VIDEO: Michael Nazir-Ali – The Struggle for Human Freedom and Dignity in a Warring World

The Struggle for Human Dignity and Freedom in a Warring World

Msgr. Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali

Christian Solidarity International – Annual Conference
Zurich, April 1, 2025

Read Msgr. Nazir-Ali’s talk as a pdf.

I am grateful for this invitation from CSI to address this question about the persecution of people on grounds of religion or belief. Are we just dealing with the ordinary human potential for evil or is there something deeper with which we have to engage?

The fact of the matter is that when we are dealing with persecuted Christians and indeed other persecuted communities, we often have the sense that we are not just dealing with wicked individuals who are persecuting others. We have the sense that there is something more than that, something “extra.” And the question is, what is that “extra” that we sometimes sense behind what is happening in world events, and indeed very often in the work that we do?

When the New Testament talks about this, it uses a number of terms. The overarching term that the New Testament uses is stoicheia, which is sometimes translated “the elementary principles.” These elementary principles can be of different kinds. In the ancient world this word was used to describe what made up the created world. Of course, we now know much more about those basic elements than the ancients did, but the principle remains the same.

As people living in this world, we are subject to some extent to these physical elements. We are limited by our bodies. We are limited by the world in which we live. And those invariances, the laws of the universe, also help us to live because without them, life would be completely unpredictable.

The stoicheia include not just the physical elements of the world, but also culture.

Everyone belongs to a culture. Some people belong to more than one culture. And it is from culture that we receive our traditions, ways of eating, ways of dressing, ways of coping with the natural environment, and ways of enhancing our intellectual, spiritual, and creative abilities. All of this belongs to culture and our place in culture.

But stoicheia also means the historical orders of the community. It means the family, but also the nation, and different ways in which human beings organize themselves. It also refers to religious organization. Again – no one is without such an organization. We all belong in different ways – to our cities, to our local communities, to our families, and of course to our nations. And that has a great deal to do with who we are.

Now, the terms principalities and powers. The New Testament uses different words to refer to these, but the typical words are archai and exousiai.

What are these powers and principalities? The first thing to know is that these principalities and powers have been created. They are part of God’s providence. In John 19:10-11, Pilate says to Jesus, “Do you not know that I have the power to release you or to execute you?” And Jesus says to him, “You have no power except that which is given to you from above.”

The principalities and powers are the historical orders of human association, as well as those within these orders of human association who have authority to organize and give the orders a certain direction. These principalities and powers were created by God and ordered in a particular way. So we need to recognize first of all that we are not just talking about the negative. There is a positive aspect to the principalities and powers.

If you want a biblical reference about this positive aspect, one is in Colossians chapter 1. This is a great hymn about Christ. It says that the principalities and powers were created by Christ and for Christ. Not only their origin, but also their destiny is Christ. In Ephesians 1:21, St. Paul says that the principalities and powers have been brought under subjection to Christ. He is above all things, including the principalities and powers. And we should not forget the sovereignty of Christ over the present order, however difficult that may seem to us in our particular situations.

So the principalities and powers have been created by God for a purpose, and to some extent we know what those purposes are. There was a great debate on this question in the 1930s between the two great Protestant theologians Emil Brunner and Karl Barth. Brunner thought that even in our imperfection, in our partial state of knowledge, we could say something about God’s purposes for these historical orders of family, community, and nation. Barth said a loud “no” to this. His position was that you could only know what their purpose was as revealed in Jesus Christ. I won’t go into the debate. You decide who’s right. But certainly from the Catholic point of view, I think we would have to be on Brunner’s side – that we do have some knowledge of God’s purposes and of the destiny of what has been created, even if it is fully and definitively disclosed in Christ.

But there is another side to this: the principalities and powers are also fallen. They share in the fallenness of the human condition. Very often when Scripture refers to the principalities and powers, it speaks about their fallenness. In I Corinthians 2, Paul says that he is talking about a wisdom from above, but it is not the wisdom of the rulers of this age. It is not the sophistication of the foreign policy of the United Kingdom or of the U.S. or whatever it may be. It is another kind of wisdom – not of the rulers of this age. And if the rulers of this age, the archai, if they had known any different, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
So we begin to see the fallenness of the situation.

