Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies

By N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird

An urgent call for Christians everywhere to explore the nature of the kingdom amid the political upheaval of our day.

Should Christians be politically withdrawn, avoiding participation in politics to maintain their prophetic voice and to keep from being used as political pawns? Or should Christians be actively involved, seeking to utilize political systems to control the levers of power?

In Jesus and the Powers, N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird call Christians everywhere to discern the nature of Christian witness in fractured political environments. In an age of ascending autocracies, in a time of fear and fragmentation, amid carnage and crises, Jesus is king, and Jesus’s kingdom remains the object of the church's witness and work.

Part political theology, part biblical overview, and part church history, this book argues that building for Jesus's kingdom requires confronting empire in all its forms. This approach should orient Christians toward a form of political engagement that contributes to free democratic societies and vigorously opposes political schemes based on autocracy and nationalism. Throughout, Wright and Bird reflect on the relevance of this kingdom-oriented approach to current events, including the Russian-Ukraine conflict, the China-Taiwan tension, political turmoil in the USA, UK, and Australia, and the problem of Christian nationalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: Mar 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9780310162254

N. T. Wright

N. T. Wright is the former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England and one of the world’s leading Bible scholars. He is Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University, and Senior Editor at Saint Andrews. He has been featured on ABC News, Dateline, The Colbert Report, and NPR’s Fresh Air. Wright is the award-winning author of many books, including Paul: A Biography, Simply Christian, Surprised by Hope, The Day the Revolution Began, Simply Jesus, After You Believe, and Scripture and the Authority of God.

Book preview

Preface

We, Tom and Mike, enjoyed our collaboration with SPCK and Zondervan in writing The New Testament in Its World: An introduction to the history, literature, and theology of the first Christians (2019), as well as the spin-off video series The New Testament You Never Knew and the masterclass lectures put out by Zondervan. We find again a common interest in our concern for how to ‘build for the kingdom’ in an age of – as the front cover says – totalitarian terror and dysfunctional democracies. We have both dipped our toes into this area before, Tom with his book God in Public: How the Bible speaks truth to power today (2016) and Mike in his Religious Freedom in a Secular Age: A Christian case for liberty, equality, and secular government (2022). We are not trying to be political theorists or social activists, but we are concerned with the political and social implications of the gospel. The globe is awash with terror, tyranny and trauma, divisions and despair, not just in the West, but also in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Our world seems dangerously combustible, due to financial crises, pandemics, increasing injustices and inequalities, democratic chaos, geopolitical upheaval, wars and rumours of more wars to come.

The aim of this book is not to be like most publications on Christianity and politics. We are not going to tell Christians what they should think about abortion, gun control, Brexit, Trump, climate change, racial justice and other hot-button issues. But neither are we offering an abstract theory of statecraft and faith-craft that never quite comes in to land in real life.

Jesus and the Powers has one objective: to say that, in an age of ascending autocracies, in a time of fear and fragmentation, amid carnage and crises, Jesus is King, and Jesus’ kingdom remains the object of the Church’s witness and work. That is true today, tomorrow, the next day, until death and despots are no more, until such a time when ‘he has put all his enemies under his feet’ (1 Corinthians 15:25). Such a conviction means that the Church needs to understand how it relates to empires biblical and burgeoning, how to build for the kingdom in our cities and suburbs; to understand the time for obedience to the State and the time for disobedience to the State. We need to grasp where the Church sits between presidents and principalities. We must think deeply as disciples, without partisan prejudice, unbeguiled by the deceptions of demagogues, in order to attain ‘every good thing that is at work in us to lead us into the Messiah’ (Philemon 6). We want people to consider how we can pursue human flourishing, how we might work towards a common good, and how we can pursue the things that make for peace in a time of political turmoil such as has not been seen since the 1930s.

We hope that such a book will help Christians begin to discern how to respond with wisdom to the situations in places such as Ukraine, Nigeria, Gaza, Myanmar and Taiwan. Help them to discern how to think about constitutional monarchy and democratic republics. Teach them to fear the seduction of political power. Call them to seek to build something that carries over into the new creation, as well as to rest in the goodness and faithfulness of the one who is King of kings and Lord of lords.

