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

by N.T. Wright

We find again a common interest in our concern for how to ‘build for the kingdom’ in an age of – as the front cover says – totalitarian terror and dysfunctional democracies.

We are not trying to be political theorists or social activists, but we are concerned with the political and social implications of the gospel. The globe is awash with terror, tyranny and trauma, divisions and despair, not just in the West, but also in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Our world seems dangerously combustible, due to financial crises, pandemics, increasing injustices and inequalities, democratic chaos, geopolitical upheaval, wars and rumours of more wars to come.

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. That is true today, tomorrow, the next day, until death and despots are no more, until such a time when ‘he has put all his enemies under his feet’ (1 Corinthians 15:25). Such a conviction means that the Church needs to understand how it relates to empires biblical and burgeoning, how to build for the kingdom in our cities and suburbs; to understand the time for obedience to the State and the time for disobedience to the State.

We hope that such a book will help Christians begin to discern how to respond with wisdom to the situations in places such as Ukraine, Nigeria, Gaza, Myanmar and Taiwan. Help them to discern how to think about constitutional monarchy and democratic republics. Teach them to fear the seduction of political power. Call them to seek to build something that carries over into the new creation, as well as to rest in the goodness and faithfulness of the one who is King of kings and Lord of lords.

Christianity brought about a revolution in European civilisations and is now part of the political and moral DNA of the West. But the Church was also party to unholy alliances with Western rulers, not least in its complicity with European empires that wrought colonial violence all over the world. Yet whatever the good, bad and ugly of history, the Church cannot retreat from politics. If we are to speak truth to power and stand up to the powers, then we must do kingdom-business with the business of political power (chapter 2).

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).

We next discuss the topic of submission to governing authorities (chapter 5) and when Christian witness requires us actively to disobey them (chapter 6).

These are difficult and complicated subjects, and we are concerned to affirm the goodness of government as much as to explain what we might do if governments revert from public service to predatory tyranny. Finally, we set forth the case for a liberal democracy. It is the ‘liberal’ in ‘liberal democracy’ that enables us to live with political and cultural differences, not despite being a Christian but precisely as a Christian. Nothing is straightforward, diversity breeds conflict, but we are called to love our left-wing and right-wing neighbours, and to build a better world for people of all faiths and none (chapter 7).

This volume was in its final stages of pre-production just as the Israel–Gaza war began in October 2023. We lament the loss of innocent life and the carnage and cruelty that has taken place. The present conflict has deep and murky roots, resulting in a politically and morally complex situation which intersects with colonialism, empire, land, religion, violence, human rights and wider geopolitical factors. It is almost impossible to say anything about this subject without inflaming someone somewhere. The brutality of the Hamas attacks on Israeli citizens reminds us of Isaiah’s denunciation of those who ‘rush to shed innocent blood’ (Isaiah 59:7); yet we concede that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians over two generations also reminds us of King Ahab’s violent seizure of Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kings 21). Alas, the powers are again doing their worst, bringing horror and bloodshed to Israelis and Palestinians alike.

With Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza, and Palestinian children dying in the streets, there is no time to waste on partisan antics or grandiose statements for tribal consumption. We urge all readers to challenge dangerous rhetoric, whether it concerns driving Jews out of the land ‘from the river to the sea’ or, conversely, treating the Palestinians in Gaza as the ‘Amalekites’ who should have been wiped out long ago – in both cases appearing to invoke biblical precedent or even warrant for the ongoing cycle of violence and wickedness.

The global financial crisis in 2008 strongly suggested that the whole economic system was a scam to make the filthy rich even richer.

the current state of many Western democracies is such that they are now fraught with fragmentation to the point of being caught in legislative deadlock or committed to some morbidly self-destructive feat of devouring themselves from the inside out.

The USA convulses between its political extremes represented by white Christian nationalists and progressive identitarians. It lacks the consensus and belief in a greater good that once characterised its political class. 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. Then there are the lobbyists who buy politicians like someone collecting antique spoons. The West might not have hard corruption such as that found in a banana republic, but it is infested with the soft corruption of corporations that fund political campaigns to further their own interests. America’s political actors and the tribalized media entities have based their funding models on hyping up audiences with the grievance de jour.

This palpable democratic dysfunction gives China and Russia all the material they need for the claim of their own internal propaganda that democracy is a disordered and chaotic mess.

The global war on terror peeled back the curtain to show that liberal democracies are heavily dependent on war for economic growth as well as for moral coherence.

