Never forget that power, the ability to resist, etc, does not depend finally on what capital etc controls or lets escape, but on God’s faithful giving to God’s people. This is but another way of stating the hopefulness attendent upon the ubiquity of power. Because capital, sin in any of its forms, cannot possibly capture all power, because it finally cannot capture God even as it tries to by marketing God and faith and spirituality, there is always already present the [divinely given] power of resistance that may appear anywhere anytime — what Yoder refers to as the brushfire reading of history.
Our power to live the Christian life does not depend on what the state or corporation will permit. It depends solely on God’s fidelity and our willingness to trust God. As Yoder wrote, all the state, etc. can do is make discipleship more costly. Capital finally does not provide or deny the conditions of possibility for faithfulness.
The cost which is here defined is the cost to us for resistance; whether that resistance be a non-participation or an activity which says NO by positing, or BEING an alternative. Those NOs and those ALTERNATIVES will bring an exclusion, which disadvantages us in terms of our “value” and “economy” as it concerns the powers.
These “powers” have been so mythologized in the form of ancient archetypal devils and “satanic rites” that the POWERS can operate in our society without detections as such. This is what so turned my stomach about the “Revelations” series; with its goofy dark villian who kept cutting off his fingers and liking it; and who laughed the evil laugh and glorified death. Not excatly your “angel of light”. The “angels of light” operate as “saviours” as much as they succeed in furthering the assumptions that the “success” of our system of Capitalism/Democracy/IndividualSpirituality (the latter of which fits nicely with capitalism) is “working”. Of course, to further that notion is to keep people separated from the realities that dominate the lives of those on the “disadvantaged” side of the mechanism. Gordon Cosby spoke to me of the shift they are advocating for their “structure of fellowship” for their churches: that they intentionally seek out difference, and see it as a means of salvation for both sides of that difference equation; both sides of the relationship. The opppressed can meet and know and “live with” the oppressor, and vice versa. It is a seeking out of the areas of our lives and our world where reconciliation still needs to be done, and to let that reconciliation feed the response to move back into that world where reconciliation is needed at some point of misison.