Below I reproduce a paper which should help readers understand better where I’m coming from in relation to corporisations and the Powers. The paper is lodged here at Research Gate.

Ministering among the Powers Corporate Human Entities, Emergence and Christian Mission

November 2013 Conference: Neapolis 

Abstract
From 1984 Walter Wink began to publish a trilogy of books which have been widely referred to and which many people have found helpful in relating the NT language of power to social and political realities. However, it seems to me that little progress has been made in taking hold of the insights and hermeneutic Wink offered and to use them to help Christians ministering -or simply working- in corporations, institutions and human organisations of any kind. This paper outlines further perspectives deriving from and in dialogue with Wink’s work leading into an emergence-based reading of the entities being described in such a way as to begin to consider how Christian ministers might conceive of their tasks in relation to corporate human entities.

Introduction
From 1984 Walter Wink began to publish a trilogy¹ of books which have been widely referred to and which many people have found helpful in relating the NT language of power to social and political realities². However, it seems to me that little progress has been made in taking hold of the insights and
hermeneutic Wink offered and to use them to help Christians ministering -or simply working- in corporations, institutions and human organisations of any kind. I think that there are two main reasons for this. One is that, as Marva Dawn³ notes, Wink himself doesn’t manage to remain consistent in holding to the insights he draws from his reading of the NT language of power: he tends to slip back into thinking of the Powers in a way which suggests that they are merely personifications of social, economic or other such forces. I write ‘slip back’ because Wink himself suggests that his reading shows them to be more
than this and that the modernist ‘flat’ reading of them as sub-personal and merely materialistic needs to be challenged by reading them in a frame of an integral world view⁴. He is not alone in this because it seems to me that many of those who reference his work fall into the same under-interpretation. Perhaps
the fact that they do is an indication of how strongly a more materialist reading has inhabited our imaginations.

And I think that it is precisely imagination which is the difficulty here. Wink offers a way of reconceptualising the Powers in order to think about them in an integral world-view frame. He uses the metaphor of inwardness and depth⁵. The suggestion is that these entities are deeper than the surface presentation of them as forces. That in fact reality has a spiritual depth which is shared by the Powers (and in fact, as he goes on further into the trilogy, other material-world objects⁶).

Now I confess that, much as I’m drawn to recasting thinking in terms more friendly to an integral world-view, I find this proposal hard to take to. It seems to remain a mere metaphor without really disclosing more or enabling us to rethink the Powers productively in relation to the very social, economic and political realities we are attempting to theologise about. I think that the reason why Wink and others fall back into a way of talking about the Powers which still tends to remain at the level of material-world forces is that the depth metaphor is not sufficiently productive of insight in a cultural context in which a reductive materialist discourse is pre-eminent. Where the depth metaphor useful is in helping us to recall that we want to hold a more three-dimensional view (to extend the metaphor a little) of these realities which integrates material and spiritual and puts down a marker that this is the project we’re engaged in. However, it doesn’t enable us to do much more than that.

What I would like to propose as a way to begin to address this difficulty, is to take hold of an emergentist7 way of thinking in order to capture the integral insights that has attracted many to Wink’s work in the first place. This standpoint should then enable us to re-frame our thinking in relation to a non-reductive materialist approach which I consider will enable us broadly to integrate the materialist insights drawn from the sciences -including the social sciences- with theological thinking taking a spiritual dimension seriously. In doing so we take a position concerning the relationship between the material-world and the spiritual.

An outline of Wink’s approach and an apologia
In broad terms, Wink proposes that when we encounter the language of power in the NT and we consider it in its contexts, we find it used of material entities such as people who govern or a nexus of practices and people. We also find the same vocabulary used of entities which are clearly spiritually understood and non-material. There are also instances where both understandings are possible and where both could simultaneously be held. Wink suggests that this duality of meaning is more a construct of modern Western readers for whom the material and the spiritual are fairly sharply distinguished than for first century people of the Mediterranean for whom spiritual and material realities were polar opposites on a continuum -or perhaps rather flip-sides of a single reality⁸.

