Spiritual Warfare: Stupidity, Malice, Responsibility, and Resisting the Powers and Principalities. (Essay)

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Spiritual Warfare is one of those topics that gets people either all hot and bothered or makes them scoff and turn their noses up. But I think the reality of spiritual warfare is not ghost-busting or fighting demons like a Marvel character. In this piece I’m going to try and give another dimension to what spiritual warfare means.

Spiritual Warfare is About the Kingdom of God

Spiritual warfare is about the kingdom of God revealing itself in this world. It is about the proclamation that Christ is Lord above all earthly rulers, powers, nations, and politicians. Spiritual warfare is not about who wins in the end. We know that Christ is already victorious. It is about making that victory visible here and now in how we live our lives and how we contend for the kingdom.

Scripture is very clear about what the kingdom of God and the victory of Jesus look like in the world.

It is characterised by righteousness and justice flowing like mighty rivers, by the hungry being fed, the naked being clothed, the homeless being housed, the prisoners being set free, debts being forgiven, slaves being freed, the wealthy selling their possessions to give to the poor, and the foreigner being welcomed into the land as if they were a sibling and not a stranger.

When people, systems, and structures contend against these things, a spiritual battle occurs.

An Evil Person Rarely Thinks They Are Evil

Some people aim to lead those systems, turn them to their advantage, and use the power that they bring to shape the world into their own ideal image. Others aid in that system, either directly or indirectly.

The problem with evil, according to Augustine, is that people acting evil do not think they are evil people. They genuinely think they are doing good. It is simply the case that they have a false and sickened sense of who they are doing good for and what they are permitted to do to achieve that good.

For Augustine, evil is not a ‘thing’ or a force but is a corruption, a lessoning, shadow-play, and a damaged and broken shell of what something or someone could and should have been. Evil is less than nothing because it is not a principle but is an anti-principle.

Paul says that we fight not with enemies of the flesh but with powers and principalities. Just as Jesus said, love your enemies and pay back evil with good.

Spiritual warfare is not violent, but it is equally not passive. It is not coercive, but it is forceful. It is not destructive, but it is transformative. Spiritual warfare means resisting the powers of this world, the structures that create and preserve systemic evil, and the people who assist and direct those structures and systems.

Walker Wink, who we will return to later, argues that there is a spiritual dimension to the political, economic, and social structures which can act for or against the causes of righteousness and justice. A spiritual dimension which must be contended alongside the use of political, economic, and social actions.

That is spiritual warfare in the Biblical sense of the term.

Spiritual Warfare Means Taking Responsibility

I think that, ultimately, this can be reduced to a question of responsibility.

Some people take responsibility only for themselves and for people like them. This is malice.

Some refuse to take responsibility at all and go along with the crowd or with what they are told to do. They refuse to think, to choose, to decide, to be a responsible person. This is stupidity.

There are those who take responsibility for the good of people in need, the poor and oppressed, the vulnerable and the outsider. These are the people who become neighbours. These are the people who are ushering in the kingdom of God. This is where holiness is found.

Stupidity

To be clear, stupidity in the sense it is being used here does not mean a lack of intelligence, cognitive impairment, or someone who isn’t clever.

Stupidity is what happens when someone refuses to think for themselves, refuses to be an active agent in the world, and refuses to take responsibility but rather abnegates it to someone or something else. The stupid person is the person who does something because they were told to do it, rather than deciding for themselves whether it is the right thing to do. The stupid person is the person who is obedient to a group, a system, a state, a party, an organisation, rather than making a decision for themselves.

Many scholars have held this position. The 18th-century German scholar Friedrich Schiler wrote “Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.” More recently, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” The refusal to think of being an active agent in the world is a seriously underestimated danger.

The two most important scholars for this discussion are Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hannah Arendt.

In the letter “After Ten Years”, written while in prison, Bonhoeffer wrote:

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplishes anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgement simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous. “

For Bonhoeffer, the events that took place in Germany in the 1930s and the following decade resulted from the people’s stupidity.

Stupidity is More Dangerous than Malice

The people refused to think for themselves, to take responsibility for their own choices and agency, and instead willingly gave themselves over to the system of control and domination. Bonhoeffer warns us that stupidity is far more dangerous than evil than obvious malice because, without stupidity, evil cannot prosper.

Evil people require structures of oppression and dominance to function, which in turn requires people who are willing to give over their agency to another to willingly choose not to think. Without people going along with the evil lurking behind systems of control and domination, hidden behind authoritarian leaders and the cult of personality, evil could not survive.

