Here I continue my/our discussion of N. T. Wright’s book Creation, Power, and Truth: The Gospel in a World of Cultural Confusion with Chapter 2: Jesus the Lord: the gospel and the new imperialism. If you have read the chapter, feel free to comment. If not, fell free to ask a question.
The first chapter was about neo-gnosticism. I mentioned here that I thought he was stretching the term “Gnosticism” too broadly and too thinly. I feel the same way about Chapter 2, insofar as Tom uses “Gnosticism” to describe one major cause of modern and postmodern political imperialism. However, if he used the term and concept of “spiritualism,” as in “I’m spiritual but not religious,” pointing to a privatized spiritual experience divorced from politics, I would agree with him. I do agree with him (except about Gnosticism).
In this chapter Tom attacks a common Christian bifurcation between spirituality and politics. As I have argued here before, he argues that a true biblical spirituality proclaims that “Jesus is Lord” which is a political statement. “I suggest that our semi-gnostic propensity to concentrate on a spiritual message over against, or to the exclusion of, the claim of God on the entire creation has led us into a radical inability to say anything very much to, or about, contemporary political issues, not least because we are afraid….”
Clearly, Tom opposes “empires” and criticizes both the U.S. and the U.K for their histories of empire-building which he compares with the Roman Empire of old. But the main point of the chapter is that Christians, by and large, have misinterpreted the gospel in such a way that it has nothing to do with politics.
Toward the end of the chapter Tom offers a “threefold typology” of proper Christian political theology: “1 God intends the world to be ordered, and will put it in proper order at last….” “2 He doesn’t want chaos…” and “3 God’s people have a vital calling to speak the truth to them [viz., political authorities] and call them to account in anticipation of [the] final day.”
I have been criticized here for speaking of politics. I urge those critics to read this chapter and study Tom’s deep dives into the Bible where he shows that Hebrew prophets and Jesus and early Christians spoke about politics—not in the partisan (party-specific) sense but in the sense of how human life should be ordered and not ordered.
With Tom I firmly reject the misunderstanding of the gospel and of so-called “separation of church and state” that attempts to silence prophetic speech to powerful leaders.
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