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

by N.T. Wright

For the Neoplatonist, the aim was not for a multi-ethnic and multilingual community to worship together as the sign of hope in the present, pointing towards what the Creator God would eventually do for the whole cosmos. The aim was for the individual ‘soul’ to be so purified that, after death, it would leave the world of space, time and matter and make its way into the divine presence in ‘heaven’. It cannot be stressed too strongly that none of this is found in the New Testament.49 It represents a major step away from the biblical vision to which Jesus and his first followers were obedient. (This is why, of course, from the third century onwards, methods of reading Scripture were developed to make the Bible address what people thought it ought to be addressing – a process that continues to our own day.) As long as people are focused on ‘going to heaven’, they will have less compulsion to pursue the New Testament’s vision of a united trans-ethnic and trans-local family worshipping the one God and thus holding the powers of the world to account. Indeed, they may warn that this is all too ‘worldly’, a distraction from a proper ‘heavenly’ focus. Thus the Church’s vocation to speak truth to power, the truth of God’s wise, healing justice, sustained by the knowledge that the powers of the world have actually been defeated on the cross, can easily go by the board when people ‘translate’ the language of Jesus’ victory into the message of ‘going to heaven’ despite ongoing sin. Of c...