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

by N.T. Wright

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...