REVIEW: Jesus and the Powers

In our harum-scarum political moment, the Via Media beckons

Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies by N.T. Wright and Michael F. Bird. Zondervan, 2024. 201 pp., $22.99

“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.” 

With this surprising promise N.T. Wright and Mike Bird open their new book on Christianity and politics. 

At the same time, they also decline to proffer “an abstract theory of statecraft and faith-craft that never quite comes in to land in real life.” Instead, channeling the moderation of their Anglican faith, they identify extremes and work inward from there. 

In chapter one, Wright and Bird draw our attention to the perpetual presence of empire in our world. Amid these “powers,” are God’s people destined to be passively pushed about, or can they be a force for kingdom good? To prove that the latter is possible, the authors walk the reader through the biblical story of God’s people in the shadow of empire: Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian, Ptolemaic and Seleucid, and finally Roman. In the process, Wright and Bird emphasize that the kingdom message of Jesus and his followers was directly relevant for the world around them; it was not spiritually removed from it. The early Christians challenged the powers without calling for revolution. 

In a remarkable turn of events, Christianity went from being persecuted to privileged, with a new legal status, thanks to Constantine. The Christian population boomed, but with power came new problems for the Church. This becomes the subject of chapter two. 

Wright and Bird maintain that the downside of church-state relations in the past should not result in the church’s retreat from politics today. Instead, the church should act as the moral voice of society, speaking truth to power and standing up to the powers: “We must do kingdom-business with the business of political power.” Against an isolationist approach to politics, the authors make a strong case for increased political involvement. Christian testimony “must not shrink back from its theo-political implications, even if it must be vigilant not to be seduced by the temptations of proximity to power.” 

Such a conviction undoubtedly stems from the authors’ Anglicanism. One can feel their impassioned dismay at more radically Protestant political positions:

We are no fans of theocracy, nor of the divine right of kings. Yet when we hear that complaint, we always have a standard answer. Yes, you want to avoid the evils of Constantine and Christendom. Instead of seeking influence in the halls of power, you want to be the angry prophet on the margins speaking truth to power. All well and good. But what happens when the power listens? What happens when the power or the people ask you to sit on a committee, contribute to an investigation, run a programme, advise on policy, or serve as a chaplain? That kind of absolute separation of Church and State is fine if you want to be a critic making snarky criticisms on the sidelines. But if you want to change the game you need skin in the game. The people who change history must make history. If you want to build for the kingdom, then you have to build something: relationships, alliances, advocacy, food banks, para-church ministries, youth clubs, foreign aid programmes. You need to be in the room where it happens.

Wright and Bird explain further in chapter three: “The Christian vocation is neither pious longing for heaven nor scheming to make Jesus king by exerting force over unwilling subjects.” In this chapter, they lay out a political theology from a close reading of several biblical texts. The paradox of politics, they explain, is that human beings both maintain order and abuse their authority, often simultaneously. In today’s increasingly post-Christian society (or, in Aaron Renn’s thesis, a “negative world”), is the role of Christ-followers to re-narrate the biblical foundations of Western Civilization while remaining cognizant of the human propensity for evil?

The sovereign God made human beings in his image, Wright and Bird retort. The imago dei denotes humanity’s vocation to share in the governing of creation for God’s glory. God put Adam and Eve in the Garden to work it and to guard it. Therefore, government is a prelapsarian institution, not “a badge of lost innocence,” as Thomas Paine contended in Common Sense. The vocation of imago dei is “reaffirmed” in Psalm 8, which begins and ends by declaring God’s sovereignty. The psalm describes the responsibility of human beings to reflect, like a mirror, God’s authority in his world.

At every step, the authors seem to intuit the reader’s questions. In particular, we were eager to see Wright and Bird identify “the powers.” Doing so, of course, threatens to jeopardize their promise not to be unnecessarily specific. Using Paul, the authors challenge an Epicurean dichotomy of the earthly and heavenly since “Anything in creation that is worshipped instead of the Creator God has the capacity to become an idol.” This means that behind those propped up as “gods” (whether Zeus or Caesar) lies the “shadowy sub-personal and demonising influence of the demons.” 

We appreciated the authors’ critique of Western rationalism in this regard, citing “the dark mood” of Nazi Germany and the “extraneous influence” of forces encountered in “deliverance ministry” as examples of the powers. Always threatened by darkness, government is not in itself evil. As Christ breaks the power of sin so that the redeemed can faithfully serve as a royal priesthood, so too does He break the powers of this world. In principle, they write, God has reconciled “the structures of governance, the tendons and ligaments of complex human society.”

After surveying the church’s origins and history of political involvement and articulating their understanding of the church’s role in relation to political power, chapter four offers needed practical suggestions. Until Christ returns, it is the role of the church “to hold authorities to account.” To do so, Christians may need to be “in the room where it happens.” So, rather than building the kingdom (something we are unable to do), what does “building for the kingdom” look like? The authors offer tangible examples.

In chapters five and six, the authors articulate a middle path “between submission and subversion.” Reading Romans 13, Wright and Bird emphatically affirm the goodness of government done right. But they also offer a roadmap for those instances when governments “revert from public service to predatory tyranny.” In chapter five one gets a sense of the degree to which Wright and Bird are attempting to be thoughtful and careful, regularly commenting that they are in “morally fraught space.” They wonder, “Would anyone claim that there is an easy answer?” The chapter is a deft overview of political theology from antiquity to the present. In the end, it seems that the authors side with Calvin, who remained opposed to tyrannicide and reluctant to revolt.

