Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Do You Worship Politics?: An Interview with Dr. Christopher J. W. Wright | Who Is Jesus?

Episode Date: December 10, 2020

Have politics become the new religion? Is the West dying? Should Christians engage in politics or step out completely? Get answers to these questions from https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Pastor Patrick Miller)'s interview with https://chrisjhwright.wordpress.com/about/ (Dr. Christopher J. H. Wright )on his new book Here Are Your Gods. Interested in more content like this? Scroll down for more resources and related episodes, including https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/keep-your-faith-out-of-the-voting-booth-questions-youre-asking-matthew-4-8-9/ (Keep Your Faith Out of the Voting Booth?) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/4-signs-youve-turned-politics-into-an-idol/ (4 Signs You've Turned Politics Into an Idol) from our earlier series https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcast-series/questions-youre-asking/ (Questions You're Asking). Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks.  Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. Do you feel like politics have become a new religion? How do you know if politics has become an idol in your own life? Today I'm excited to have one of my favorite authors on the show, Dr. Christopher J.H. Wright, to discuss his new book, Here Are Your God's Faithful Discipleship in idolatrous times. Chris is an Old Testament scholar and teacher and is currently the International Ministries Director for Langham Partnership.

Thanks for being on the show, Chris. Thank you, Patrick. It's good to be with you. I look forward to talking with you. I have to say, you wrote a book a while back. It was the first book I read by you called The Mission of God's People, and it had a major impact on how I think about who God is and what his calling is both for me, but for the community that I'm a part of here who call ourselves Christians. And so I've always been grateful for your work. And I really enjoyed this new book.

So I want to hop right into some questions and get your feedback. So Idol, that's in the title of the book. And it's not a word that we use very often today, unless we're talking about pop stars or maybe personal heroes. And when most people read about idols in the Bible, we think of those tiny little fertility statues that maybe we saw on a high school trip to the local history museum, which means that idols don't have much to do with life in the 21st century in America. So will you tell us what are idols in the Bible?

and how do they actually connect to our lives today? It's a very good question, Patrick. And in a sense, it is the nub of the issue. It's precisely because the word idol and idolatry has got so trivialized, as you say, by associated with celebrities and pop culture and so on. And therefore, we think there are no idols around us. You know, they're just things that other people had in the past or other religions have still in some countries, but not us.

We haven't got idols in America or in Britain. And of course, I think that's very much the way, if I can put it like this, that's the way the devil likes it, because it conceals the profound spiritual reality of the worship of other gods or the worship of that which is not God, which is what the Bible is talking about, especially in the Old Testament, but also in the new, when it refers to idols. So that's an important point you're making. We have trivialized the word and therefore, in a sense, lost contact with the seriousness of the reality. In the book he wrote, it has long seemed to me that the biblical category of idolatry is handled or dismissed with a shallow understanding and simplistic responses. Now, in a lot of evangelical churches, I'm a pastor at an evangelical church, we hear the language of idolatry some. We tend to talk about things like idols of comfort or idols of control. Do you think that kind of talk is helpful or are there ways in which that kind of talk is shallow and simple?

Well, in some ways, it's a little like the word sin and sins. You know, we often talk about sins and we talk about this kind of sin, that kind of sin, and we perhaps, again, not trivialize it, but we get a rather shallow impression and don't go to the root of the fact that the Bible talks about sin, as it were, with a capital S, as a whole orientation of life, a direction of life which is away from God, and is therefore in that sense a very powerful spiritual force. like Paul talks about sin and death and the law, almost with capital letters, as powers in themselves. And the same thing can be true then of idolatry.

If we simply talk about idols as, you know, the idols of comfort or the idols of leisure or the idols of sport, yes, true, these things can be idols in that sense. But what I think I'm trying to get out in the book at East initially is that as Paul seems to be saying in Romans 1, there was a fundamental point in human history when as a human race, we, through our forefathers through Adam and Eve, chose to exchange the knowledge and the worship and trust in the one true living God with the alternatives. That is, we try to create alternatives of our own. We rejected his authority.

We distrusted his word. We disobeyed his instructions and we create idols for ourselves. So idolatry is a root condition. It's a dimension of human life. In fact, it is in many ways the fundamental sin. It's at the root of so much else that has gone. wrong. And part and a deep reality of that idolatry is the ideology of self, which underlies a great deal of other forms of sin and ideology that we put the self, myself, in that central place.

