In this second part of our conversation, Travis and Tom discuss our political witness, premillennial dispensationalism, bad theology, Christian nationalism, and how the gospel is bigger than we often realize. While the gospel encapsulates our personal salvation, there is much more involved than just that, but the redemption of all creation.

Understanding Tom means understanding not only what he is saying, but what he is responding to. Without that as a backdrop, you miss his point. Listen in and hear not only what he says, but what he is responding to, and as if often the case, it's the abuses in mind.

N.T. Wright (Tom) is currently Research Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Early Christianity at St Mary’s College in the University of St Andrews and Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. He has authored or co-authored over 90 books, and today he joins Apollos Watered to discuss his newest book, "Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies."

Other episodes referred to in this episode:

#150 | Scriptural Illiteracy & Secular Imagination, Pt. 1 | Kevin Vanhoozer

#151 | Scriptural Illiteracy & Secular Imagination, Pt. 2 | Kevin Vanhoozer

#226 | The Church Between Temple & Mosque | Dan Strange

Sign up for the Apollos Watered newsletter.

Help water-thirsty souls by partnering with Apollos Watered!

Takeaways:

• N.T. Wright emphasizes that the problem with sin is not merely personal failure, but failing to fulfill God's creational purposes in the world.
• The concept of being human in a biblical sense includes being agents of God's restorative work in creation, not just focusing on individual salvation.
• Politics from a theological perspective requires Christians to view political engagement as part of their mission to embody God's kingdom on earth.
• Wright critiques Western individualism in Christianity, advocating for a corporate understanding of faith and community that reflects our shared identity in Christ.
• The church's political witness must challenge both external powers and internal inconsistencies, holding leaders accountable to God's standards.
• Wright argues that genuine political engagement should reflect the values of the kingdom of God, prioritizing love and justice for all people.

The problem with sin is not, oh dear, I've done some wrong things, so God's got a big stick and he's going to punish me.

But that oh dear, I've messed up.

I've worshiped idols.

And therefore the bit of God's ongoing creational purposes, which I ought to be an agent of, ain't happening right now.

And I need to be rescued not just so that my soul can go to heaven, which is something the Bible never says, but so that I will be part of God's putting right purposes for his world.

And that is a whole different take on what it means to be human, what it ought to mean to be human.

Time, everybody.

It's time for Apollos Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ.

My name is Travis Michael Fleming, and I am your host.

And today on our show, we're having another one of our deep conversations.

Why do our politics matter?

Why do we even have a conversation about politics?

What does this have to do with the mission of God?

I know some of you are so tired of hearing about politics, it feels like it's being shoved down your throat 24 7.

And if you're anything like me, you just want it to go away.

You, you don't want to hear it anymore.

You're tired of the pundits.

You're tired of everything else.

And I confess I was once of that same mindset.

But I've since shifted.

I have shifted not because of the political process, but because of the theology behind politics.

Which is why we have this second conversation with the often controversial British New Testament scholar, lecturer and former Bishop of Durham, NT Tom Wright, about his newest book, Jesus and the Powers, written with Australian theologian Mike Bird.

It is all about politics in the way that we as Christians should be thinking about politics.

Now, this isn't a kind of book where you go, I'm going to have to go out and vote for this person, not that person.

It's not that kind of book.

Rather, it's a book that goes deeper, goes into what politics is in the sight of God and what it does.

It's a book that challenges us to reassess how we're thinking about the people we do or don't vote for.

It asks us to remember that our own values or issues are not as important as the issues that Jesus calls us to now, you might be a person that unites the two.

And you say, well, my values are what Jesus calls us to.

And that may be so.

And if that's the case, I hope.

I mean, I hope that is the case for you.

But for most of us, I think we have other issues that come to the forefront.

And we have to ask ourselves, what does our political witness say?

Is our political witness able to stand up to the powers not only of the opposition, but to those within our own parties when they depart from the standard of God?

Again, I can hear some of you saying, well, this isn't a church separation of church and state.

Well, you've already bit into a lie.

Not that we're asking for a Christian state.

That's not what we're asking for, but we're asking rather to see the political process through the eyes of God.

Why did God enable politics to happen?