Perhaps the clearest examples of this approach in the NT canon are Ephesians and Revelation. In Ephesians chapter one we find ‘the heavenlies’ (epouranioi) presented as a spiritual reality co-ordinate with earthly realities such as people who have a status and presence in spiritual reality which re-frames their seeming positions in understandings of their earthly places. In this we get a glimpse of a way of thinking about this dual reality in which one pole is not a mere epiphenomenon or sub- or super-structure to the other but where they may mutually inform one another.

In Revelation it is clearest for our purposes to refer to chapters 1-3. In these chapters we find John the Seer’s letters to the seven churches and the way that these are addressed and written also demonstrates the duality we have been considering in a helpful way. A persistent theme running through Revelation is a see/hear duality⁹: John sees in one image and hears the same thing referred to using other imagery.
For example, he sees the Lion of the tribe of Judah and hears the entity referred to as the “Lamb”¹⁰; he hears of 144,000 and sees a multitude without number¹¹.

So it is with the introduction to the letters to the churches, though not quite in the same direct way just described, but still showing an interplay between spiritual and material views of reality. In Rev.1, we are introduced to Christ first of all (v.10-11) by voice naming the seven churches and then (vv12ff) he is seen walking among symbols of the same seven churches holding seven stars representing the “angels” of the same seven churches (v.20). The other visible characteristics described pertaining to the one who walks among the candle holders are picked up verbally in the letters to the individual churches.
Here we are interested in the stars which we are told are the “angels” of the churches and the lamp-stands representing the churches themselves. Yet, as we see when we read on, these are not distinct entities.

Each letter is addressed to the Angel of the church concerned and the verb-endings and pronouns corresponding to that address are the second person singular. By the end of each letter, without any sense of a change of addressee, the address has become to each member of the church, indicating the church in the form of its members. The clear implication is that the church is being addressed in two aspects: one its spiritual holon, labelled “angel”, the other in its several members. The stars in the hand of Christ tell of the spiritual closeness of the churches to Christ, the lampstands of their earthly and material-world presence. For the Angel to respond to Christ, the members of the church have to act and to think in certain ways. The Angel repents by the turning of the hearts, minds, lips and actions of the people of the church.

These examples give, I believe, clear testimony to Wink’s theses that the NT writers in common with their eastern Mediterranean compatriots viewed reality as bi-polar and integral. We also see that they could readily understand human corporate entities as simultaneously spiritual and physical. We should also note that, in describing the spiritual dimension of a corporate entity, they were comfortable using terms that many of us modern Westerners would consider pretty exclusively spiritual and having no primary reference to a human material reality let alone a corporate one, that is that “angel” could be the
spiritual-realm correlate of a group of humans.

With these in mind, it becomes readily appreciable that Wink can propose that the Powers (‘thrones’, ‘principalities’, ‘dominions’, ‘lordships’ etc etc) are best understood as spiritual and material, earthly and heavenly, visible and invisible¹². A main implication of this is that these terms should not be
understood as entities in the way that medieval Christian speculation made them: demons that had climbed the greasy pole of hell accumulating power and authority on the way. Wink would argue that even the demons of the gospels should be understood as spiritual correlates of the impact of social, political and economic oppression on the human psyche I don’t think it is necessary to take that further turn: it
seems to me¹³ that a more traditional understanding of demons can sit alongside an interpretation of ‘Thrones’, ‘Principalities’ and the rest which sees them as dual. I mention this so as to encourage those who would wish to maintain a more traditional demonology in respect of individuals, not to also
reject Wink’s otherwise helpful hermeneutics in respect of corporate entities.

Corporisations
At this point I would like to introduce a neologism. I do so because in trying to talk about ‘corporate entities’ I found that a briefer term was wanted. The most natural term to reach for to capture the idea of entities that are composed of or made up of human beings was ‘corporations’. However, this term is already in common-enough usage with a more restricted meaning of something like ‘for-profit business enterprises (usually fairly large and powerful)’. While such entities are included they do not exhaust what is being named here. Having tried various possibilities, for the purposes of this discourse, it seemed
well to adjust the term to signal an extension of meaning and to try to prime an understanding involving a bottom-up development (this for reasons that will become more evident below) co-ordinating a number of human beings (among other things) into a further something. So a new term, ‘corporisations’,
seemed to be a way forward.

