Walter Wink

If we are, in fact, misrecognizing our needs, then simply discovering that we have them takes us only so far.

When people asked Marshall, so when do we get off track? What happened? He would make reference to Walter Wink, who wrote a book called The Powers That Be.

And he would say that Wink talks about how some thousands of years ago, a male god crushed a female goddess and she broke into a thousand pieces.

In workshops, he didn't usually elaborate further than that, other than to encourage audiences to read Wink's book.

It's okay.

uh came out and um one thing that stood out which i think is worth revisiting is that you talked a lot about um a uh a jesuit priest theorist named walter wink oh yeah talked about the need to understand domination systems yeah not in ideological terms but in other terms because this is You know, I think the U.S. is far enough away from the Cold War where we can start to think about things without immediately falling into, you know, you're either a John Birch Society member or, you know, a plant for the CPUSA.

Although we're slow to kind of make it more complicated.

But can you talk about domination systems, both in D, but your work more generally? Because that seems to be the one thing that kind of goes through everything.

Yeah, well, it's been a long time since I thought about Walter Wink.

In fact, just the other day, I was trying to remember his name.

But he wrote about...

However, in the DDC, what generally happens as babies and children is we are trained out of this innate wisdom.

because of the cultural beliefs in the disconnected domination culture about what children, in inverted commas, should do, should being one of the core words of the DDC, which I learned from Marshall Rosenberg, Creative Nonviolent Communication, His term was domination culture, which he got from Walter Wink, which Walter Wink got from Rian Eisler.

Rian Eisler coined the term.

And then what I realized is it's not just about domination, that in my map, domination comes as a result of disconnection.

And...

Coincidentally, I had been reading on our trip some of Walter Wink's book called The Powers That Be.

Walter Wink's well worth reading.

Won't go into that now.

Anyway, his dominant picture there is that christ has introduced a alternative kingdom to anything earthly ever conceived and all of the earthly systems assist what he calls domination systems and that what he explains is that the way domination systems work, sure they're national, sure they're social, but they actually often get encased in the family.

So what might have been implicit, if we, for instance, were to read the story of David and Goliath, we could imply various moral implications.

But when we're reading the Sermon on the Mount, we're getting them from the mouth of Christ, mouth of Jesus.

And it is a very, I mean, Wink is very powerful in this, Walter Wink.

But, um, generally regarded as the foremost Old Testament scholar and theologian, and he calls this system totalism.

Now, another very influential author for me is Walter Wink, and he uses the term domination system.

So we're gonna dig down into this a little bit.

We're gonna look at how, um, [chuckles] how Moses revealed this system, and next time, um, if we, if we could do a big long one, I'd keep this all together, but we gotta divide it.

Pardon me.

Now, that's a real brief view of Brueggemann, and if people wanna know more, have them write in, and I'll give you a whole list of books and articles and everything else.

The second person we wanna look at is Walter Wink, who's also had a big influence on me for years, and he wrote, uh, several books.

One of them I really like, The Powers That Be.

It's what got into the fabric and it's carried on in different iterations but let's i'm going to resist the urge to go down that road because we're going to go down it much more properly um so when we say thy kingdom come it's yes it's a request But it's a statement of commitment.

We're saying we're not going to participate in what Walter Wink calls the domination system.

Again, we're going to look at that in the next week or two.

But we're committed to fairness.