Buried in NT Wright's interesting address on the role of Scripture in the Church to the Lambeth Conference is this curiosity:
All this brings us to three particular features of tomorrow's world which stand out particularly and call for a biblical engagement that as we take forward our God-given mission. I am here summarizing the Noble Lectures I was privileged to give at Harvard University two years ago, which are yet to be published. The three features are gnosticism, empire and postmodernity, which fit together in fascinating ways and which provide a grid of cultural and personal worldviews within which a great many of our contemporaries live today. I speak particularly of the western world, and I regret that I am not qualified to do more of a 'world tour'. But I remind all of us that, whether we like it or not, when the West sneezes everyone else catches a cold, so that cultural trends in the Europe and North America will affect the whole world. (I notice that, though the current American election will affect everybody on the face of the earth for good or ill, only Americans get to vote. This strikes me as odd, though of course we British were in the same position for long enough and didn't seem to mind at the time.)
I'm not entirely sure what to make of the throwaway line. Is he suggesting everyone in the world is entitled to a vote this November?
Matthew Lee Anderson
Matthew Lee Anderson is an Associate Professor of Ethics and Theology in Baylor University's Honors College. He has a D.Phil. in Christian Ethics from Oxford University, and is a Perpetual Member of Biola University's Torrey Honors College. In 2005, he founded Mere Orthodoxy.
