Principalities and Powers

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the language of "principalities and powers" in the Bible, and how it applies to the 21st century world I inhabit. My thinking on the topic has been stimulated, informed, and shaped by the following sources: the "demonic individual/personalism" of the conservative evangelical/charismatic Protestantism that I was raised in, exemplified in, for example, Frank Peretti's novels, which I devoured as a teenager; my own personal encounters and experiences with forces and sensed presences of evil; and more recently, the writings of John Howard Yoder, Walter Wink, William Stringfellow, and Marva Dawn, which expanded and corrected my individualistic and dualistic understanding of the powers to include their comprehensive, systematic, and concrete/physical manifestations and dimensions.

I am convinced that this is an extraordinarily important subject that has been widely misunderstood and underappreciated by American evangelical churches, thereby greatly hindering their mission and witness, even, at times, enabling them to be co-opted and used to further the ultimately deadly agenda of the principalities and powers themselves. More on this later.