N.T. Wright: What Jesus Would Say to the ‘Empire’ Today

In a year seeing over 50 countries at the polls—half of which could shift geopolitical dynamics—the timing of Jesus and the Powers’ release was no accident.

A few years ago, N. T. Wright (author of Surprised by Hope) and Michael F. Bird (Jesus Among the Gods)—who had collaborated on The New Testament in Its World—realized there was a lack of biblical guidance on how Christians should engage with politics, and they decided to do something about it.

“We both had the sense that most Christians today have not really been taught very much about a Christian view of politics,” Wright said. “Until the 18th century, there was a lot of Christian political thought, which we’ve kind of ignored the last 200–300 years—and it’s time to get back to it.”

The “gateway” to political theology, Wright believes, is the idea that, until Christ’s return, “God wants humans to be in charge.” And while all political powers have in some sense been “ordained by God” according to Scripture, he says, Christians are called to “take the lead” in holding them accountable.

“The church is designed to be the small working model of new creation, to hold up before the world a symbol—an effective sign of what God has promised to do for the world. Hence, to encourage the rest of the world to say, ‘Oh, that’s what human community ought to look like. That’s how it’s done.’”

And as the global church becomes “a community worshiping the one God and doing justice and mercy in the world,” this is a “sign to the caesars of the world that Jesus is Lord and that they are not” and a “sign to the principalities and powers that this is the way to be human.”

In an interview with CT, Wright discusses the need for more theological collaboration around political issues, the skewed eschatology behind Christian abdication from the political sphere, and how the global church should engage with the various forms of empire “let loose” in our world today.

I’d heard from a couple people at the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) conference last fall that there’s not a lot of scholars doing work in political theology right now. Would you agree with that?

Yes, let me give you an example. When the Ukraine scenario broke two years ago, I wrote to two or three leading Christian thinkers in the US and said, “Okay, guys, you work on this front more than I do. What should we be thinking about this? If we had the ear of President Volodymyr Zelensky, let alone Vladimir Putin, what should we be saying to them?” And it was quite clear from their responses that there’s a lot of caution—that this is a hugely difficult area, and we’re not quite sure how to get into this.

I think that reflects the fact that even among those who’ve written books about political theology, when a crisis happens, I’m not sure any of us have a clear roadmap for how we would address that. My point is, we’ve hardly begun to think through all these things and how we structure our politics wisely.

An awful lot of Christians have been told, in so many words, that politics is a dirty game. We leave it to the politicians and the social workers while we’re teaching people how to say their prayers and go to heaven—and never the twain shall meet. I think we’ve got to the point, now, where most Christians realize that split simply doesn’t reflect the Bible in general or Christian witness. Particularly when you start thinking about what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God “on earth as in heaven.”

At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, when Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” what does that lead us to think of Jesus having authority on earth? It looks, in the New Testament, like Jesus delegating tasks through the Holy Spirit to the church. Not that the church should be running the world, but that the church has a vital role to play in speaking truth to power—in holding up a mirror to power and in modeling what God’s new creation should look like.

In your introduction, you referenced previous works of yours and Mike’s have partly inspired this book. But I was wondering if you could speak more about its biblical or theological underpinnings?

One of the things that’s really come strongly to me over the last couple of decades has been the role of human beings within God’s good creation. The idea in Genesis 1, the creation of humans in God’s image, means that God is committing himself to working in the world through human beings.

In Western theology, we often read Genesis 1–2 as God’s setting human beings up to a moral examination, which they then fail. That gets the whole conversation off on the wrong foot, instead of around the question of how is God going to wisely rule his world through obedient, responsive human beings if they’ve messed up and if they’re worshipping idols? The answer is that God has rescued them from their idolatry so that they can run his world as his vice regents in the way that he wants.

For me, one of the key texts that jumped out to me when I was first working on this is from John 19, where Jesus says to Pontious Pilate, “You could have no authority over me unless it was given you from above.” So, Jesus acknowledges that this second-rate Roman governor has a God-given authority.