We have to contend with a deteriorating climate situation and further economic turmoil on the horizon. In addition, many liberal democracies find it impossible to reach any workable and equitable agreement on environmentalism, racial justice, healthcare, immigration, gun control, abortion, religious freedom and LGBTQ+ rights, leaving people with only fresh disgust at the system itself.

In addition, 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.

Those points are all well and good, but we need more than things to console us and scriptural reflections for us to consider. In an age of ascending autocracies and dysfunctional democracies, the obvious question is: what should the Church do?

But here’s the question for us today, the one that we intend to explore in this book. How do we build for the kingdom of God amid Afghan and Ukrainian refugees in France? How do we build for the kingdom while seeing the injustices that afflict people of colour and indigenous peoples in the West? How do we build for the kingdom in a seminary in Taiwan under the shadow of Chinese aggression? How do we build for the kingdom while reckoning with the past and present evils of our own democratic institutions? How do we build for the kingdom with our own divided politics over abortion and climate change? Are we more shaped by social media than Scripture? And, most challenging of all, how do we build for the kingdom in the face of menacing empires while resisting the inevitable seduction to create an empire of our own? Such things call for wisdom and discernment. Hard as those questions are, we need more than ever to recover our kingdom-vocation. For our days are mired in one tragedy after another, truth has become tribalised, despots seem undefeatable, democracies appear endemically defective, and masses of men and women have dulled their senses into moral apathy by giving themselves over to the mind-numbing frivolity of their i-devices. 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 ab...

Let us begin with 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.

They ransack the world, and now that the earth fails to contain their all-devastating grasp, they scour even the sea: if their enemy has wealth, they are greedy; if he is poor, they are ambitious; neither East nor West has satiated their hunger . . . They plunder, they murder, they rape, all in the name of their so-called empire. And where they have left desolation, they call it ‘peace’.37 The great Roman peace was a peace that was created and sustained by merciless violence.

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.

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.

Political philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb captures just how radical the Christian message was in a world where the gods were powers and power was worshipped: The Greco-Romans despised the feeble, the poor, the sick, and the disabled; Christianity glorified the weak, the downtrodden, and the untouchable; and does that all the way to the top of the pecking order. While ancient gods could have their share of travails and difficulties, they remained in that special class of gods. But Jesus was the first ancient deity who suffered the punishment of the slave, the lowest ranking member of the human race. And the sect that succeeded him generalized such glorification of suffering: dying as an inferior is more magnificent than living as the mighty. The Romans were befuddled to see members of that sect use for symbol the cross – the punishment for slaves. It had to be some type of joke in their eyes.

Who would celebrate a military victory today with a monument depicting their head of state committing an act of sexual violence and murder?

It is fair to say that the creation of a Christian political order was never the Church’s purpose.

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.

The authenticity of Constantine’s faith has been a matter of concerted debate. Some suppose that Constantine’s affection for Christianity was less a matter of revelation than it was of Realpolitik: he saw Christianity as a useful tool for controlling the empire. The reality is probably more complex. Constantine most likely had some devotion to one God in general and to Christ in particular. But Constantine perhaps admired the Christian God because he saw in this God a mirror of himself: one unrivalled and supreme lord of the world.

Accordingly, we must be careful about overly valorising Western civilisation and too eagerly lionising liberal democracy in the name of Christian triumphalism.

It’s hard to explain to young people these days what the British East India Company did in India. It was the equivalent of Amazon.com raising an army, invading New Zealand, taxing the population into poverty, enslaving people into textile production, and then turning the country into a narco state to manufacture heroin for South America.

Christianity has often given sanction to greed, conquest, slavery, exploitation and the ‘othering’ of oppressed peoples.

Even our liberal democracies, built on notions of freedom, equality and the rule of law, are hardly the paragons of virtue we like to think they are. Many liberal democracies can still multiply injustices with racism, poverty, inequality and ecological recklessness. The ability of corporations – big tech, big pharma, the energy lobby, the gambling cartels – to buy politicians and influence legislation poses the question as to whether Western nations are ruled by the people or a plutocracy of CEOs.

Further, in many Western nations, ‘Christianity’ has been the religious underpinning to white nationalism. Or else, the churches within liberal democracies have been affluent to the point of being indifferent to the suffering of others.

The Christians of the West were supposed by many to be building Jerusalem on earth. While some shards of heavenly light did shine through, on other occasions the construction seemed instead to resemble a cathedral of human depravity. Christendom often looked like a city of perdition rather than the city of God. 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?

