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by
N.T. Wright
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January 22 - March 23, 2025
The aim of this book is not to be like most publications on Christianity and politics. We are not going to tell Christians what they should think about abortion, gun control, Brexit, Trump, climate change, racial justice and other hot-button issues. But neither are we offering an abstract theory of statecraft and faith-craft that never quite comes in to land in real life.
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).
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).
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.
we need wisdom, for the Church has much work to do to prepare for such a day.
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.
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.
Liberal democracy was the system, the climax and culmination of human political evolution.
a social arrangement that balanced rights and responsibilities, freedom and order, centralised and distributed power, a system that could deliver sustainable economic growth.
for ever.
China’s economic rise did not lead to its democratic liberalisation; rather, the country turned into a wealthy and predatory superpower that runs a technological surveillance state.
Russia remains what it has been ever since the seventeenth century: a military dictatorship.
Do you feel more or less free than 20 years ago?
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.
lobbyists who buy politicians like someone collecting antique spoons.
Most illiberal impacts are from corporate welfare and/or unending “campaign” financing?
infested with the soft corruption of corporations that fund political campaigns to further their own interests.
the grievance de jour.
true that democratic parliaments and parties can be futile and insufferable in the same way as dictatorships are brutal and intolerable.
liberal democracy is not the bastion of benevolence that we like to pretend it is.
liberal democracies are heavily dependent on war for economic growth as well as for moral coherence.
now, we have the additional nightmarish prospect of nuclear war, a catastrophic horror that is inevitable unless we make it impossible.
We have to contend with a deteriorating climate situation
workable and equitable agreement
the killing fields of Kosovo,
puts the world to rights
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.
we need to put our faith where our fear is and exercise a faith that works through love.
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.
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.
God’s kingdom is neither a timeless and abstract ideal nor the dissolution of the space–time universe.
Jesus’ message was that God was becoming king in and through his work, his preaching, his healings, and even by his death on the cross.
Thereafter, creation was being healed and a new people, Jews and Gentiles together, were being redeemed and united in a renewed creation that could be anticipated by the gift of God’s spirit.
For the early church, the kingdom of God was never about going to heaven. It was a way of summarising what God had embryonically established in Jesus, the spirit-led work that God was doing among them in the present, and what God would establish in the fullness of time.
bring
(echoing Paul in Colossians 4:11), we have spoken not of ‘building the kingdom’ but of building for the kingdom.
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.
our days are mired in one tragedy after another,
dulled their senses into moral apathy by giving themselves over to the mind-numbing frivolity of their i-devices.
consider how best to offer a Christian witness in an age that has lost its ability to reason with others.
But God had raised Jesus from the dead, undoing what Pilate and Herod had done to him, robbing death of its finality, and testifying to the goodness of God’s power and the power of God’s goodness.
In AD 300 about 10% of the Roman Empire was Christian. By 380, however, 50% of the population were Christian, including emperors, generals and governors of the realm.
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?
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 t...
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duumvirate of bishop and king,
because we live in a world where the weak and victimised are given almost sacral status.
Has anyone read Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (published as Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World in the United States)?