In Galatians, we see both their createdness and their fallenness. First of all, we have Paul saying – and he’s referring to the Jewish law at first and then to Gentile ways of organizing – he says these things were paidagogos. This word is sometimes translated “school master.” He says these things were like the slave who took the children to school in ancient Greek society. That is what paidagogos means – the elementary principles that organize human behaviour. They are not what true human freedom and destiny is about. They are just a beginning. And so he says we should not be bound by these principalities and powers, by the elementary principles that we see around us, because Christ has set us free.

In Colossians 2:8, Paul says, “Do not be deceived by philosophy and empty deceit according to these elementary principles.” He’s talking about false thinking which leads to false action, to wrong action. He says, do not be deceived by it. And then he says that Christ on the cross has disarmed these principalities and powers. He has shown them to be what they really are or have become in their fallenness.

Now we could say, well, what is it about the powers that could have been authentic and what is it about them that has fallen? We can say that they are the informing principles of human organization – what informs human organization, what gives it form. They are what inspires humans.

What is the inspiration for acting in a particular way against a religious or ethnic minority? What is it that leads people to enslave other people? What is it that leads some of the Fulani to come further and further down Nigeria to kill the farmers and occupy their land? What is it? It’s not just individuals. It’s something more than that. Informing principles – what inspires people, sometimes for good but often for bad.

And what is the intelligence of the organization? I know there are businesspeople here and we were talking about business earlier. But to know about a business, you have to know what is the intelligence of the business. What is it actually that makes the organization work? Walter Wink talks about the spirit of an organization, the spiritual aspect of an organization, of a nation, of a community, of a religious organization, whatever it may be.

We know about this to some extent. We speak of the spirit of a school or the ideals of a nation. These can be very good, but these can also, as we know in Europe, go very wrong. These principalities and powers can be fallen, and this fallenness can be seen, for example, in the desire to dominate. In his book Engaging the Powers, Walter Wink calls this “systems of domination.” The desire is to exercise power over other human beings. It’s very innate in us, to enact these systems of domination.

Systems of domination can be about greed. I was once with a former prime minister of the United Kingdom – I won’t say which one – on a television programme, and just before it started, he leaned towards me and said, “Greed is good, Michael, isn’t it?” Greed. And I said to him, “Well, you would expect me to say it is not good, but why do you say it’s good?” And he said, “Because it makes people rich.”

You see, this is not just an individual opinion. This is the opinion of the economic systems that dominate our world – money, power, and of course sex. Sex sells everything in our world. If you go around looking at ads in Zurich – and Zurich is not the worst city in this respect – sex is used to sell everything, however ridiculous it may be.

This is how the principalities and powers reveal their fallenness. But we must never forget when we engage with these principalities and powers that they have been created providentially to fulfill God’s purposes. We should never forget that last phrase in Colossians 1:16. Not only have they been created by Christ, but they’ve been created for him. This means they can be redeemed.

Created, fallen, redeemed – that should be our story already. That is the message of the church to the world. And it is also a message of the church to the principalities and powers. St. Paul says in Ephesians 3:10 that the task of the church is to make the good news of Jesus Christ manifest to the principalities and powers – not just to individuals. It’s an amazing thing to say.

Now, I have great respect for Walter Wink and also for Lesslie Newbigin, who also deals with this matter in his book, The Gospel in a Plural Society. They both tend to say that the principalities and powers are only manifestations of the spirituality of organization, or the inwardness of an organization. The external structures show what is inside.

But is that all, or is there also a supernatural analogue to what we see? I think Wink and Newbigin are saying there isn’t. I would say there is, both in the good sense and the bad sense. The Bible also speaks of the angels of the nations, and even the angels of the churches. In the Book of Revelation, you will find that it is not the churches that are addressed. Sometimes in our homilies and so on, we speak as if Christ is addressing the seven churches of Asia Minor. It’s actually, in each case, the angel of the church. That is to say, the spirit, the inwardness, the meaning of a particular church. What is it?

Of course, if you read the address to the seven churches, some of them are commended for what they are and what they’re doing, and some of them are not. So even there, the fallenness of the principalities and powers can be seen. I think there is a supernatural aspect to it, both good and bad, and you may want to explore this. We don’t want to get hung up on it, but the fallenness has to do with something more than just human.