This is what is meant by the phrase: All it takes for evil to thrive is for one good person to do nothing. Ordinary, everyday people willingly sacrifice their own responsibility and turn it over to another and because of their stupidity, evil emerges and takes power.

The most dangerous evil is often boring

Hannah Arendt wrote about the same phenomenon in her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann.

Bonhoeffer described this phenomenon as stupidity. Arendt spoke of the banality of evil. For Arendt, the sheer ordinariness of the autocrat in the box was a startling indictment of the capacity of evil to emerge from an authoritarian and totalitarian system, especially when allied to a cult of personality and the principle of the leader.

Eichmann performed unimaginable evil, but did so because he felt it was his duty to obey orders and be obedient to a system to which he had given his allegiance. He was deeply evil but in a boring and banal way. Not a raging demoniac or horrible monster twirling his moustache.

He was an administrator who, through his refusal to think, and his refusal to be responsible, was integral to genocide.

Stupidity and the banality of evil are still active and dangerous phenomena today. People are just as likely to be stupid and to abrogate their responsibility today as they were ninety years ago.

Bonhoeffer’s warning holds true.

Reason falls on deaf ears, protests to think of other people fall flat, facts are ignored, intelligence is denigrated, power is promoted, strength is worshipped, weakness is mocked, and when facts become irrefutable, they are simply ignored or pushed to one side.

You cannot persuade a stupid person with reason, with facts and figures, with a logical argument, because the stupid person has refused to think. They are motivated not by reason but by fear, by anger, by inferiority, by hope.

Hope is perhaps the most dangerous of all the qualities which underpin stupidity.

We remember when Augustine said that no one evil believes they are evil. The stupid person has been sold a vision that the world can be changed in a way which will put them at the centre of it, where previously they had felt at the margins.

Stupidity supports evil because they believe that it will make the world a better place to live. They simply accept what the strongman, the leader, is telling them about what better looks like and what goodness looks like. They accept it because they have refused to think.

How can stupidity be challenged if it cannot be refuted with facts and arguments?

Fighting stupidity with a better story

With a story. There needs to be a competing narrative which appeals to the deep-seated need for relevance in the person who is willing to make themselves stupid.

What story can be told that unseats the narrative spun and delivered by the evil leader in order to break a person out of their stupidity and the banality of their evil and set them back on a path towards responsibility.

This is what we see Jesus doing with his parables throughout the Gospel. It is what we see Paul doing when he sets out the challenge of the cross. It is what we see the early Church doing when they confront paganism head-on by articulating a story which is more powerful, more meaningful, and more transformative than the narratives of competing ideologies.

We can redeem people from stupidity through the power of the Gospel narrative to subvert and destroy the narratives of control and domination to which the stupid person has given over their willingness to think, to take responsibility, and to be properly human.

Malice

Stupidity is more dangerous than malice. It is important to remember that the danger of stupidity emerges from its willingness to support and empower people who act from malice.

The danger of the charismatic leader

Bonhoeffer reminds us that there is an immense danger in a cult of personality that grows around the principle of a leader, of a strongman, of a person whose power and influence and charisma are such that people will overlook their actions, will ignore what they say, will accept behaviour that contradicts their own espoused values.

This leader, the idol of strength and domination, is a person whose personal malice is such that people will willingly cease thinking for themselves and will give up their responsibility to that strongman.

The person who acts with malice is driven by competing desires and fears, which turns other people into objects of their own desire. They act with violence and coercion to dominate people for the sake of their own ego and control.

They will turn systems and structures into tools of their will and will take on the agency of those people who make themselves stupid. But the need for power and dominion conceals the deep-seated fragility of a person who has broken and destroyed their humanity by making themselves only a shadow of what it means to be human.

When a person turns another human into an object, they lesson themselves. When they choose to act in a way which dominates, which controls, which forces, which damages, which hurts and destroys and undermines the humanity of others, they inevitably dehumanise themselves until they become a broken shell of malice and hatred and fear.

Fear creates bullies

Most of all fear. Fear of not being good enough. Fear that the lies that they spin will be undone, will be revealed. Most of all, fear that they will stop believing their own lies. This why they must always denigrate and destroy, because only being strong, and strong only in the sense of capacity to destroy, will they be safe from the damage their have inflicted on themselves.

