fact so many "find God" in the wilderness testifies to the strong power of the Creation (and another concern about worshiping what should instead be pointing us back to God, as Wink himself declares). It would also fit the paradigm that just as there is an oppositional spiritual force as potential/actual disobedience, spiritual forces behind the demonic, and a spirituality of any and every human collective, including nations, that there would be spirituality/spiritualities behind the forces of nature. Again, not to be worshiped, but to point back to their Creator and to praise Him as declared in the Psalms.

Wink gives the reader no end of things on which to ponder; it's a massive challenge to anyone who wants to faithfully embody Christianity while living in the shadow of the Enlightenment. Wink persuasively shows how the worldview of the first century and before was pervaded by such ideas of spiritual forces and powers; yet, in himself, as with the rest of us, there must be grappling with how much they really understood, how much was "mere superstition," and how much "we" have rejected, thanks to Enlightenment philosophy and thinking, that the ancients truly understood better than we.

Nevertheless, Wink has done a service by doing the research, putting forth the ideas, and forcing us to grapple with them. ( )

[back cover] "Unmasking the Powers" is one of the most powerful and incisive treatments of the evils which afflict our society and our church that I have ever read. With wisdom, scholarship, and evangelical zeal, Walter Wink deals with the many ways that the powers of evil infiltrate our lives. This book is a must for anyone who would understand the seductive and destructive aspects of evil which are so much a part of human life. It provides not only methods by which the influence of evil can be unmasked, but also hints of how that influence can be counteracted.