And that then becomes a whole ideology, the ideology of the autonomous self or of the celebrity self, or of the independent, nobody tells me what to do kind of self, all of which are marks in some ways of idolatry. You're obviously not from the U.S. if people can't tell by your accent, but a lot of our listeners are from the U.S. We have some from all over the world. But you've spent some time here in the United States, and I think that probably gives you a unique perspective and perhaps an ability to see things in our culture to which we might be blind. So what are some of the forms of idolatry that you think maybe American Christians might be blind to, oblivious to in our lives? That's a dangerous question to ask. And I really, in some ways, don't like being asked.

As you say, I'm not American. I'm actually originally from Northern Ireland. That's where the accent comes a bit. But, of course, I'm British now and living here in central London. And so I do hesitate to, you know, in a sense, to comment or critique the culture of other people, especially when I'm so frequently a guest in the United States as I am and speak at conferences there. And we have a very strong presence of Langham Partnership in the US. But I think idolatry, within the United States, as I am. America is in some ways similar to what is found throughout the whole of the Western culture, that is Western civilization, including European and British, the whole kind of Anglo-Saxon, European, Euro-American culture of the West, which I describe in the book, which has been going on now for about 500 years, which in America rather curiously took the form in the initial finding of the American state by this separation of state and church to escape from the

domination of the kind of late modern Christendom of Europe, and yet has ended up with a kind of almost a Christendom kind of ideology of itself, which is the idea that somehow, if you just get Christians into power, then everything will be wonderful, that you will then be able to have a country in which the Christian church has a certain degree of privileges, and that then goes along with a certain cultural expression of that, that has been developed. within the United States. And that, I think, is a, in itself, rather dangerous. And by the history of the world around the place,

would show that when Christians get into power, they're no less susceptible to the corruption of power and all that goes of that than any other sinners. And we all know that we're still sinners, we're still fallen, we're still greedy, we're still fallible. And so the idea that somehow we've got an ally in the White House or in Whitehall in our country in itself, that that is what we should strive for.

Well, it's something where it's actually quite baffling to the majority of the world's Christians who, of course, don't live in the West. We need to realize that the majority world is where the majority of the world Christians live. And for most Christians, through most of world history and in most places of the world, have not lived under governments,

which could by any stretch of the imagination be called Christian, in fact, often quite the opposite. And yet they bear faithful witness, even to death and martyrdom for their faith. And their faith and the success of the Christian church doesn't depend upon state patronage or a government or a judicial system which gives them favors. One of the things that we've talked a lot about on this podcast to, again, our American audience, and I am an American, so perhaps I can take my own shots more fairly. Because they're straight into my own heart. They're true of me, whether or not I want them to be. I have a deep temptation to

idolize political parties, to idolize my nation. I'm deeply tempted to think about America as a almost eternal nation, which will last forever and bring hope and peace and goodness to the world. In fact, I'm quite sure I've probably said things more similar to that than I would like to admit. And one of the themes that you drew out in your book is that the Bible doesn't view nations in this way. There's a biblical theme that nations rise and empires rise, but they also false. So could you impact that theme for us a bit today? And can you tell us how maybe that applies to modern day nation states? Yeah, thank you. That is something I do try to draw it in the book. In some ways, it is, I think, one of the reasons why God has given us such a long Old Testament in our Bible.

I get asked that question all the time. You know, why the Old Testament is saying, well, I mean, it's just a wonderful book. Have you read it? But that's a good answer too. I like that one. Well, I mean, obviously, if we don't read the Old Testament, we haven't a clue who Jesus is. I mean, that's part of the problem, is that people often have a very shallow, unbiblical, identicate kind of Jesus that they've invented for themselves and don't realize the depth of the story from which he comes, into which he comes, which is the story of God, creation for the promise to Abraham, and God struggle with Israel, the promise of the Messiah, and so on.

