The language of spiritual warfare has intensified during the past two decades. NeoCharismatics are the primary drivers of the category, but it has also become part of popular discourse. For example, when Mikhaila Peterson updated Piers Morgan on her father Jordan Peterson’s health condition, she claimed there was some kind of demonic attack in addition to Peterson’s physical complications. She argued that the apparent resurgence of Christianity in America was being met with demonic resistance.
We can trace the origin of this conception of spiritual warfare to theological developments in Anglo-American Protestantism at the end of the twentieth century. These developments cover the breadth of American Protestant traditions, from the mainline to NeoCharismatics with evangelical positions in between.
While traditional Christian views of spiritual warfare have focused on the interplay between human psychology and demonic influence (think of C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters), Protestants also attributed the existence of evil in institutions and cultures to demons. It was not simply that there was structural evil or systemic injustice; it was that these systems were under demonic influence.
These developments stemmed from interpretations of Jesus casting out demons in the gospels, and the apostle Paul’s illustration of principalities and powers (Eph. 6:12). On the one hand, the Methodist theologian Walter Wink argued that the principalities and powers were impersonal entities that emerged from institutions. On the other hand, NeoCharismatics like C. Peter Wagner argued that the powers were territorial spirits or supernatural agents who had taken control of a country, a government, or even a corporation. In between these positions, some evangelicals like Gregory Boyd opted for a fusion of the two.
Despite their different conclusions, these views share some common themes. All of them operate within a Christus Victor model of the atonement, in which Christ’s death and resurrection have conquered demonic principalities and powers. Believers are called to conquer in Christ’s name, and there is a connection between political theology and a theology of spiritual warfare. If demonic powers can infiltrate and manipulate institutions, then understanding how they function is part of a Christian view of cultural and political engagement.
Finally, they all operate broadly within the Wesleyan or Arminian view in which God allows creatures to choose whether and how they respond to his grace and will (I reserve Wesleyan for those in that tradition and use Arminian to refer to Baptists or others who have rejected a Reformed view of divine election).
Wink and the Powers
Walter Wink turned to Paul’s framing of non-human powers in Ephesians while experiencing the brutality of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet firsthand in 1982. After seeing many of the thousands that Pinochet tortured, imprisoned, or murdered, he “found a whole new sense of the truth and that relevance of the biblical understanding of the Powers has grown.”
This experience compelled Wink to join the effort by Protestant theologians to explain the immense evils unleashed by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. They were trying to comprehend the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, the symbolic center of the approximately 150 million dead at the hands of totalitarianism.
In his essay for First Things, Walter Sundberg quoted Emil Brunner’s observation that through the experience of totalitarian wickedness “many people have abandoned their former ‘enlightened’ objection to the existence of a ‘power of darkness,’ and are now prepared to believe in Satan as represented in the Bible.”
Yet, as Sundberg noted, Paul Tillich wrestled with the demonic question more than most in his efforts to explain what had occurred. Tillich rejected the idea that the demonic referred to any existing world of spirits even as he insisted upon its reality as a structure or system that emerged from destructive self-elevation. Erupting from collective human action, this system exercised a downward causality, enticing people and groups to abandon the good and so destroy other forms of being in the process.
The demonic stems from the idolatrous placement of finite realities over the infinite. Alongside Reinhold Niebuhr, Tillich was attempting to describe how psychological and sociological dynamics boomerang upon a person so as to “possess” behavior. This position became a standard liberal Protestant position that one still finds in theologians like the Lutheran theologian Ted Peters.
Walter Wink expanded on this approach. He saw how Latin American liberation theologians had discussed systemic injustice, and postulated that the demonic was behind such systems. For Wink, “the demonic is the spirituality produced when the angel of an institution turns its back on its divine vocation.” Drawing on Revelation, he suggested that the term angel referred to an inner ethos. This spirituality or ethos emerges from the culture of an institution, like Jung’s collective unconscious. It became an impersonal force that was more than the sum total of an institution’s parts.
As impersonal forces, these “powers” had their own kind of agency. They existed between the personal and mere human personification. Wink used language like corporate personality, spirit, or essence to describe a worldview embedded in a set of practices that compelled allegiance. Like the biblical accounts of demons possessing bodies, the ethos of an institution also possesses a corporate body or culture. While the spirituality of an institution may be good, it becomes diseased through idolatrous pursuits that turns it into an oppressive system. The angel becomes a demon that uses violence to bring about its will.