In other words, yes, rulers have a God-given authority, and God will hold them to account for what they do with it. … The early church, like the Jews, thought it was their responsibility to critique them. It’s like the prophetic witness of John the Baptist saying to Herod, “You’re out of line here,” or Jesus himself telling the rulers and authorities that when they were misstepping.

Faithful Christian engagement with politics isn’t saying to political leaders, “You don’t have God-given authority.” It’s saying, “We’re going to be your critics in how you’re using that God-given authority.” I suspect most people in most churches in the Western world—let alone anywhere else—have never even begun to conceive of it like that. But until we do, we won’t understand what the church’s responsibility should be.

How should Christians hold the government accountable and ensure those in public service use their powers responsibly? And how do you envision that happening in a pluralist society where people hold different religious views and may have different standards for justice?

When I read, say, Psalm 72—which I go back to again and again, the great Messianic psalm—some people have objected to the “royal” psalms, because “it’s all in service of empire.” But, actually, if you look at Psalm 72, it says, “Lord, give your justice to the king, so that he will look after the widows and the orphans and the strangers,” etc., and it repeats that again and again. Then, at the end, it says, “and so the earth, the whole earth shall be full of his glory.” This is how God wants to be glorified.

There is something that you could call a kind of natural theology of global ethics. Most traditions would say looking after the weak and vulnerable sounds like a good idea. And unfortunately, vested interests get involved, because if the weak and vulnerable happen to be migrants who are coming into your country, and you don’t want any more people in your country, then you say, “No, tell them to go away, go somewhere else.” But we need wise, thought-out policies on migration, because not all countries can support the thousands of people who want to come and live there.

The church needs to train people to think wisely about all those relevant issues. We shouldn’t be leaving it to the professional economists—or, at least, we need Christian professional economists. We need Christian people to look at issues of development or migration or the huge issues that are facing us globally and to advise the church wisely, so that the church can speak truthfully. Not just in sound bites, as I’m doing now, of course, but with real depth and authority on serious issues.

What would you say to Christians who are like, “Well, this world is going to hell in a handbasket anyway”—those who don’t get involved in government because they’re thinking, “Well, the church is separate—it’s a bastion away from the world”?

Right, and it’s very interesting, the transition was in the early 18th century. So much in Britain and America was almost triumphalist in the sense that “We are now taking over the world, and the gospel is going to rule”—and Handel’s Messiah, “He shall reign forever and ever,” you know—which sounds great in the 1740s. But interestingly, by the 1790s, something has turned, and Epicureanism has won—the French Revolution has happened, people are getting frightened and wondering what’s going on.

I think it does go back to the Enlightenment, where you get that split of religion and politics. The Epicureanism of the 17th and 18th centuries basically split heaven and earth miles apart. This leaves people to run earth the way they want—which usually means for their own advantage, by keeping anything religious out of the question. And that has been a disaster.

Then you get the dispensational movement, particularly in America, and other similar movements with a very negative eschatology—that the only way anything can happen is if God ditches this whole project and starts again from scratch. So, many Christians turned back to Plato to say, “Well, actually, we have souls that are going to escape from this place anyway and go somewhere else.” But as I never tire of saying to students, the word heaven in the New Testament is never used for the place of our ultimate destiny. And the word soul is never used for the beings we will be in our ultimate destiny.

People have come with the assumption that the biblical story is about how human souls can find their way up to the beatific vision in heaven. Whereas the entire biblical narrative runs the other way—it’s about how God comes to dwell with humans here. The strapline in Revelation chapter 21 isn’t that the dwelling of humans is with God—it’s that the dwelling of God is with humans.

The older I get, the more I realize Acts 2, the descent of the Spirit filling the house, is a temple scene; it goes straight back to 1 Kings 8 or Exodus 14. It’s a way of saying, “This is what God always intended to do. God, the Holy Spirit, always intended to live with and in—and be operative through—human beings. And wow, it’s actually happening.” This is a totally different way of doing theology.

The old idea of God throwing the present creation away—so why would we bother to put it right?—simply does no justice. We urgently need as a global community to think more Christianly, more biblically, about the whole scenario.

N.T. Wright is Research Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Early Christianity at St Mary’s College in the University of St Andrews and Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. His most recent book, co-written with Michael F. Bird, is Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies.