In a yr seeing over 50 countries on the polls—half of which could shift geopolitical dynamics—the timing of Jesus and the Powers’ release was no accident.
Just a few years ago, N. T. Wright (creator of Surprised by Hope) and Michael F. Bird (Jesus Among the Gods)—who had collaborated on The New Testament in Its World—realized there was a scarcity of biblical guidance on how Christians should engage with politics, they usually decided to do something about it.
“We each had the sense that the majority Christians today have not likely been taught very much a few Christian view of politics,” Wright said. “Until the 18th century, there was numerous Christian political thought, which we’ve sort of ignored the last 200–300 years—and it’s time to get back to it.”
The “gateway” to political theology, Wright believes, is the concept that, until Christ’s return, “God wants humans to be in charge.” And while all political powers have in some sense been “ordained by God” in accordance with Scripture, he says, Christians are called to “take the lead” in holding them accountable.
“The church is designed to be the small working model of latest creation, to carry up before the world a logo—an efficient sign of what God has promised to do for the world. Hence, to encourage the remaining of the world to say, ‘Oh, that’s what human community should seem like. That’s the way it’s done.’”
And as the worldwide church becomes “a community worshiping the one God and doing justice and mercy on the earth,” it is a “sign to the caesars of the world that Jesus is Lord and that they should not” and a “sign to the principalities and powers that that is the technique to be human.”
In an interview with CT, Wright discusses the necessity for more theological collaboration around political issues, the skewed eschatology behind Christian abdication from the political sphere, and the way the worldwide church should engage with the assorted types of empire “let out” in our world today.
I’d heard from a pair people on the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) conference last fall that there’s not numerous scholars doing work in political theology right away. Would you agree with that?
Yes, let me offer you an example. When the Ukraine scenario broke two years ago, I wrote to 2 or three leading Christian thinkers within the US and said, “Okay, guys, you’re employed on this front greater than I do. What should we be fascinated about this? If we had the ear of President Volodymyr Zelensky, let alone Vladimir Putin, what should we be saying to them?” And it was quite clear from their responses that there’s numerous caution—that it is a hugely difficult area, and we’re not quite sure the best way to get into this.
I believe that reflects the indisputable fact that even amongst those that’ve written books about political theology, when a crisis happens, I’m unsure any of us have a transparent roadmap for the way we’d address that. My point is, we’ve hardly begun to think through all this stuff and the way we structure our politics correctly.
An awful lot of Christians have been told, in so many words, that politics is a unclean game. We leave it to the politicians and the social staff while we’re teaching people the best way to say their prayers and go to heaven—and never the twain shall meet. I believe we’ve got to the purpose, now, where most Christians realize that split simply doesn’t reflect the Bible on the whole or Christian witness. Particularly if you start fascinated about what Jesus meant by the dominion of God “on earth as in heaven.”
At the tip of Matthew’s Gospel, when Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” what does that lead us to think about Jesus having authority on earth? It looks, within the New Testament, like Jesus delegating tasks through the Holy Spirit to the church. Not that the church must be running the world, but that the church has an important role to play in speaking truth to power—in holding up a mirror to power and in modeling what God’s latest creation should seem like.
In your introduction, you referenced previous works of yours and Mike’s have partly inspired this book. But I used to be wondering when you could speak more about its biblical or theological underpinnings?
One of the things that’s really come strongly to me over the past couple of many years has been the role of human beings inside God’s good creation. The idea in Genesis 1, the creation of humans in God’s image, implies that God is committing himself to working on the earth through human beings.
In Western theology, we frequently read Genesis 1–2 as God’s setting human beings as much as an ethical examination, which they then fail. That gets the entire conversation off on the unsuitable foot, as a substitute of across the query of how is God going to correctly rule his world through obedient, responsive human beings in the event that they’ve tousled and in the event that they’re worshipping idols? The answer is that God has rescued them from their idolatry in order that they will run his world as his vice regents in the way in which that he wants.
For me, one in every of the important thing texts that jumped out to me once I was first working on that is from John 19, where Jesus says to Pontious Pilate, “You could don’t have any authority over me unless it was given you from above.” So, Jesus acknowledges that this second-rate Roman governor has a God-given authority.
