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You can find previous episodes of “The Stone Chapel Podcast” at Lanier Theological Library.
“The Stone Chapel Podcast” is part of the ChurchLeaders Podcast Network.
This episode has been edited for clarity and space.
N. T. Wright
Hello, I’m Tom Wright, and I’m a senior research fellow at Wyciffe Hall in Oxford. You may conceivably know me as N.T. Wright. My parents played this trick on me of calling me by my second name. But ordinarily I go by Tom Wright.
David Capes
Dr N. T. Wright! Tom Wright, good to see you. Welcome back to The Stone Chapel Podcasts. N. T. Wright
Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.
David Capes
Well, you do a lot of these podcasts, I know. But when you do it for us, it’s so important to us, to hear from you. Your last one with us was on the “Romans Road”, a couple of years back. And that was one of our top podcasts that year.
We’re going to be talking about your book, Jesus and the Powers, the one that you co-authored with Michael Bird who is our friend from Australia. And how was it working with Mike? No, just kidding! I’m not going to ask you that. But co-writing a book is not easy to do.
N. T. Wright
It isn’t! Michael made it very easy as with the previous thing we collaborated on, which is the big fat book called The New Testament in its World. What Michael did was to comb through my longer works and pulled out key strands and special bits. And with this, he just went through looking for anything I’d written on political theology, over the years, and then brought it into a coherent frame. And then we agreed on some new bits that I would write and some new bits that he would write. Then we would send them to each other, make comments and edit together.
I tease Mike that my main task is to go through and take out the Australian jokes. But actually, he is so good. And the last three chapters in this book, which were his originally, I was delighted with. Because he’s read a lot of stuff in terms of contemporary political thought and Christian political thought, which I hadn’t read except for one or two bits. It’s been a great journey actually. And the long chapter that I wrote in this book, which is on “the powers” in Colossians and John, I found that especially fascinating.
If somebody reads it, they’ll see, I wrote it just after the coronation of King Charles. The coronation of King Charles, as millions of people around the world watched, began with our Hindu Prime Minister in Westminster Abbey, with the words in letters of gold behind him, saying “the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our God”. Reading Colossians 1:15 following and I sat there thinking there are so many ironies going on, on my television screen right now. That, for me is very helpful, because I think people have had an over simplistic view that either you believe that the church should just get out of politics entirely, or you believe that we should be in there trying to make the kingdom of God happen. And for many people, it’s either-or. And actually life is much more complicated, multi- layered and interesting than that.
David Capes
We all want simple handles, don’t we?
N. T. Wright
We do. And you can have some of those. Jesus is Lord, therefore, Caesar isn’t. But hang on, in a democracy Caesar is all of us. So now what can we do? And so, once one complexifies it, you realize, yeah, okay. You can have the simple slogans. But then you say, now in the real world, dot, dot, dot, and then it comes out a bit differently.
David Capes
The subtitle of the book is Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies. It’s published by Zondervan, Reflective Publishers. When I saw the book, I thought immediately about Paul and “the powers” as the beginning place, and I thought about spiritual powers. We don’t wrestle against flesh and blood, but we wrestle against spiritual powers and principalities, etc, etc. And that’s true. We don’t want to deny that and yet, we are in this world. And we want the kingdom of God to fill this world. To be done on earth as it is in heaven. It does get very complicated, doesn’t it? And how do you put it all together?
N. T. Wright
Yeah, it goes on being difficult because the language of “the powers”, both in the first century and now is inevitably fuzzy. I think it’s bound to be so because I think when Paul is going through and talking about powers and authorities and thrones and dominions, I don’t think he has a specific dictionary definition of each of those, which he would carefully differentiate from the next door one. I mean, you will notice whenever he does one of these lists, whether it’s in Colossians 1 or at the end of Romans 8 or wherever, it comes out slightly differently. And there are different powers and authorities.
And I think Paul is aware that when you’re facing the stuff that he faced in the world, whether it’s looking at a new temple going up to Caesar in Ephesus or Corinth. Or whether it’s just being aware of what we would call the social forces or cultural forces is that there are shadowy things happening, which are more than the sum total of the human intentions involved at the time. And yeah, this is a point that my late friend Walter Wink used to make. The guy who thinks he runs General Motors, actually, General Motors is running him. And if he gets out of the way, it’ll carry on.
People in the first century were perhaps more aware than we are post enlightenment, of the existence of shadowy forces, compelling us to do things. We talk about economic forces or political forces. And for us, it’s almost a dead metaphor. But actually when you run up against stuff, then it stops being a dead metaphor and you discover there’s something which logically you ought to be able to do, but which you can’t do. And you can’t quite see why not. And you talk to people about it. And yeah, we should be able to make that happen. But then something is in the way.
David Capes
What is that something that’s in the way?
N. T. Wright
Well, that’s the question. Our problem has been that we’ve forced this either-or choice. That it’s either human authorities, or what we might call spiritual or non-human authorities. And in the New Testament world, I think those two overlap, and interlock. Caesar is on his throne, and all his many minions around in the Roman world, they are ordinary human beings. You can talk to them, you can engage them, you can push back at them, if you’re so minded. At the same time, they are wielding a power which is more than their own power. Sometimes they will do that quite knowingly.