Last time we laid the groundwork, God's kingdom comes first.

This time we flesh that out a bit.

There's some really deep stuff in there and we cover a lot of territory.

And if you listen closely, you can tell that there was so much I wanted to unpack but wasn't able to during simply due to time constraints.

I do enjoy talking to people like Tom because they do make me step back and think about the assumptions that I have and why I have them and to challenge me in ways that I need.

And there is quite a bit that I'm still thinking about from this conversation.

And in the second part to our conversation, we dive into some of the background things that inform our political engagements.

Things that on the surface might not seem political at all, but they are.

Let's dive in.

Happy listening.

In the book that came out, it was specifically focused on North American Christianity, called the Great Dechurching.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but in it it talks about how in the last 25 years, 40 million people have stopped going to churches in the United states of America.

40 million.

Wow.

And, I mean, there's a lot of different factors involved.

The Internet plays a part within it politics.

Some of it's just simply mo.

Just practical things.

But what you're seeing is a continued decrease across the West.

In the uk, you see it in Europe, you see in Australia, we see it here.

But do you think this is just your personal opinion?

Is it because we have separated it and made it individual salvation without the understanding of a robust understanding of the church and its role, that we've lost this greater witness to the world because we've individualized it to the point of removing it from the collective nature that the church has.

I think that's part of it.

I think that's part of it, to be sure.

It's partly the whole Enlightenment critique which has eaten into the very fabric of many people's awareness.

So that even if they still sometimes want to go to church and sing Christmas carols, say, because that reminds them of when they were kids, nostalgia, it doesn't actually go too deep.

It's still there, it's still a resource, but it often doesn't go too deep.

But I think you're absolutely right.

And this is where this is the danger of certain kinds of Western individualism that we want to say the gospel is for you, that, you know, you can't think you're a Christian just because your great aunt was a Christian or whatever.

It's got to be you.

Personally, I've heard people, preachers say God has no grandchildren.

You know, you need to know God as your father, not just your parents father or whatever.

And there is of course, great truth in that.

Make for yourself, make your own the faith into which you were born or baptized or whatever.

It is, however, that individualism then does produce, and I've seen this in some would be evangelical contexts, the idea of church, which is just a sort of happy accident that this person's a Christian, that person's a Christian, that person's a Christian.

So sometimes they all like to be in the same room saying their prayers or singing a hymn together.

Cause it's kind of fun rather than seeing the witness of a community.

Because, you know, in the book of Revelation, the great scene is a great multitude that no one can number of all nations and kingdoms and tribes and tongues.

Unless there are moments when we're doing that, we're not actually being our true selves, we are diminished.

And different cultures, non Western cultures have often got this right.

You know, the African slogan, I am because we, we are, and so on.

And that can be overdone.

And that can produce passive Christians who just slide along and hope it's all right.

But we've got to recapture that sense of corporate identity.

Well, I think that's where Andrew Walls came in.

Understanding just the understanding of the non majority or the majority world, speaking to the non majority world.

Because one of the thesis that we have is that as the Western church begins to decline, we've seen cultural idolatries that have attached to a Christianity, syncretizing it into something altogether else and removing it from the church.

What we want is a missionary identity, really, or a missionary ecclesiology as the church.

And that's where I think what you're saying is it has to permeate within the political world because the gospel is political in its nature.

So in some respect, we're not fighting the unbelieving world right now.

I mean, we are, but we're fighting bad theology is what we're fighting.

Bad theology across the board, absolutely.

And, I mean, it's very telling.

I was reading a book recently, a very serious academic book on Christology, on what we have to say about Jesus, which goes into all the great medieval debates and Reformation debates about how you put the humanity together with the divinity, et cetera, et cetera.

At a certain point, reading that book, I thought, hang on, where's the kingdom of God in all of this?

And I looked in the index and there was no mention of the kingdom, not as K kingdom, but not under Jesus teaching either.

It's as though the only thing that matters, figuring out how Jesus can be both fully divine and fully human.

As though if we get that right, then, wow, we've won.

We're at the top of the tree.

Instead of saying the whole point, the way I've said it in lectures is sometimes like this.