People of malice exist in every level of society, from the playground bully to the politician, from the abusive pastor to the violent husband. But, when a malicious person is able to gain the following of people who have made themselves stupid, then something uniquely dangerous emerges.

This is why the cult of the leader, of personality, is so dangerous when combined with stupid people. The malicious person is lifted up through the willingness of the stupid to obey them uncritically and unthinkingly. When this leads the malicious person into a place of control over systems and structures, then those systems and structures are perverted from their proper function and turned into tools of evil.

We have already seen that stupid people cannot be challenged with facts. The malicious person gains their power from stupid people. This has an impact on how the malicious person can be challenged.

You cannot knock a malicious person down from their power simply through facts, through truth, through making a convincing argument, because their power is derived from people who refuse to think and who have given up their responsibility.

Even when the malicious person is revealed in all their evil and corruption, in their hatred and vitriol, they are supported by the people who have refused to think because they will not think but will continue to obey. If they once start to think and accept responsibility, they will end up destroying themselves with the truth of what they have allowed to happen. Banal evil is still evil.

How can a malicious person be challenged if they are empowered by the stupid?

By destroying them.

How to destroy malice

They must be exposed and destroyed, not through violence, not by the techniques and actions of the malicious leader, but through the subversive power of the Gospel. The malicious person is at the root a fragile and broken person who lashes out to hide from their own iniquity. They must be strong, they must be powerful, they must be feared, they must win at all costs, or they are nothing. So we must make them nothing. Less than nothing. Reveal that evil is only a shadow of broken and damaged humanity.

To laugh at their strutting ways and at their puffery. To undermine their claims of strength and power by revealing where strength will ultimately lead. To show the malicious leader that they are subject to the judgement of the cross by not fearing them, by refusing to be cowed by them, and, most importantly, by not obeying them.

Their power derives from stupidity. This can be denied to them by turning your back on them and treating them as what they are. A damaged and broken sinner, subject to judgement, under the shadow of the cross, who is not powerful, who is not scary, and who is only able to be important because others refuse to think.

The kingdom of God reveals their lies for what they are. The strong will be knocked down, while the weak will be raised. The first shall be last, and the last shall be first. The oppressor will be struck down, the pride will be humbled, and the violent will fall beneath their own violence.

Instead, in the kingdom of God, it is love which is the ultimate power, not fear. It is compassion which is the ultimate force, not violence. It is a place where the victim is made the victor because it is the kingdom of the broken God, who is crucified by the powers of malicious people but who is resurrected.

Christ, the victorious king who has crushed death beneath his cross and whose kingdom has no end and before whom every king and prime minister, every dictator and president, will be brought to their needs in the judgement of the cross.

Principalities and Powers

Walter Wink reminds us that the systems and structures, organisations and governments, corporations and churches within which we participate and engage, have a spiritual dimension. They have a form of corporate identity that has a kind of soul or spiritual reality to them, which must be understood and contended with. Wink says that these are the things Paul is talking about when he speaks about Principalities and Powers.

The failure of the powers

There is a divine vocation for these principalities and powers: order, justice, and righteousness. When the principalities and powers are corrupted and turned against their vocation, they become vessels and tools of evil.

This is what Wink describes as systems of domination and violence. This can also include ideologies and more ephemeral powers such as racism, misogyny, slavery, and ableism. These powers and principalities find their strength in the myth of redemptive violence – that violent power can bring about justice and goodness and that enough violence in the right hands will defeat evil and make things better.

This is a reminder that the reason why stupid people give their responsibility and power to malicious agents is because they are given hope. This hope gains its edge in the worship of strength located in the cult of the charismatic leader.

The malicious agent is able to maintain the allegiance of the stupid by taking on and corrupting the principalities and powers to serve them and their desires. The promise of redemptive violence is brought out through the systems of domination and control embedded in the corrupted principalities and powers.

How to resist the powers

Corrupted powers and principalities cannot be defeated by the same tools they employ. Any violence employed against them inevitably creates another system of violence which continues to re-embed the myth of redemptive violence. Violence worked once, why wouldn’t it work again? A country born out of violent revolution is likely to see violence as an appropriate way to settle its disputes.

A person who has learned that violence will make them feel safe will continue to use it. An organisation which has demonstrated that violence can bring about change, which is a form of control, will continue to use it. Violence breeds violence. The corrupted powers and principalities cannot be defeated but must be redeemed.

When these three things come together, a malicious agent who is empowered by people who have made themselves stupid and who is able to coopt the powers and principalities, there is a real and present danger in the world.

