“Wright”–ing off the debt for the third world
It may not be Easter, but as Christians, we are a resurrection people–that is, our calling is to live out, every day of the year, the radical implications of Christ’s resurrection and victory over sin and death. Living in a post-resurrection world essentially means, according to the former Bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright, “God’s new world has begun, therefore we’ve got a job to do, and God’s Spirit to help us do it.” The Easter event, being a fundamental restructuring of the world in which Christ is exalted as Lord over all of New Creation, compels Christians to act as agents of justice, mercy, peace, and reconciliation—the “advance guard” of God’s forgiveness.
A subject of the British Empire, Wright has not shied away from dashing all sorts of modernity’s callow optimism and imperialistic aspirations with a fresh breath of hope stirred up by an ancient yet very much relevant story about God’s actions in human history. Most of the time, Wright has the Western economic and political powers in mind when he speaks of the empires in today’s world; empires that have so far shown themselves to be more wrapped up in achieving their own ends at the expense of life, money, environment, and the rest of the world.
In the wake of World War II and decolonization, Western powers managed to take the high ground (which we still occupy) in providing financial loans to the developing world. Over the years, the debt owed by the developing world has mushroomed into a crushing financial responsibility that has incited corruption, violence, and abject poverty. How can we respond?
We can call on governments to write off the debt. Among his New Testament research, Wright finds time out of his busy schedule to call the Church to pay attention to the developing world’s debt. Wright has taken a firm stance for cancelling this debt.
Why? Because through the Resurrection, Christ, the truly just ruler, establishes himself as Lord over all Creation, the just judge of the empires. With our help, Christ initiates the birth of the Kingdom of God on earth in which sin in all its forms and oppression, poverty, injustice, sickness and violence are all stamped out in the name of his victory over the forces of sin, darkness, evil, and corruption. Jesus took “upon himself the full force of the world’s cruel systems, the political and economic enslavement from which we still suffer, so that the power of evil can be broken and something new may
take its place.”
Modern empires have attempted to hush up God and his story. God and his people are relegated to the realm of “private religion.” But God is a public God, with Jesus being his very public Incarnation. As such, the Church as the Body of Christ must remain unfailingly public in its prophetic witness against the residual forces of darkness that still roam the earth, against the empires that forget where their true authority is derived from and what their responsibility truly is, and against those idols of money, sex, and violence that we still run to when we are feeling powerless, hopeless, and in need of a rush of what we think is “hope.”
N.T. Wright will be visiting TWU, November 16-17, as part of the Distinguished Lecturer Series. He will be speaking at chapel and at a public lecture at Christian Life Assembly on Tuesday, November 16. Stay tuned to find out more.
Ryan Schutt
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