Wink called a total system of oppression that stems from warped economic and political relations a “domination system.” The Christian’s task was to name, engage, and unmask the powers through nonviolent resistance. The goal was not to destroy the system, but to unmask its cruelty and violence to bring about change. It was about reorienting those in the system back toward their divine vocation.
Wink’s ideas influenced many Protestants. Willie Jennings used Wink’s work to diagnose American racism, suggesting that a demon resides in the racial antagonism of the country. N. T. Wright adopted Wink’s views in his book Evil and the Justice of God (2006) to help explain the events of 9/11. He argued that “the satan” in scripture is a “subpersonal” or “quasi-personal” negative or anti-God force that humans call into existence through their idolatry. The problem of political power is that these quasi-personal forces emerge from group dynamics, and then exhort downward causality upon them. As such, they stand behind earthly rulers.
Wagner and Territorial Spirits
Emerging at the same time as Wink’s views, the NeoCharismatic approach claimed that there was a demonic agent, in the traditional sense of a literal fallen angel, behind the spiritualities or ideologies that controlled a culture. The language of the powers in the New Testament pointed toward “territorial spirits,” demonic agents who sought to control life in order to bring about its destruction. This view rejected the idea of impersonal entities in favor of the spiritual agency of fallen beings.
When Walter Wink was in Chile, Peter Wagner was visiting Omar Cabrera in Argentina. Having been ordained in the Pentecostal Holiness Church, by the 1970s Cabrera had launched his own ministry. By the time Wagner visited Cabrera in 1985, Cabrera had built one of the ten largest churches in the world. As someone who taught about church growth, Wagner was attracted to growing congregations. According to Wagner, Cabrera told him that the growth was related to identifying and binding territorial spirits that controlled cities.
After Wagner returned to the U.S., the Pentecostal novelist Frank Peretti published This Present Darkness (1986) and Piercing the Darkness (1989), which chronicled spiritual battles in a small town. Coming at the end of the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s over alleged ritualized Satanic abuse of children supposedly recovered from repressed memories, Peretti’s novels sold millions. As Justin Lee wrote in his First Things review, Peretti’s novels dramatized the kind of warfare that Peter Wagner would embrace. Wagner explicitly acknowledged the connection in Warfare Prayer (1992) when he endorsed Wink’s efforts to convince others of the reality of the demonic, but also claimed that Peretti dramatizes the struggle in more personal terms.
Wagner held a symposium at Fuller Theological Seminary in 1988 that brought together evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Charismatics to explore John Wimber’s “power evangelism.” During this conference, Wagner floated the idea that there were territorial spirits who controlled institutions, cities, and even countries. Fusing Paul’s language of the powers with the depiction of evil forces as princes in Daniel 10, he claimed that there were demonic spirits assigned to specific regions. These spirits must be identified and confronted through intercessory prayer. Wagner was fond of quoting Wink’s aphorism that “history belongs to the intercessors.”
Over the course of the nineties, Wagner and others developed what he called “strategic-level spiritual warfare.” Following George Otis, it outlined prayer techniques to discern the spiritual dimension of a city or an institution. Otis referred to this technique as “spiritual mapping.” Once identified, individuals or groups would fast, go on prayer walks in a city, and intercede to bind the demonic forces. Believers were following Jesus in binding strongholds by channeling Jesus’ authority through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Wagner, the key leader in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), spread this method throughout the movement. Apostles and prophets led congregations to engage in social transformation to take nations for Christ. The path to dominion was through engaging in strategic-level spiritual warfare in the seven mountains of culture described in the Seven-Mountain Mandate. Wagner followed Wink down the path that connected spiritual warfare and the political, but he substituted Reformed theonomist’s dominion theology for Wink’s Neo-Anabaptist approach.
Greg Boyd’s Warfare Worldview
Boyd developed his views between 1997 and 2003 as part of a general criticism of the classical Christian view of God. Although he had rejected process theology, he embraced open theism with its revisioning of divine simplicity, omniscience, and omnipotence. God is a complex being who does not know the future, and therefore changes in response to creatures. The future comes into being through a Creator-creature partnership in which God exercises sovereignty through guiding his plan to overcome those who seek to overthrow creation.
Boyd’s “warfare worldview” was an extension of his claim that “God must work with, and battle against, other created beings.” He stopped short of divine dualism while affirming that the cosmos is a society of free beings, which includes hostile cosmic forces that seek to destroy God’s plan for creation.
The principalities and powers mentioned in the New Testament refer to conscious agents in rebellion against God. The cosmos is caught up in a war between God and these fallen agents whose leader is called Satan. Arguing that there must be some kind of hierarchy among fallen angels, he explicitly rejects Wink’s view of impersonal forces within and acting upon social and political structures.
