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

by N.T. Wright

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.

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).

The optimism of the early 1990s died on the killing fields of Kosovo, in the ruins of the World Trade Center and in the valleys of Afghanistan. Many commentators celebrated the demise of history. But, like a resurgent virus, history has struck back with a vengeance.

It is important to note that God does not program history like a computer programmer running an algorithm, but neither is God surprised by history. History is the theatre of divine glory, and all history will culminate in a dramatic moment when God puts the world to rights through Jesus.

The end of history is neither a whimper nor a bang, but creation itself transfigured into a new creation.

the turmoil of our times means we must constantly be people of prayer. We have permission – and, indeed, a command! – to pray, ‘Rise up, O God, judge the earth, for all the nations belong to you!’8 We should pray for our kings, prime ministers and presidents so that ‘we may lead a tranquil and peaceful life, in all godliness and holiness’.9 We can pray for peace, prosperity, justice and freedom as something to be enjoyed by peoples of every city, country and continent.

Hong Kong theologian Kwok Pui-Lan on the importance of empire for the study of Christianity: Christianity cannot be understood apart from empire. We cannot understand the Bible without knowing something about the struggles for survival of the Hebrew people under the Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman Empires. Christianity began in the Roman Empire, in which Jesus and the early disciples lived as colonised peoples. Jesus died on the cross, which was a symbol of state terrorism and a form of torture and punishment for political rebels.18

Martyn Lloyd-Jones said that these three short chapters of the book of Habakkuk provide God’s answer to the ‘problem of history’.26

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

Jesus thus grew up in the immediate aftermath of the failed Galilean rebellions where the physical signs and traumatic memories of Roman imperial violence, including crucifixions, were everywhere. Roman armies had swept through the region and brought with them bloodshed, destruction, murder, rape, plundering and enslavement.40 That is the context in which Jesus soon began his ministry proclaiming the kingdom of God.

Thus, when Jesus proclaimed that ‘The time is fulfilled! . . . God’s kingdom is arriving! Turn back, and believe the good news!’41 he wasn’t offering people four spiritual laws or a road to heavenly bliss. Rather, Jesus was saying that the prophetic promises about the end of exile, a new exodus, a new covenant, a new temple, Israel’s regathering and restoration, were at last coming true. God was coming and coming as king. The kingship of God was being manifested through the things Jesus himself was doing: his own mighty deeds, healings, exorcisms and even his death.42 The day was coming, and was now already here, when the empires of this age would be eclipsed and judged by the kingly power of Israel’s God.

Paul’s kingdom-charged gospel was embedded in the Jewish tradition of YHWH’s contest against the powers and pantheon of the pagan world. To declare that Jesus is Lord was to imply that Caesar is not.

Even to whisper ‘Jesus is Lord’, then, carried with it an air of challenge, that perhaps Caesar’s lordship, with its pretention to divine status and unrivalled supremacy, spoke not to invincibility but to idolatry.

John was calling on his fellow believers to see what he saw, that Roman power, for all its self-vaunted greatness and glory, was a predatory and idolatrous fusion of greed, arrogance and violence that was ripe for judgement like grapes ready for harvest.

still within the annals of history, a moment was soon to come when a Roman Caesar, Emperor Constantine, would order his soldiers to put the sign of the cross on their shields. An act that marked the end of the cross as a symbol of Roman tyranny over Christians and marked instead the beginning of a new era when Rome would see herself as a faithful servant of the Lord Jesus Christ. As Will Durant famously said: 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

In AD 300 about 10% of the Roman Empire was Christian. By 380, however, 50% of the population were Christian, including emperors, generals and governors of the realm.

Thereafter the Church had to shift from resisting empire to residing within the empire as a privileged guest.

The early church had to negotiate empire, resist empire, flee from the empire, suffer under the empire, offer apologies for itself to the empire . . . until the Church became one with the empire.

That said, for all the evils of Christendom, with its marriage of Church and State, with the duumvirate of bishop and king, there were genuinely positive and ultimately revolutionary changes for human civilisation. Over the centuries, the Latin West and the Greek East became increasingly shaped by a Christian vision of God’s love for the world and the place of Christian virtues in societies where few restraints on evil and exploitation existed.

The Christians turned the whole edifice of gods, power, greatness and hierarchy on its head. God had used the foolish to shame the wise. God was a defender of the poor and champion of the weak. The rich would be sent away hungry while the poor would be well fed. A time was coming when there would be a reordering of power: the first would be last and the last would be first. So the rich had to mourn and wail for their riches lest these become evidence against them at the final judgement. Christians were accused of ‘turning the world upside down’3 and it would seem in that task that they were wholly successful because we live in a world where the weak and victimised are given almost sacral status.

Whether we are conservatives who believe that voiceless and vulnerable babies should not have their lives ripped apart in utero, or progressives who contend that women have the right to have control over their own bodies, we are all arguing in Christian language, and we are all trading in Christian currency.

This is so profound

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.’6

The Christian Scriptures scripted the social and sexual revolutions of the modern age.

It is fair to say that the creation of a Christian political order was never the Church’s purpose. The political order that became Christendom was simply the result of the success of the Church’s mission to proclaim God’s kingdom. Christendom appeared because converted rulers wanted to place their realm under the reign of Christ.15

Even with acknowledging the sins of the past, there is a case to be made for the achievements of Christendom and for Western civilisation.20 Whatever its failings, which are obviously many, Christendom gave us schools, academies, universities, hospitals, the Enlightenment, the rise of science, and notions of universal human rights, things that are impossible without Christianity being hardwired into the moral and intellectual DNA of the West. Christianity is the reason why the gladiatorial games ended and slave-markets were shut down. The pope’s Christendom was preferable to Caesar’s paganism. Western civilisation is still preferable to Communism and a caliphate.

Sad to say, with a few exceptions, it was empire rather than evangelism that made Christianity a global religion. 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?

Jesus’ kingdom is not like the kingdoms of this world. It doesn’t originate the same way or behave like the kingdoms of this world. But Jesus’ kingdom is still for this world, for the benefit and blessing of this world, for the redemption and rescue of this world.

If Jesus’ kingdom is of such an order, not from this world but for this world, then keeping out of politics is impossible.

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:

we believe Christians should be committed to the politics of divine love, that is, love for God and love for neighbour.

The ‘gods’ themselves are nonexistent, in the sense that there is no ultimate reality corresponding to the words ‘Zeus’, ‘Ares’ or ‘Aphrodite’. But when people go into the temples dedicated to these fictitious entities, they lay themselves open to the shadowy sub-personal and dehumanising influence of the demons.

The young church found itself in an unexpected position vis-à-vis the actual powers of the first-century world. We watch in awe as the early apostles, and then Paul, navigate their way through uncharted waters, with Peter and the others telling the Sanhedrin that they had to obey God rather than human authorities, and Paul appearing to take delight in telling both the Philippian magistrates and the high priest himself how to do their jobs. We should be clear: they were not saying, in effect, that human authorities were unimportant, irrelevant or to be abolished forthwith. They were calling them to account, informing or reminding them of their God-given role in the Creator’s world.

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.

This remains true whether or not the Church appeared to ‘succeed’. In a way, martyrdom itself proves the same point, of the arrival on the scene of a new kind of human life, the Jesus-shaped way of wise and healing justice, in the face of which death had lost its ultimate power. New creation is demonstrated by faithfulness unto death just as much as by calling the ‘powers’ to account in word and example.

Oliver O’Donovan puts it well: Theology must be political if it is to be evangelical. Rule out the political questions and you cut short the proclamation of God’s saving power; you leave people enslaved where they ought to be set free from sin – their own sin and others’.3

Precisely because we believe that Jesus is King and his kingly power is operative among us, we cannot retreat to the attic of spiritual affairs, not when there is a gospel to proclaim and a hurting world crying out for healing and hope. Precisely because Jesus is the King of kings, we offer him our worship and allegiance, while earthly monarchs and ministers of state may expect from us our intercession, taxes, counsel and service, a service that in its own way advances God’s purposes for human affairs.

Those warnings aside – the temptations of power and the dangers of mixing God and politics – it can be a great service to one’s nation to have men and women of deep Christian conviction in public office.

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.

Among Protestants, Luther envisaged the two kingdoms as two divinely appointed instruments for dealing with temporal and spiritual matters, though his views oscillated on how much magistrates should interfere in church matters. Anabaptist theologians advocated the partition of Church and State and stressed the separation of the Church from the realm and reach of the State. The Reformed churches developed the notion of clergy and magistrates as mutually disciplining one another. Such a view might have sounded good, but it became problematic after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which led to newly created nation-states in which the principle of religious tolerance made it necessary to loosen the Church–State relationships.

