Patient Revolutionaries

I'm part of book club reading Lesslie Newbigin: Missionary Theologian. Yesterday we met to discuss chapter 2, which includes an excerpt from Gospel in a Pluralist Society, which I found riveting and transforming. Newbigin examines the Western notions of "what are variously called principalities, powers, dominions, thrones, authorities, rulers, angels, and other names" in the New Testament. Newbigin critiques our naive notions:

We imagine a host of angelic or demonic beings flying around in the air somehwere above our heads, suppose that Paul and his contemporaries believed in these, just as people once believed in fairies and elves, and conclude that we can ignore this part of his writing (pp38-39).

He then sets forth a biblical exposition for the realities to which these words refer:

They refer to something behind these individuals, to the offices, the powers, the authority which is represented from time to time by this or that individual. . . . That is why it is the business of the Church to make manifest to them the wisdom of God (p39). [emphasis mine]

Newbigin supplies ample illustrations. Capitalism drives free market economies, which facilitate efficient exchange of goods and services. Yet there is a reality behind capitalism that holds people captive to greed. Race and culture are necessary and intrinsic parts of human life, and yet we can clearly see that behind these there are powers and authorities that hold people in various races and cultures in different kinds of bondage - and powers that destroy the relationships among races and cultures. Of all these economic, social and structural powers Newbigin says:

They are created in Christ and for Christ; their true end is to serve him . . . but they become powers for evil when they attempt to usurp the place which belongs to Christ alone. In his death Christ has disarmed them; he has put them under his feet; they must now serve him; and the Church is the agency through which his victory over them is made manifest and is effected as the Church puts on the whole armor of God to meet and master them (pp44-45) [emphasis mine]

How does Newbigin propose that we respond?

We are not conservatives who regard the structures as part of the unalterable order of creation, as part of the world of what we call 'hard facts' beyond the range of the gospel and who therefore suppose that the gospel is only relevant to the issues of personal and private life. Nor are we anarchists who seek to destroy the structures. We are rather patient revolutionaries who know that the whole creation, with all its given structures, is groaning in the travail of a new birth, and that we share this groaning and travail, this struggling and wrestling, but do so in hope because we have already received, in the Spirit, the firstfruit of the new world. (p46) [emphasis mine]