Jesus and the Powers

Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies

De: N. T. Wright, Michael F. Bird

Narrado por: James Langton

Duración: 7 h y 9 m

Resumen del Editor

An urgent call for Christians everywhere to explore the nature of the kingdom amid the political upheaval of our day.

Should Christians be politically withdrawn, avoiding participation in politics to maintain their prophetic voice and to keep from being used as political pawns? Or should Christians be actively involved, seeking to utilize political systems to control the levers of power?

In Jesus and the Powers, N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird call Christians everywhere to discern the nature of Christian witness in fractured political environments. In an age of ascending autocracies, in a time of fear and fragmentation, amid carnage and crises, Jesus is king, and Jesus’s kingdom remains the object of the church's witness and work.

Part political theology, part biblical overview, and part church history, this book argues that building for Jesus's kingdom requires confronting empire in all its forms. This approach should orient Christians toward a form of political engagement that contributes to free democratic societies and vigorously opposes political schemes based on autocracy and nationalism. Throughout, Wright and Bird reflect on the relevance of this kingdom-oriented approach to current events, including the Russian-Ukraine conflict, the China-Taiwan tension, political turmoil in the USA, UK, and Australia, and the problem of Christian nationalism.

©2024 N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird (P)2024 Zondervan

Excellent biblically sound treatise on Christianity and politics

Excellent biblically sound treatise on Christianity and politics and how to treat where a Christian can or should be a part of the political word without doing harm and without apathy

Excellent handling of Christian Political Engagement

How do we live as exiles in a fallen world? NT Wright provides a truly biblically soaked answer!

Sets out issues clearly but weak in solution

As is typical of N. T. Wright's work, this book has a helpful discussion of Biblical teaching concerning the kingdom of God and Jesus as the one with "all authority in heaven and on earth."

However, also typical of Wright's work, in my opinion, the application of the Bible to social issues Is not as helpful. In this book the advocacy for a "liberal democracy" as the best form of government might be all right in a society which, overall, a Biblical view of virtue and reality is assumed by the vast majority. To whatever degree that has been so, it no longer is. Wright himself has pointed out elsewhere that, especially since the Enlightenment, such a view of reality no longer prevails.

Wright and Bird say, "We are contending that an ideal state has its freedoms and obligations tethered to something transcendent yet translatable" (p. 156 Kindle ed.). Charles Taylor has set forth powerfully the case that we now live in a "secularized" world. The reality of transcendence has effectively been lost in this secular age.

That moral and ethical framework grounded in transcendence has all but disappeared in the way government and politics work. In the U. S., at least, there is no reasonable expectation that we will soon return to a time when differences are allowed to co-exist peacefully — not in a society in which acceptance and approval are virtually synonymous.