The idea of Jesus being divine and human, that is the key in which the music is set, but it isn't the tune that's being played.

In other words, I've used the image, supposing the conductor comes onto stage, looks around at the audience and says C minor.

And the audience think, yeah, we've got Beethoven 5 on our programs.

We thought it was in C minor.

So you're telling the truth, but we're waiting for you to go, da, da, da, da.

And so it's one thing to say I, as a theologian, have constructed this lovely picture of how we can say Jesus is divine and human.

But unless you're prepared to say the kingdom of God is breaking in, has broken in, in Jesus is coming at his return, and we are agents of it right here and now, then the heart of the thing, the main music not being heard or played.

We had Kevin Vanhuser on the show, and we were talking about it as a divine drama, really, the divine drama of redemption and our play in it.

It's not just a propositional script where you discern these truths, but we also had Dan Strange on, and he mentioned in the first millennium how they're debating on the deity of Jesus, fully God, fully man.

Second one.

Second Millennium, nature of salvation, third millennium is what does it mean to be human in the middle of the world.

And I think that's a pretty telling idea to see that.

And I think your work actually is hand in glove for that.

It just fits that idea, which is something the scripture's already talked about.

Why do you think though, we've lost this?

I mean, is it because of the bad theology that's there?

How have we just moored away from this so much, so completely?

I think a lot of it and you know, I don't join in the anti Augustine chorus which goes on.

I have a lot of respect for Augustine, even where I think he did lead us astray in some ways.

But the concentration on sin then filtered through the long Middle Ages comes out as this is the first thing we say about human beings.

Indeed it's the first thing we say about Genesis.

You know, God creates this lovely garden and he sets humans an exam which they fail.

And that's not what's going on in Genesis 1 and 2.

It isn't, here's an exam and if you pass this, you get to go to heaven.

And if you don't, I'm sorry, you're going to hell.

And so many Christians have been taught theology that way.

What it is is here are these humans who are the image bearers within God's templ.

And as you will know this stuff, I hope that creation is the construction of a temple, a heaven plus earth reality with an image at its heart.

That is a temple in the ancient world.

Now the humans are given this amazing vocation to reflect God into the world and reflect the praises of the world back to God.

Before we mention sin, we've got to celebrate that vocation which is celebrated in for instance, Psalm 8.

In other words, the fall hasn't ruined that vocation.

And in Colossians 3, Paul says that we are now in Christ to be renewed in knowledge according to the image.

In other words, getting back to the image is where we're aiming at.

And in the Book of Revelation we are to be the royal priesthood.

That's the same thing.

Sharing God's rule over the world, sharing the praises of the world to bring them back to God.

Now when you see that that's what being human is all about, then you realize that the problem with sin is not oh dear, I've done some wrong things, so God's got a big stick and he's going to punish me.

But that oh dear, I've messed up, I've worshiped idols and there the bit of God's ongoing creational purposes, which I ought to be an agent of, ain't happening right now.

And I need to be rescued not just so that my soul can go to heaven, which is something the Bible never says, but so that I will be part of God's putting right purposes for his world.

And that is a whole different take on what it means to be human, what it ought to mean to be human.

And when we get that right, yes, well, roll on the third millennium, if that's what we're going to be talking about.

But positive line.

And this isn't to say that sin doesn't matter.

It's when you see this, you realize just how much sin matters.

Because it's not just messing up me personally or others around me, it's messing up God's purposes for his whole creation.

Well, that's why we have Romans 8, where it says that the creation groans for the sons of God to be revealed.

Absolutely.

That was my last book, which you didn't interview me on.

You probably.

You've probably seen this book, have you?

I have.

I haven't got it yet, but I'll do that and then we'll do an episode on that one.

Just for fun.

Just for fun.

Okay.

Just to annoy your wife even further.

Okay.

But going back, you mentioned the fact that they were considered to do their vocation, and yet when, when Adam falls, all of creation falls with it.

I.

I think sometimes we fail to mention that part of it.

We do talk about the fall, but we talk about it as an individual in the humanity, how death entered in.

And we know that because death then spread to all the world.

But it's intimately tied to creation itself.

Why is that so significant for us?

