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

by N.T. Wright

We believe that the Church’s answer to the global crises of our day is, in sum, the kingdom of God. The Church’s message and mission rest on the notion that God is King, God has appointed Jesus as the King of kings and Lord of lords, and the Church’s vocation is to build for the kingdom!11 Our working hypothesis is that the kingdom of God is not from this world, but it is emphatically for this world. The Church’s kingdom-vocation is not only what it says to the world, but is also what the Church does within and for the sake of the world.12

Suffice to say, the kingdom is about God’s rescue and restoration of the entire creation as worked out in the context of Israel’s covenantal history and God’s action in the person and work of Jesus.

To build for the kingdom we need to confront the difficult subject of empire, appreciate the ambiguous place that Christianity has occupied in Western civilisation, and consider how best to offer a Christian witness in an age that has lost its ability to reason with others.

The great Roman peace was a peace that was created and sustained by merciless violence.

There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.56

As Anglicans, we routinely get cornered by our Baptist friends who tell us that the Anglican arrangement, with the King as the supreme governor of the Church of England, and the Crown appointing bishops and key positions in the English Church, is a political abomination. Or worse, it is a rehash of the Constantinian corruption of power, grasping after a new Christendom while ignorant of the evils of the old one. The wall of separation between Church and State is good for Church and State, lest the two corrupt each other in some unholy theocratic alliance. So we are told ad nauseam. We are no fans of theocracy, nor of the divine right of kings. Yet when we hear that complaint, we always have a standard answer. 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? That kind of absolute separation of Church and State is fine if you want to be a critic making snarky criticisms on the sidelines. But if you want to change the game you need skin in the game. The people who change history must make history. If you want to build for the kingdom, then you have to build something: relationships, alliances, advocacy, food banks, pa...

To put it negatively: 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). All this is on display, again and again, throughout the Bible, but as an open-ended story, indicating that the Creator’s last word has not yet been spoken. And that last word will itself emerge from within the parameters already set in Genesis 1 and 2 and Psalm 8 (the human vocation), Genesis 12 – 22 (the Abrahamic vocation) and not least Psalms 2, 72, 132, 2 Samuel 7 and the messianic passages in Isaiah (the Davidic vocation). If the world is to be held to account, it will be through a human; through an Israelite; through a Davidic king. One could say that this is one of the questions, deep rooted in Israel’s Scriptures, to which the New Testament offers a clear answer.

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’.

Anyone witnessing Jesus’ crucifixion would of course have said that the principalities and powers (the Roman soldiers and the shadowy demonic ‘forces’ that stood behind them) were celebrating a triumph over Jesus himself. But no: the resurrection compels Paul to see the picture the other way round. Jesus himself had stripped the rulers and authorities of their armour. He had held them up to public contempt.

The fact that God has celebrated his triumph over the rebel powers doesn’t mean that there is no role for ‘powers’ any more. 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. Such a perspective might seem to imply that perhaps a cheerful anarchy, or a kind of optimistic ‘people’s republic’ with no visible power structures, would solve the problems of a city, a nation or the world. On the contrary: just as humans, liberated from sin, can take their rightful place as the royal priesthood, so the structures of governance, the tendons and ligaments of complex human society, are in principle reconciled. God intends that humans should share in running his world, and should be held accountable.

Structures through which this happens – though still vulnerable to abuse and distortion – are not automatically evil. On the contrary, they are thus in principle reaffirmed and celebrated. As with everything else in God’s creation, once they stop being worshipped they stop being demonic. It takes the victory of the cross to break their power.

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. So, too, can democratically elected majorities. That is why wise critique – a central part of the Church’s vocation – remains vital.

(In our world, interestingly, the news media assume that the task of holding authorities to account belongs to them, often thereby setting themselves up as a new kind of ‘authority’. They thus, having taken over the Church’s vocation, regularly delight both in reporting the Church’s follies and failings – of which there have tragically been many – 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).

The early Christians, like the Jews, focused their critique not on how the rulers had become rulers but on what the rulers then did with the power they now had.

The Church’s mission today is to be ambassadors of reconciliation, speaking truth to power, and seeing the powers reconciled to God. That does not collapse future hopes into present endeavours, but it does mean that our earthly labours are signs pointing ahead to a renewed creation. Our mission is not to be the ‘religious department’ of an empire. It is, rather, to build for the kingdom.

Christians are not distinguished from others by language, food, dress or convention, but by their ‘peculiar way of life’ and the ‘strange character of their own citizenship’.7

Augustine understood that the ‘city of God’ was not spatially separate from the ‘earthly city’, because the city of God was not a place but a pilgrimage within this world. A pilgrim may make use of temporal goods such as government, employing them for their divinely intended ends, without worshipping them and without being corrupted by idolatries of power.

The integration of cross and kingdom should cultivate a cross-shaped kingdom-perspective that flows into all theatres of life. The kingdom of God is the healing, rescuing sovereignty of the Creator God, working in the power of the spirit through the death and resurrection of Jesus to bring about the future consummation of heaven and earth. This ultimate future is anticipated in the present in the cruciform vocation of all Jesus’ followers who, in their multiple different callings, are building for that kingdom here and now.

First, God builds God’s kingdom. The kingdom itself is not manufactured or constructed by human hands. Be that as it may, 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. That is central to what it means to be ‘made in God’s image’. God intends his wise, creative, loving presence and power to be reflected, ‘imaged’ if you like, into his world through his human creatures. God has enlisted us to act as his stewards in the project of creation and in new creation.

Second, we do well to distinguish between the final manifestation of the kingdom and the present anticipations of it. The final coming together of heaven and earth is, of course, God’s supreme act of new creation, for which the only real prototype – other than the first creation itself – was the resurrection of Jesus.