Another term that might be noted and related here is ‘apparatus’ -being a translation of Foucault’s term ‘Dispositif’ as picked up and theorised further by Giorgio Agamben¹⁴. However, this term is also not (yet, at least) well known outside of political philosophy and also has connotations derived from it’s place
in Foucauldian thinking. Although it is intriguing that Agamben traces the etymology and genealagy of the term in Foucault to ecclesiastical thinking about power in the early Christendom period, the terminology in this case deriving from theology seeking to co-ordinate the immanence and transcendence of God in reflection on providence in relation to earthly government¹⁵ This is intriguing because it seems that the vocabulary of ‘Principalities and Powers’ etc would convey the ideas of aggregating human individuals into corporisations, that is controlling entities with something of ‘a life of their own’. However, as Agamben develops his thesis it becomes somewhat clear that a different emphasis and a concern with emerging Trinitarian theology on the part of church leaders (and others) led to the adoption of ‘disposition’/’apparatus’ (in Foucault’s French ‘dispositif’) as the key term. That said, Agamben’s discussion of the matter is helpful in providing insight into further potential theological resources to inform consideration of this topic.

Emergence and corporisations
As mentioned above, I judge that Wink’s original image of ‘inwardness/depth’ to try to capture and elucidate one of his key insights concerning the re-appropriation of the NT’s language of power, fails to activate imaginations in such a way as to help us to apply his insights more fully in ministerial practice.
Therefore, we are in need of another concept or image to help us. I propose that emergence might be that. Emergence is a reasonably well established idea in scientific theories¹⁶ (though some aspects of it are still contested) with some important philosophical correlates, some of which (I would argue) are helpful to a more general recasting of Christian ideas for a wider public. Although ’emergence’ may appear daunting, therefore, as a term, its in-life instantiations are, if not understood, at least familiar and can lend a sense and basis of comprehension which is sufficient for the task of taking hold of the basic concept to help us get a firmer grasp of corporisations in terms drawn from Wink’s insights.

Emergence, then, is when a further distinct entity or ‘system’ comes into being from the complex interlocking interactions of a group of self-bounding entities. This further entity is composed of the other entities and their interactions. They are bound together by feedback loops whereby energy and information continues to be part of the system rather than lost into the wider environment. The feedback further acts within the system. The whole interacting system is complex and not predictable in terms of the bottom-up mechanics. This is the realm of chaos and complexity¹⁷ This gives us a layered physical universe where each layer -sub-atomic, molecular, organic, intelligent- in a sense rests on the ‘lower’ layer and may form the basis or substrate for the next layer ‘up’. Many readers will be familiar with the idea of levels in science¹⁸, and this is part of that. If that seems too dense or too far from the reader’s prior understandings, perhaps some examples will help.

Fundamental particles such as quarks and gluons interact in such a way that sub-atomic particles can emerge and in turn, the interactive relating of various configurations of these protons, neutrons and electrons make up atoms and in turn atoms interact in such ways that molecules can come into being (that is ’emerge’). Note how at each level the conditions are produced to allow the emergence of the next level. There is some (probably much) contribution by the ‘base’ level to what emerges: for example, molecules have different behaviours and properties according to their composition of particles though the way that these properties and behaviours are is not entirely predictable from knowing their composition.

Some molecules are of sufficient size, complexity and/or properties that they can be self-replicating and form organic tissues. The organic level emerges from the molecular. It is at this point that non-scientists can appreciate more readily that entities on one level can exercise top-down causality for we may
be aware that organisms and tissues are able to direct and re-direct the behaviours of molecules and even their composition. So, for instance, an organism attaches carbon atoms to oxygen atoms to produce ‘new’ carbon dioxide molecules during a process which dragoons oxygen molecules to play a part in metabolising other molecules for energy. In such processes the ‘driving force’ is the emerged entity (animal tissues in this instance) rather than the molecules in and of themselves.