And what does that mean for us then, as we're acting as these ambassadors in the midst of this world, trying to dispense our own vocation as the redeemed humanity.

That's absolutely vital.

And it's interesting that several of Jesus parables are about farming, about sowing seeds or whatever.

It's as though being a steward of creation is built into his thinking about the kingdom.

And that part of the point of the kingdom is he is sowing the seed of the kingdom, as in Isaiah 55, you know, as the rain and the snow come down, and so will my word be.

That goes forth from my mouth.

Jesus is doing new creation and telling us we got to join in.

And the sowing of the seed is both a metaphor, as in the parable, and metonymy in other Words, our looking after of creation is itself part of the kingdom good news.

But then I have, of course, as you'd expect, the line that goes on too, as you said, Romans 8, where the point is that creation is groaning in travel and creation will only be put out of its misery when the humans are finally raised from the dead to be the genuine humans they were supposed to be all along.

And at the moment we are lamenting with the groaning of creation and the Spirit is lamenting within us, which is one of the most profound passages in Paul.

But the point is that we are grieving the fact that God's creation is not yet as it should be and will be, and that we are living with that tension because we who have the first fruits of the Spirit, we know where this ought to be going.

And it seems to me that's one of the places from which you would fund a properly Christian ecology.

A care of creation is that.

And if somebody says, well, God's going to set it all right in the end so we don't need to worry now, I would say, you know, wash your mouth out.

The whole point, as with when we sin, it's no good saying, well, one day God will raise me from the dead and I won't want to sin.

Then Paul is very clear, no, you've already been raised from the dead in Christ, so you jolly well deal with sin in your life right now.

Thank you very much.

And in the same way, if we are already raised with Christ, then we are in this tension between what we already are and what we will be.

And if what we will be is the true creation carers and creation restorers as Romans 8, then we ought to be getting into practice right now, and we ought to be putting up signs of that coming refractifying of creation right now in the present, taking that into.

Consideration and getting back into the political aspect of that and playing that out.

You look over a variety of different expressions of government in this.

I don't know if it's you or it's Mike.

It's writing about it.

What is our responsibility to speak the truth to power in civil disobedience specifically, or even uncivil disobedience?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, there are times when some sort of civil disobedience seems to me, I'm not sure about uncivil disobedience, but certainly some sorts of civil disobedience are appropriate and could say that some of what Jesus did was uncivil disobedience.

When he was feasting with Publicans and sinners.

This was, you shouldn't be doing that.

You know, this is going totally against the grain, but it was a sign of the kingdom.

And in a sense the Last Supper was a sign of the kingdom.

Jesus doing something which was a quasi Passover meal, but absent from and over against the temple system.

I mean, that was a very, very powerful and deliberate symbol, sign, sacrament, whatever you want to call it.

But this is a matter obviously for discernment.

And the church has always had to wrestle with that of discerning the spirits and of not rushing in.

It's so easy to rush in when something has triggered us and we're angry about something.

Oh, we're going to do this, we're going to be so brave and put out the banner to this or that, the other.

And then it may be that in a week or two or a month or two, we think actually there might have been a wiser way of doing that.

And I don't have much experience of doing that kind of thing because I've been very, very, very fortunate to live most of my life within systems which, though not perfect, are still not, you know, the, the devastating sorts of political systems that some people have to have to live under.

But I ask myself the question, you know, what would I do if I was living in Hong Kong right now?

What would I do if I was living in Taiwan and the Chinese came to invade?

What should we have been thinking when the Russians invaded Ukraine and so on and so forth?

These are very difficult questions.

And I've actually asked some wise friends who are leading political theologians about such things, and they tend to say, yes, these are very difficult questions, thank you very much, but they're real.

They're on the ground right now.

So the question about, you know, whether civil disobedience is justified.

Romans 13 indicates the general truth that God wants his world to be ordered because order is better than chaos.

Basically, even tyranny is better than anarchy, because in anarchy and the bullies and the bad guys are always gonna win.

With tyranny there is a hope that actually things you may be able to navigate through.

But the great Western, this is one of the really important things, which again, Tom Holland brings out.