That does not mean that principalities are beyond redemption. But I think we just have to to mention this.

In Romans 13, we find the famous chapter about the godly ruler, the godly magistrate that we are to obey. The rulers are set over us by God – that is the argument in Romans 13. The godly rulers, those who exercise restraint and coercion for the sake of order in society, we are to obey them. That’s the default position.

But then how does what is said in Romans 13 become what is said in Revelation 13, where the ruler becomes the evil beast? Dietrich Bonhoeffer had to wrestle with this. What had been given for the good order of German society had become, under National Socialism, the evil beast. And then when he recognized that it had become the evil beast, what to do about it?

Pope Francis has said there is no such thing as a just war. I think he’s right. But we can also say with Bonhoeffer that there are some things that we have to do which may be justifiable, however partially and ambiguously.

The default position is that we must obey the rulers, the archai and the exousiai, the rulers and authorities, except when they prohibit what God commands. So for example, in Iran, Christian worship in Farsi is forbidden. But, of course, Farsi-speaking Christians must continue to do what God has commanded, whatever the consequences. And there are consequences – imprisonment, extrajudicial killings, harassment of all sorts.

So the default position does not hold when the ruler prohibits what God commands or when the ruler commands what God prohibits. One example is if you have a whole-scale revision of human anthropology and the rulers, the supreme court or parliament, tell you that marriage is something other than what the word of God has taught, and the church has practiced. The Catholic adoption agencies in the United Kingdom had been working for 150 years to place the most difficult children in adopted homes. When the legislation about marriage was passed, they asked for an exemption – only an exemption. “Please let us continue to do what we are doing.” They were told no, no exemption. You either obey the law and place children where your church’s teaching says that you should not, or you close down. So they closed down.

We are now facing a similar situation with the assisted suicide bill in parliament. There may be some limited recognition of conscience, maybe, for individuals. But the church also runs care homes for the elderly. You see I’m wearing the Order of Malta insignia here. The Order of Malta and the Order of St. John together run one-fifth of all care homes in the United Kingdom. What will they do? Will they be exempt from this legislation or will they be forced to allow doctors and medical practitioners to come into the care homes to kill people? You see how the godly ruler of Romans 13 turns into the evil beast of Revelations 13.

So this fallenness, this fallen aspect of the principalities and powers, how is it seen in our own experience? First of all, there is just common tyranny: people together being wicked. A very good example of this is Eritrea, where one man’s obsession with power has created suffering first for evangelical Christians, then for the Orthodox and for the Catholics. It is not, as far as I know, informed by any kind of particular ideology (though Marxism is in the background). It is just the desire for the sheer exercise of power. Even where there are other factors, you find this aspect of tyranny very much in the fore.

Then you have Marxism. Here in Europe there are people who have experienced Marxism directly. The problem with Marxism was not just the lack of freedom for people, but a kind of historical and economic determinism that denied God-given freedom. Both tyranny and Marxism are marked by intolerance.

In China, the church has grown exponentially since the communist revolution. In 1949 there were 3 million Protestant and maybe 1 million Catholic Christians in China. Now there are perhaps 120 million. This is the result of the Chinese Marxist state trying to stamp out Christianity!

Albania as a Marxist country declared that it would wipe out religion altogether. A few years ago, I had to go to Tirana. And as the plane approached Tirana airport, the air hostess said, “And now ladies and gentlemen, we are approaching Mother Theresa International Airport.” You see, that’s the victory of Christ!

In China, the Vatican has got this agreement with the Chinese government. Cardinal Zen, the former Archbishop of Hong Kong, said it is not going to work. And I think on balance he is right. Catholic priests and even some bishops continue to be under house arrest or in prison. The house church leadership is regularly persecuted. But in spite of that the church is growing, despite the persecution.

Then you have, as we all know, radical Islamism. Radical Islamism has caused the persecution not just of Christians but communities like the Baha’i in Iran and the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan. Now the Alawites – who knows what is going to happen to them in Syria? And the strange thing about radical Islamism is that it denies how Islamic thinkers and writers came to terms with the actual world in which they were living. The last 250 years of thinking about Shari’a, about Islamic law, have been completely forgotten, replaced with a desire to imitate what they think was happening in the seventh century. That is actually what salafi means – somebody who wants to go back to the very beginning. It has caused enormous problems for people – life and death issues.