But we know that people who are refusing to think cannot be challenged by argument, by facts, or by truth. We know that malicious agents cannot be challenged by playing the same games that they play, but competing for strength and power. We also know that the powers and principalities cannot be defeated through conventional means or through their own tools of oppression.

What can we do to challenge the corrupted powers and principalities?

Following the way of the cross

We must resist them through the way of the cross. Wink points towards nonviolent but active protest and disobedience, which subverts the capacity of the corrupted powers and principalities to dominate and oppress. I would also point to the reminder from N. T. Wright that the ultimate power for those systems and structures of control and domination is violence, the power to kill and destroy.

The lessons of the early Church show how effective that is for those who are committed to the truths of the Gospel. When a person is secure in their faith and in the hope of the resurrection, the violence of the powers and principalities collapses and is turned back on itself through the cross.

There is also some advice from a perhaps surprising source. Thomas Aquinas wrote extensively on the responsibility of the powers of this world. He said that the divine vocation of the powers and principalities was to bring justice and righteousness into the world and maintain the good and well-being of people within those systems and structures.

When those powers and principalities cease to perform their divine vocation, there are four things that Christians can do.

Four ways to resist the powers

First, they can remind the powers and principalities of their vocation and prophetically challenge them to do better and live up to what they should be doing and who they should be. Part of the vocation of the church is to remind powers and principalities of their vocation and to call them to repentance and redemption.

Second, the church can enter a state of confession. This is where they proclaim the essential truth of the Gospel as a critique of the actions of the powers and principalities. This was seen in the confessing church in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s. The church also ceases to perform its civic functions of weddings, baptisms, blessings, and social provision. The church only performs vital functions such as funerals.

Third, Christians can protest the powers and principalities by standing in solidarity with the oppressed, putting themselves between the violence of the corrupted powers and the victims of that violence, engaging in civil disobedience, and engaging in nonviolent but active protest.

Fourth, in exceptional circumstances, when the powers and principalities have ceased to fulfil their divine function and have become instruments of evil, they can be ignored, rejected, and overturned. In this case, Christians and the church have a duty to refuse to obey and to actively seek the end of the embodiment of those powers and principalities alongside the redemption of their spiritual elements.

Responsible Holiness

What is the opposite of stupidity, malicious agents, and corrupted powers and principalities?

Holiness.

We need responsible holiness

Holiness requires us to take responsibility. We cannot abrogate our responsibility to another; we must think in order to be responsible, and we must be responsible to be holy.

Responsible for who? Responsible for our neighbour. Taking responsibility for the good of our neighbour means that we will not be a malicious agent because the malicious person is only able to think about themselves and their own good.

Who is our neighbour?

Jesus is clear about this. The neighbour is not any old person, and not everyone, and not only the people who look like us, talk like us, think like us, and believe like us. We become the neighbour when we take responsibility for the good and well-being of a person in need. The person who is the victim, who is abused, who is oppressed, who is hungry, who is poor, who is in prison, who is subject to domination and violence.

This person is our neighbour and it is to this person that we must become a neighbour.

Holiness is grounded in love for the neighbour, which means putting their wellbeing before our own, caring for people in need, and being responsible for them. Responsible holiness means stepping into spiritual warfare because responsible holiness directly challenges and critiques the way that evil emerges and gains power in the world.

Responsible holiness refuses to engage with the corrupted powers and principalities. Responsible holiness refuses to treat others as an object. Responsible holiness refuses to give up one’s own agency and maintains a strident and passionate thinking which demands we make our own choices and not subvert our agency to another. Responsible holiness rejects the myth of redemptive violence, and rejects the abject fallacy and pathetic pretence of the strong and the cult of the leader.

Responsible holiness is the way of the cross in the world, which transforms, redeems, and ushers in the reality of the kingdom of God. The challenge to Christians is to be holy by taking responsibility for their neighbour.

If everyone did this, then malicious agents could not gain the power needed to enforce systems of domination and violence through the corruption of the powers and principalities of this world. If everyone was responsibly holy, then the world really would be transformed.

Conclusion

The Gospel narrative, its power to transform people’s lives, and the essential and prophetic message of the cross—that the weak will be made strong, the last shall be first, and those who think their power makes them safe will be brought low—must be heard in the world through the church and through individual Christians.

The vocation to responsible holiness succeeds when we all take responsibility for each other and become each other’s neighbours. Then, we will be living in the way of the cross.

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