We find a similar top-down causality in play when we consider brains. As is well-known, brains consist of networks of particular cells (cells, then, are emergent entities, by the way) which connect to one another in reconfigurable ways allow the relaying of electro-chemical signals. These connections and the patterns of relayed signals can become extremely complex and co-ordinate huge amounts of information. This is the basis for memory and thinking, among other things we experience as humans. We should note that it is not individual neurons that form, say, ‘a memory’ (even if we could define what a memory was) but memory is produced by the activation of patterns of neuronal interactions. From the activity of patterned neuronal interaction constantly fed by energy and information (which is a functioning brain) a mind
emerges. It is a mind constrained in certain ways by the characteristics of the brain, the ”habitual’ neuronal pathways and so forth, but this mind is able also to form and fashion the neuronal activity to suit its own ends. We don’t think simply what we’re determined to think; minds are capable of directing the matter and energy of the brain.

Before we leave these examples of emergence, I’d like us to consider a further one because it is germane to the issue of corporisations and provides a helpful foil for thinking further about them. Let’s consider social insects: honey-bees and social ants are probably the best known. Individually these creatures are not necessarily particularly intelligent. However, as hives or ‘nests’ they are considerably more intelligent¹⁹ and can solve corporately some quite tricky practical mathematical problems. Here we
see the emergence of a mind (a hive mind, if we may so put it) not from neural tissue but from more complex bodies acting according to algorithmic rules based mostly in chemical signalling²⁰.
I draw attention to the example of social insects because it gives us a further model to help grasp the idea of an emergent entity -a corporisation- whose substrate is individual multicellular bodies rather than just cells. As such it offers a window into the possibility that multicellular bodies such as our own
could be networked together in appropriate conditions and allow the emergence of a ‘new’ entity composed from our bodies, minds and theirinteractions.

Emergence: a creational trajectory
I would further suggest that we consider emergence as describing a ‘creational trajectory’. That is to envisage it as a dynamic process latent in creation which unfolds given the right conditions. Metaphorically speaking we might think of it as a force of creation (though that would be too teleological a way to speak of it for scientific accounts): part of God’s providential ordering of creation such
that not only do ‘things make themselves’ but also greater complexity is wrested from entropy meaning that top-down causality is possible not just the bottom-up causality of classical mechanics. In this we are perhaps seeing the wisdom in the monadology of Leibniz²¹ -a contemporary if Isaac Newton-
whose philosophy prefigured a post-Newtonian science based in relativity. In this way, we might not be surprised, we may even expect that the creational trajectory of emergence would move past human beings who would find ourselves, in some way, capable of concorporation into higher-order (next-
level) entities.

It is of course, one thing to note the possibility of such a trajectory but quite another to find it in actuality: so we might want to note evidences that there may be next-level entities beyond human beings. Part of that evidence might be found in a persistent human tendency to treat them as such in the sense of recognising that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and that groups, societies etc have a character of their own and tend to marshal human attitudes and behaviours in certain characteristic ways. We can describe a national character (and run the danger of it becoming a stereotype), we can talk about a company’s ethos and we can recognise the imprint (‘character’ if we were to think etymologically) of a school or public service on the habits of life and thought of participating people: these show a formational influence of the coroporisations corresponding to the top-down causality we have noted inrelation to prior-level emergences.

In fact, the way that Agamben describes apparatuses (which I think are either corporisations or a wider phenemenon out of which corporisations coagulate, more of which below) lends further credence to the creational trajectory; “… ever since Homo Sapiens first appeared there have been apparatuses; …there
is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not … controlled by some apparatuses” (p15, 2009): they arise -that is, emerge- with human minds in communities, with language and culture.
The question then would become, what is the status of such entities? How do we understand them theologically?

Corporisations and Powers
Part of the answer is already to view if we accept that corporisations are largely and often the same things as the Powers. In this case, we see that such things are part of God’s providential ordering (which is where the theology Agamben traces in Foucault links in) and in general terms are called to serve human welfare by enabling humans to aggregate and co-ordinate our efforts to produce goods and services that we could not as single entities. Thus passages like Romans 13 recall us to this providential purpose and encourage us to give ourselves (in appropriate degree) into the corporisations in order that we can share together in promoting human flourishing.

