Jesus and postmodern political life

What does Jesus have to do with politics, whether at the local or the global level? How do Christians live and witness in a pluralistic and fractured multi-cultural society?

This month at the theology reading group we are discussing
Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in An Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies by Tom Wright and Michael F. Bird

The relationship between Christianity and politics is a complex issue with theological, historical, cultural, and social dimensions. I appreciate that Wright and Bird do not gloss over the complexity of the issue and yet write in an accessible, balanced, and winsome manner. I found the book easy to read and enjoyable. Overall, I found it encouraging and challenging.

On the other hand, I should point out that after I wrote most of this post I read a critical but appreciative review of the book by John Nugent at Englewood Review. He considers that Wright and Bird are too uncritical about Christendom, and that they view things too much through the lens of the creation mandate (Genesis 1:26).

The section, Building for the Kingdom (p.83ff) is inspiring. God builds God's Kingdom. But he invites us to participate in this work.  "we do well to distinguish between the final manifestation of the kingdom and the present anticipations of it." In other words, it is now but not yet.  Christians are to build for the Kingdom. This includes engagement at all levels of society, motivating small and large acts. Wright draws on 1 Corinthians 15:58

So, my dear family, be firmly fixed, unshakeable, always full to overflowing with the Lord's work. In the Lord, as you know, the work your doing will not be worthless."

He explains the significance of this in the following inspiring passage:

what we do matters because it carries over into the final new creation....

We are - strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself - accomplishing something which will become, in due course, part of God's new world.

If that is true, then, every act of love, gratitude and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely disabled child to read or to walk... all spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the Gospel... - all of this will finds its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make.

 The work we do in the present to build for the kingdom gains its full significance from the eventual consummation of the kingdom in the time appointed by God. Applied to the mission of the Church, this means that we must erect in the present the signs of that kingdom, providing a preview of what everything will look like when God is ‘all in all’, when his kingdom has come and his will is done ‘on earth as in heaven’. When the people of the new creation behold its wonder and beauty, it should strike them with an acute sense of déjà vu, as if to remind them of a prayer they once heard prayed, an act of mercy they saw performed, a song that they had once sung that now echoes all around them, a sermon about Jesus that they now see spring to life, a cry for justice that is now answered, and a love that was even better than what they were told. We build for the kingdom, because what we do for the King carries forward into his royal realm.

Consistent, with the above passage, Wright and Bird have a broad view of what Christian witness is. It is not just words but also actions.

What about worldly governments, good and bad? The consider Romans 13:1-7 and 1 Peter 2:13-17. Rulers have been delegated by God to administer justice and so they are accountable to God. Just because a ruler's authority has been given to them by God does not give them carte blanche to do as they please or an obligation to their Christian subjects to blindly affirm and obey them. As rulers are accountable to God it is appropriate and responsible for Christians to remind them of this, particularly when they are agents of injustice. Furthermore, there is room for civil disobedience and in exceptional cases perhaps even violent resistance. (page 42-3)

The sacred versus secular divide is a false dichotomy, including in politics, where it plays out in church-state relations. This dichotomy may express itself in two extremes: theocracy (where the state enforces the orthodoxy of one religious community, as in Oliver Cromwell or in Iran) and autocrative secularism where the state is used to eliminate any public expression of religion (e.g., in the former Soviet Union and China).

Christianity is not primarily about "going to heaven" but "heaven coming to earth" (with now but not yet caveats).

(pages 61, 65, 66)

Another false dichotomy to avoid is the Kingdom of God versus the Cross of Christ. In extreme this puts social justice in opposition to evangelism, and the Gospels in tension with the Pauline Epistles. Wright discusses how when he was Bishop of Durham he oversaw churches that had a sole emphasis on one or the other.

(page 78ff)

“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. Advancing the kingdom means promoting the gospel from Jesus and about Jesus. Kingdom-work is continuing to do the very same things that Jesus himself did among individuals in need, challenging self-assured religious types, offering mercy to the downtrodden and forgotten, warning of judgement, exhorting faith in God’s generous forgiveness, and speaking words of truth in the halls of political power.”

