How political is the Bible? Received wisdom tends to offer up two answers to this question.

The first is "not very" because, so the argument goes, Jesus was deliberately apolitical. A 2009 Sunday Times review of two books by the distinguished New Testament historian Geza Vermes gave as good an example of this as you could hope for. "Jesus's main concern," wrote the reviewer, "was healing the sick, comforting the poor and preaching about the coming of the Kingdom of God. He had no interest in politics, revolution or theology."

The idea that "kingdom" is not a political term, "God" is not a theological term and preaching about the "coming" of both is not a "revolutionary" act (however we understand that phrase) is, to put it kindly, odd.

In reality, it is not just such obviously political words that are in fact political.

As the theologian Oliver O'Donovan has observed, "almost the whole vocabulary of salvation in the New Testament has a political pre-history of some kind", including words like salvation, justification, peace, and faithfulness.

We might be forgiven for not hearing the political overtones in "salvation" or "faithfulness", so determined have we been to over-spiritualise Christianity, but how can we not hear politics in "peace", let alone "kingdom"?

This, then, is one answer that is clearly wrong. There is, however, a second, more subtle response, which is that the Bible is political but that its politics is univocal and largely supportive of my own existing political beliefs.

Those of a more authoritarian bent tend to hear the biblical message of political order above any other. Establishment evangelicals in early 19th-century Britain were accused of owning Bibles that fell open naturally and repeatedly on chapter 13 of Paul's letter to the Romans, which begins (in the King James translation): "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God." Authoritarians naturally hear an authoritarian tune.
By contrast, those of a more liberal or libertarian persuasion, hear the Bible's message of political freedom most clearly. Christian radicals of the early 19th century hurled the words of Jesus, with some effect, at the powers that be. Like the sectaries of the mid-17th century with whom they were compared, they saw the Exodus, in which God liberated a vulnerable and victimised people from slavery, as the paradigm of biblical politics.

It was and is possible to hear both tunes, although rarely at the same time.

William Wilberforce, for example, was accused of radicalism, even Jacobinism, for his indefatigable campaign to abolish slavery, while also being condemned as brutally authoritarian for his defence of the Peterloo massacre and his support of the ensuing, draconian Six Acts.

The Bible, then, is not only an irreducibly political text but one that is profoundly complex and intractable, with a discomfiting tendency to cut across our natural political categories.

Partly because of this difficult, angular nature, and partly because it is the only political text to have been widely read, discussed and digested at every level in society, the Bible has done more to shape the ground of British political thought than any other text. Over the next eight weeks, I will explore the impact it has had on our ideas of justice, equality, toleration, nationhood, democracy, and the welfare state.

This is not to say – to pre-empt the inevitable comments – that such political commitments would never have arisen without the influence of the Bible or that they will necessarily disappear if biblical Christianity ceases to play a significant role in our national politics. Both of those are points worthy of debate, but this is not the place for it.

Rather, it is to say that the British attitude to such virtues and ideas has been shaped, indeed was often founded on, the political Bible and we do a grave injustice to both our history and ourselves if we pretend otherwise.

This article was first published in the Guardian.