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

by N.T. Wright

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.

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. The Israelites were often caught between and conquered by these great empires. Yes, there were brief periods of independence and even expansion, first under King Solomon, then much later by the Hasmoneans. But the Israelites most of the time were either living under the shadow of empire or experiencing the terror of empire. They were either vassals or victims of the imperial powers that towered over them. Yet that is not the whole story. The testimony of Scripture is that kings and empires are raised up and brought down as Israel’s God so pleases.

In less than ten years, from the brutal Diocletian persecutions in AD 303, to the Edict of Milan in 313 granting Christians official legal protections, the fate of Christians at the hands of the Roman Empire had radically shifted from utter hopelessness to blessed reprieve. In an even more dramatic shift, Christianity would move from being merely tolerated to becoming hegemonic. How did followers of Jesus fare in this new arrangement, finding themselves no longer martyrs but chaplains to the empire? Under Roman sponsorship, Christians were no longer hunted, but were now able to hound and harass their traditional rivals among pagans, Jews and heretical Christian sects. Indeed, Christianity, through its bishops, became a powerful player in the halls of imperial power, in both Rome and Constantinople. At its worst, the Church then became an instrument of empire, offering Christ’s insignia to the decrees of soldier-emperors who continued to do what empires always do: conquer, enslave and exploit. The Church came to exchange the cross of Christ for the sword of Rome.

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. Many so-called intellectuals keep pushing the tiresome notion that Christianity engineered the Dark Ages to stifle learning, to sponsor the divine right of kings, and to build religious capital into the walls of oppression. Further, they often spout the view that every advancement of human rights and every progression of human endeavour derives from intellectual seeds sown by the French Revolution and from the freethinkers of the Enlightenment. Sceptics even have the gall to claim that the rise of modern science and the abolition of slavery all happened in spite of Christianity, not because of it.4 Yet that old chestnut, well-worn as it is, has one fatal flaw: it is not true.5 Most people in today’s world recognise as noble the ideas that we should love our enemies, that the strong should protect the weak, and that it is better to suffer evil than to do evil. People in the West treat such things as self-evident moral facts. Yet such values were certainly not self-evident to the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Vikings, Ottomans, Mongols or Aztecs. The reason why most people today accept those ideals as axiomatic is that we are products of the Christian revolution.

But what happens when the power listens?

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. 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. But the point remains: rulers, even when foolish and unjust, appear to hold a God-given authority. This is balanced, second, by the rider: those in authority will be held to account.

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.

One could offer a rough and ready summary of where we have got to so far. 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.

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 covenant with Israel and thereby renew creation itself.

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 terms are slippery. We perceive them through the lens of modern Western thought, in which a great gulf stands between the present world of space, time and matter and any other, whether we call it ‘heavenly’ or ‘spiritual’ or anything else – or indeed whether, like the sceptics and rationalists, we sweep such categories off the table as so much metaphysical nonsense.

Jesus warns his followers of his imminent arrest, using the same phrase for the soldiers that he used for the one who would be ‘cast out’ because of his death: ‘the ruler of the world is coming,’ he said (14:30). It makes no sense, in my view, to separate this from the satanic takeover of Judas in the previous chapter (13:2, 30) or from the arrival of the soldiers in the garden (18:3),

Created; defeated; and then reconciled. 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. But, once that has happened, wise humans can and must rise to the challenge of establishing and maintaining God’s intention for a well-functioning human society.

The present multicultural family of believers, created by the gospel and sustained by the spirit, is the real and tangible sign in the present time of the ultimate renewal of all creation promised in Romans 8:18–30. The present ‘filling’ with hope (Romans 15:13) is the anticipation of the time promised in Isaiah 11:9 when the whole earth shall be ‘filled’ with the knowledge of YHWH as the waters cover the sea. Paul has not abandoned the very much this-worldly hope of Israel’s Scriptures.

world, who have no idea that the Jesus whom they worship did indeed win the victory over the dark powers of the world, let alone what that might mean in practice. And this has left the door open for very different, and unbiblical, visions of the political calling of the followers of Jesus. As in earlier days, when it was possible for devout Christians to imagine that a bloodthirsty ‘crusade’ might be God’s will,

These are the virtues and practices of the community for whom Jesus has become the centre of life. Once we start pondering what this way of life really means, we have, in effect, a whole political vision, including economy, the environment, community development and plenty more. A community like this will not simply respect existing structures: it will be reshaping them from within. Reflecting God’s image to the world around is more than simply offering an alternative vision. It can and should be transformative.52

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.56

where the churches are so divided that they have no collective witness with which to speak the truth to the powers in question; where people ignore the regular biblical insistence on the love of enemies, and the goal of a single multi-ethnic worshipping community, and prefer de facto ethnically based separate assemblies; where truth ceases to matter, either because it is deconstructed into ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’ or because political leaders so obviously tell lies – then the gospel, the euangelion, is being denied, irrespective of how many people within ‘the system’ think of themselves as evangelisch or ‘evangelical’.

Jesus warned against mistaking the work of God’s holy spirit for the work of the devil. There is equal danger the other way round, when people suppose they are working for God while unthinkingly serving the ‘powers’.59

Our mission is not to be the ‘religious department’ of an empire. It is, rather, to build for the kingdom. How do we do that?

Ever since the Enlightenment, God, religion and the Church have been removed into the private sphere, like a demented elderly relative confined to the upstairs attic:

What is clearly not in mind is that preaching the cross to the ‘lost’ would happen in one church while acts of mercy for the poor would happen in another church.

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.

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. God alone will sum up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth.30 He alone will make the ‘new heavens and new earth’. We would not only be kidding ourselves, but committing utter folly, to suppose that our own labours could help in that final great work.