There is a politician in another country right now who is claiming that he has the power of God within him before the election, which he’s fighting right now, as we’re doing this recording. And in the ancient Roman world, most of the people like consuls in Rome, they were also priests in one of the local cults. And so, they will be trying to channel what they would see as their religious possibilities. And now Saint Paul would say, actually, those great gods, Zeus and the rest, they don’t exist. But there are these nasty little things called daimonia. Demons, as we might say. Again, our trouble is with the word demons.
David Capes
We don’t have the right language.
N. T. Wright
Well exactly, exactly. So a daimonion, or a daimon, there’s a slippery meaning there because Socrates thought he had a daimon, which was like a sort of super conscience. It was a good thing, telling him what to do and what not to do. But then it slides all the way into a nasty, corrupt little creatures who will get under your skin and force you to do things you didn’t want to do. There’s that sense that we are in a world of power, of different sorts of powers. That we can’t quite name accurately, pin down and deal with. But we, in believing that Jesus is Lord, believing that on the cross, He has won the victory over all powers.
And therefore, even if we can’t understand them, and name them all, we can say, nevertheless, when we’re in these situations where bad things are happening, or whatever, we can be assured that Jesus is Lord. And then we can go to work to say, when the emperor comes to us and says, can you help me run this country, which has happened in history. This is tricky. But yes, we believe that God does want wise humans to be in charge of his world. And we will hold you to account for that wisdom. So that’s the way of it as far as I can see,
David Capes
As I think about American politics, in particular, I often turn to Mike Bird. Mike Bird seems to be reading up more than I do. When I want to know what’s going on in my country, I talk to my Australian friend. He seems to have his finger on the pulse. Isn’t part of the problem, that we have driven a wedge between secular and sacred?
N. T. Wright
Of course. And that’s written into your constitution, right. But I think that’s part of the problem. It is part of the problem, because actually it doesn’t work. It never did work. But particularly in the last 50 years, it doesn’t work. Which is why now there are people up and down your country, who are quite happily writing about and trying to get into the question of the overlap. How you do the life of prayer and worship and so on, as well as the life of public thought.
But a lot of it goes back to the Enlightenment’s Epicureanism. Thomas Jefferson said, “I am an Epicurean” in which the gods are removed from the world and don’t have anything to do with us. And we didn’t have anything to do with them. Now, if you’re a deist, which is a softer version of the same thing. You can go and visit God on a Sunday afternoon if you want, like visiting an elderly relative in a care home. But you don’t expect to be told what to do in public policy the next day.
However, if you believe in the kingdom of God, if you believe that there is one God who made one world and through Jesus, God is reclaiming his sovereignty over that world, then you’ve got a whole different set of questions. The Enlightenment put those questions on hold, which allowed all sorts of countries, not least my own Britain to say, okay, we will now go and colonize the world and make a lot of money out of that actually. Because the religious bit is on the side. Some say we may give you the Bible, while we’re at it. I’ve seen in African countries, that slogan, “when the missionaries arrived here, they had the Bible, and we had the land. How come they’ve now got the land and we’ve got the Bible?” And I understand that.
David Capes
Not quite an even exchange from their point of view, probably.
N. T. Wright
Well, exactly, exactly. But the Enlightenment settlement, whether it’s in America, or France, or in Britain, because there we have an established church. Many, many people still think in terms of religion and politics can’t mix. That has to be challenged in the name of a whole biblical theology, rooted in the Old Testament coming through the enhancements of Jesus about the Kingdom of God.
And we see that working out in the book of Acts. It isn’t a case of the apostles going out into the world and simply saying, we’re in charge now, because they’re not. But they’re holding the world to account, not least by establishing communities, which show that there is a different way to be human. Which makes people sit up and say, I didn’t know you could do it like that. And sometimes the authorities are delighted at that. And sometimes they’re horrified. Ever since the book of Acts, we’ve been negotiating that, but we’ve got to negotiate it and not assume that our 18th century settlement will do the job for us.
David Capes
One of the things we see today is that people will withdraw from political life, because they don’t want to vote for either candidate. They don’t want to support either person or side of an issue. But we’ve got to get in there. We’ve got to work hard. We’ve got to change the world. Overthrow, in a sense. The kingdom of God, it seems to me, is not in either position.
N. T. Wright
Yeah, I would agree with that. And I understand that dilemma, that feeling. But I still think that in America, there are lots of people who think that by getting this right, we will have almost a Messiah figure who will come and deliver us and do everything that we want somebody to do. In Britain, we don’t think like that, except that Tony Blair presented as a sort of Messiah figure. Because we all got so fed up with Margaret Thatcher and then John Major. Here’s a new fresh face.
When Barack Obama became president, one of our English commentators said he’s basically Tony Blair with brains. But Blair, did have that sort of Messianic feel, which then he came a huge cropper on, of course, with the Iraq War. He’s never been forgiven for that. But normally, in Britain, we are not choosing the very best of the very best. We’re choosing the least worst.
David Capes
You already know that going in.