If we don't have the Old Testament, we all to understand Jesus. And I will come back to that in a minute. in terms of political parties and everything else. But just to go back to your earlier question, yes, one of the things that the Old Testament shows us very clearly is that empires rise and fall and God is sovereign over them. So Solomon's empire lasts a while and then falls. You get then the Egyptian powers, the Babylonian power,

the power of Assyria, the power of Persia and Greece. They all come and God can use them. They do things. They do bad stuff. They do some good stuff. But at the end of the day, their arrogance, implodes. And indeed, the very thing that you just said, that, you know, people, that you might be tempted to think about America, you know, this is sort of the eternal country, God bless America. This is,

you know, the great land that God has, as it were, built up for the future of the world. That's exactly what Babylon was saying. You actually read it there in Isaiah and in Jeremiah. And so were the Egyptians, so were Tyre and Saiden. They all had this megalomania of somehow thinking that we are it. and we will never, ever suffer defeat or loss. And God, I think, smiles and says, well, just wait a few years or a few centuries, but your time will come. And so I think personally that although God clearly had a reason and a purpose in his historical providence for the rise of European civilization, which let's remember is only about 500 years old,

which in biblical terms is about half a day. We were told that a thousand years is but one day. So European civilization is like a morning or an afternoon in God's great clock. Five hundred years ago, Europe was probably the poorest continent on the planet. There were far more wealthy and prosperous empires and kingdoms in Africa, down in the Shanti and down in Ghana, also over in Zanzibar, certainly in India and in China. And indeed, if you go back even before that to the Central American great civilizations, the Incas and the Aztecs and so on. So Europe was the poor man. But then we decided to export

ourselves. We didn't ask permission. We just went. We just discovered new continents for ourselves. They'd been there all the time where we didn't know about them. We simply took over. We landed. We didn't need visas. We didn't ask for permission. We ended up with a kind of European expansion, which is then created nations like Australia, New Zealand, US, Canada, etc. And that whole project, as one might call it, was then combined with a mixture of Christian faith, but a Christian faith which had become highly compromised with state power in Christendom, in the medieval and then the early modern period, and then become, as it were, corrupted with that sort of love child of the gospel and modernity, the enlightenment,

which creates this flight from the authority of the church, but a myth of progress that somehow things are always going to get better and better, but they'll get better and better through autonomous human efforts and science. And so you get this kind of combination of a Christianized culture with enlightenment skepticism, which then produces nations like secularized Europe, the French Revolution, and then the American independence from Britain, and then the finding of the American state. And clearly God had a purpose through all of this because through these centuries he was doing other things. You know, the faith was spreading in other parts of the world.

You have the abolition of the slave trade. You have some of the horrors and benefits of the colonial era and the missionary era. But there comes a point at which even that great Western culture, which reaches a kind of perhaps it's zenith in the years after the Second World War, become so arrogant and so oppressive and so dominating economically as well as politically and in terms of his ideology that you get the feeling that God is saying, you know, you've done your job, it's time to move on. This century is not going to go by with the dominance of Western culture in that sense. Now, the one thing to say about that if I could just continue is when these great empires

fall in biblical times, there is a sense of relief and rejoicing among those who are oppressed by them, like, you know, fallen is great Babylon. But there's equally a great fear because of the turmoil that happens when Ezekiel sees the great merchant ship of Tyre set out to sea crammed with the cargoes of the nations. That's the picture he has in Ezekiel. So this was a great mercantile empire, the economic empire that ruled the Mediterranean Sea.

And then it goes out to sea, and an east wind blows, and it sinks. And it collapses. And what happens is, is that all the little people on the shore are aghast. They are terrified because if the big ship goes down, it pulls an awful lot of other smaller people with it. So the collapse of Western civilization in a sense is nothing to rejoice over because it will cause great damage

and great suffering and in many ways already is, of course, around the world. So those are some of the reflections that are, in my view, from a biblical reading of those thousands of years of biblical history. You're speaking about the decline of the West. What are some of the signs of decline in the West that you see might be, or I shouldn't say might be our under God's sovereign hand? Well, I mean, some of the things I refer to in the book, like the increasing obscenity of the inequality between the super wealthy and the increasing impoverishment that we see not just between the West and the so-called developing world, but within all countries. so that within America you have this scandal of huge numbers of children going to bed hungry every night. You have the racial divisions. We have the same thing here in Britain.

There are divisions of economic disparity. There's also this year a fact that so much of our wealth and world dominance is based on a history of slavery, of genocide at another level, of oppression and violence and bloodshed in the colonial era. and these things, you know, historical injustice eventually fights back. The Bible shows us that as well. There's also, I think, the hollowing out of our culture by the kind of the culture almost of emptiness, you know, that nothing matters, that you end up with the ideology of the self. Then that leads to Nicolism. You know, there really is nothing.