The great Western push towards what we loosely call liberal democracy is itself one offshoot of the Christian impulse to say we want to find a way which doesn't let people get too high an opinion of themselves into self id, but which doesn't lapse into chaos either.

And the idea of voting every few years and of doing our Best to advise and support and have a loyal opposition, et cetera, et cetera.

This seems to be as good a way of doing stuff as we have yet found.

And though I'm not saying that the Gospel validates the great 18th century liberal democratic experiment, it certainly has more to support it than the forms of tyranny and anarchy which we've seen sadly disfiguring the planet in recent.

There's so much that I would love to parse out on that, but we don't have time today.

Let's talk about Christian nationalism.

I know that is something that is, in the American, at least in the media perspective, how much it's actually being lived out.

That's a debate.

So you don't know if the media is taking control of it.

But what does Christian nationalism get, let's say.

Let's, I hate to say get right.

Let's say what it gets right.

But I know, because there's a whole lot more that gets wrong.

Or is there anything thing that Christian nationalism has that's right within it?

That would be hard to say because one of the most fundamental things about Christianity is that it's for everybody, is that it is precisely for the Samaritan, who you might have considered an outcast or whoever.

It is for the Jew and the Gentile together.

It is for male, female, slave free, et cetera.

So as soon as you say we're going to have a Christian gentile thing and keep the Jews out, or a Christian Jewish church and keep the gentiles out, then St Paul particularly, but actually the whole of the New Testament says, hang on, hang on, hang on.

You're missing something absolutely fundamental.

This is about being the new humanity.

And anything which says this nation has a specific Christian calling.

We in England used to play this game the whole time.

We've largely given it up now, which is, I think, a very, very good thing.

But if you go back a century or so, you will find people saying and meaning it most sincerely that in our country we have actually Christian civilization and we have a responsibility to export that to the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, we exported a lot of other stuff as well.

And it just so happened that it meant that diamonds and gold and other goods came back our way.

Oh, what a happy accident that was.

So, you know, we've deconstructed all that.

And I'm not one of those who thinks that empire is always wrong.

But saying that this empire is a Christian empire, I think is always wrong.

Because if it was Christian, it wouldn't be the empire of just.

Just the people who happen to belong to this country or this ethnic group or whatever it would by definition have its doors thrown open to in a broad wide welcome to anyone.

Ho.

Everyone who thirsts, come to the water, says Isaiah.

And Jesus picks that up in John 7.

And without that note, which I think Christian nationalism must do, without that note, then we're not Christian anymore.

And then it just becomes a nationalism which is using Christian language as a way of propping itself up.

Trump, one of the things that you mentioned in direct correlation to that, or at least I'm going to bring that out, you talk about how when we're to submit to the authorities, that's referring to those who have been elected or appointed or conquered, meaning that legitimate or illegitimate, there's a submission to those authorities.

Am I stating that correctly?

Yeah.

It's a way of saying that the Jews of the first century and the Christians in the early days, they didn't much bother about whether somebody had been freely and fairly elected, because insofar as people had elections, they had elections in Rome from time to time, but it really didn't matter.

Everybody knew that Caesar was it and the petty officials beneath him would come and go.

That wasn't the point.

The point was God wants his world to be ordered and governed, and order and governance is better than anarchy and chaos.

Therefore, you submit because you want to share God's project, which is of bringing wise order to the world.

Back to Genesis 1.

Order, creation, coming out of chaos.

But along with that goes constantly the responsibility of God's people to speak the truth to power.

Back to what we were saying half an hour ago, the John 16 mandate of convicting the world of sin and righteousness and judgment.

And that's not a matter of waiting for the next election and voting the other way next time.

It's a matter of constant.

And you see the Church doing this in Acts.

You see Paul doing it in Acts, where Paul, the Philippine magistrates tell him to get out of town and he says, excuse me, Roman citizen beaten without trial, imprisoned without charge.

That's a public apology, by the way.

And he gets it because they're scared.

He knows his rights and he's prepared to tell them when they've been out of line.

He does the same with the high priest in Acts 23, you know, and this, it seems to me, is a model of the way in which, even though Paul was Paul, as I've often said, would say boo to every goose and then all the swans as well.