I’ve just lent a book about Salman Taseer, the Muslim governor of the Punjab in Pakistan, and his children. All he did was go to see Asia Bibi, the poor Christian woman who had been condemned to death for blasphemy and was in prison in Pakistan. And when he came out, he said how terrible this was, that this would happen where he was governor. Within a few days’ time, his own guard shot him 37 times in the back! The assassin was then acclaimed as a hero by the extremists.

They have to forget and neglect what is the best in their own tradition, to cause this kind of suffering to happen, day by day by day.

We also cannot neglect the rise of new kinds of nationalism. Nationalism in this sense is always a danger. You’ve seen it in Europe and now we are seeing it in India. I was amazed in a recent visit there that the very people who conspired against Mahatma Gandhi, and in the end killed him, are now being celebrated with golden statues. This kind of nationalism celebrates race, ethnicity and even religion, to define who is in and who is out.

I was visiting a bishop in the west of India, and he said, “We have a bishop visiting us from the east of India. Would you like to meet him?” I said, “What’s he doing here?” And he said, “Well, a lot of his people have taken refuge in our part of India. Come and meet him.” So I went to see him, and I expressed my sorrow about the nun who had been raped and paraded naked in the part of India where he was bishop. He looked at me and he said, “She is my sister.” What can you say? I wept silently with him.

In August 2023, the church in Pakistan was mourning the burning of 27 churches in Jaranwala by Islamic extremists. But Hindu fundamentalist extremists have burned nearly 400 churches in India, in a particular a part of it. Nationalism like this is a toxic mix.

And then of course there is secularism. When I stopped being the Bishop of Rochester and started working with the persecuted church, I had thought that most of my work would be in the Middle East, Pakistan, Africa and areas like that. But the people in the United Kingdom said to me, “What are you going to do about people here?” People who lose their job because they are Christian. People who will not be given an exception of conscience. The Catholic midwives in Edinburgh who were told, “Okay, the legislation gives you protection not to perform an abortion, but you still have to prepare the patient,” and they lost their case in the courts.

Does this mean that Christians will not be able to enter certain kinds of professions? the registrar who said, “I’m happy to do anything you like but don’t let me preside on a same-sex marriage.” She was told, “No, you have to, if you don’t, you’re sacked.” The magistrate who, when a case came up for adoption, said, “I believe as a Christian that children are best placed with a married couple.” A complaint was immediately laid against him with the Lord Chief Justice. He was removed from the bench, and not only that, but he was also dismissed from other public responsibilities that he had, for example with the National Health Service. Tim Farron, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, was removed from his leadership because he was told, “In this party, a Christian cannot be leader.” We’re talking about something real. It may not be extrajudicial or even judicial execution, but it’s people’s living. It’s their belonging to professional organizations from which they are removed. Certain kinds of professions are being closed to them. In the United States, it’s the way in which organizations are being compelled to provide services contrary to their faith. This is real.

So finally, what should we do? The key verse here is Ephesians 6:12. Most Christians, when they think of principalities and powers, think of this verse. St. Paul says, “For we are not contending against flesh and blood but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenlies. Therefore, for this reason, take the whole armour of God” – the whole panoply of weaponry. And what is the whole armour of God? “So, get dressed, gird yourself with truth. Put on the breastplate of justice.” (“Justice” is what dikaiosynēs ought to be translated as, not just “righteousness.”) “Put on your feet the sandals of the gospel of peace. Besides all these, take the shield of faith, with which you can can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.”

So that’s the weaponry. There is no other weaponry. “The sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.” The term for “word” here is logos – this is Jesus Christ, pre-existent, incarnate, crucified, risen and glorified. That Word of God, that discerns what is the spirit of an organization, what is its inward meaning, what is its inspiration, what informs it, what is its intelligence. It’s only with the Word of God that we can tell the good from the bad, the constructive from the destructive.

And it says to take the shield of faith. Faith has two aspects to it. There is the faith by which we are able to believe. That is very important. We have a faculty of faith, the capacity to believe. It can be moribund. Sometimes when I see people in England washing cars on Sunday morning or going to boot sales – what do people find in boot sales? – I think, “Well, has this faculty of faith died? Can it die? Can it be awakened?”