There's no past, there's no future. There's nothing more than me or whatever little story I can tell to make my own life, significant. So there are quite a lot of cultural signs there as well, of course, as the degradation of so much life, not only through poverty and inequality, but through the loss and destruction of family life, the disorder of sexuality, a whole range of ways in which I think, again, the Bible shows us that civilizations just in a sense rot. They rot from within, and they become the seeds of their own collapse. It's not as if God has to actually throw thunderbolts in order to destroy them. They simply collapse under the weight of their own evil and some of the consequences

of it. I know there will be people listening to this who find various things he just said in various ways offensive and challenging. But one of the things you said in your book that was helpful to me was, as you were talking about these signs of decline in the West, that these are signs we see throughout the Old Testament of decline in the ancient empires as well. And so these are things that in some sense, God has already, you said God gave us a long Old Testament so we could see this happen again and again, he's warned us, he's told us that's where this road, that's where this path ultimately leads. Now, I think for some people hearing this, when they hear talk about the decline of the West, they start wondering if maybe you're advocating that Christians should retreat from public life.

They should retreat from politics. They should go and and find a nice cave to cloister up in and get ready for the coming apocalypse. Do you think that's our only option, or would you advocate a different approach to Christian engagement in this moment? No, that's certainly not a valid option. I think it's no more a valid option than the idea that somehow by simply creating a sort of theocratic state in which Christians of all the power would be the answer. equally the opposite of that, the Christians simply withdraw altogether

from any involvement in economic, social, or political life or judicial life is the answer. No, it isn't. We are called to engagement, but also to distinctiveness, which is one of the things I try to bring out in the book. Engagement, because the Bible gives us

plenty of examples of that, of people who were believers, that is, whether in Old Testament Israel, the covenant people like Joseph, like Daniel, who were servants of the state and were able to remain faithful to the living God, preserve their faith, and yet serve the state, and then bear witness to the living God in those conditions. And also in the New Testament, Jesus says that we are to be salt and light.

And salt and light are no good, as he said about light, if it's stuck in a bucket. So just withdrawing from the world is not the answer. We are called to be engaged, to do our work, to be in politics and business and government and law and education, and medicine, but not to imagine that somehow we can thereby bring about the sort of messianic transformation of society, which is going to produce a utopia. We are engaged in transformation, but as Jesus said, it's the transformation that will be worked by the kingdom of God. And the kingdom of God, he said, is like mustard seeds. It's like yeast that grows within the

dough. It's small ways, bearing witness to the reality of God's kingdom, not imagining that we can somehow create the kingdom of God on earth ourselves. That was part of the mistake of the so-called social gospel of the late 19th, early 20th century, was the idea that somehow the kingdom of God would come on earth when we were able to get all the education and environmental change that we could do. No, there's only one savior, and it's not us, it's Jesus. And ultimately, the future belongs to the kingdom of God, and God will bring it in the new creation. Our job is to be engaged, to be salt and light, to bear witness to the kingdom of God, to make a difference where we can, to seek justice, to walk humbly, to do mercy, to be engaged in society with the values

of God's kingdom, and that will then also transform the way we think and act in the political sphere. Chris, I think that these are deeply challenging words, and I know that many people listening to this want to be faithful apprentices of Jesus. They also want to be politically engaged citizens, and I would encourage them to go and read your new book. In case you missed it, it's called Here Are Your God's Faithful Discipleship in Idolatrous Times. Yeah, thanks. The only thing I could add would be, if any of your listeners are keen to follow up on the sort of more political, judicial, economic side of being involved in politics, when one of my earlier books, the Old Testament ethics for the people of God, would be possibly one dimension,

because it really does pick up what does the Old Testament teach us about? issues of justice, law, you know, being engaged in politics and so on. So it's a bigger book, but for those who are serious about trying to think through a biblical response in those areas, then Old Testament ethics for the people of God would be one to perhaps pick up. I do enjoy that book. I fear recommending it, because to most people, that is a very thick book, it's frightening to look at. But for those who, you know, are really trying to think it through, especially for younger people who aren't so scared of that sort of thing, it might be useful. I agree. It's a wonderful book. I hope people will pick it up. Well, thanks again for coming on. I really appreciate you taking the time. I know you're a busy person and this is a sacrifice for you. So I appreciate you making that for us for us. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with? Texting an episode to a friend or a family member is a

great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.