Jesus and the Powers

 

N.T. Wright, a retired Bishop of the Church of England, is an eminent and well-known scripture scholar and theologian. In this latest book, Jesus and the Poers: Christian Political Wirness in a Age of Totalitarian Terror and and Dysfunctional Democracies (2024), he and his co-author, Australian theologian Michael Bird, seek to address in straightforward, non-technical language the perennial question of the Christian commitment to politics and government, a question that has acquired increased salience in a post-Christendom world, in which the once widely acclaimed alternative of liberal democracy has become increasingly problematic. Indeed, for these authors, this presetn decade may "be the most precarious and perilous time in human history since the 1930s."

The authors stress something that many modern progressives insouciantly seem to be increasingly eager to forget, namely that both the Latin West and the Greek East were and have continued to be "shaped by a Christian vision of God's love for the world and the place of Christian virtues in societies where few restraints on evil and exploitation existed." This is an inescapable historical fact, but it is also much more than that. It is of the very nature of Jesus' kingdom, which, while completely unlike the kingdoms of this world, "is still for this world, for the benefit and blessing of this world, for the redemption and rescue of this world."

The theological claim is that "the Creator intends his world to be run through obedient human beings." God, the authors insist, "intends that humans should share in running his world, and should be held accountable." Thus, "because we believe that Jesus is King and his kingly power is operative among us," Christians "cannot retreat to the attic of spiritual affairs, not when there is a gospel to proclaim and ahurting world crying out for healing and hope."

In this post-Christendom context, the author's preference is clearly for a form of liberal democracy, a form of political arrangement which seems to have lost a lot of its former luster and appears increasingly threatened. The authors aregue that "in a world with a human propensity for evil, greed and injustice, liberal democracy stands as the least worst option for human governance." It is, they stress, "neither a necessary not a sufficient conditon for a just society, but it can be an enabling condition for a just society."

In a world in which no political axiom can any longer be taken for granted, the authors offer a valuable religious argument for invigorating liberal democracy. This is especially timely when the ideas that have underpinned liberal democracies find themselves challenged not just by populist authoritarianism but by explicitly religious versions such as messianic imperialism (e.g, Russia) and a revived Catholic integralism.