Against Christian Nationalism (p.129ff)

“Christian nationalism is impoverished as it seeks a kingdom without a cross. It pursues a victory without mercy. It acclaims God’s love of power rather than the power of God’s love. We must remember that Jesus refused those who wanted to ‘make him king’ by force just as much as he refused to become king by calling upon ‘twelve legions of angels’. Jesus needs no army, arms or armoured cavalry to bring about the kingdom of God. As such, we should resist Christian nationalism as giving a Christian facade to nakedly political, ethnocentric and impious ventures.”

Against Civic Totalism (p.136 ff)

Under the guise of being "progressive" a state seeks "to regulate the individual's beliefs, convictions, conscience and religion". This has a strong "culture war" dimension and I feel that sometimes this threat is overblown by some politically "conservative" Christians.

A strong case is made for liberal democracy as the best form of governance, albeit the best among bad options.

“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.”

Eight benefits of liberal democracy are given. One is "Economic opportunity and equality."  There is substantial evidence for this, as argued in the best book that I read in 2019.

Following John Inazu, the authors advocate for "confident pluralism".

“Confident pluralism has a very simple premise, namely, that people have the right to be different, to think differently, to live differently, to worship differently, without fear of reprisal. Confident pluralism operates with the idea that politics has instrumental rather than ultimate value. In other words, politics is a means, not an end. No state, no political party, no leader is God-like, or can demand blind devotion. Any attempt by political actors to create social homogeneity by compelling conformity, by bullying minorities or by punishing dissent, whether in religion or in policy, is anti-liberal and undemocratic. "

What is missing from the book?

Any discussion of the problem of smartphones and social media. Today, they completely shape popular political debate, making it superficial, divisive, and polarising. There are several important dimensions to this. Christians are addicted to their phones and this undermines discipleship, contemplative practices, and incarnational ministry. Tech companies are now "powers" for evil that need to be grappled with.

There is a good emphasis on the multi-cultural nature of the church. In this context, it should be acknowledged that the global church is now centred outside the West. In the West the largest and fastest growing church are not white but immigrants. I would like to hear their voice on these topics. My limited experience is that many of these voices are less sympathetic to liberal democracy.

One book from an African perspective is The Church and Politics by Bernard Boyo.

John Nugent points out the book also lacks any engagement with alternative visions of political theology, such as due to Karl Barth, Stanley Hauerwas, or John Yoder, who are more wary of the church engaging with worldly powers. Admittedly, they might have made a longer book. In fairness, page 34 does mention Hauerwas's critique of Christendom.

The Undeceptions podcast has a good episode where John Dickson interviews Tom Wright about the book.

The Doge Leonardo Donà Worshiping the Virgin and Child. by Marco Vecellio (1545–1611) The Doge's Palace in Venice

For me this captures the ambiguity of Christendom. Who is worshiping who? 

N.T. Wright on the coronavirus

Time magazine published a nice article by N.T. Wright,
Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus. It's Not Supposed To.

Some of his main points are expanded upon in this video interview.

Videos on Genesis and Science

Today we watched and discussed several excellent videos that deal with the issue of how science is related to Genesis.

Science and Genesis, featuring John Polkinghorne, Alister McGrath, N.T. Wright, and others

Enuma Elish. This Babylonian creation myth contrasts with the Genesis text.

Test of Faith. The videos are not online. You have to buy them. But snippets are available on Youtube

We also discussed "The World as Creation," chapter 3 in Gods that Fail by Vinoth Ramachandra.

Do I believe in the soul?

In a scientific age, the question of the existence and definition of "a soul" seems to be one that perplexes and confuses Christians. Earlier I posted a review I wrote of a disappointing book on the subject.

It seems to me that from a Biblical perspective the key concept is that of a whole person. When the Bible talks about "heart, mind and soul" it is not defining the separate parts of a person but rather trying to capture the concept of a whole person. Note that the "heart" it is discussing is not the bodily organ but the desires, intentions, and aspirations of a person. Souls cannot be detached from bodies; it is bodies that will be resurrected and exist eternally.

“We have been fooled, not for the first time, by a view of death, and life beyond, in which the really important thing is the ‘soul’ — something which, to many people’s surprise, hardly features at all in the New Testament.
“We have allowed our view of the saving of souls to loom so large that we have failed to realise that the Bible is much more concerned about bodies."

N.T. Wright, For all the Saints, Remembering the Christian Departed, 2003
[a large extract can be read here].

In the tradition of bad journalism, prior to publication of this book, The Times ran a misleading headline, Durham's new Bishop abolishes Heaven and the soul.


This issue is also explored in great detail in Nancey Murphy's book Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies. Based on hearing a lecture she gave on this subject, I have some sympathy to her views, and especially that she emphasizes the relevance of the concept of emergence, and the limitations of reductionism. However, at times I also find she over-uses technical jargon in a way that is not particularly illuminating or convincing.

N.T. Wright on the Atonement

This morning my son and I are discussing the chapter on Salvation in Alister McGrath's Theology: The Basics. A key issue is the nature of the atonement and the question of penal substitution. This led me to read an interesting (but rather long) article The Cross and its Caricatures by N.T. Wright which addresses some controversies in the U.K. in 2007. Below I have extracted a few paragraphs that I found helpful and challenging and are independent of the context in which the article was written.

I am one of those who think it good that the church has never formally defined 'the atonement', partly because I firmly believe that when Jesus himself wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn't give them a theory, he gave them a meal. Of course, the earliest exponent of that meal (Paul, in 1 Corinthians) insists that it matters quite a lot that you understand what you are about as you come to share in it; ....

Robert Jenson's .... main point is that standard theories of atonement (of how, in other words, Jesus' death effected our reconciliation with God) have located the cross within conceptualities and narratives other than the biblical one, to which the gospel writers and Paul all point as the proper matrix for understanding the event ('Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures'). Anselm cut the cross loose from its scriptural moorings and placed it within a feudal system of honour and shame; Abelard, within a story of a divine teaching programme; the Greek Fathers, within the world of mythical satanic powers. None of these is without biblical resonance, but equally none grapples with the actual story the biblical writers tell, and the way in which the gospel writers in particular present the meaning of Jesus' death primarily through a narrative, a narrative which offers itself not just as an echo of bits and pieces of the ancient scriptures of Israel but as the continuation of that story and the bringing of it to its climax.

..... The biblical doctrine of God's wrath is rooted in the doctrine of God as the good, wise and loving creator, who hates - yes, hates, and hates implacably - anything that spoils, defaces, distorts or damages his beautiful creation, and in particular anything that does that to his image-bearing creatures. If God does not hate racial prejudice, he is neither good nor loving. If God is not wrathful at child abuse, he is neither good nor loving. If God is not utterly determined to root out from his creation, in an act of proper wrath and judgment, the arrogance that allows people to exploit, bomb, bully and enslave one another, he is neither loving, nor good, nor wise.....

Miroslav Volf. In his magisterial Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994), he demonstrates, with sharp examples from his native Balkans, that it simply won't do, when faced with radical evil, to say, 'Oh well, don't worry, I will love you and forgive you anyway.' That .... is not forgiveness; it is belittling the evil that has been done. Genuine forgiveness must first 'exclude', argues Volf, before it can 'embrace'; it must name and shame the evil, and find an appropriate way of dealing with it, before reconciliation can happen. Otherwise we are just papering over the cracks. As I said early on, if God does not hate the wickedness that happens in his beautiful world, he is neither a good nor a just God, and chaos is come again.   ......the problem which Anselm already identified: you have not yet considered how serious sin is. It isn't that God happens to have a petulant thing about petty rules. He is the wise and loving creator who cannot abide his creation being despoiled. On the cross he drew the full force not only of that despoiling, but of his own proper, judicial, punitive rejection of it, on to himself. That is what the New Testament says. That is what Jesus himself, I have argued elsewhere, believed what was going on. That is what the classic Anglican formularies and liturgy say.....

Sadly, the debate I have reviewed .... shows every sign of the postmodern malaise of a failure to think, to read texts, to do business with what people actually write and say rather than (as is so much easier!) with the political labelling and dismissal of people on the basis of either flimsy evidence or 'guilt by association'. We live in difficult times and it would be good to find evidence of people on all sides of all questions taking the attitude of the Beroeans in Acts 17, who 'searched the scriptures daily to see if these things were so', instead of 'knowing' in advance what scripture is going to say, ought to say, could not possibly say, or must really have said (if only the authors hadn't made it so obscure!).