On the other hand, the Powers are fallen²². And as such they may become ‘curved in on themselves’²³: serving their own ends and interests to the detriment of humans within or outside of their composition. The fallenness, presumably, is entailed by their composition, in part, of fallen human beings. It would be of the nature of emergent entities that characteristics of constituent parts would likely become embedded into the higher-order entity: thus tendencies to self-serving, exclusion, violence etc could all too easily become characteristic of a corporisation. It is not surprising, then, that Scripture witnesses to the need sometimes to strategically resist the top-down causality exercised by corporisations.
Sometimes this is at the level of behaviours, sometimes lifestyle and at other times outright disengagement or ‘prophetic’ actions and /or words²⁴.

Corporisations and our place in the world
Somehow, while we are called on to co-operate with others for the common good which implies “obedience” to corporisations, we are called not to become hive-creatures²⁵, like the Borg in the Star Trek universe where individuality is extinguished or fully subsumed in the collective. Sometimes sin is crouching at the door in the form of the collective pressure to act in certain ways, but we must individually not let it have us but ‘master it’. This is also already acknowledged in the post-Nuremburg Trials’ principle that “just following orders” is no defence against conviction of participation in corporate evil such as genocide.

Thus it appears that we are called to participate in corporisations but to do so critically with a view to keeping them true to their vocation to serve human (and planetary) well-being. We are also called to resist, if necessary, where ill is being done. The forms of resistance are many and are not explored in this
article for want of space.

The other theological dimension is to note that corporisations are entities with their own interiority, integrity and purposes. They have agency to varying degrees and are known to God, having a general place God’s purposes and, I would argue, a particular vocation. I would suggest that the particular vocation of corporisations should be understood analogously to that of human beings. Each of us emerges from a genetic-informational, biological, chemical and mechanical-physical nexus. And
yet we are “made by God” (as many catechisms affirm among their first answers) thus we recognise that though the interactions of chance and necessity in life could mean that we have multiple possible life pathways, yet it is still in some way cogent to think of ourselves as having vocations. I propose
that this analogy is one of principle and of providential ordering and can be taken to be something we can work with ministerially. Wink writes and speaks of recalling the Powers to their vocation and I believe that this is a good starting point for Christian ministry to and among corporisations.

Our ministry with corporisations
To do that, though, we will need a ministry of something like corporate spiritual direction. And, again, the analogy with individual humans is helpful as is relating to creatures whose mode of being is different to humans²⁶. The other issue which comes up quite sharply in dealing with The Powers becomes apparent in considering the ministry of ‘corporate exorcism’ which is found being attempted by many who are engaged in what is often called ‘strategic-level spiritual warfare’²⁷. Leaving aside the usually-mentioned
theological difficulties with this approach²⁸, it seems to me that a further significant yet unnamed difficulty is how to address and communicate with corporisations. The SLSW ministries assume that somehow addressing them verbally is possible and effective. But that relies on an implicit model of the
entity which I believe is not warranted: there is no real consideration given to how an entity might sense or come to know what is being communicated or done; where should one go to address it and how to address it? With a human being we know about sensing and communicating, with a trans-human entity
we perhaps don’t and are likely to be misled by uncritical analogies as many people are when relating to their pets, sometimes with humorous, sometimes in disturbing ways.

If the emergent approach is taken, then we might reasonably ask what the sensorium of such an entity could be and how we could use that to transmit information. We should also ask what are its interests, fears, hungers and motivations with which we could connect in order to foster some kind of
understanding. It would be well to remember that, for the most part, we human beings receive spiritual sustenance through the media of written and spoken words, or sacramental actions. When we deal with another order of beings which are both material in some way and spiritual, then we would expect that an analogy could pertain: that communicating with corporisations would involve signals mediated by its means of interaction with the world which yield to it information about its environment.
To make the analogy more concrete, let’s consider what is involved in communicating with, for example, a dog. We humans can communicate with dogs but we cannot do so in the same way and to the same extent as we would a human being. In communicating with a dog, we have to recognise that
its ability to process language is fairly limited and we need to accommodate to that. We should be aware that its interests are different to ours and so it will pay attention differently. We have to recognise that a dog reads body language and values its rank in its pack (which may include us). We can make communicative use of its interest in certain foods and some have used a dog’s aversion to discomfort or even pain to attempt some communication. We might also consider, in the light of the analogy of corporisations with hive insects, how one might communicate with a bee hive or ants’ nest. These
analogues are important to help us not to commit the error of treating the ‘interiority’ of corporisations too humanly.

We should attempt to make an inventory of the communicative capabilities, interests and sensorium of a corporisation in order to help us to understand how to minister to and in it. So, we might consider what nourishes it, how it gets its energy (not only literally but also metaphorically: money? Customers?
Recruitment? Property?) and what ministry might be plausible given those flows of energy and resources. We might ask what it values and concentrate on reasoning relating to that: reputation, league tables, image etc. We might want to observe what it fears: legal challenges? Foreclosure? Reputational damage?
It is important also to ask how it gains information about its environment -and alongside that, what its environment is in terms of what it pays attention to.

For example a bat’s environment in attentional terms is sonic and not luminal, a dog’s is odour-rich but visually-poor, a bee-hive’s is high-energy light-rich but sound-poor and aggregated from the sensory capabilities of the worker bees.

A corporisation is likely to have its senses closely relating to what is important to it or what it fears. But being aware of how it senses what kind of information can give important clues as to how to attract and keep its attention and pass on information in such a way that it may change its perceptions or priorities.
Therefore, we will need to develop that ministry, mentioned above, of corporate spiritual direction: by prayer, pastoral conversation, research, theological reflection and attention to the marginalised we seek to understand what God’s general and particular purposes for the corporisation are -how they are carried out and resisted and how those purposes might be encouraged in its life and re-presented to its consciousness and actions. Our ministries may, then, be proclamatory or persuading: attempting to engage management in processing information in relationship to priorities and mission. They may be
oppositional in word or deed; strategically challenging aspects of the life of the corporisation. We may need to engage in alliance-building. We may need to identify who to influence and who is part of the problem or the solution to difficulties. In all of these things we would be seeking to call or recall the
corporisation to its vocation.

Andii Bowsher February 2013.
Tyne and Wear, Great Britain

Amended August 2023, to clarify argument regarding the angels of the churches in Revelation.

Endnotes

1 Wink, Walter. Naming the powers: the language of power in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984. Wink, Walter. Unmasking the powers: the invisible forces that determine human existence.
Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986. Wink, Walter. Engaging the powers: discernment and resistance in a world of domination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992. Wink later published a book which summarised the findings of the trilogy and developed some ideas further:
Wink, Walter. The powers that be: theology for a new millennium. New York: Doubleday, 1998.
2 Greg Boyd, p.77 in Beilby, James, and Paul Rhodes Eddy. Understanding Spiritual Warfare
Four Views.. Grand Rapids: Baker Pub. Group, 2012.
3 P.33f Dawn, Marva J.. Powers, weakness, and the tabernacling of God. Grand Rapids,
Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 2001.
4 See the ducussion on pages 15-26 of Naming the Powers.
5 P.104ff, Naming the Powers
6 I’m not convinced by that aspect of his argumentation but taking a cue from actor-network
theory, I think that other world-objects can play a role -even an agentive one- in human affairs.

7 Amos Yong takes a similar approach to the one I’ve been developing, and it appears that he
and I have come to similar conclusions about the Powers and emergence. See pp.205ff
Yong, Amos. The spirit of creation: modern science and divine action in the Pentecostal-
charismatic imagination. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2011
8 p.15 Naming the Powers: “it was far from the case that these terms primarily referred to
spiritual entities; to the contrary, these terms could be extended to take in spiritual powers
because they were the normal terms for power in all its manifestations. The world of the
ancients was … a single continuum of heaven and earth, in which spiritual beings were as
much at home as humans. … too complex to reduce either to the human structures … of
liberation theologians or to the spiritual beings of traditional theology.”