To such ends, our book begins by noting the political upheaval and emerging empires of our own day. It then describes how Jesus and his followers came on to the scene at the height of the Roman Empire and had to negotiate their own way around various imperial horrors (chapter 1). Thereafter, we point out that the Church had to pivot from being under the threat of the empire to enjoying its many benefactions. The Church’s relationship with emperors, and then with kings and princes in the Middle Ages, fashioned a host of complications about Church and State relations with which we are still living today. Christianity brought about a revolution in European civilisations and is now part of the political and moral DNA of the West. But the Church was also party to unholy alliances with Western rulers, not least in its complicity with European empires that wrought colonial violence all over the world. Yet whatever the good, bad and ugly of history, the Church cannot retreat from politics. If we are to speak truth to power and stand up to the powers, then we must do kingdom-business with the business of political power (chapter 2).

On the topic of the ‘powers’, these loom large in the scriptural narrative, with spiritual and political forces intersecting across the tapestry of history. Looking at Paul’s letter to the Colossians and especially at John’s Gospel, we see that the powers of this age will be pacified by Jesus and then reconciled through him. The back story here is that God had always intended humans to be partners in his dominion. Yet the powers of the age fomented rebellion and wreaked havoc so that creation itself now groans for deliverance. God’s solution is to telescope authority into one human being, one child of Abraham, one Israelite, one son of David – the Messiah. His death makes atonement for sins and brings a victory that results in the ruler of the world being cast out and the powers of darkness being disarmed. In the here and now, governments might have power; but they are merely granted power, and they will be held to account for how that power is exercised.

The Christian vocation is neither pious longing for heaven nor scheming to make Jesus king by exerting force over unwilling subjects. Instead, Christians should be ready to speak truth to power, being concerned with the righteous exercise of government, seeing it bent towards the arc of justice and fulfilling the service that God expects of governing authorities (chapter 3).

Following naturally on from that point, we must address more concretely the topic of how to build for the kingdom in what is becoming a frightening and fraught world. The kingdom might not be from this world, but it is most certainly for this world, so we cannot retreat from the world with our kingdom-mission. So, we proffer some suggestions as to what building for the kingdom looks like in actual practice (chapter 4, which reworks several of Tom’s lectures, articles and resources from his books God in Public and How God Became King: Getting to the heart of the Gospels).

We next discuss the topic of submission to governing authorities (chapter 5) and when Christian witness requires us actively to disobey them (chapter 6). These are difficult and complicated subjects, and we are concerned to affirm the goodness of government as much as to explain what we might do if governments revert from public service to predatory tyranny. Finally, we set forth the case for a liberal democracy. It is the ‘liberal’ in ‘liberal democracy’ that enables us to live with political and cultural differences, not despite being a Christian but precisely as a Christian. Nothing is straightforward, diversity breeds conflict, but we are called to love our left-wing and right-wing neighbours, and to build a better world for people of all faiths and none (chapter 7).

That is the journey that lies ahead of readers. It is something of a short pilgrimage in political theology, undertaking a mixture of biblical overview, zooming in on church history highlights, centring on Jesus among the powers, offering reflections on Church–State relations, and wrestling with knotty topics such as ‘secularism’ and ‘civil disobedience’. The task is about trying to think and pray through the missional vocation and kingdom witness of the Church in our contested political theatres. The Church carries a gospel which is not reducible to this-worldly political activism, nor so heavenly minded as to live aloof from the trials and terrors of our times. If the gospel announces that ‘Jesus is King’, then we must wrestle with what Jesus’ kingship means in Tiananmen Square, on the floor of the US Congress, in the lunchroom of Tesco or Walmart, or in choices we make at the ballot box. There will be a day when politics is no more, when all things are subject to ‘the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah’ (Revelation 12:10). Before then, we need wisdom, for the Church has much work to do to prepare for such a day.

Finally, we remain grateful once again to Philip Law of SPCK for guiding this book through to completion and for his advice and feedback along the way. The Zondervan team led by Katya Covrett was also a wonderful part of the cast of characters who helped in the publication of this volume. Brian Walsh was kind enough to offer feedback on parts of the manuscript. Unless otherwise specified, all New Testament translations are from Tom’s The New Testament for Everyone, 3rd edition (London: SPCK; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2023), while the Old Testament translations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.

