According to Wink, there are 5 worldviews, each involving heaven and earth and their interconnection:

1. The ancient worldview; as above, so below.
2. The spiritualist worldview; the soul is good, flesh is bad. According to the Gnostics, the soul entrapped in the body needs release; and the earth was created by an evil demon.
3. The materialistic worldview: the world is an illusion. All there is, is the world, matter, and the body.
4. The theological worldview: there is an uneasy coexistence or separation between religion and science.
5. The integral worldview: heaven and earth, sould and body, are two aspects of a single reality.

Satan (Principalities and Powers) is the world-encompassing spirit of the Domination system (racism, sexism, nationalism, militarism, authoritarianism.

But the Powers are not necessarily evil: they are needed to provide order, some structure to overcome chaos. So the Powers are good, but fallen (misused), and must be redeemed.

Hobbes got it wrong; human nature is not necessarily evil.

Rousseau got it wrong: human nature is not necessarily good.

Marx got it wrong: economic structure may not lead to evil.

The basic myth of the Powers is the myth of redemptive violence. God’s way is the spirit of creative nonviolence, as personified by Jesus. But the Church became part of the Powers.

In the Babylonian creation myth, Marduk killed and dismembered the Mother Goddess Tiamat, and created humankind out of her blood. Here creation itself is an act of violence. The origin of evil precedes the origin of things. Chaos is prior to order. Evil is prior to good, ontologically. The Biblical creation myth is the opposite: the world and humans were created before evil entered the world with original sin. [I would call the murder of Abel by Cain the original sin. And we are all descendents of Cain. As such, we must be healed or redeemed. Not so much to send our souls to heaven, but to save the world from violence.]

Babylon is an early agricultural society. That is when the Domination system originated, according to Riane Eisler (The Chalice and the Blade). Hunters and gatherers lived in partnership societies (the Garden of Eden?)

But Sveva Caetani has another view of evil: as a tiny insignicant incubus, a homunculus. It is more like a virus than like a predator or raptor. There are three kinds of evil, classified by Osgood’s semantic differential categories: good-bad, strong-weak, active passive.

The Manichean devil is bad, strong, and active. (Predator.)

The Augustinian devil is bad, strong, passive. (Entropy.)

The Caetani devil is bad, weak, but active. (Virus model.)

Girard’s theory is that the only early human societies that survived the chains of feuding (revenge killing, “eye for an eye”) were those that learned to scapegoat – to load the evil on a sacrificial animal. The usual interpretation of the crucifixion of Jesus is that he was the scapegoat for our violent sins. But Wink’s interpretation is that he was teaching us nonviolence, the opposite (alternative) way of life, which can also interrupt the chain of ongoing revenge, by absorbing the evil. (This is also the view of Jim Douglass in “The Nonviolent Coming of God.”) This would save us, but only if we learn and practise it. In this sense, HE IS THE WAY. But we must all be healed. This would be redemptive nonviolence.

Creation – Fall – Redemption. This kernel of Christian moral theology is also found in the Jewish Kabbalah in the doctrine of the breaking of the vessels. The new meaning of the phrase “The Son of Man” is a redeemed, regenerated human being, a new species in cultural evolution.