Mindscape and the Powers that be

I've been asked to chat with some clergy about 'spiritual warfare' which prompted me to think about what I'd say and realising as I did so that I needed to be able to say it succinctly and clearly and that a lot of the stuff I'm reading and thinking about at the moment may be getting in the way of that. So, time to try to boil down some basics. I realised that I'd been quietly cooking up a metaphor which may have the potential to hold together the various things that I think we need to keep hold of for this take on the Powers That Be to be a useful 'ministerable' approach for 21st century Christian leaders. Here I'm expressing myself more succinctly than I might speak, and so with a more condensed and sometimes scholarly style.

So, what do I think needs to be said to give a way in that could be useful to get people started in thinking about the powers that doesn't reproduce the mis-steps of the strategic-level spiritual warfare approach?

I think a good place to start might be to recall that humans are created social ("it is not good that the earthling should be alone") and one of the corollaries of that fact is that we tend to build a shared 'mindscape'. By that I mean that we share, mentally and affectively a range of things which we hold in common even if we appropriate them individually in terms of subjective experience. We co-create and co-curate images, language, metaphors, habits of mind and practice, artefacts and objects etc. If you think that this looks remarkably like 'culture' then I think you'd be right. I think that the overlap between 'culture' and what here I'm calling 'mindscape' is extensive. I'm choosing to use the term 'mindscape' because I think that 'culture' tends to be overused and i want to try to focus our attention on the sense of co-ownership and intimate connection to it. It seems to me that 'culture' so often gets used in an objectified way which wrests from us our own (admittedly small) individual participation and contribution to this collective endeavour. I also want to develop the metaphor of landscape implied by the term to help us to understand some important things about the Powers and corporisations.

If we think about the collectively shared ideas, images, understandings, ways of thinking and perceiving etc as a landscape in which we all roam and which to limited degrees we help to shape then we have a way to begin to grasp corporisations and the Powers that be. But first we need to understand the geography a bit in order to properly see these latter objects of attention. We can in our imaginations see hills and valleys. These we might link to culturally-shared contours making some ideas, perspectives and affections more or less easy to traverse and to navigate. the valleys mean that some ideas and perspectives more easily collect from various minds and flow together further contributing to the shaping of the collective thought-world while the cliffs, hills, and mountains are things that we can take our bearings by and make difficult certain moves across the idea space.

Some of the mindscape has 'beings' in it. Just as plants and animals in our physical world are made out of energy and matter, so in the mindscape there are beings made of the 'stuff' of our collective thoughts, emotions and imaginings. And don't forget that includes people: we are also objects of our own thinking, feelings and imaginings and appear as such in our collective mindscape. And since these mindly representations are attached to and/or associated with physical bodies, (and so too are various other physical-world objects like mountains and buildings, buses and bison), then the mindscape is something that interpenetrates physical reality -mediated by human brains. Or perhaps it's the other way round: physical reality underlies and (partly but definitively) shapes the mindscape.

Therefore the mindscape has in it things like institutions and organisations  which are formed from human bodies, conventions, ideas, values and artefacts held together in the mindscape and having bodily and physical reality as well as mindly reality. We should notice how the physical and the mindly mutually inform one another. The mindly aspects help to hold together and shape the physical and yet also the physical enables, constrains and partially fashions the mindly.

This landscape of human shared thought is spiritually significant and in fact spiritual in its own way. First of all, since we human beings are spiritual beings, then the 'things' that we compose or make up, like organisations and institutions -in short, corporisations- must share something of that spiritual nature and that is worked out by their helping or hindering our relationship with God, by sharing and in a sense mediating it (I don't mean in a salvific way, but in a peer-to-peer sort of way in which church can be implicated, for example). Mindscape, particularly through the corporisations that grow within it, obscures or clarifies things relating to God and human flourishing: it helps to further or to hinder God's purposes on earth.

Walter Wink is quoted as saying: 'History belongs to the intercessors'. Listening to him explain this and translating that into the metaphor of mindscape, i would say that he saw prayer as reshaping mindscape. In a sense prayer erodes strongholds (ie bastions of ideas resistent to the gospel), rechannels flows of information or clears ground for easier movement of the gospel. I'd add also the Eph.6:10ff stuff which is really about faithful Christian living and sometimes costly integrity in discipleship: living in opposite spirit to an untruthful and/or degrading ethos, speaking truth to power, mind-feeding and discernment, works of mercy, acts of solidarity and prophecy which are all things that the classic spiritual disciplines are about forming and fostering within us individually and collectively.

I am wary of the language of spiritual warfare in a context where (unlike the early church) militaristic language for Christian discipleship is sometimes taken literally. However if we were to use it, it is these classic disciplines that constitute spiritual warfare. This I would hold along with the insight that our battle is not against flesh and blood (ie not primarily against the employees, volunteers or office-holders in corporisation) but against spiritual wickedness which by virtue of making use of the opportunities in the mindscape or the particular constitution of a corporisation is able to marshal human collective effort into anti-gospel and counter-humane processes and ends.