This is perhaps not the best way to win friends and influence people.

And we don't all have the personality of Paul.

But the model is correct that the church is not to say, oh well, we won't vote for you next time.

Then the church is to say actually here is the standard by which you really ought to be behaving and you're getting this wrong right now.

And the church better be careful because it needs to know the ground it's standing on.

And there may be a critique coming back as well.

So before we launch this Exocet into the public domain, let's make sure we've got our own house in order.

But that isn't an excuse for hiding away until we're squeaky clean ourselves.

We've got to embrace that mandate.

Speaking then truth to power, what role does the government have?

Or what is our role when the government outsteps its authority into other arenas?

Specifically in America talking about gay marriage and abortion, but you can also talk about immigrants, you can talk about whatever issue that you have have.

What is our role then to after speaking truth to power, the powers that be don't listen.

Do we submit?

Okay, how do we respond?

I mean it's very interesting looking from the outside at the American situation where you've got the same people wanting to have legislation that allows drunken 17 year olds to own weapons grade guns and the same people who want to prevent young women who've been raped having abortions.

There's something very bizarre about that which tells me that actually the desire to legislate against abortion at all costs is not actually driven by the same thing that was driving the Jews and the early Christians to say that abortion was real.

Because abortion was common in the ancient world.

In the pagan world people would often compel their wives to have abortions, which were very dangerous operations in the ancient world.

But that was ruled out by the the Jews and the Christians, just like they ruled out infanticide.

You have a daughter that you don't want, throw her out.

The Jews and the Christians didn't do that.

Now the fact that the Jews and Christians didn't do that was a witness to the society and the society noticed.

Now the trouble is in America at the moment, as in Britain in other ways, these things have all got bundled up so that if you put a check by this thing on this side of the page, you're going to put a check by all those others because that's what that party stands for.

And then your putting checks the other side in contradistinction to that.

Most of these issues do not admit of such an easy, easy categorization.

So one of the things the church has to do is to articulate in the public square, by whatever means possible, wiser ways of thinking about the things that have become the so called hot button issues.

Now, I know that's not easy.

I was in public life myself for several years as a bishop in the House of Lords and so on, saying things which are unpopular in that context.

People don't like it, naturally, but the church has to be able to do that.

And I remember speaking up in a debate in the House of Lords about the assisted dying question, the euthanasia bill.

And we have to be able to say things, to say this is the path of wisdom and that is the path of folly.

And then if people don't listen, then we have to find ways of demonstrating that action.

The way we're following is the wiser and healthier way for the human race.

In the book you talk about these different disparate groups that are all in some ways finding their root or their voice within a Judeo Christian framework.

And they are speaking, I mean, they are beneficiaries of that.

How do we mend the division between voices that are so influenced by this idea of, of rights and justice and all of these different pieces and those on the other side that advocate for evangelism and holiness, they're not opposing factors, but yet we've made them that way.

Yeah, yeah, we've made them that way through the outworking of various basically 18th century impulses.

This is very much enlightenment stuff where you have a split between sacred and secular, between church and politics, et cetera, et cetera, in a way which certainly didn't come out of the New Testament and actually didn't come out, out of some of the mainline reformers either, because they were, they were usually very keen on reforming society as well as enabling people to find fullness of salvation and so on.

So it's a comparatively modern thing.

And I think part of the deal is we have to demonstrate that to people to show them historically how we got where we got and some bad turns that we made and the bits of the Bible that we missed out in doing so.

And then we have to put the chess pieces back on the board and say, I'm sorry, the whole teaching about Jesus kingdom message is a vital part of the Bible.

And if you skip over it on your way to your reading of Paul as telling you how to go to heaven, then you are missing out a vital part of God's word.

Ironically, some of the people who do that claim to be Bible Christians, but then their whole theology is if you say this prayer, you go to heaven and be careful you don't try to do any good works to earn your passage there as well.

Or that will nullify it, which is such a misreading of Paul.

But I've heard that again and again.

It's not any misreading of Paul, it's a skipping over of the Gospels and how people can justify that, I'm really not sure.

