DYING TO THE POWERS

One does not become free from the Powers by defeating them in a frontal
attack. Rather one dies to their control: “Those who try to make their life secure
will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it” (Luke 17.33). Here also the cross
is the model: we are liberated, not by striking back at what enslaves us – for
even striking back reveals that we are still controlled by violence – but by a
willingness to dies rather than submit to its command.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 93)

WHAT STRANGE PRESCRIPTION IS THIS THAT OFFERS RELEASE FROM

THE POWER OF DEATH BY THE POWER OF DYING?
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 93)

We are dead insofar as we have been socialized into patterns of injustice.

(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 93)

Socialization, Conversion, Resocialization, Ego and the Powers

Each of us has already lost what would be been our way, had we only known how to
find it (Rom. 3.9-20). There is no helping it; children must be socialized. Rules,
customs, habits must all be learned, and learned under the supervision of the
Domination System. So, along with many good and necessary learnings, children are
also taught racial prejudice, jingoistic pride, insatiable consumerism, and hatred of
others not like themselves. And there is no helping it; at some point we must
begin to become ourselves. And so to do that, we who are dead must die to our
learned preferences for domination.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 94)

Why doe the NT use this imagery of death for the press of fighting free from
the Powers? Because, says psychology pioneer Carl Jung, the unconscious still
operates on the archaic law that a psychic state cannot be changed withought
first being annihilated. And the annihilation must be total. … In the sacrificial
system the need to sacrifice the ego was projected upon an animal. When the
projection is withdrawn, one faces the task of dying to the socially formed ego in
order to become the self one is meant to be: “present you bodies as living
sacrifice” (Rom. 12.1).
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 94-5)

But rebirth is not a private, inward even only. For it also includes the necessity
of dying to whatever in our social surroundings has shaped us inauthentically.
We must die to such things as racism, false patriotism, greed, and
homophobia. WE MUST, IN SHORT, DIE TO THE DOMINATION SYSTEM IN
ORDER TO LIVE AUTHENTICALLY. As Paul put is, “Far be it from me to glory
except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the Domination System
[kosmos] had been crucified to me, and I to it” (Gal.6.14)
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 95)

Rationalists may need to die to idolatry of the mind; dominating personalities to their
power; proud achievers to their accomplishments. … They must die to what killed
them.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 95)

Depth psychology and Eastern mysticism alike have spoken profoundly of the
death of the ego. … What these approaches have not make clear is the degree to
which the ego is also a web of internalized social conventions, a tale spun by
the Domination System that we take in as self-definition. We are not only
possessed by the oge as an autonomous inner complex, but also an outer network of
beliefs that we have internalized. THE UNQUESTIONABLY AUTHENTIC
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE OF ‘REBIRTH’ OFTEN FAILS TO ISSUE IN
FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGES LIVES BECAUSE THIS SOCIAL DIMENDION OF
EGOCENTRICITY IS NOT ADDRESSED. … THUS, DYING TO ONE’S EGO CAN
BE JUST ANOTHER FALSE SPIRITUALITY UNLES IT INVOLEVS DYING TO
HER POWERS.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 95-6)

We can no more free ourselves from the ego by means of the ego than we can
liberate ourselves from the powers by means of the Powers. The ego must be
totally reoriented with God at the center, but this is impossible for the ego to do. What
is required is the crucifixion of the ego, wherein it dies to its illusion that it is the
center of the psyche and the world, and is confronted by the greater self and the
universe of God.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 96)

Paul describes the experience thus:

‘I [the ego] have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I [the ego] who
live, but it is Chris who live in me [the true self]. And the life that I [the ego]
now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of god who loved be an gave
himself for me (Gal. 2.19-20).
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 96)

The ego, as it were, tears up the false deed by which it ha claimed possession of the
house, and acknowledges that the whole property belongs to God. And lo! God
allows the ego to go on living there. The ego now knows Whose the house is,
beyond a shadow of doubt, though by force of habit it inevitable slips back into
acting as if it owned the house. But now it doesn’t take such wrenching to let go of
the pretense. Usually a simple reminder will do. This is one reason why Christians
worship [and pray]. To worship [and pray] means to remember Who owns the
house.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 97)

The task is not ego conquest by means of ego ( a persistent pitfall in all forms of
spiritual aspiration), but ego surrender to the redemptive initiative of God in
God’s struggle against the Powers of the world. This means our abandoning
egocentricity not only as individuals, but as cultures, as nations, even as a
species, and voluntarily subordinating our desires to the needs of the total life
system. And because the ego has been entangled with thousands of tendrils from
the alienating system of dominations, the process of dying to one’s conditioning is
never fully over.
(Wink, The Powers Be, 1998, 97)

Dying to the Powers is not, finally, a way of saving our souls, but of making
ourselves expendable in the divine effort to reign in the recalcitrant Powers.
When Jesus said, “Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who
lose their life will keep it’ (Luke 17.33), he drew a line in the sand and asked if we
would step across – step out of one entire world, where violence is always the
ultimate solution, into another world, where the spiral of violence is finally
broken by those willing to absorb its impact with their own flesh. That new
approach to living is nonviolence, Jesus’ “third way.”
(Wink, The Powers Be, 1998, 97)