When we read the Bible, therefore, we must be aware of the false dichotomies, the foreign categories and the freighted presuppositions that people project upon it. True, the gospel cannot be reduced to a this-worldly project of social betterment. But neither is the gospel an escapist drama for the soul pining for the angelic decor of heaven. If we go that route of spiritual escapism, supposing that the gospel has nothing to do with power, politics, economics and injustice, we are embracing a perspective totally alien to the testimony of the prophets, the teaching of Jesus or the witness of the apostles. If Christians had stuck to ‘spiritual’ things, then there would be no William Wilberforce, no Martin Luther King, whose lives throbbed with the pursuit of justice precisely as the expression of their deeply cherished faith. There would have been no Velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia and no Christmas revolution in Romania in 1989 if Christians had not taken a stand and acted against Communist authoritarianism.

Let us beware of those who tell Christians to mind their own business, just as much as we rebuff those who offer Christians power and privilege at the price of their silence or compliance.

Polycarp was bishop of Smyrna (Izmir in modern-day Turkey) in the mid second century. Some time around AD 155/156, he was arrested and brought into a stadium where the proconsul, Statius Quadratus, urged him to swear by the genius of Caesar and to curse Christ. Polycarp was warned that, if he didn’t obey, he would be executed, either torn apart by wild beasts or burned alive. The dilemma was that Polycarp acknowledged that ‘we have been taught to pay proper respect to rulers and authorities appointed by God, as long as it does us no harm’.19 But when faced with coercion in matters of faith, even with threats of violence and execution, Polycarp was determined not to renounce Christ when commanded by a Roman official. He retorted, ‘For eighty-six years I have been his servant, and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?’20

By living exemplary lives, Christians provide a service, not only to the emperor, but to God. ‘Nevertheless,’ comments Thomas Schreiner, ‘if governments prescribe what is evil or demand that believers refuse to worship God, then believers as slaves of God must refuse to obey.’27

So, is disobedience to government possible for the Christian? The answer is ‘yes’, for two reasons. First, no earthly institution, whether monarch or magistrate, possesses absolute authority. The authority of the State is not an inviolable position but a performance of service, a service rendered to God and exercised for the people. The government’s authority is, then, conditional upon its performance to meet God’s standards of righteousness and to win the consensus of the people in how they wish to be governed.35 Second, while government is divinely instituted for the common good, and should be obeyed in principle, not every governor is good. Government should not be obeyed in every instance, especially if it interferes with religious liberty, acts unlawfully, or renders harm to its own people.36

Many Protestants decided that obedience only applied to legitimate authority, authority that acted with justice and piety. So it was a duty, as well as a rightful desire, that one should actively and violently resist illegitimate government, that is, a government whose tyranny made it an enemy of both God and the people.

Thomas Aquinas had noted that authority could be illegitimate for two reasons: first, if it was attained by violent usurpation; and second, if it was exercised in violent and unlawful ways. Aquinas appealed to Cicero’s justification of Brutus for killing Julius Caesar who was a tyrant.48 Aquinas preferred that a tyrant be removed not by ‘private persons’ but by a ‘public authority’ such as a senate or council of nobles, a view that was to be influential.49 John Wycliffe concluded that if God appointed tyrants then that would mean that the sins of tyranny would be attributed to God, which would be a blasphemous proposition, he claimed. For Wycliffe, tyrants are like those kings spoken of in Hosea 8:4: ‘They made kings, but not through me . . .’50

there is a case for non-violent resistance demonstrated by John Paul II, as well as Martin Luther King, Gandhi and countless others.

Even to consider the prospect of violence as permissible or divinely sanctioned enters into a morally fraught space. There is a reasonable argument for a just war against a foreign invader, but a justification for anti-government revolutionary violence against one’s own civic leaders and against one’s fellow citizens is more precarious.

The problem is that some governments are tyrannical to the bone and citizens must develop instruments of resistance depending on the degree of tyranny. Wrestling with such questions, one faces the kind of trilemma that Dietrich Bonhoeffer did in the 1930s. Bonhoeffer was confronted with the question of whether to remain in America to lobby the US government to take a hard line against Nazi Germany, travel to India to study pacifism with Gandhi, or return to Germany, join the Confessing Church, and (eventually) take part in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Would anyone claim there was an easy answer?

We do not think that the regulation of the price of tea and the ambitions of landholding gentry in the American colonies justified the American revolution against British authority. The reading of Romans 13:1–5 used to justify the American war of independence by the colonies was also used to justify the insurrection of the confederacy against the US federal government and its emancipation of slaves.