One of the things that you mentioned is having a shared story as we're going through the world, kind of really parking our theology within the greater biblical framework of the story and its share, its trajectory and where it's headed, because we do, we live by a story.

You've mentioned this in several different of your writings.

Why is it so important to hang this truth and understanding within the greater biblical narrative?

It seems to me that as Christians we are not at liberty to pick and choose in the Bible to say we want this little strand here that's going to be our.

And no doubt we all begin by having certain biblical strands which we kind of like and understand, random and go with.

But it's rather that the story of Jesus itself embeds itself into the narrative from Genesis to revelation.

In other words, the story of creation and new creation, the story of covenant and new covenant or renewed covenant or renewed creation.

And the way that the Gospels tell the story of Jesus has its roots deep in the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament, in the promises of creation and new creation and covenant and new covenant.

And.

And it's pointing forwards the whole time to the ultimate new creation of resurrection and the new world.

And so if we're followers of Jesus, and the Jesus that we know is the Jesus we find in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, not some fantasy figure that we've dreamt up somewhere else, the real Jesus, then we are not at liberty to say, well, we'll have Jesus, but we will forget those Old Testament roots.

Many people have tried to do that.

Or we'll have Jesus, but we'll forget that he was talking about new creation and think that he was talking about souls going heaven.

Thousands of people still believe that, of course.

Rather we need that whole biblical framework and when we forget it, we lapse back into some kind of philosophy.

Christian Platonism is the popular thing, has been for years, which is about the souls going to heaven and so on.

And somehow, somehow those of us who are gripped by the total biblical story, we have to learn how to tell that and how to Live it in a way which makes people say, oh, that's curious.

I'd never quite seen it like that before.

How does that play out with this and that and the other?

Those are the golden moments for me as a teacher when I realize that people are glimpsing a bigger picture of the biblical narrative.

And no doubt if I live for another five or 10 or 15 years, please God, I will see bigger and bigger vistas as well, because that's been happening to me all my life and I hope it's not going to stop now.

You mentioned our greatest argument, and I'm going to read this little quote here you have on 169.

Our greatest argument against tyranny.

The answer to the critics of liberal democracy is to point to the monumental achievements of liberal democracy in improving the quality of life and preserving equality under the law for all of its citizens.

You also mentioned a few pages before that.

The love of neighbor.

And if we're to show a quality of life and the love of neighbor, how do we speak to the love of neighbor when the neighbor is doing something that could, as you mentioned, female circumcision.

Yeah.

Something that could, could actually harm people.

Yeah.

How do we do that?

How do we go about loving our neighbor to prevent something that they have that freedom in some respect to do?

Yeah, yeah.

We, we campaign.

We campaign through proper channels to get a law passed or changed to make it clear that there are certain ways of behaving which are intrinsically dehumanizing, which are intrinsically destructive, which are dangero and which are reducing the humanness of human beings.

And that, that has to be pretty near the heart of it.

And if the campaign is not working, then the early Christians would say we have to live in such a way that the wider society will come to see that the way we're living is the better way to be.

I mean, it took the church 300 years before the, the, the Roman Empire cottoned on.

So many people becoming Christ could see that the way these Christians were living was vastly preferable to the way that the pagan world had ordered itself.

But that took time and it took a lot of martyrdom and a lot of prayer and a lot of anger and threats and so on.

Maybe we'll have to go through that again.

The Enlightenment has bought us time by embracing an Enlightenment shaped version of Christianity.

The Western world doesn't need to be persecuted because who's going to persecute us for believing that one day we'll go to heaven when we die?

As long as we just keep ourselves quiet at the moment.

But if we were actually to start saying we're going to campaign for the rehumanization of our neighborhood, our town, our country, whatever, this might quite soon lead some people in authority to say we're going to ban that, we're going to rule that out.

And then who knows how soon we could get to that point.

I forget who it was.

I think it was a Roman Catholic archbishop of Chicago, was it, who said, somebody's quoting this to me the other day who said to his subordinates, I will probably die at peace in my bed.

Some of you may well die in a police cell.

Some of your successors may well die in front of a firing squad.

Now that's perhaps a bit overdramatic, but it could happen.

It wouldn't be the first time that there's been a big change.

And particularly if we give up liberal democracy for all its dangers and faults, if we give up liberal democracy and go for some sort of state tyrann tyranny instead, then who knows how quickly we would get to that point.

These are good thoughts, good conversation.

One of the things that we do like to leave our people with is because we are Apollos watered, we want to help water faith.

So we say we leave them with a water bottle for the week.

What is one little water bottle that you can leave for our audience today?

I.

I would want to go back to Colossians chapter 3, verse 10 and say that when the Spirit comes, we are to be renewed in knowledge according to the image of the Creator.

That's really, really important.

So many issues come down to God made humans to reflect his image in the world.

The Gospel doesn't stop us being genuine image bearing humans.

The Gospel remakes us into genuine image bearing humans.

And the Gospel says yes to the original creation of in saying yes to the new creation.

And that is at the heart of many of our great puzzles at the moment.

Well, Tom, I want to thank you for coming on the show.

Thank you for the book.

I recommend everyone go out to get it to read it.

Jesus and the Powers.

It should be out in just the next week or so and then you can get it wherever you get your books.

But Tom, thank you for coming on.

Apollos watered.

Thank you very much.

Good talking to you.

All the very best.

Thank you.

The way we engage politics has everything to do with our theology.

How do we see our faith interacting with the world we live in?

Do we just think it's all going to burn?

So it doesn't matter?

There are some out there who definitely feel that way.

But there are others who are obsessed with everything and believe that our political stance is keeping civilization from descending into complete chaos.

That may be true, or it could just be an overstating of the point, because I think there's a bit of truth in both and neither is completely right.

God wants his world to be a world of order, not chaos, even to the point of realizing that even tyranny is better than anarchy.

That was one of the surprising points that Tom made.

After all, who wants tyranny?

Nobody that I know.

He wasn't advocating for tyranny.

Rather, he was showing us why God tolerates people and structures and even nations that are opposed to him, in which our dehumanizing because the alternative might be worse.

But still we have a responsibility to use the structures we have available to us to disobey civilly at times, though only after much prayerful study of the Scriptures, some deep thought and continual discernment.

That may mean speaking truth to power and disagreeing with the parties that we have found ourselves aligned with.

Our faith is to be good news for everyone, including the people who don't believe the way we do, precisely because we need to show them the truth of who Jesus is by standing for truth.

And that means forsaking the idolatries of our day and then speaking truth to power.

No matter who that is.

Politics matters.

I'm reminded of how much the prophets of the Old Testament spoke truth to power, even if it meant speaking against the leaders of their own groups.

We can't avoid politics, nor can politics become our lives.

Politics should be engaged for good.

We are here to subvert the structures that happen when people in power forget that they are to serve God's interest in order and human flourishing to challenge them.

When the false gods of money, power, sex, and so many others others take center stage.

We speak out when behaviors and ways of looking at the world dehumanize the very people that they seek to help.

We shouldn't expect everyone around us to get it either, even those who are Christians.

We have to remember that it was the Pharisees of old who were the most religious, devout and zealous who came against Jesus as well as the powers of Rome.

We should expect the same attacked within, from our own right ranks, and sometimes from the outside.

Our job is to stand for what is right even when it hurts, even when those who purport to see the right cave to the expediencies and promises of the morally compromised and power hungry.

This means being misunderstood and persecuted because as Tom said in closing from Colossians 3, we have put on the new self which is being renewed in knowledge, in the image of itself creator.

The Gospel remakes us into genuine image bearing humans, so our politics had better reflect that I hope that you enjoyed our conversation.

I know that I did and I hope it challenged you.

And as always, I want to know what struck out to you.

Is there something that you might have disagreed with and I'm sure that there is, or what challenged you, if any of those have happened to you, where you've been challenged or you disagree with or something that a point that really struck home that you resonated with.

We want to hear from you.

Go online to our Facebook page, simply join up with our page like it and then join in a conversation.

Start one or watch our videos on YouTube where you can see the full part of this conversation and feel free to drop a comment because we'd love to be able to hear from you.

I do want to thank our Apollos water team for helping us to water the world.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Water.

Stay watered everybody.