The Empire as Kosmos: Walter Wink and the Structural Mistranslation of Power
The New Testament authors often use the Greek term Kosmos to denote “the world” in a pejorative sense – not creation as such, but the artificial world-order alienated from God.
Biblical scholars identify this Kosmos with what Walter Wink calls the “Domination System" and what Audre Lorde identified as the "Master's House."
It is the entrenched complex of political power, social hierarchies, and religious legalism that demands violence for the sake of order.
John's Gospel, for instance, portrays Satan as “the prince of this world (kosmos)” – an accuser-figure who governs the systems of collective sin.
This Kosmos is the realm of empire: a human order maintained by force, injustice, and untruth.
It stands in stark contrast to the living Cosmos, the harmonious creation under God's reign.
Whereas the true Cosmos (the universe as intended) thrives on life-giving love and mutuality, the Kosmos survives by lies and blood. Its order is a false peace built upon what Girard calls the “cycle of slaughter and violence” that perpetually enslaves humanity.
The Roman Empire of Jesus's time was an embodiment of the Kosmos: a vast dominator system (Pax Romana) that enforced unity through conquest and crucifixion.
The crucifixion of Jesus reveals the kosmos for what it is – an unjust “order” founded on innocent blood. As Wink observes, the mind behind this system is manifest in “principalities and powers” – the spiritual ethos of greed, cruelty, and fear that inhabits empires and institutions.
This is “the whole world” under the grip of the Evil One, the aggregated “Power of Darkness” that Jesus confronted.
The Kosmos runs on Scapegoating Logic: it secures unity by singling out victims.
Its ruling principle is what Wink calls the Myth of Redemptive Violence – the belief that violence saves, that killing the right people brings peace. Under this myth, the empire's sword claims to uphold order and goodness even as it crushes the innocent.
Against this closed circle of death stands the Cosmos of God – the “Kingdom not of this world” which Jesus preached, a social order not founded on victims.
In Christ, the Cosmos (true creation) invades the Kosmos (fallen system), and their clash exposes a terrible truth: the Kosmos maintains its artificial peace only by making endless scapegoats.
This means that the biblical injunctions about “not conforming to the world” were not originally about rejecting worldly pleasures but about resisting the imperial order.
Kosmos as a Constructed System:
The term kosmos—often translated simply as “world”—has long been interpreted as denoting the physical universe. However, thinkers like Wink invite us to see kosmos as the entire constructed system of power. This system is the result of centuries of cultural and linguistic shaping, where biblical language (and its subsequent mistranslations) has solidified the idea that this structured, oppressive order is both natural and eternal.
