If you\u2019re an American of a certain age raised in a charismatic\/pentecostal tradition, you will remember the Power Team: A half-dozen or so bulked up men who would hold assemblies at churches and schools, displaying feats of strength and attributing them to God.<\/p>\n
I think the reasoning went something like this: If these guys can rip a phone book in half or punch through a stack of boards with their bare hands, then God can surely give you the strength to do through force what is necessary in or around your life, too.<\/p>\n
Jesus and the Powers by N.T. Wright and Michael F. Bird has nothing to do with the Power Team, yet oddly I find a connection.<\/p>\n
More about that, in a bit.<\/p>\n
In this book Wright and Bird tackle the age-old struggle concerning the relationship between Christians and Political empire. That\u2019s a simplistic summary, but I think it\u2019s a good kicking off point. We Christians in America need badly to understand and address this relationship, because we happen to live in a season where the struggle is real, and present.<\/p>\n
But how do we deal with this? Should Christians seek to control politics, or influence it, or serve it, or ignore it? Everyone from Christian Nationalists to 7 Mountain Dominionists to Anabaptist separatists to Catholic social thinkers (and many more) seem to have an answer.<\/p>\n
In other words what is the best way to approach our \u201cChristian political witness in an age of totalitarian terror and dysfunctional democracies\u201d? (The book\u2019s subtitle)<\/p>\n
The answer to this question, and a Biblical rationale behind the answer, is essential to pursue.<\/p>\n
Wright and Bird engage the question by pointing out historical connections between church and empire and both some positive and negative results of that connection. They also exegete Biblical texts about the powers, briefly unpack a theology of the Kingdom of God, and extoll the virtue of liberal democracy and confident pluralism.<\/p>\n
And the refrain they keep returning to throughout the book is that we are called not to build the Kingdom but to build for the Kingdom. Building for the Kingdom is the activity of Christians who are partnering with God\u2019s redemptive work in the world and who are preparing people for the consummation of the Kingdom. By contrast, God is the only one who can rightfully build His Kingdom, and as George Eldon Ladd and John Bright suggest, that Kingdom is already inaugurated but not yet consumated, and will not be until Jesus comes back.<\/p>\n
Thinking we are building God\u2019s Kingdom by our own actions, or worse yet are in charge of forcing Kingdom rule as representatives of Christ, has historically led to disastrous outcomes.<\/p>\n
This is a long quote, but I think it gets at the point of what can happen when we mix up the church with the Kingdom of God and believe we are responsible for building it:<\/p>\n
\u201cChristendom did not make the world the kingdom of heaven. Often it was the opposite: it manufactured a merciless hell for many on the margins. Bishops and princes got rich and fat off the suffering of others. This is the tension we must wrestle with in church history and in the story of Western civilization. Christendom, for all the cultivation of Christian virtues, for all the claim of the Spirit\u2019s effervescent presence, for all the advances in human liberties from the Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights, was still tainted with the human capacity for evil. It is indubitably true that Christian civilization was often neither Christian nor civil. At times, it seemed as if the kingdom of heaven was still very much in heaven and not on earth.\u201d (31)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Those who want to build the kingdom by winning elections and culture wars are at the very least on a slippery slope to the kind of empire building and human controlled theocracy that has historically done significant harm to the cause of Christ.<\/p>\n
But it seems that many Christians, in the United States at least, aren\u2019t getting that message. Here there is often a sense that the more strength, the more victory. \u201cMight Makes Right\u201d may not have been the message that the Power Team was trying to communicate in the 90\u2019s, but in some sectors of US Christianity if you can \u201cwin the argument\/pass the law\/elect the leader\/force your perspective\u201d then clearly God is on your side and He is against those you think are suspect and will help you tear apart their arguments like overly thick phone book.<\/p>\n
But this misses something important about the way of the cross, victory through suffering, the power of the persecuted church, Jesus model of servanthood, and his admonition that those who lead don\u2019t \u201clord it over\u201d but \u201ccome under\u201d.<\/p>\n
Maybe we would do well to remember that \u201cGod\u2019s power is made perfect in weakness\u201d (2 Corinthians 12:9). Maybe we would do well to remember that we don\u2019t build the Kingdom but we live it out as we influence others, through servanthood, to invite God\u2019s rule and reign in their lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you\u2019re an American of a certain age raised in a charismatic\/pentecostal tradition, you will remember the Power Team: A half-dozen or so bulked up men who would hold assemblies at churches and schools, displaying feats of strength and attributing them to God. I think the reasoning went something like this: If these guys can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":169,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2489,3210],"class_list":["post-37932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dlgp02","tag-wright","cohort-dlgp02"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/169"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37932"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37933,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37932\/revisions\/37933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}