But what we can and must do in the present, if we are obedient to the summons of the gospel, if we are faithfully following Jesus, and if we are indwelt by the spirit, is to build for the kingdom.

precisely because we do not see ‘all things’ under his feet now, the Church must get busy in the task of preparing the world for Jesus’ cosmic lordship. Because we are incorporated into the new-creation life of Jesus’ resurrection, we can commit ourselves to kingdom-work, knowing that what we do is neither ‘worthless’ nor ‘in vain’. What is more – and this is crucial – what we do matters because it carries over into the final new creation. We are not called to tinker in the world and then walk away from it, but to curate creation for its consummation. We are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to fall over a cliff. We are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown on to the fire. We are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site. We are – strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself – accomplishing something which will become, in due course, part of God’s new world.

God’s recreation of his wonderful world, which has begun with the resurrection of Jesus, continues mysteriously as God’s people live in the risen Christ and in the power of his spirit. This means that what we do in Christ and by the spirit in the present is not wasted, not abandoned, not discarded. Our holy labours will last long, all the way into God’s new world. In fact, they will even be enhanced there.

Not to produce works and signs of renewal within God’s creation is ultimately to collude, as evil does and as empires often do, with the forces of chaos and death themselves.

When they’ve finished with their stones and their statues they will hand them over, without necessarily knowing very much about where, in the eventual building, their work will find its home. They may not have seen the complete architect’s drawing of the whole building with ‘their bit’ identified in its proper place. Nor may they live to see the completed building, with their work at last where it belongs. But they will trust the architect so that the work they have done in following instructions will not be wasted. They are not, themselves, building the cathedral; but they are building for the cathedral. When the cathedral is complete their work will be enhanced and ennobled, and will mean much more than it could have meant as they were chiselling it and shaping it down in the stonemasons’ yard.

Put your faith where your fear is; fill your mind with things of love, not the love of things.

Perhaps the single greatest threat is not the rise of secularism or the emptying of churches, but the apathy and indifference of the churches that are still here. People too self-absorbed and too affluent to care for anything outside their own social media bubble, beyond their own circle of friends, and beyond the view of their front lawns. Too many so-called disciples committed to Jesus to the point of convenience, not to the point where their discipleship costs them anything. Yet Jesus bids us all to come and follow him, to leave worldly trinkets behind and to do hard things, crazy things and impossible things, for no other reason than that he is our king, walking alongside us, suffusing our earthly endeavours with the energy of the spirit.

If there is one failing of our liberal democracies, it is that our political systems have encouraged career politicians who have never run a farm or a shop or a school or a ship, and who lurch from utopianism, which gets most of them into politics in the first place, to pragmatic power-seeking, which is what they turn to when Utopia fails to arrive on schedule. When Christian men and women have confidence in their convictions, have experience of life’s struggles, see public office as a means, not an end, seek the common good rather than limited privilege, act transparently and respect the rule of law, and cherish consensus rather than stirring up partisan frenzy – then we are seeing people with a real opportunity to build for the kingdom.

The Western world in general has bought heavily into the Enlightenment belief that ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ are divided by an unbridgeable gulf. In that setting, it makes sense to tell Christian people to stop meddling in political matters, stick to spiritual things, stay in your lane of pious niceties and keep your religious sentiments to yourselves. But the compartmentalisation of the spiritual and secular is foreign to Scripture and to most of church history.41 Secular government is still a divine servant and is therefore theological; the Church’s existence cannot be divorced from life within the public sphere and is therefore political.

Augustine’s city of God never reforms or redeems the city of man. Rather, it resists it in order to outlast it.

In every age, every church has had to discern what it meant then and there to say that Jesus has ‘all authority’ not only ‘in heaven’ but also ‘on earth’,46 working this through in terms of the Church–State relationship, balancing sacred and secular, with the Church discovering what it might mean to be ‘in the world’ but not ‘from the world’,47 to bear theo-political witness without becoming a theocratic menace.

Even if there are two kingdoms,48 it does not mean that Christians are prohibited from moving between them or working among them. We are not required to stick to ‘spiritual things’, even if that means that some political leaders will excoriate us as ‘meddlesome priests’ or ‘God-bothering nuisances’. It is our commitment to Jesus that means that we do sometimes have to make a meddlesome nuisance of ourselves.

What we can do at present is ‘seek the welfare of the city’ in whatever city or village we sojourn, direct institutions such as government towards their God-given tasks of administrating justly as Paul taught, lead wisely like a Joseph when called to serve, give advice to power like Daniel when asked, deliver (as Huldah did) words of prophetic warning and encouragement to rulers, and pray for our political leaders so that we might lead a peaceable life and be known for our godliness. We can colonise earth with the redemptive power, life, beauty and joy of the kingdom to come, yet always with the sober realisation that we’ll only ever be an outpost, a signpost, or a billboard of how God intends humans to be his covenant partners in the magnificent display of his sovereignty over the new creation.51

Your faith is your defiance against the idols of this world. Your love is your rebellion against the powers of this evil age. Your church is not a retirement village for moralising geriatrics. Your church is supposed to be more like a boot camp for soldiers of Jesus who go out into the world wearing the full armour of God, preaching reconciliation with God, loving their neighbours, sowing good deeds in the soil of hurting hearts, and becoming the scourge of the corrupt and the champion of the weak. We undertake these tasks in such a way as to make clear that Jesus is worthy of our worship.

But making Christianity powerful is not the same thing as making the country authentically Christian. Our goal should be promoting the gospel to bring people into the family of faith, not pandering to political leaders so that they might let us share their podium.