Like Peter Wagner, Boyd understood the powers as personal, transcendent beings who have become evil and seek to overthrow God’s purpose in creation. These powers do not possess individuals like demons do. Instead, they seek to infect the foundational structures of creation, and therefore stand behind idolatrous nationalism and other sinful structures.
Where Boyd parts with NeoCharismatics like Wagner is in how to engage in spiritual warfare. Boyd is part of a group of evangelicals influenced by the Neo-Anabaptist thought of John Howard Yoder and others. Confronting the powers involves enlisting in Christ’s revolution against everything that stands outside of the kingdom of God. This means revolting against systems like nationalism, racism, and sexism as part of establishing the kingdom.
Protestantism and the Powers
The positions I have outlined span the breadth of American Protestantism, from evangelical to Pentecostal-Charismatic to mainline Protestant. They also help to understand distinct approaches to political engagement within the Protestant world.
First, Wink, Wagner, and Boyd operate broadly within the Wesleyan and Arminian stream. As a United Methodist minister, Wink came under the influence of process theism and embraced a form of panentheism in which God and the world are bound up with one another. If process theology had a denominational home, it was in certain sectors of the United Methodist Church.
In Wink’s words, “everything is in God and God in everything. Spirit is at the heart of everything, and all creatures are potential revealers of God.” Because of the centrality of “spirit,” Wink argued that systems had a spirituality that functioned like a soul, and this spirituality could become demonic.
Boyd and Wagner both embraced open theism. Wagner repeated Wink’s claim about the future belonging to the intercessors because he thought the future was open. Not even God knew the future. Spiritual warfare was how to build that future in cooperation with God.
Second, all three embraced a Constantinian fall or shift in Christianity. For Wink and Boyd, this fall meant a rejection of all forms of Christian nationalism as the embodiment of idolatry. Christian existence was always in tension with the project of the nation-state and could never fully endorse that project without compromising the nature of the church.
Wink and Boyd are two sides of the ongoing influence of the Neo-Anabaptist vision of John Howard Yoder. While Wink passed away in 2012, Boyd pastors Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. As a multicultural megachurch, Woodland Hills continues to have a strong impact on St. Paul. Boyd also adjuncts in the Anabaptist Studies program at Northern Seminary, which, arguably, could be considered the theological home of this Neo-Anabaptist vision.
Wagner’s Constantinianism derived from the restorationism that came through the influence of the Latter Rain Movement in Pentecostalism. He thought that the church needed to restore apostles and prophets as offices that led the church. He also concluded that evangelicals had focused too much on the personal to the exclusion of the social and the national. A restored church would be led by apostles and prophets to transform nations.
This vision is at the heart of the soft Christian nationalism advanced by Lance Wallnau and other NeoCharismatics. Most of them are part of the NAR that Wagner brought to life, although I am beginning to think that the NAR designation should be abandoned in favor of NeoCharismatic.
Finally, all three embrace a version of Christus Victor. This view of the atonement has had a resurgence in the twenty-first century due partly to their influence, and partly to the growth of Pentecostalism, which had always embraced it. Grounded in the Exodus tradition of liberation, all versions of Christus Victor portray Christ’s work as the defeat of sin, death, and the demonic to liberate the world from slavery. Unlike penal substitutionary theory, Christus Victor reinforces a more activist posture because Christians must continue to confront and conquer powers of darkness in society, as well as in the self.
The most prominent advocate of Christus Victor is N. T. Wright. As I mentioned, Wright operates with a version of Wink’s view of the powers. He has combined a view of the powers as quasi-personal forces with the postcolonial emphasis on empire in Jesus and the Powers (2004), a book he co-authored with Michael Bird. Bird and Wright see resisting totalitarianism and all forms of Christian nationalism as resisting the powers.
These developments in Protestantism reside below the surface of spiritual warfare language and views of the demonic. One cannot understand contemporary Protestant approaches to political theology apart from these developments. Spiritual warfare is no longer simply the Christian battling thoughts and desires that may have been planted by demons—it is about the way the demonic comes to exist in cultures and nations, which helps explain the evils totalitarianism has unleashed upon the modern world.
Whether the demonic refers to impersonal forces that exercise downward causality or corrupt and fallen spirits who seek to influence the direction of human behavior, Wink, Wagner, and Boyd insist that the biblical language cannot be demythologized away. This is the difference between older modernist Protestant liberalism, for whom the demonic is a symbol of warped collective behavior, and the newer postmodern forms of Protestant thought for whom such an explanation is insufficiently biblical.
