Where the Last Becomes First
March/April 2025The complicated legacy of Christianity’s political witness
The story of Christianity and politics through the ages is a messy one. In their new book two renowned Anglican theologians, N. T. Wright from Britain and Michael F. Bird from Australia, take another look at this controversial tale, combing Scripture, history, and current events in search of general principles that can help guide Christians in their political engagement today. In this excerpt from Jesus and the Powers (London: Zondervan, 2024), Wright and Bird argue that Christianity’s political involvement throughout history has played an overwhelming role in shaping the world we now inhabit.
The early church had to negotiate empire, resist empire, flee from the empire, suffer under the empire, offer apologies for itself to the empire . . . until the church became one with the empire. A fateful moment of transition. Over the first three centuries Christians were sometimes begrudgingly tolerated, but at other times they were the victims of local and even empire-wide persecutions. The Roman persecution of Christianity as a seditious misanthropic cult ended with the conversion of Constantine and his subsequent patronage of the Christian religion. Constantine’s victory over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge just outside Rome in A.D. 312 made him the supreme Roman ruler of the West. Constantine attributed that victory to the providence of the one true God and the power of Jesus Christ. That was immediately followed by the end of persecutions and the gradual adoption of Christianity as the official state religion in the coming decades. As many had foreseen, Caesar had at last bowed his knee before Christ.
In less than 10 years, from the brutal Diocletian persecutions in A.D. 303 to the Edict of Milan in 313 granting Christians official legal protections, the fate of Christians at the hands of the Roman Empire had radically shifted from utter hopelessness to blessed reprieve. In an even more dramatic shift, Christianity would move from being merely tolerated to becoming hegemonic. How did followers of Jesus fare in this new arrangement, finding themselves no longer martyrs but chaplains to the empire? Under Roman sponsorship Christians were no longer hunted, but were now able to hound and harass their traditional rivals among pagans, Jews, and heretical Christian sects. Indeed, Christianity, through its bishops, became a powerful player in the halls of imperial power, in both Rome and Constantinople. At its worst, the church then became an instrument of empire, offering Christ’s insignia to the decrees of soldier-emperors who continued to do what empires always do: conquer, enslave, and exploit. The church came to exchange the cross of Christ for the sword of Rome.
That said, for all the evils of Christendom, with its marriage of church and state, with the duumvirate of bishop and king, there were genuinely positive and ultimately revolutionary changes for human civilization. Over the centuries the Latin West and the Greek East became increasingly shaped by a Christian vision of God’s love for the world and the place of Christian virtues in societies where few restraints on evil and exploitation existed. Consider this: once upon a time, the pagan philosopher Celsus could look down upon Christianity as a detestable and servile religion that attracted only “the foolish, the dishonorable, and stupid, only women, slaves, and little children.” Christianity to Celsus was unmanly and un-Roman because at its center was a so-called crucified god, adored and worshipped by the feeble-minded and weak-bodied dregs of society.1 Celsus was typical of Roman aversion to the cult of the crucified Nazarene. Beginning with Constantine’s legislation and empowerment of clergy, Christianity began a social, legal and moral revolution that still echoes today. Political philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb captures just how radical the Christian message was in a world in which the gods were powers and power was worshipped:
The Greco-Romans despised the feeble, the poor, the sick, and the disabled; Christianity glorified the weak, the downtrodden, and the untouchable; and does that all the way to the top of the pecking order. While ancient gods could have their share of travails and difficulties, they remained in that special class of gods. But Jesus was the first ancient deity who suffered the punishment of the slave, the lowest ranking member of the human race. And the sect that succeeded him generalized such glorification of suffering: dying as an inferior is more magnificent than living as the mighty. The Romans were befuddled to see members of that sect use for symbol the cross—the punishment for slaves. It had to be some type of joke in their eyes.2
The Christians turned the whole edifice of gods, power, greatness and hierarchy on its head. God had used the foolish to shame the wise. God was a defender of the poor and champion of the weak. The rich would be sent away hungry while the poor would be well fed. A time was coming when there would be a reordering of power: the first would be last and the last would be first. So the rich had to mourn and wail for their riches lest these become evidence against them at the final judgement. Christians were accused of “turning the world upside down”3 and it would seem in that task that they were wholly successful because we live in a world where the weak and victimized are given almost sacral status.
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Most people in today’s world recognize as noble the ideas that we should love our enemies, that the strong should protect the weak, and that it is better to suffer evil than to do evil. People in the West treat such things as self-evident moral facts. Yet such values were certainly not self-evident to the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Vikings, Ottomans, Mongols, or Aztecs. The reason most people today accept those ideals as axiomatic is that we are products of the Christian revolution. Even when people hotly deny this, insisting (with some justification) that it’s the church that has been “the oppressor,” the moral protest against oppression is itself rooted in Christian belief. For the Christian message is that all human beings reflect the image of God: God loved the world so much that he sent his Son to save it, and the cross proves that true power is found in weakness, greatness is attained in service, revenge only begets greater evil, and all victims will be vindicated at God’s judgement seat. That is what has been wired into the moral compass of Western civilization. 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 all trading in Christian currency.
1 Origen, Against Celsus 3.44.
2 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “On Christianity: An essay as a foreword for Tom Holland’s Dominion,” Incerto, August 26, 2022, https://medium.com/incerto/on-christianity-b7fecde866ec (accessed August 14, 2023).
3 Acts 17:6.
Taken from N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, Jesus and the Powers. Copyright © 2024 by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Used by permission of Zondervan Reflective. www.harpercollinschristian.com.