Chapter six, nevertheless, spells out situations where Christian witness might require active disobedience. We appreciated Bird’s awareness of current legislation in his own country (Australia) and his modeling of how one thinks in kingdom-minded ways in ethically fraught situations, especially when there are efforts to “redefine what it means to be a human being.” While Wright and Bird voice concerns about the far right, they do not pull punches about the far left either: Some species of political progressivism “amount to liberationist sentiments without liberalism, a postcolonial project which does not end caste systems so much as reinvent them.” 

In chapter seven Wright and Bird stake their claim for “liberal democracy” as the best for human flourishing. At the very least (and in the spirit of Churchill), it is “the least worst option.” The authors are aware that their discussion is largely Anglo/Eurocentric, acknowledging that “attempts to turn parts of the Middle East and Central Asia into liberal democracies have either proved difficult or been an abject failure.” Furthermore, the authors are realistic about their use of the Bible when it comes to proving the “right” form of government. Reasoning from biblical precepts rather than following clearly articulated divine commands, Wright and Bird argue on behalf of confident pluralism as articulated by John Inazu: “love of neighbour,” they write, should involve allowing “our neighbour to be beside us and yet be different from us.”

By the end of their concise book, the authors meet their objective in proclaiming that “in an age of ascending autocracies, in a time of fear and fragmentation, amid carnage and crises, Jesus is King, and Jesus’ kingdom remains the object of the Church’s witness and work.” And yet, in our view the book does not clearly answer a few foundational questions that, even in such a brief work, should be addressed. 

In particular, we wanted the authors to say more about the ultimate end to which government should be directed, beyond simply denoting Christians’ involvement in it. What is the purpose of Christian political witness? Is it to “bring people into the family of faith,” or to help create a just social order? It seems that they would answer affirmatively, but can both be done together? Frustrating as it is for those who want to be told that there is a “right” candidate, party, or policy, in the end the authors are pragmatic: “Sometimes it is a matter of siding with the lesser evil.” In this they capture how many feel and vote. Yet, such judgment is often in the eye of the beholder. Does voting for someone because of an affinity with policy ever threaten a Christian’s witness to the gospel?

To ask another way, is our duty twofold: to build for the kingdom wherever God has placed us, and to ensure the survival of liberal democracy as the least-worst option, since its benefits as outlined are regularly in jeopardy? As Wright and Bird write, “Democracy falters when people take democracy for granted rather than prizing and cherishing the freedoms it gives us. Democracy can atrophy with apathy.”

1 Timothy 2 speaks with noteworthy apathy about the form of government under which Christians live, as long as it secures certain ends, such as allowing Christians to “live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and dignity.” Whoever wields the sword—whether a king (the one), those in authority (the few), or all people (the many)—pray for them. The authors nod in this direction, but the passage is only mentioned once, in connection with prayer. Though critical of certain interpreters from the third century onwards, one is hard-pressed to see how Augustine strays far from 1 Timothy 2 in the City of God: “As far as this life of mortals is concerned, which is spent and ended in a few days, what does it matter under whose government a dying man lives, if they who govern do not force him to impiety and iniquity?”

This pushes back against Wright and Bird’s strong resistance to what they term an “escapist piety.” They go so far as to call “going to heaven” an “unbiblical theme.” While we too fear the abuse of Platonic and Epicurean dichotomies—and enthusiastically agree with the vision of a people and cosmos made new—we felt that the point could have been made in a more nuanced manner. 

We also felt that Wright and Bird made unnecessary sideswipes at the American Revolution and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, claiming that “the price of tea and the ambitions of landholding gentry” in the colonies did not justify war against the crown and that the First Amendment radically embodies the Enlightenment’s “strict separation of Church and State.” These contested assertions require (at a minimum) further elaboration, especially since the book seems directed, at least in part, to an American audience. Christians attempting to steer clear of utopian dreams and escapist piety could learn a thing or two from the American Revolutionaries’ “sober expectations” and “Prudence”—which, the Declaration of Independence reminds, “dictate[s] that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.”

Moreover, the idea that the First Amendment erects “a wall of separation of church and state” is at best one opinion among many. Rather than prohibiting the church from influencing government, the First Amendment prohibits the government from dictating religious belief and worship. And it does so because religion has public significance. As John Courtney Murray wrote, the First Amendment “is not a piece of eighteenth-century rationalist theory; it is far more the product of Christian history.” Americans, he wrote, learned human dignity and equality “in the school of Christian faith.”

In the end, we walked away with the impression that Wright and Bird delivered what they set out to do. They should be applauded for their awareness of current events and issues. Such awareness is exhausting but necessary. Nonetheless, what Wright and Bird offer here is, in a certain sense, timeless. While speaking of current events, they weave a compelling tapestry of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. While ardent defenders of liberal democracy, they are clear-eyed about its pitfalls. They address forthrightly abuses and extremes on both ends of the political spectrum. 

Jesus and the Powers will undoubtedly serve as a first-stop reference resource for those seeking a better understanding of how to think about political theology. It is not only saturated with scripture, history, and sources, the prose is also entertaining, attainable, and inspiring. They carefully yet boldly “speak truth to power.”

David Anthony Basham is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Ashland Theological Seminary

Joseph K. Griffith II is the William Blackstone Professor of Law & Society at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University

^{Image: Jesus Before Pontius Pilate, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna}