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

by N.T. Wright

‘What power can be given to the magistrate for the suppression of an idolatrous Church, which may not in time and place be made use of to the ruin of an orthodox one?’

secularity – by which we mean preventing theocracy, enabling the free exercise of religion, and permitting liberty of conscience in religion

Liberty of conscience!

governments attempted to regulate religion to keep it pure and publicly acceptable.

hierocratic Integralism36 built on the state-sanctioned purification of religious life and the subjection of secular government to papal authority.

the regulation of religion by the State and the punishment of religious dissenters by the State are not conducive to the freedom of worship of a country’s citizens. Moreover, using religion to manufacture social and ethnic homogeneity is doomed to give sanction to prejudice and to weaponise religion in the hands of wicked actors.

Is Patriarch Kirill just a black-hatted and bearded version of American moral-majority founder Jerry Falwell, albeit with incense?

Christian nationalism as giving a Christian facade to nakedly political, ethnocentric and impious ventures.

Christianity’s influence can only be eliminated by realigning institutions towards a secularised morality, by narrowing the parameters of religious freedom, by a coercive catharsis of religion itself, and by deconstructing resident fixtures such as history, constitutional law and even family.

religion ascribes

notions of ultimacy

to something other than the State and the State’s vision f...

For civic totalists, the danger of religion is that it creates a competing social vision and an alternative morality, which divides the loyalty of citizens away from the State’s objectives for human conduct, rendering certain forms of religion as hostile to the State’s ambitions.

the ruling regime must be protected by ‘a shared account of basic civic values that impose limits on what can be true in the religious sphere’.

There is something terrifying about a state so convinced of its own self-righteousness, that excites its citizens into a frenzy of rage and worship, a state that feels free to control, coerce and kill, all in the name of its empire, for the sake of progress, or to prove it is on the ‘right side of history’.

Puritanism for people who have never read works by John Locke or Thomas Paine about tolerance and individual rights.

#BlackLivesMatter,

#MeToo

It is a comic irony that the secular State has an innate inability to realise the ideals of love and justice taught by Jesus precisely because they believe such ideals must be attained without him!

Yet the pulpit-pounding preacher and the irreligious professor are all attempting to tune their moral compasses after crawling out of a crater created by Jesus and his gospel.

the magistrate ‘hath authority, and it is his duty, to take order, that unity and peace be preserved in the Church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire; that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed; all corruptions and abuses in worship and discipline prevented or reformed; and all the ordinances of God duly settled, administered, and observed’ with ‘power to call synods, to be present at them’. Many Presbyterian churches around the world have modified this line so it doesn’t grant such authority to the civil powers over their synods. Interestingly, the 1689 London Baptist Confession, which uses the Westminster Confession of Faith as a template, conspicuously avoids granting the magistrate such authority over Baptist churches.

Christian faith is meant to be a public faith, for the common good, which compels us to do good, to make good, and to build good in private and public endeavours.

Yet almost nobody today talks as if the State is a divine servant, is accountable to God, or exercises divine authority in its governance. There is a reason for that, a back story that has led to suspicion about anyone claiming to have divine sponsorship, to have ‘God on our side’ and a monopoly on the divine legitimacy. Whether or not we have experienced it for ourselves, we all fear the kind of theocracy in which certain humans are regarded, even if only by themselves, as infallible mouthpieces of the divine will.

No democracy can survive external actors maliciously exploiting its internal fissures without a narrative substructure rooted in something beyond itself.

what those liberties are for.

struggle for freedom

the State is simultaneously a source of evil and a potential safeguard against it.

We are contending that an ideal state has its freedoms and obligations tethered to something transcendent yet translatable. A state anchored in a particular story with universal relevance. A state authority that knows it is not and never should try to be almighty, combined with a citizenry that aspires to civic virtue. In such a settlement, even with a secular constitution, one may appeal to sustaining traditions and narratives such as those supplied by religion to enable a comprehensive suite of freedoms and safeguards against tyranny and anarchy. A state that seeks to be just needs a coherent and compelling justification for the rights and responsibilities of its citizens which is rooted in something bigger than themselves and even beyond themselves. Also, such a state needs common convictions about who humans are, something like creatures bearing the ‘image of God’ who share ‘one stock’,7 in other words, a political anthropology that explains universal human value.

Such a state needs to provide its citizens with a summation of their agreed duties and obligations to one another as summed up in something like the Decalogue, the Sermon on the Mount, or the parable of the Good Samaritan, even if it then finds secular expression in various bills of rights and declarations about human rights.

some kind of eschatology about the telos, the end or goal of freedom, felicity and flourishing.

no religion should pursue hegemonic supremacy

Political liberalism, far from being the formidable foe of Christianity, proves in fact to be its lost child, who refuses to believe the truth about its paternity.

we wish to prosecute the thesis that in a world with a human propensity for evil, greed and injustice, liberal democracy stands as the least worst option for human governance. Liberal democracy is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a just society, but it can be an enabling condition for a just society.

Law is one

God is one,

plurality of divin...

Monarchy, he claimed, was preferable to the democracy that brings only ‘...

bean counters, endless rules and regulations, and multiplication of committees.

the early Christians, like the Jews of their day, were not particularly worried about how a ruler became a ruler

(whether authority was inherited or acquired in a palace coup, by conquest or in revolution)

Romans 13 is not concerned about this at all. Peter?

they were very concerned about how rulers behaved and what they did on...

History shows that there is no single political structure that Christianity is tied to as Christians have lived under and advocat...

can be undergirded with the Christian vision, and which represents a type of ‘wisdom’ that will make the most of human endeavours.

Unless their happiness is to the direct detriment of our own,

our neighbour is free

Facts don't care about your feelings.

Liberalism means liberty to love despite our differences.

Liberalism prefers generosity over conformity. Liberalism chooses to find goodness in others.

Reinhold Niebuhr famously said, ‘Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.’

campaign donations, political careerism, nepotism, factionalism, legislative gridlock or media biases, there is much to complain about. One obvious problem with democracy is that power ends up in the hands of people who desperately want it.

As a result, citizens are forced into deliberation, even ferocious debate, on these topics.

attempt to manufacture economic growth while simultaneously ensuring that the taxation system and government programmes do not create a situation where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but the total wealth of the nation is shared among its citizens.