Many will claim that the Church should never get involved in politics. The Church (such people will say) should not seek a place at the table of political power or even get involved in debates about civil rights, climate change and public housing. It’s not the Church’s business to go around singing the praises of the West, or yelling tirades against the West. Our Lord said, ‘My kingdom is not of this world’22 because the kingdom is spiritual and timeless, and belongs to the heavenly realm.23 Many will wag a finger at us as meddlesome clergy planting their pulpit in places it does not belong. Keep your sermons in church, not Congress; worship your Lord far away from the House of Lords. Stick to the cure of souls, not trying to save the world!

‘My kingdom isn’t the sort that grows in this world,’ replied Jesus. ‘If my kingdom were from this world, my supporters would have fought, to stop me being handed over to the Judaeans. So then, my kingdom is not the sort that comes from here.’ (John 18:36)

This translation captures something that many commentators gloss over. Yes, 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 were an earthly king of this age, then there would be soldiers killing to bring about his kingdom, just as they do for every other earthly kingdom: victory through violence. Yet that’s not how Jesus’ kingdom will come. The kingdom will come rather through the imperial violence done to him on the cross and through the anti-imperial, death-reversing, justice-loving power of resurrection. Then the kingdom spreads, not through conquest, but through the spirit’s life-giving and liberating power being experienced by more and more people and through their life-giving contributions to the world. At the heart of John’s kingdom-theology is God’s love revealed in the death of his Son, the Lamb, the Messiah. This is conquest, but by love. This is power, but in weakness. This is kingship, but in self-giving suffering for others. This kingdom is not one that arises from within the world. But as it advances, as it spreads, it dispels and displaces the dark forces in the world.24 If Jesus’ kingdom is of such an order, not from this world but for this world, then keeping out of politics is impossible. We must be political in some sense because th...

In this book, we are trying to answer some questions. How do you build for the kingdom in an age of empire, where totalitarians tyrannise and our democracies appear dysfunctional? This is not a purely religious question; it is also a contemporary political matter.

Those to whom authority and responsibility are given will be held accountable, and that accountability works outwards to include any who put the authority-figures in the position of doing the wrong thing.

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. This would not have come as a surprise to John’s non-Jewish readers, some of whom at least would be used to the idea of magistrates being put on trial after their term of office.

Nor would it surprise Jewish readers, whose Scriptures contained many oracles of divine judgement on wicked rulers. Saying that the authorities are appointed and authorised by God does not mean that God endorses whatever they then do. (That fallacy occurs in modern democracies, when winning an election is said to give the victors a mandate and reason to act with carte bla...

The idea of humans reflecting the divine image is actually the democratisation, on the part of Israel’s Scriptures, of the well-known ancient view that kings and other rulers were made ‘in the image of the god’.

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.

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.

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 give 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.

This could easily be the emphasis picked up by later readers, not least those who knew the book of Daniel. There, the ‘little’ horn that utters proud blasphemies against the Most High will have its dominion taken away, ‘consumed and totally destroyed’, leaving the way clear for the worldwide kingship and dominion to be ‘given to the people of the holy ones of the Most High’.

But what are these ‘powers’? Paul lists several in Colossians 1: ‘thrones and lordships and rulers and powers’. A similar list in Ephesians declares that Jesus is lord over all ‘rule and authority and power and lordship’, and over ‘every name that is invoked, both in the present age and also in the age to come’.28 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. They already feature prominently in significant biblical contexts such as Deuteronomy 32, Isaiah 14 and arguably Daniel 7.29 Then, in a famous passage in Romans 8, we find ‘death . . . life . . . angels . . . rulers . . . the present . . . the future . . . powers . . . height . . . depth’ – with Paul adding ‘any other creature’, not only in case he’d left anything out but in order to remind us that all these things are precisely creatures, part of God’s world, not independent divine or quasi-divine beings.30 It is possible to tease out particular meanings for all these terms, but the fact that Paul can mix the lists around is a fair indication that he is more concerned to stress the lordship of Jesus over all ‘powers’ of whatever sort than to provide specific definitions or discrete categories.

For Paul, the visible world and the invisible overlapped in all sorts of ways. Anything in creation that is worshipped instead of the Creator God has the capacity to become an idol. And when Paul discusses idols and their temples, he explains that there you will find demons – malevolent discarnate beings bent on corrupting and distorting human life and work – eager to recruit more humans to their deadly pursuits.