Principalities and Powers

The Chancellor's Lectures for 1954 at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in 1956 and reprinted by Wipf and Stock in 2003. It is a short book of about a hundred pages in four chapters: The Rulers of this Age, The Great Accuser, The Bondage of Corruption, and What the Rulers Did Not Know. Caird examines the language Paul uses of principalities, authorities, powers, world-rulers and elemental spirits, reading it against its Old Testament and Jewish background and taking it as mythological language for spiritual realities the first Christians knew at first hand. It came out in the same decade as Hendrikus Berkhof's Christ and the Powers, and the two are counted among the first modern treatments of the subject.