So there is the faculty of believing, and Luther was absolutely right, I think, to draw attention to this, to faith as trust.

But then there is also the faith that is believed. The capacity for faith can be exercised wrongly. People believe in all sorts of absurd things, knowing them to be false. So we must also safeguard what is to be believed.

In Engaging with the Powers, Walter Wink talks about girding yourself with the truth. John [Eibner] was talking about speaking truth to power. But it’s not the same thing in each case. The truth to power is different, different, different.

In the case of Pakistan, for example, “truth to power” means telling people that the blasphemy law has been misused to victimize innocent people. I was addressing a cultural gathering in Lahore. And in the front row, I noticed there were some learned people from the majority community present. And when I finished, one of them stood up and he said, “Who is the person that you admire the most?” Well, in a way, for Christians, there is an obvious answer.

So, I didn’t answer his question directly. I said, “I have been told since I was a child by my Muslim friends and relatives that the Prophet of Islam when he was insulted forgave his enemies. I was also told that it is incumbent on Muslims to practise the sunnah [tradition] of the prophet.” And I sat down. There was pin-drop silence. Nobody said anything after that. It was like the encounter that Jesus had with the Pharisees over the woman they had brought to him. Everyone began to leave. Truth to power can take a number of forms.

In the case of Syria, we have to say who these people are who have been brought to power by the principalities and powers. They have not come to power on their own. They could not come to power on their own. We know the military realities of Syria. Who are these people? What role did Western intelligence play in this? Where did the weapons come from? Where did they receive this training that enabled them to do what they have done? Why did the Syrian army melt away in the way that it did? All of these questions need to be asked if we are speaking truth to power.

In the West, people are selling us a false anthropology, a false view of the human condition. And we have to say, “No, we are not going to buy this.” Because our anthropology, as we were saying earlier, is rooted in Genesis. It is an anthropology where human beings, man and woman together, are made in God’s image and given a common task which they perform in their own distinctive ways. Truth to power. I’m sure that each one of you will have examples of what that means in your own situation.

But then there is the question of justice. I’m so glad that in the United Kingdom now, there are organizations like the Alliance for Defending Freedom, Christian Concern, and others to whom people can go if their employment is being threatened, their family life is being threatened, or their children are in danger of being taken away from them because of their Christian faith. Alliance for Defending Freedom in India, on so many occasions, has brought about the release of people, especially pastors, who’ve been wrongfully arrested.

I don’t know about CSI’s priorities and how they will emerge, but I think this question of seeking justice for those who have been unjustly dealt with because of their faith, or maybe for some other reason, is very important. That is what it means here when he says, “Put on the breastplate of justice.”

Always in the cause of peace! Whatever we do, whatever intermediate steps we may take, the end result must be reconciliation, the restoration of friendships, the wholeness of society, the integrity of the family, all of these things that make for peace.

In the Hebrew Bible, and also in the New Testament, “salvation” and “healing” are the same word. Salvation and healing. Salvation and wholeness. In the end, the good news is about the wholeness that God wants for us. In his creation of the principalities and powers, this was his purpose. But like so much else in our human societies and our human lives, that has gone wrong. And part of our calling, not all of it, but part of our calling is to recover, to redeem what has gone wrong, so that God’s purposes in fulfilling the destiny that he has for the created order can be fulfilled.

So, brothers and sisters, the principalities and powers have been created by God, they have fallen away from their original vocation, but they can be redeemed by the apostolic proclamation. This requires working with faith for truth, justice and peace in a cruel and unjust world. This is the calling of the Cross. It should be our calling.

Biography: The author of many books, Michael Nazir-Ali stands among the Christian’s world leading thinkers and social commentators. He was born in Karachi, Pakistan, where he was ordained as an Anglican priest. He subsequently served in Pakistan as Bishop of Raiwind, and in the UK as General Secretary of the Church Mission Society (CMS), Bishop of Rochester and a member of parliament’s House of Lords. He currently President of the Oxford Centre for Training, Research, Advocacy and Dialogue. In 2021 he was received into the Catholic communion and ordained as a Catholic priest. Pope Francis bestowed on him the title Prelate of Honour of His Holiness. Having been closely associated with the evangelical wing of Anglicanism he sometime describes himself as being “Catholic and evangelical.”