We are putting up a signpost, not offering a photograph of what we will find when we get to where the signpost is pointing.

In a healthy liberal democracy, Christian voices will not be stymied, but neither will non-Christian voices be censored. There should be limits on a Christian influence in government; it must never be absolute. Here we do well to remember that the whole purpose of Christian influence is not the pursuit of Christian hegemony but the giving of faithful Christian witness. Christian hegemony treats Christians as a type of invisible ruling class or an unspoken civil religion that demands public assent. In contrast, Christian witness is offered in a spirit of persuasion, rather than in a spirit of pursuing raw public power.

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.

will make their displeasure known and felt. And there we will most assuredly have the true metal of our faith tested, either to have our complicity purchased with gold, or to bear the cost of irritating a godless civil power by our unwavering allegiance to Jesus and his gospel.

Nor does promising to privilege Christianity compensate for a lack of character or for policies that benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. 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.

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.

Nonetheless, we should take heed of Fascist-like regimes who weaponise grievances, valorise militarism, play on ethnic prejudices, and believe that all the nation’s problems can be solved by a demagogue carrying a big stick.

It is worth noting, too, that Fascism and Communism, for all their differences, both hinge on absolute power put into the hands of the State and its supreme leader. Indeed, Timothy Snyder has argued that the Fascism and Communism that ravaged Eastern Europe should be understood as part of the one phenomenon of authoritarian dictatorship.4 Tomáš Halík opines that Communist evils tend to be glossed over due to our haunting and horrified fixation on the evils of Fascism:

The ironic thing about Communism is that it is simultaneously too Christian and not Christian enough. On the one hand, Communism is too Christian in that it constitutes an over-realised Christian eschatology, trying to bring heavenly justice to earth by violent revolution, attempting to manufacture the conditions where ‘the last will be first, and the first will be last’.13 Such a Communist utopia can only be created, Marx said, ‘by despotic inroads’,14 so that the road to paradise runs through several caverns of hell. We cannot forget that ‘the Kharkov famine [of the Soviet Union] and the Killing Fields [of Cambodia] were perpetrated by atheists in an attempt to realise the most lofty ideals of human perfection’.15 On the other hand, Communism is not Christian enough because it lacks a doctrine of total depravity. In Marxism, evil is what capitalists do, what the bourgeois do, what the factory owners do, but it cannot accept that evil lives in the hearts of Communists too. Marxist leaders believe that they ‘are exempt from error and can therefore arrogate to themselves the exercise of absolute power’.

That is dangerous because to identify any leader as ‘YHWH’S anointed’27 or a new ‘Cyrus’28 is to invest a perilous amount of religious capital in a single person. Such a person may prove to be all too human, all too given to corruption, full of depravity and easily seduced by the lust for power. After September 11, 2001, Tony Blair spoke about ‘evil’ being at large in the world and of his determination to deal with it – almost as though this was a new and unexpected problem – but that with his policies and leadership evil could be conquered. We know where that led.

the British philosopher John Locke put it, ‘What power can be given to the magistrate for the suppression of an idolatrous Church, which may not in time and place be made use of to the ruin of an orthodox one?’34 In a diverse and pluralistic society, governments would be wise neither to privilege one religion, nor to punish people over their religion.

Christian nationalism is impoverished as it seeks a kingdom without a cross. It pursues a victory without mercy. It acclaims God’s love of power rather than the power of God’s love. We must remember that Jesus refused those who wanted to ‘make him king’ by force just as much as he refused to become king by calling upon ‘twelve legions of angels’.39 Jesus needs no army, arms or armoured cavalry to bring about the kingdom of God.

One danger is the slow and steady accession of a soft authoritarianism under the guise of being ‘progressive’.40 We have in mind what happens when a state seeks to regulate as much of the individual’s beliefs, convictions, conscience and religion as possible. A system where non-state-centric forms of life are corroded by constant surveillance and deliberate over-regulation.41 What alerts us to this danger is several things: 1 emphases on a hierarchy of ‘identities’ rather than the rule of law and equality before the law to negotiate relationships between citizens; 2 adoption of a mode of moral reasoning that assigns all people into the binary slots of either ‘oppressor’ or ‘oppressed’; 3 legal preference for bespoke notions of ‘equality’ rather than accommodating religious and cultural differences; 4 the State conceived no longer as an instrumental good, but as an ultimate power with jurisdiction over every facet of life, in order to achieve a comprehensive renovation of society according to the State’s progressive vision. In other words, we are concerned about a progressive post-liberal order that does not value the right to dissent, the value of ideological diversity or the necessity of public debate, and that does not tolerate religions it cannot dictate to.

There is danger in an aggressive collectivism which argues that persons should not be treated as individuals who are equal before the law so much as expressions of specific sexual and ethnic identities.

Hence G. K. Chesterton’s complaint that ‘the modern world is full of old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.’62 Western liberalism, with its talk of rights and aversion to injustice, is Christianity’s prodigal son squandering his inheritance on ‘disordered loves’, while claiming it has inherited nothing from its parents.

Those who acclaim Jesus as King will always be suspicious of a state or class that ‘claims to be [a mediator] of ultimacy’.72

The implication of Romans 13:1–7 and 1 Peter 2:13–17 is that governing authority is conferred by God and therefore accountable to God. God alone is authority; consequently, states and their delegates merely have authority.

In this post-Christendom settlement, authority was delegated not from on high, from God to the king, but transmitted from below, from people to public officials.

the Western preoccupation with individual rights and liberty, over, say, the common good and combating poverty, betrays a hierarchy of values and a particular social location which is neither self-evident to, nor expedient for, every other Christian church in the world.