It has been increasingly painful to watch my granddaughter, old enough to take so much in but too young to talk, use hands to communicate. Whenever she sees something to interact with, she waves. This includes cars and trucks but increasingly settles on people. And above all other children. Yet when she sees children, COVID-19 distances her. So she will wave and wave. Once when her grandma took her to a playground and her waving to potential playmates failed, she burst into tears. Her hands speak her longing. And highlight the distances traumatizing our world these days.
Those hands yearning take me back to books I encountered as a 1980s seminary student but which had been released around the time I was born: Principalities and Powers by G. B. Caird (1956); and Christ and the Powers, by Hendrikus Berkhof (1953). I’d not heard of either before.
But given how regularly the Apostle Paul’s references to them in letters to the Romans, Ephesians, Colossians were cited in church when I was growing up, I had heard ceaselessly about the principalities and powers. My vague sense was that they were satanic forces of evil, fearsome but not in ways hugely pertinent to my youthful realities.
Caird’s and Berkhof’s were the first treatments of the powers that made me come alive. Both wrestle with whether Paul ultimately believes literally in angelic or demonic powers and both shift at least some emphasis to what Berkhof calls “structures of earthy existence.” Here the focus starts to fall on the patterns and systems that make up our cultural, political, social, legal, military realms, and more.
It is no accident that Caird and Berkhof were writing in the aftermath of a planet and countries and cultures devastated by world wars. Their books were released in the decade after World War 2, a decade which also saw the Korean War, the Cold War, and so many more occasions for thinking through the powers.
Particularly Berkhof taught me to see such structures as both evil and good. Particularly Berkhof feels to me alive in spirit today, addressing the core realities we are at this moment living through as he tells us that the structures are evil. They are evil because they demand loyalties only God deserves, as when a nation commands us to pledge allegiance in ways that clash with obeying God.
As a Mennonite raised to believe in two main realms, one the world’s, one God’s, and to be loyal to God’s when they clash, I practically drank in this view with my mother’s milk. This is why when I turned draft age during the Vietnam War, I registered as a conscientious objector loyal to God rather than then-President Nixon and the military he commanded.
But that is not the end of the story Berkhof tells us about the powers. For Berkhof the powers are also good. Commenting on Paul’s conclusion in Colossians 1:15-17 that Christ “is before all things, and in him all things hold together,” Berkhof says that “Diverse human traditions, the course of earthly life as conditioned by the heavenly bodies, morality, fixed religious and ethical rules, the administration of justice and the ordering of the state—all these can be tyrants over our life, but in themselves they are not. . . ; they are the dikes with which God encircles His good creation, to keep it in His fellowship and protect it from chaos. . . .”
And that takes me back to my granddaughter’s longing hand. For that hand to touch other hands, it needs powers that protect her from the chaos.
On the nights when it looked like U.S. powers were on the cusp of unleashing direct military intervention against protestors for racial justice, some among the military powers I would still register conscientious objection to rose against such domination. Here and there in politics and government as some leaders show us what demonic idolizing of the powers looks like, others, often humbler in ego and role, protect us from chaos.
I pray that in the days ahead and for years to come many hands, seen and unseen, will build dikes against chaos and clasp my granddaughter’s outstretched hand.
—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. Until recently, when Mennonite World Review was merged into Anabaptist World, he wrote “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.