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by
N.T. Wright
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March 28 - April 14, 2024
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.
We need to grasp where the Church sits between presidents and principalities.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
The 2020s appear to be the most precarious and perilous time in human history since the 1930s.
We believe that the Church’s answer to the global crises of our day is, in sum, the kingdom of God.
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.
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.
Not a kingdom in the sense of an earthly empire or an ephemeral spiritual state,
but as a vision and vocation for faithful action that works to bring God’s kingship over every facet of human life.
The kingdom of God is the imperative that drives the Church’s evangelistic preaching and its virtues, and compels us to reorder our lives according to the symbols and story of Jesus as the crucified, risen, and exalted king. But a caveat is needed lest we naively equate our own efforts directly with the kingdom of God itself. That is why, as we have already said (echoing Paul in Colossians 4:11), we have spoken not of ‘building the kingdom’ but of building for the kingdom.
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 Bible is a book utterly immersed in empire. Its stories are set in the midst of the great empires of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Macedonia, the Ptolemies and Seleucids, and then finally the Roman Empire.
But the Israelites most of the time were either living under the shadow of empire or experiencing the terror of empire.
In other words, Babylon’s power was not unbreakable, its victories not final; a day of recompense was indeed coming. Until then, the people needed to keep faith in God’s own faithfulness to them. In response, Habakkuk goes away rejoicing ‘in the God of my salvation’.25 Habakkuk understood how empires made history, a history made of desolation wrought by kings who believed they were walking and talking icons of their own deities. Yet the God of the covenant, while he might use these kings for his own purposes, would never let them have it all their own way. That is precisely why the Welsh
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The messenger declares the demise of Babylon and the liberation of enslaved Israel, summed up with two Hebrew words, malak elohayik, ‘Your God reigns.’27 In
which we are to understand the suffering ‘Servant’ of Isaiah 53. The Servant’s affliction and vindication is a microcosm of the story of Israel, suffering at the hands of pagan oppressors, but trusting in God to put things right in the final assize. A passage of Scripture that was to be very important for the early church.
The ‘one like a son of man’ has excited interpretations as to whether he is an angelic creature or a messianic agent. Most likely, the man is a multivalent symbol who represents God’s kingship, God’s anointed king and God’s royal people. The man is the heavenly embodiment of God’s earthly people and the divine counterpart to the arrogant horn who speaks in arrogant tones.
The great Roman peace was a peace that was created and sustained by merciless violence.
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.
drama. First, there was God’s royal rescuing power, executed in Jesus’ messianic mission, his crucifixion ‘for our sins’, his resurrection as the ‘firstborn from among the dead’, and experienced in the giving of the holy spirit.
Second, there was to be a future reckoning: ‘Then comes the end, the goal, when he [i.e. Jesus] hands over the kingly rule to God the father, when he has destroyed all rule and all authority and power.’
The poetry of Horace and Virgil is saturated with lines and language about how the Romans were the divinely appointed masters of the world.
If so, then, it means that Paul was not a travelling evangelist offering people a new religious experience, but an ambassador for a king-in-waiting, establishing cells of people loyal to this new king, and ordering their lives according to his story, his symbols and
his praxis, and their minds according to his truth.
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
But the resulting product, Christendom, was far from perfect. Christendom did not make the world the kingdom of heaven. Often it was the opposite: it manufactured a merciless hell for many on the margins. Bishops and princes got rich and fat off the suffering of others. This
is the tension we must wrestle with in church history and in the story of Western civilisation.17 Christendom, for all the cultivation of Christian virtues, for all the claim of the spirit’s effervescent presence, for all the advances in human liberties from the Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights, was still tainted with the human capacity for evil. It is indubitably true that Christian civilisation was often neither Christian nor civil. At times, it seemed as if the kingdom of heaven was still very much in heaven and not on earth.
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.21 Yet within the West there is a tension. The Christians of the West
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5. Here we are indebted to Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian revolution remade the world (New York: Basic, 2019), esp. pp. 80–106.
Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the roots of political theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 195; James K. A.
Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming public theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2017), p. 162.
First, Jesus is portrayed as endorsing the wider biblical view (about which more anon) that God the Creator desires and intends his world to be run by human authorities.
This is balanced, second, by the rider: those in authority will be held to account.
The problem of political power – even among the people of God, let alone in the wider non-Israelite world – is thus a major theme of the Old Testament. This is the necessary background for understanding what Paul, John and the other early Christians say, with characteristic density, about
the ‘powers’ – and for thinking wisely about what it all might mean for today.
Of course, the royal psalms that celebrate the wise rule of the Davidic king can themselves be seen, like the plaintive refrain in Judges, as simply serving the interests of this or that Israelite monarch. No doubt they were sometimes used that way. But as they stand, they hold out the promise of a coming king who would at last overthrow idolatry, bring peace to the warring nations, and in particular come to the rescue of widows and orphans, the oppressed and the stranger. Psalm 72 is perhaps the clearest statement of this theme of saving, healing justice: a prayer for YHWH, the Creator, to
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his justice, his character of putting-things-right, to the king, so that the king will ‘defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor’. This royal justice will bring about a worldwide rule of peace and prosperity. Just as King Solomon had built the Temple so that the divine glory would come and fill it, so this reign of wise, healing justice would cause the divine glory to fill the whole earth.
But there is another strand of ancient biblical thought which offers a radically different vision of how the coming Davidic king will overcome the powers of the world and establish a reign of justice and peace.
It is sufficient to say that, in early Christian reflection, following arguably from the teaching of Jesus himself, the passages about the ‘suffering Servant’ in particular were taken as the vital clue to understanding how the messianic victory over the forces of evil was accomplished. It was through this strange figure, the king who was also the servant, who was also (it seems) the ‘arm’ of YHWH himself. The servant was to embody both the vocation of Israel and the vocation – so to say – of Israel’s God, and thereby take upon himself the weight of exile, shame and death, in order to renew the
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Israel and thereby renew creation itself. Victory over the dark powers, particularly those conjured up by the idolatry which the prophets condemned not only in the pagan nations but also in Israel itself, would come through Israel’s God, the Creator, fulfilling in person the multi-layered vocation of the king, and of Israel itself, and ultimately of true humanity. All that, we may surmise, stands in the background of what John and Paul are saying when they sketch, with tantalising brevity, their picture of Jesus and the ‘powers’.
That obviously includes both what we would call ‘earthly’ or ‘political’ rulers and what we might call any ‘non-human’ or ‘supernatural’ quasi-personal ‘forces’ that stand behind the ‘earthly’ rulers.
The point about the ‘powers’ is that, in Paul’s world, they are both (what we would call) ‘earthly’ and (what we would call) ‘heavenly’ or ‘supernatural’. Those
But both Paul and John insisted that Jesus had achieved something