Tom Wright and Michael F. Bird

Postscript

This volume was in its final stages of pre-production just as the Israel–Gaza war began in October 2023. We lament the loss of innocent life and the carnage and cruelty that has taken place. The present conflict has deep and murky roots, resulting in a politically and morally complex situation which intersects with colonialism, empire, land, religion, violence, human rights and wider geopolitical factors. It is almost impossible to say anything about this subject without inflaming someone somewhere. The brutality of the Hamas attacks on Israeli citizens reminds us of Isaiah’s denunciation of those who ‘rush to shed innocent blood’ (Isaiah 59:7); yet we concede that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians over two generations also reminds us of King Ahab’s violent seizure of Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kings 21). Alas, the powers are again doing their worst, bringing horror and bloodshed to Israelis and Palestinians alike.

With Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza, and Palestinian children dying in the streets, there is no time to waste on partisan antics or grandiose statements for tribal consumption. We urge all readers to challenge dangerous rhetoric, whether it concerns driving Jews out of the land ‘from the river to the sea’ or, conversely, treating the Palestinians in Gaza as the ‘Amalekites’ who should have been wiped out long ago – in both cases appearing to invoke biblical precedent or even warrant for the ongoing cycle of violence and wickedness.

Abbreviations

1

The Kingdom of Jesus in the Shadow of Empire

History strikes back

‘I was born in a country that no longer exists.’ When I (Mike Bird) tell people that, they give me odd looks, as if I was maybe born in Atlantis or Narnia. But I assure them that my place of birth is not the stuff of myth or fantasy. After letting them make a few poor guesses I soon put their confusion to rest by clarifying, ‘I was born in the Federal Republic of Germany or West Germany for short.’ The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) came into existence because of a string of empires that rose and fell before it: the Kingdom of Prussia (1701–1871), then the German Empire (1871–1917), then the Weimar Republic (1918–33), then the German Reich (1933–45). After the Second World War, the country was partitioned into West and East Germany (1945–90), and then, after the Berlin Wall came down, the country was again unified as a new entity (1990).

I (Mike) was born in Germany because my father was serving in the British Army as an armoured cavalry soldier as part of the British occupation of post-war Germany. Then, when I was 4, my parents divorced, and my mother and I moved to Australia, a former British colony, a direct legacy of the once-great British Empire. She married my stepfather, who was the son of Serbian immigrants who came to Australia after the Second World War because of the ethnic violence that plagued the Balkans. Note too that Australia had been a part of the British Empire since the time of colonisation (1788) and federation (1901). However, since the 1940s, Australia has increasingly looked to another great empire for its security, the USA, which is why Australia has supported the USA in military actions in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, for a time, I served in the Australian military and frequently worked beside military collegues from Singapore, the UK and the USA. I never served on active operations, but I took an oath of loyalty to the Queen and to the Australian people. At the same time, Australia is now economically closer to Asia than to Europe or North America. China is Australia’s largest trading partner and India is now Australia’s largest source of immigrants.

Why am I telling you this? Well, as you can see, the circumstances of my birth, the place where I grew up and the vocations I’ve had were directly related to the rise and fall of more than one empire. If there had been no German Reich, no Soviet Union and no British Empire, then perhaps I would never have been born, or at least never been born in Germany, never moved to Australia and never enlisted in the Army. I imagine that my life story is probably similar to that of many people. In fact, Tom Wright’s father spent most of the Second World War as a prisoner of war, very fortunately surviving, even when many of his compatriots did not. Our lives have all been shaped by world empires in some way, by some previous conflict, by the prospect of future conflict or by the decisions of governments that are not our own. The history of the world has been about the clash of civilisations, the rise and fall of empires, great battles over political ideology, religious rivalry, East versus West, Marxism versus capitalism.

Except that the great clash of civilisations was supposed to be finished because the battle over ideologies was done and dusted. After the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991), and the end of apartheid in South Africa (1994), it was clear to many that liberal democracy had won. Liberal democracy was the system, the climax and culmination of human political evolution. Liberal democracy was a social arrangement that balanced rights and responsibilities, freedom and order, centralised and distributed power, a system that could deliver sustainable economic growth. It was during the late 1980s that the American legal philosopher Francis Fukuyama wrote his celebrated The End of History and the Last Man, declaring in 1992 that:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such . . . That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.¹

For a long time it looked as if Fukuyama was right. The world came together to defeat Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime after it invaded Kuwait. Despite ethnic bloodshed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, international intervention prevented further violence. Most countries were downsizing their militaries, the European Union was going from strength to strength, the internet was connecting people in whole new ways, and most economies were prospering in the 1990s. Western liberal democracy would now surely spread to Russia, China and the Middle East. ‘History’, conceived as the battle of ideas and clash of empires, had ended . . . or so we thought.

What came next in the final years of the twentieth century and in the first quarter of the twenty-first century were forces of chaos and cruelty that we thought had been vanquished for ever. There were drug cartels terrorising Latin America. There was the rise of radical Islam, September 11, 2001, and the global war on terror. These were followed by the Iraq War, the rise of Islamic State, civil war in Syria and a twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan ending with a calamitous retreat. The global financial crisis in 2008 strongly suggested that the whole economic system was a scam to make the filthy rich even richer. North Korea acquired nuclear weapons with Iran not far behind. China’s economic rise did not lead to its democratic liberalisation; rather, the country turned into a wealthy and predatory superpower that runs a technological surveillance state. Despite hopes that Russia might become westernised, it seems that Russia remains what it has been ever since the seventeenth century: a military dictatorship. The Arab Spring rose and fell in a matter of a year. In the aftermath, none of the Arab states, except perhaps for Tunisia, is any freer than it was before. Added to that, the world is now experiencing the increasing effects of climate change, there are mass migrations of people fleeing conflict and poverty, and every nation remains ravaged by the effects of Covid-19. At the time of writing, Putin’s Russia continues to devastate Ukraine, intent on either absorbing it or destroying it. China gazes menacingly upon Taiwan, persecutes religious minorities such as the Uighurs and Christian house churches, and ferociously cracks down on pro-democratic dissent in Hong Kong.

To add further insult to Fukuyama’s thesis, the current state of many Western democracies is such that they are now fraught with fragmentation to the point of being caught in legislative deadlock or committed to some morbidly self-destructive feat of devouring themselves from the inside out. Places such as Australia and Italy have had a revolving door of prime ministers. Britain tore itself apart over Brexit. The USA convulses between its political extremes represented by white Christian nationalists and progressive identitarians. It lacks the consensus and belief in a greater good that once characterised its political class. The American political extremities believe that the other side should not even exist. America’s respective news channels and social-media platforms attract viewers and rake in massive profits by pouring gasoline on the fires of grievance and stoking the embers of indifference. Then there are the lobbyists who buy politicians like someone collecting antique spoons. The West might not have hard corruption such as that found in a banana republic, but it is infested with the soft corruption of corporations that fund political campaigns to further their own interests. America’s political actors and the tribalized media entities have based their funding models on hyping up audiences with the grievance de jour. The gambling industry has massive influence among the political class in the UK, Australia and Canada. It is sadly true that democratic parliaments and parties can be futile and insufferable in the same way as dictatorships are brutal and intolerable.² This palpable democratic dysfunction gives China and Russia all the material they need for the claim of their own internal propaganda that democracy is a disordered and chaotic mess.

We are not the first ones to say so, but Fukuyama was wrong. History has not ended, empires are still on the march, and liberal democracy is not the bastion of benevolence that we like to pretend it is. Economic growth has not brought liberalism to China but rather drives its one-party authoritarianism. Russia has returned to its status quo as a military autocracy. Europe can’t decide whether it wants to be the Habsburg Empire 2.0, a technocratic villain in a James Bond film, or a society of nationless nihilists where people are devoted to Europe in general but belong to nowhere in particular. The global war on terror peeled back the curtain to show that liberal democracies are heavily dependent on war for economic growth as well as for moral coherence.³ The 2020s appear to be the most precarious and perilous time in human history since the 1930s. Except that, now, we have the additional nightmarish prospect of nuclear war, a catastrophic horror that is inevitable unless we make it impossible. There are parts of the world that could be set aflame by the smallest spark, such as an assassination, a company that goes bankrupt or a political coalition that