GOD AND SECULAR SOCIETY

God and Caesar: the Bible, Postmodernity and the new imperialism N.T.Wright

St Mark’s Review 2006 (2) No. 201 pages 3-13

N T Wright gave this address (here in summary form) at St Mark’s National Theological Centre in 2006.

The theme of this paper is the confrontation between the power of God and the powers of the world. That is, between Jesus and ‘the world’ represented by Pontius Pilate and the imperialism of his day. Contemporary biblical interpreters must relate this to the conflict between Jesus and the new imperialism which has appeared within the modern and postmodern world.

Postmodernity

Postmodernism may appear hostile to the new types of imperialism which stalk our world but in fact, ends up colluding with them. Today’s empire is not the political one of the Romans, but an economic one which achieves a similar financial and economic effect without direct political or governmental control.

Post-modernity is a critique of modernism’s confidence in continual growth and progress and its notion of privatised faith and its self-confident view of self. Postmodernism recognises the truth that after 200 years the Enlightenment vision of modern utopia has still not appeared (terrible evil is still a reality!) and so takes a different approach. Postmodernism asserts that there is No Big Picture; reinvigorates spirituality (though it is often a pick-and-mix spirituality that easily collapses into self-help therapies and pagan practices); and deconstructs the lonely ‘I’. These are all necessary reactions to modernity but postmodernism itself does not work: it has not been able to prevent massive rises in global debt, increase in global warming or the monstrous wall in Palestine. Indeed, the modern empire co-opts post modernity to serve its own ends. This is the imperial world of today. How does it relate to the biblical picture?

Biblical perspectives

The phrase in John 18:36 should not be “my kingdom is not of this world” as much as “my kingdom is not from this world”. That is, there is no denial from Jesus that his kingdom is for this world, but it does not come from this world. There is a contrast between two utterly different types of kingship which lies at the heart of the New Testaments theological analysis of politics and the gospel. There is a sustained critique of imperial ideology. The New Testament contains a political narrative, no less than a theological one, about the sovereign purposes of the created God for his whole creation. God intends that earthly rulers should exercise their rule, humbly, under his sovereignty, for the good of their subjects. The Enlightenment idea of a great narrative of progression of world history reaching its climax in the Western world is a parody of the Christian narrative of world history reaching its climax in the events to do with Jesus. The postmodern critique of modern eternity is a secularised version of the theologia cricis, which is the ultimate deconstruction of human power and prestige.

New creation

Heaven and Earth are designed to overlap and interlock. The church must learn to live according to the whole biblical narrative which has a love story, rather than a power story at its heart. The church must learn the application of the cross to the puzzles and pains of the world. Jesus was not entrusting his disciples with a message for individuals alone, but a new way of life for the world. We need to generate and sustain communities which will sometimes look like traditional churches, and sometimes look quite different. We must re-engage with the worlds of the media and the arts, of politics and education, of science and technology. We live through the Lenten season of postmodernity anticipating the new creation.

The full text can be obtained from St Mark’s Review , see http://www.stmarksntc.org.au/ <http://ea.org.au/Redirect.aspx?id=9b6491e8-b8d1-41a5-9d4e-5b9606f1923b& redir=http://www.stmarksntc.org.au/>