Prompt 54: November 3, 2025
The Prompt:
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
Ephesians 6:12
Essence is too weak a word for what is meant by principalities; a closer description would be the governing spirit of category itself. It is through principalities that the world is given character and shapes our understanding of objects and phenomena. The reason this matters is that you and I are not sovereign agents over our own thoughts or understanding.
Better a patient man than a warrior, a man who controls his temper than one who takes a city.
Proverbs 16:32
The underline of the Ode To Culture project has always been a reference to uncovering the hidden assumptions, biases, preferences, worldviews, ideologies, and philosophies that inform our lives and test them against scripture, truth, beauty, and the rigors of lived experience. This prompt is an invitation to identify what principalities we struggle against.
The thread is open. Create boldly, and may the Spirit guide us all
Context:
Take this example:
Gather all the writing pens around you. As you look them over and test them, you are interacting with the judgement of what the category PEN entails. The examples you are testing will either fit inside the definition, stretch the definition, or fall out of the category altogether.
- One sample may write in yellow ink, so it fits in the category, but it is not useful in the way most pens would be used.
- One sample (I tested this one last weekend at a restaurant) may be a rock-em-sock-em Grinch on the opposite end of the writing point. One arm on the Grinch was broken, so it straddled the line between PEN and TOY, but it still fit the category of PEN.
- If you pick up a sample that has dried out and no longer writes, you would be right in casting it out of the PEN category and consider it TRASH. Just because it looks like a pen, doesn’t make it a pen.
Everything that participates with a category is necessarily in constant judgement against the ideal of that category. The way that PEN can fit into the category of TOOL is an example of how principalities stack into each other and participate in higher modes of being. The presumption in the Christian tradition is that EVERYTHING was created in that order.
It is a radical assumption to believe that everything matters.