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Home > Resources > Recommended Reading > N.T. Wright
N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Fortress Press, 1996.
When thinking through the relationship between Church and State, most modern-day Christians in the West compute with an outmoded operating system. We are inheritors of a software package which downloads the paradigm of American disestablishment onto our conceptual hard drive. Our default worldview says Church and State are two separate realms with two separate jurisdictions and "never the twain shall meet." The programming language says that the Church should concern herself with things private, interior, spiritual and heavenly. The State should concern itself with things public, external, material and earthly. Ever since Thomas Jefferson and the Danbury Baptist Association shook hands on this code of conduct, the politicos and the pious have been instructed to keep the peace by keeping to their separate domains. It’s not surprising that this software has sold so well. After all, there were all sorts of problems configuring the cause of Christ with the cause of Constantine, Charlemagne, King Henry VIII, and Ferdinand and Isabella. In the name of the One whose kingdom was supposedly not of this world there was all sorts of hell on earth. The various plans for expanding Christendom resulted in bloody crusades, geo-political upheaval and death by orthodoxy. Given the religious violence, Enlightened thinkers installed a firewall to stop the virus. Because of this history, church-state theory is usually conceived of as one of two competing technologies. The medieval approach gives us the Church as a powerful conquistador. The modern approach gives us the Church as a harmless country club. In terms of the fight or flight syndrome, we have either a Christendom employing the weapons of Caesar or a Christianity in safe distance from the public square. It is here that we should bring in the exegetical techies and their biblical upgrade. N.T. Wright is one such voice who is attempting to patch up the glitches in the system and offer another approach. Wright is a former professor at Oxford and presently the Bishop of Durham. A prolific writer, he is best known for his ambitious six-volume project on the theology of the New Testament. Wright continually asks, what happens if we re-source our thinking on the Church’s identity and mission by returning to the witness of the New Testament? What results are gained? In other words, what does the Church’s present calling look like in the light of her former life in imperial Rome with the rise of emperor worship, the gospel of the pax Romana and the ancient order of social relationships. Wright argues that the Christian gospel, by its very nature, is already a political message. The Church, by its very nature, is already a body politic. Baptism, by its very definition, is an act of political insurrection. Eschatology is, by its very definition, an assertion of the aim of politics as the just ordering of society. Heavenly-mindedness is not an escape from the earth, but a colonizing of the earth with the presence of Christ’s kingdom. The confession of Christ as kurios is political claim that rivals the confession of Caesar as Lord. The crucifixion of Jesus is a political stripping of the powers that be (Colossians 2:15). The resurrection of Jesus is a declaration that He has in fact been enthroned to rule (Romans 1:4). The subsequent birth of the Jesus movement is a revolution in the structures of power and the emergence of a new way of being human marked out by faith in Jesus, sacrificial love and redemptive justice. When the New Testament is read this way, it becomes clear that the gospel cannot be reduced to a timeless, apolitical, ahistorical message about God saving souls. The good news declaration, "our God reigns," is the banner of a revolution — personal and public, spiritual and political, "on earth, as it is in heaven." -- TLT |
