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by
N.T. Wright
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April 9 - April 11, 2024
the pagan philosopher Celsius could look down upon Christianity as a detestable and servile religion that only attracted ‘the foolish, the dishonourable, and stupid, only women, slaves, and little children’. Christianity to Celsius was unmanly and un-Roman because at its centre was a so-called crucified god, adored and worshipped by the feeble-minded and weak-bodied dregs of society.
Horace, a Roman poet of the Augustan Age, once mused, ‘When your organ is stiff, and a servant girl or a young boy from the household is near at hand and you know you can make an immediate assault, would you sooner burst with tension? Not me: I like sex to be there and easy to get.’
This is Satire. Cf. Juvenal 9
and he prohibited the Ephesian men from working as ‘slave traders’.
The Roman emperor Claudius celebrated his conquest of Britain by commissioning a marble relief for the Sebasteion of Aphrodisias in Caria which depicted him, muscular and mighty, dominating and raping a female captive of Britain.
the creation of a Christian political order was never the Church’s purpose.
Do we regard the Church’s association with empire as a marriage of providential convenience or an act of spiritual adultery?
Did Christ defeat Caesar or did we merely turn Christ into Caesar?
While Church and State are separable, there is always going to be a connection between religion and politics because of the intersection of values and voting.
Yes, you want to avoid the evils of Constantine and Christendom. Instead of seeking influence in the halls of power, you want to be the angry prophet on the margins speaking truth to power. All well and good. But what happens when the power listens? What happens when the power or the people ask you to sit on a committee, contribute to an investigation, run a programme, advise on policy, or serve as a chaplain?
‘In His name all oppression shall cease.’
inscribed above the high altar in Westminster Abbey. The new king would have had a close-up view of these words as he was crowned and anointed: ‘The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ.’2
God the Creator desires and intends his world to be run by human authorities. Of course, a full statement of this biblical principle would add that God intends the authorities to act with wisdom and justice, paying special attention to the needs of the poor and vulnerable.
rulers, even when foolish and unjust, appear to hold a God-given authority.
Saying that the authorities are appointed and authorised by God does not mean that God endorses whatever they then do.
The biblical view is that God holds his appointed authorities to account for their actions. A classic example is in Isaiah 10, where God first appoints the Assyrians to punish his people and then punishes the Assyrians themselves for the arrogant spirit with which they carried out the task.
Thus Paul, in the Colossians passage, describes Jesus first and foremost as ‘the image of the invisible God’: the truly human one, in other words.
John, meanwhile, well aware of what he’s doing, has Pontius Pilate declaring ‘Here’s the man.’
the point that was clear in the Hebrew Bible but opaque to those who, from comparatively early in the Church, tried to fit the scriptural hurricane into the bottle of Greek philosophy.
The somewhat sterile later debate about whether ‘the divine image’ was ‘lost’ in the Fall needs to be recalibrated not just in terms of what humans are but in terms of what they are called to do: not so much ontology as vocation.15 In those terms, the call to reflect God into his world has clearly not been rescinded.
anarchy is hopeless, because the bullies will always prey on the weak (so God therefore intends his world to be governed by humans). But authority is problematic, because the vocation to rule constitutes a temptation to abuse power (so God will hold authorities to account).
God the Creator wanted his world to be wisely governed, as it were, from within, by his image-bearing human creatures. Indeed, that delegated authority is one of the primary meanings of ‘image-bearing’.
something corresponding both to Genesis 3 – 11 and to the long story of humankind’s failure, of Israel’s failure. These multiple disasters have led to the point where the ‘principalities’ and ‘powers’, though created in, through and for the one we now know as Jesus, had accrued terrible power to themselves through human idolatry, and were now on the rampage through creation, wreaking havoc with people’s lives and with God’s world.
It is easy for modern Western observers, instantly suspicious of all ‘powers’, to be glad that the ‘powers’ were ‘defeated’ and then to leave it at that, content with a sneering critique of all human authorities.
Here as elsewhere we must avoid any facile over-realised eschatology, whether it be in the form of an unquestioned ‘divine right of kings’ or in the form of an equally unquestioned vox populi, vox Dei. Kings can err. So can mobs.
They did not, in other words, translate the biblical promises into another dimension: say, that of Plato. They did not say, ‘Well, Scripture promised a renewal of Jerusalem, but we now see that this means the “heavenly Jerusalem”.’ They had no thought that the reconciliation and new creation spoken of in the Psalms and Isaiah now turned out to be referring to the ‘heavenly salvation’ of people’s ‘souls’.
Paul has not abandoned the very much this-worldly hope of Israel’s Scriptures.
it is a central part of the Church’s task, in the power and leading of the spirit, to hold up a mirror to worldly power, to hold authorities to account.
and in downgrading Christian practice to the status of a curious minority hobby, which is of course how many Christians appear to understand their faith).
As long as people are focused on ‘going to heaven’, they will have less compulsion to pursue the New Testament’s vision of a united trans-ethnic and trans-local family worshipping the one God and thus holding the powers of the world to account. Indeed, they may warn that this is all too ‘worldly’, a distraction from a proper ‘heavenly’ focus.
An older form of Christian teaching warned that sinning risked a postmortem hell. The biblical warnings assume that hell already exists for many people here on earth, and that it is the Church’s task both to analyse and denounce the idolatries that produce it and to model the way of life that, through the spirit, reflects instead the image of the true God revealed in Jesus.
It all reminds me uncomfortably of the moment when the Israelites, suffering defeat at the hands of the Philistines, had the bright idea of bringing the ark of the covenant into the line of battle.
then the gospel, the euangelion, is being denied, irrespective of how many people within ‘the system’ think of themselves as evangelisch or ‘evangelical’.
Would-be ‘Christian monarchs’ can abuse their position. So can elected officials, if – for instance – they brandish a Bible in the hopes of recruiting the support of the devout for their unbiblical actions and attitudes.
good deal of the New Testament, following directly from the teaching and example of Jesus himself, is about the radical redefinition of power: power in weakness, power through humble service, power and indeed victory through self-sacrifice.
has yet to work out what it might mean that he – the Jesus of cross, resurrection and spirit – already possesses all authority on earth.
Our mission is not to be the ‘religious department’ of an empire. It is, rather, to build for the kingdom.
Ever since the Enlightenment, God, religion and the Church have been removed into the private sphere,
It is a recipe for a two-storey universe in which God dwells ‘up there’ and God has little to do with anything ‘down here’.
The Church does not exist to provide religious sponsorship to anyone’s programmes.
The fact is that all Christians, whether as private citizens or as public figures, must be willing to ‘do God’ in public.
Aristotle said that humans are a ‘political animal’ in that they are social creatures and want to order their civic lives for some good end. The Bible has an analogous thought, except that instead of ‘political animal’ we have the ‘image of God’, which is the human vocation for ref lecting God’s sovereign rule over creation, and the good end for which we aim, and towards which we orientate ourselves, is the ‘new heaven and new earth’.
We must live luminously visible lives that appear odd to others because of our allegiance to Jesus and adopting a life patterned after Jesus.
the city of God was not a place but a pilgrimage within this world.
become a life-giving force in the world as a soul is to the body.
they had pulled apart what belonged together, the cross and the kingdom. The result was a series of unhelpful dichotomies: the atonement or healing, crucifixion or crown, God’s forgiveness or God’s transformative love.
Jesus proclaims and enacts the ‘kingdom of God’, yet what we find in the titulus over the cross at the climax of the story is the naked proclamation of the kingship of the crucified.
The Church is not the kingdom itself. The kingdom is the act of the one true God now ruling over the world in a new way
challenging self-assured religious types,
God builds God’s kingdom. The kingdom itself is not manufactured or constructed by human hands.
God has ordered his world in such a way that his own work within that world takes place precisely through his creatures, in particular, the human beings who reflect his image.