In other words, yes, rulers have a God-given authority, and God will hold them to account for what they do with it. … The early church, just like the Jews, thought it was their responsibility to critique them. It’s just like the prophetic witness of John the Baptist saying to Herod, “You’re out of line here,” or Jesus himself telling the rulers and authorities that once they were misstepping.
Faithful Christian engagement with politics isn’t saying to political leaders, “You don’t have God-given authority.” It’s saying, “We’re going to be your critics in the way you’re using that God-given authority.” I think most individuals in most churches within the Western world—let alone anywhere else—have never even begun to conceive of it like that. But until we do, we won’t understand what the church’s responsibility must be.
How should Christians hold the federal government accountable and ensure those in public service use their powers responsibly? And how do you envision that occuring in a pluralist society where people hold different religious views and can have different standards for justice?
When I read, say, Psalm 72—which I’m going back to time and again, the nice Messianic psalm—some people have objected to the “royal” psalms, because “it’s all in service of empire.” But, actually, when you take a look at Psalm 72, it says, “Lord, give your justice to the king, in order that he’ll take care of the widows and the orphans and the strangers,” etc., and it repeats that time and again. Then, at the tip, it says, “and so the earth, the entire earth shall be filled with his glory.” This is how God desires to be glorified.
There is something that you would call a sort of natural theology of world ethics. Most traditions would say taking care of the weak and vulnerable feels like a superb idea. And unfortunately, vested interests become involved, because if the weak and vulnerable occur to be migrants who’re coming into your country, and also you don’t want any more people in your country, then you definately say, “No, tell them to go away, go someplace else.” But we want clever, thought-out policies on migration, because not all countries can support the 1000’s of people that want to return and live there.
The church needs to coach people to think correctly about all those relevant issues. We shouldn’t be leaving it to the skilled economists—or, not less than, we want Christian skilled economists. We need Christian people to take a look at problems with development or migration or the massive issues which might be facing us globally and to advise the church correctly, in order that the church can speak truthfully. Not just in sound bites, as I’m doing now, after all, but with real depth and authority on serious issues.
What would you say to Christians who’re like, “Well, this world goes to hell in a handbasket anyway”—those that don’t become involved in government because they’re pondering, “Well, the church is separate—it’s a bastion away from the world”?
Right, and it’s very interesting, the transition was within the early 18th century. So much in Britain and America was almost triumphalist within the sense that “We are actually taking on the world, and the gospel goes to rule”—and Handel’s Messiah, “He shall reign ceaselessly and ever,” you understand—which sounds great within the 1740s. But interestingly, by the 1790s, something has turned, and Epicureanism has won—the French Revolution has happened, individuals are getting frightened and wondering what’s happening.
I believe it does return to the Enlightenment, where you get that split of faith and politics. The Epicureanism of the seventeenth and 18th centuries principally split heaven and earth miles apart. This leaves people to run earth the way in which they need—which normally means for their very own advantage, by keeping anything religious out of the query. And that has been a disaster.
Then you get the dispensational movement, particularly in America, and other similar movements with a really negative eschatology—that the one way anything can occur is that if God ditches this whole project and starts again from scratch. So, many Christians turned back to Plato to say, “Well, actually, we have now souls which might be going to flee from this place anyway and go someplace else.” But as I never tire of claiming to students, the word heaven within the New Testament isn’t used for the place of our ultimate destiny. And the word soul isn’t used for the beings we might be in our ultimate destiny.
People have include the belief that the biblical story is about how human souls can find their way as much as the beatific vision in heaven. Whereas your complete biblical narrative runs the opposite way—it’s about how God involves dwell with humans here. The strapline in Revelation chapter 21 isn’t that the dwelling of humans is with God—it’s that the dwelling of God is with humans.
The older I get, the more I realize Acts 2, the descent of the Spirit filling the home, is a temple scene; it goes straight back to 1 Kings 8 or Exodus 14. It’s a way of claiming, “This is what God at all times intended to do. God, the Holy Spirit, at all times intended to live with and in—and be operative through—human beings. And wow, it’s actually happening.” This is a very different way of doing theology.
The old idea of God throwing the current creation away—so why would we trouble to place it right?—simply does no justice. We urgently need as a world community to think more Christianly, more biblically, concerning the whole scenario.
N.T. Wright is Research Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Early Christianity at St Mary’s College within the University of St Andrews and Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. His most up-to-date book, co-written with Michael F. Bird, is Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies.