9 A particularly clear and helpful exposition of this can be found in Wilcock, Michael. I saw heaven opened: the message of Revelation. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1975.
10 Revelation 5:5 and 5:6
11 Revelation 7:4 and 7:9

12 Wink summarises the results of his word study thus: “1.The language of power pervades the
whole New Testament 2. The language of power in the NT is imprecise, liquid,
interchangeable and unsystematic 3. despite all this imprecision and uncertainty, clear
patterns of usage emerge 4. because the terms are to a degree interchangeable, one or a
pair or a series can be made to represent them all. 5. These powers are both heavenly and
earthly, divine and human, spiritual and political, invisible and structural. 6. These powers
are both good and evil.”
13 For further elucidation see: Bowsher, Andii. Demolishing strongholds: evangelism
and strategic-level spiritual warfare. Bramcote, Notts.: Grove Books, 1993. Some of
the above summarises points made there.

14 See the essay Agamben, Giorgio. “What is an Apparatus?.” In What is an apparatus?:
and other essays. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009. 1-24.
15 For the full argument refer to the first half of one of Agamben’s other books: Agamben, Giorgio. The
Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government.
Chicago: Stanford University Press, 2012.
16 See Seel, Richard. “Emergence.” New Paradigm Organisation Consulting .
http://www.new-paradigm.co.uk/emergence-2.htm (accessed January 26, 2013) “… the
term ‘emergence’ was first used by the English philosopher G. H. Lewes well over 100
years ago. The term was taken up in the 1920s by “a loosely joined movement in the
sciences, philosophy and theology known as emergent evolutionism…. But the process
of emergence itself remained, for them, unknown and unknowable. It was not until the
advent of ‘complexity theory’ that emergence became prominent again. Experiments
with computer programs known as cellular automata showed that simple interactions
between simple ‘agents’ could give rise to surprisingly complex behaviour”

17 See, for example; Lewin, Roger. Complexity: life at the edge of chaos. New York: Macmillan
Pub. Co. ;, 1992 and/or Waldrop, M. Mitchell. Complexity: the emerging science at the edge of
order and chaos. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992
18 See for example p.68ff of Re, Giuseppe. The cosmic dance: science discovers the
mysterious harmony of the universe. Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2000.

19 See for example Wray, Maggie. “Social insects and collective intelligence.” Intelligence in the Universe. http://intelligence.seti.org/pages/social_insects (accessed January 26, 2013)
20 For an imaginative apprehension of this see the science fiction novel Asher, Neal L.. The
skinner. New York: Tor, 2004 in which one of the characters is a hornet hive.
21 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, and Robert Latta. Leibniz The monadology and other
philosophical writings;. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898.

22 Wink (p.100, NtP) says they are both good and evil but that seems to amount to sharing in
human fallenness. How could they not, being composed in large part of human beings?
23 In this I am referencing by analogy Luther’s phrase ‘homo incurvatus in se’ -which echoes
Augustine’s anthropology and is picked up by Karl Barth. The phrase characterises a root of
sin.

24 See p.18ff Demolishing Strangholds.
25 There is an interesting exploration of the idea of a human hive in Baxter, Stephen.
Coalescent: destiny’s children: book 1.. London: Gollancz, 2003

26 It would be fair to note, though that though I believe Wink does affirm the agency of the
powers, he is also careful of language of personality because he is wary of us drawing
unhelpful analogies with human consciousness. He’s right to be wary and we should
recognise that we are trying to conceive of a different sort of intelligence and interiority
than what we experience.
27 A classic example being C. Peter Wagner and F Douglas Pennoyer (eds), Wrestling with Dark
Angels, Monarch, 1990.
28 A useful and fuller discussion relating to this can be found in Beilby, James, and Paul Rhodes
Eddy. Understanding Spiritual Warfare Four Views.. Grand Rapids: Baker Pub. Group, 2012.

Bibliography: cited or influential works

• Agamben, Giorgio. “What is an Apparatus?.” In What is an apparatus?: and
• other essays. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009. 1-24.
• Agamben, Giorgio. The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of
• Economy and Government. Chicago: Stanford University Press, 2012.
• Alison, James. The joy of being wrong: original sin through Easter eyes. New
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