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by
N.T. Wright
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January 22 - March 23, 2025
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.
insisting
How do you think this is partially true?
(with some justification) that it’s the Church that has been ‘the oppressor’,
power is found in weakness, greatness is attained in service, revenge only begets greater evil, and all victims will be vindicated at God’s judgement seat. That is what has been wired into the moral compass of Western civilisation.
Paul told the men of Corinth that ‘the man isn’t in charge of his own body; his wife is’9 and he prohibited the Ephesian men from working as ‘slave traders’.10 To us, we read that and think, ‘Well, obviously!’ But the first recipients who heard these words probably blinked or gaped with astonishment and uttered the words, ‘Is he joking?’
one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth’.11 Those words ‘of one blood’ seem innocent to us, but this was the verse beyond all others that was preached, printed, yelled and cried by abolitionists, African American clergy, and advocates for indigenous communities to demand justice for people of colour against oppression by white slave-holders and mistreatment by colonial masters.12
The Christian Scriptures scripted the social and sexual revolutions of the modern age.
If Jesus’ kingdom is of such an order, not from this world but for this world, then keeping out of politics is impossible.
proclamation and poverty,
But what happens when the power listens?
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. Jesus – and John, of course – assume that what Pilate is about to do, sending Jesus to his death, is indeed the wrong thing: it is a ‘sin’. It will be blamed on those mainly responsible, in other words (we assume) the chief priests who have presented Pilate with a strange prisoner and an even stranger set of charges against him.
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.
that the Creator intends his world to be run through obedient human beings.
kings and other rulers were made ‘in the image of the god’. It made sense, after all: the god was in overall charge, but the human ruler, with delegated authority, made and enforced the laws.
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
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The ‘gods’ themselves are nonexistent, in the sense that there is no ultimate reality corresponding to the words ‘Zeus’, ‘Ares’ or ‘Aphrodite’. But when people go into the temples dedicated to these fictitious entities, they lay themselves open to the shadowy sub-personal and dehumanising influence of the demons.
Pilate, the present representative of the ‘world’s ruler’, acts out his ‘authority’ by having Jesus killed. But the God who delegated that authority to Pilate reverses the verdict by raising Jesus from the dead and launching the world mission of his followers. John presents the whole sequence as the dramatic unveiling-in-action of love, which in Scripture was ascribed, not to the Messiah, but rather to Israel’s God. The Word made flesh, the true human being, has brought together the two vocations, of the human who will put God’s purposes into effect and of God himself, returning to dwell among
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But insofar as Torah (or those who might be using it to this end) was now threatening to prevent those larger purposes from being fulfilled, it must be abolished – not in the sense of leaving God’s people with no moral compass, but in the sense of inviting them, as people who were once idolaters but are so no more, into a larger multi-ethnic reality no longer defined by the restrictions (circumcision, food laws, Sabbaths) that in the ancient world marked out the Jews from their pagan neighbours.
They did not, in other words, translate the biblical promises into another dimension:
So what had changed with the coming of Israel’s Messiah? The radical transformation that took place through the events concerning Jesus had three related elements. First, it had to do with the long-prophesied change of focus from the Jewish people and their homeland to the worldwide Jew-plus-Gentile family, including the various social adjustments required if that was to work, as we see for instance in Romans 14.
The early Christians, like the Jews, focused their critique not on how the rulers had become rulers but on what the rulers then did with the power they now had.
But many such countries had strong Christian traditions woven into their national life which could be brought on board in support of the new national agenda. It was not only some of the American founding fathers who thought of themselves as the ‘new Israel’ discovering the ‘promised land’. Some French Canadians saw the province of Quebec in the same way. It became fatally easy to suppose, as many in Europe, not least Britain, had done before, that this or that country was automatically ‘Christian’, and that whatever it needed to do in pursuit of its national identity and destiny would somehow
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evangelical convictions and earnest energies for justice.
Grasping this is vital for a proper theological understanding of Christian mission. For only after we have understood how the cross and the kingdom go together will we be equipped to consider how Christians carry with them the marks of Jesus’ death and the message of Jesus’ kingdom. We can’t be content with being either a cross-centred church or a kingdom-centred church. We must have both, otherwise preaching will be impoverished, and our faith will lack deeds infused with Jesus’ kingdom-ministry.
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.
God’s setting things right
God alone will sum up all things in Christ,
Oxford, the Ozarks, or in Oklahoma City?
This is why the Anglican divine, Richard Hooker, in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, argued that the Church should be subject to the authority and laws of the State in matters that did not directly contradict the Church’s essential doctrines. According to Hooker, the State had the authority to regulate the external affairs of the Church, such as the building of churches and even ensuring the proper conduct of public worship.
‘We must obey God, not human beings!’13 There was something subversive, even world-upending, about the Church’s message that ‘Jesus Christ . . . is Lord of all’ and Jesus is ‘king’.14 Plus, for every benevolent and believing proconsul like Sergius Paulus, there was one like Gallio who turned a blind eye to mob violence by Greeks against Jews; or a Felix who wanted to release Paul from imprisonment but only if Paul paid him a bribe.
The problem with Romans 13:1–5 is not its opacity but its clarity, its plain and unqualified call for submission to governing authorities.
even David did not murder King Saul when he had the chance,
The Soviet Union and Eastern bloc were not defeated by violence, but rather by ‘trying every avenue of negotiation, dialogue, and witness to the truth, appealing to the conscience of the adversary and seeking to reawaken in him a sense of shared human dignity’.
Witness to the truth
Christian teaching affirms that obedience and respect for government is the norm even if the government is imperfect or unjust in some matters. Civil disobedience is reserved for unjust laws, and uncivil disobedience should be reserved only for violent authoritarians.
solved by a demagogue carrying a big stick.
Marxists end up oppressing their own people with guns and gulags. In addition, for all their cry for equality, some people always end up being more equal than others.
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’.
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.
Communism is not Christian enough because it lacks a doctrine of total depravity.
Chinese pastor Wang Yi
submit to the swords and authorities on earth. If you want to use earthly power today to oppress the eternal power, this Scripture has already revealed the end result. History is Christ written large, not Xi Jinping written large.
Lactantius reasoned that coerced religion was the opposite of true religion, and so it was illogical. He pointed out that if one has to use force to advance one’s religion, the arguments in favour of that religion must be pretty weak: “If the reasoning is sound,” he said, “let them argue it! We are ready to listen.” Violence shows you have already lost, he argues. Christians, on the other hand, are happy to die for their faith, since they know they have already won the Truth.
What/which morals/morality should be legislated and which should be more dependent on persuasion? What has been poorly legislated by Christians in the past? Male-only suffrage? Banning interracial marriage? Inhibiting women from living as full of a single life as a man? Argument for pluralism is similar to argument for denominations; no one has it all right, so no one should be becoming the one and only. How paternalistic should we be? I find it best in parenting to not be much more paternalistic than sure of things I am.
christianisation of kingship is not far from those who claimed that US president Donald Trump was a ‘new Cyrus’.
Can/Should this be determined ahead of time or only in retrospect?
Even Martin Luther said he’d rather be ruled by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian.
Nonconformists,
In the twelfth century, Thomas Aquinas said: The king’s duty is therefore to secure the good life for the community in such a way as to ensure that it is led to the blessedness of heaven, that is by commanding those things which conduce to the blessedness of heaven and forbidding, as far as it is possible to do so, those which are contrary.
Will the government arrest heretics, license preachers, regulate seminaries and impose Sabbath observance?
‘heresy is a spiritual matter which you cannot hack to pieces with iron, consume with fire, or drown in water’.
