81 BOOK REVIEW Wright, N.T. and Michael F. Bird. Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Reflective, 2024, 185 pages. $22.99 Paperback. N.T. Wright is one of the most prolific scholars of the New Testament and popular authors of the last three decades. He has become renowned for emphasizing that when Jesus said to Pilate that His Kingdom was not from this world (John 18:36), He still meant that it was for this world. God’s Kingdom arrived in the person and work of Jesus Christ (what theologians refer to as “inaugurated eschatology”) (19, 63). With His victorious death, resurrection, and ascension, He now calls and equips His Spirit-renewed image-bearers to “build for” the Kingdom (9)—looking toward the new earth God Himself will bring in its fullness at the end of history. This is the vision and vocation of the Church in this age while we wait: “to bring God’s kingship over every facet of human life” (8) and prepare the created order for her returning King. As co-authors, Wright and Bird have distilled for a more popular audience thoughts developed in other expanded writings, urging the Church against the pitfall of twin extremes: a) a theocratic triumphalism that is too locked-in-arms with the government and b) an anti-social retreat from participating in political concern. Since government is an institution established by God for the purposes of common order (Romans 13:1-5), it possesses a “theological” significance (94, 110-12). A primary political task of the Church as ambassadors of Christ’s Kingdom is to speak truth to power, insisting on the State’s accountability before God’s natural moral law. The Church must also discern when it must act with “civil” or even “uncivil disobedience” toward government that has legitimate—but not absolute—power. Wright and Bird express cautionary support of active subversion or revolutionary violence, but they acknowledge that there are extreme situations when Christians can justify these as required by a love for the “public good and to uphold civil rights” for others (119).
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