Book Review, by Dominic Kirkham
Tom Wright and Michael Bird, Jesus and the Powers (SPCK, 2024).
Our world is ‘dangerously combustible, due to financial crises, pandemics, increasing injustices and inequalities, democratic chaos, geopolitical upheaval, wars and rumours of more wars to come.’ So begins this book by two distinguished New Testament scholars, Tom Wright and Michael Bird (W&B). The talk now is all about the end of Western civilisation, or at best, how to save what’s left of it. W&B are plunging into this debate to establish what political witness the church can contribute that will enable a positive engagement.
The book is wide-ranging, well-informed and up to date. But I must confess I found it difficult to get to grips with. Not just because of the scale of the issues, but also because of their complexity. The authors imply as much in their postscript on Gaza, of which they say, ‘It is almost impossible to say anything about this subject without inflaming someone somewhere’ (p. xi). If this is true of one very specific regional event, how much more true is it of the last two thousand years of European history?
It seems to me that a significant element of the cultural controversy is the increasingly incendiary use of words: racist, fascist, terrorist, genocidal….Invective is hurled back and forth as an emotive attack rather than promoting understanding and dialogue. Words are used as cyphers referring to vague hinterlands of contention. At the outset of this work, the authors present their thesis that ‘Jesus is King, and Jesus’ kingdom remains the object of the Church’s witness and work’ (p. vii). But what do these words mean?
Take ‘king’, no doubt we have a pretty clear idea of what this word means, but is it really appropriate for a man whose career begins (in Luke’s Gospel) with the announcement that the mighty will be cast from their thrones and the humble exalted; who denounced those who seek privilege to lord it over others (Luke 14. 7-11), and who defined himself as one who stands in our midst as a servant: the ascription of Pilate was the attribution of a pagan! Clearly words like ‘king’ or ‘kingdom’ are being used in a very unconventional way.
Of this matrix, the distinguished exegete J.D. Crossan, following Josephus, notes that the ministry of Jesus relates ‘to the invention of a non-violent resistance against his homeland’s Romanisation’. Though this way of life accepted the possibility of martyrdom, its novelty and focus lay in the empathetic compassion of communities of support. This kind of humanitarian era has been inspiringly described as a new kind of ‘kindom’. In all of this, we begin to see what was so radical, even revolutionary, about the movement that grew from it, known simply as The Way: concepts like Christianity or The Church would take centuries to crystallise out.
All this was very different both in its organisation and beliefs from the movement that by the fourth century became known as Christianity. In contrast, W&B give the impression of a fully formed Christianity encountering and transforming imperial Rome, so that, ‘Beginning with Constantine’s legislation and empowerment of clergy, Christianity began a social, legal and moral revolution that still echoes today. ‘This is the contrived perspective we see emerging in Eusebius’ History of the Church, which, retrospectively, attributes a threefold male ministry as implicit from the outset, completely discounting women, in which empowerment lay in the imposition of newly coined credal beliefs, such as those of Nicaea, as the touchstone of orthodoxy. It is worth noting that historians have concluded that this council unleashed the worst violence in the entire history of the Roman Empire, in which an estimated 30,000 Christians were killed by other Christians in defence of ‘orthodoxy’, of which the Emperor Julian famously commented, ‘even wild beasts are less savage to men than Christians are to each other.’ The die had been cast for a nascent European Christendom.
Needless to say, we are given no clear indication of how such a radical transformation of The Way came about in the new alliance with Caesar. Instead, the authors prefer to see what happened from at least the third century as part of ‘God’s purposes through God’s people in a political world’ (p. 65). At best ‘the sins of the past’ are to be excused because of ‘the achievements of Christendom and for Western civilisation’ (p. 34).
But again, what does this mean? In a secular age, what are we to understand of the word God or ‘His’ purposes? As with ‘king’ the Greek neo-Platonic concepts of the divine, such as ‘logos’, do not necessarily convey the distinctive nature of faith (Emunah) as understood by a Jewish Aramean – as Martin Buber noted in his study of Two kinds of Faith. Even apart from this, the idea of ‘God’s purpose’ has been fatally compromised by events such as the Holocaust, at least according to the Holocaust theologian Rabbi Dan Cohn-Sherbok who writes, ‘In the past Jews believed in a providential God who guides and protects his chosen people…. But in a post-Holocaust world, for most Jews, the prayers have lost their meaning. The Jewish religion, Judaism — with the Lord of history at its centre — has been eclipsed by belief [in] the state of Israel. Has Zionism replaced God?’
This transformation mirrors what also happened to Christianity during the Enlightenment. W&B acknowledge this process of secularisation that has so changed the West, but are keen to affirm that the Christian moral structure that emphasises the importance of the individual still provides the foundation for the secular narrative of human rights and liberal democracy: ‘Whether we are conservatives who believe that voiceless and vulnerable babies should not have their lives ripped apart in utero, or progressives who contend that women have the right to have control over their own bodies, we are all arguing in Christian language, and we are still trading in Christian currency’ (p. 28).
At this point one begins to see that the thesis of this work is beginning to sound more like a work of apologetics with the reaffirmation of certain assumed themes. To the authors ‘it is fiercely ironic then that the secular Kulturkampf is really a critique of Christian ideas with other Christian ideas.’ (p. 143) This may be true but for me, as I indicated at the outset, the whole thesis becomes bogged down in a morass of words and assumptions that are not clearly articulated or even acknowledged. It is this that makes the book so difficult to get to grips with. For this, or any book, perhaps what we need most is a better methodology of writing, and of reading.