God had a purpose when he created the universe and put man in the center of it. This is what the Bible tells us. I believe God’s plan was not thwarted by Adam and Eve eating from the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God’s plan was not thwarted by Cain killing Abel, and God’s plan was not thwarted by the Babylonians constructing a tower to their own glory.
God is patient and long-suffering. He created His universe and called it good, but His plan is and always has been to perfect His creation.
God gave us the ability to go our own way, but God’s purposes will be accomplished despite the freedom God gave us.
God gave us the ability to create our own kingdoms, but God’s purposes are to invite all people to embrace His kingdom. He provides the way freely as a gift, but our kingdoms often look better to us, and our ways seem right in our own eyes.
This is a very simplistic view of the whole sweep of Scripture, from beginning to end, which I believe we need to see so we don’t miss the forest for the trees. Of course, only God has perspective to see and to make sense of all the trees in that Great Forest. But, He gave us His word so we can begin to catch a glimpse of God’s great plans.
I want to focus on the big picture today, to survey the sweep and arc of God’s plan as revealed in the Bible, but I am not going to start with the creation of the universe or in the garden. I am going to start in Babylon. After all, we all live in a spiritual Babylon today.
We read in Genesis 11 that the world had one language and common speech. The people moved eastward, found a plain, and they settled there.
Recall that God instructed Adam and Eve to fill the whole earth. Their descendants settled in Babylon, however, and they remained there contrary to that instruction. They didn’t want to follow God’s plan; they wanted to follow their own plans.
The people came together to build a city for themselves and “a tower that reaches to the heavens” to “make a name for themselves.” This is a description of human beings choosing to go their own way, rather than God’s way.
They were afraid of being scattered over the face of the whole earth because that is what God wanted: for them to fill the earth. Because they resisted they were afraid..
The people were unified in going their own way against God. Their unity in going their own way was an obstacle to God achieving His purposes. For this reason, God confused their language, and they scattered over the whole earth.
People do not do well with differences. We isolate. We become group-focused. We despise others who are not like us, and we have inordinate pride in ourselves and our own kind. THIS is the story of human history.
It is also the story of God working His purposes in the world He created to achieve his ends. We may have trouble following it, but I think it will come into better focus if we jump quickly to the end. Then we will fill in the middle. All of this is just a brief snapshot of what God has revealed.
People are talking about Christian nationalism everywhere. The term, Christian nationalism, is often used and often invoked, but I don’t see it often defined. It can mean different things to different people. The phrase has increasingly become a pejorative label, though some people wear the pejorative label proudly now like a badge of honor.
My concern about “Christian nationalism” grows out of my own Christian experience. I admit that my experience is primarily anecdotal, but I find in Scripture adequate cause for that concern, and Scripture shines light on my experience and on any form of Christian nationalism, as I will explain.
I am chiefly concerned about the Church’s faithful witness and faithful adherence to following Christ. I am concerned that the world often confuses Christianity with particular political expressions, and I am concerned that Christians often do exactly the same thing.
The very fact that “Christian” nationalism has become a pejorative label suggests my concerns have some warrant. And not just me; I see a rising tide of concerned followers of Christ wrestling with the issue.
Jesus was clear to his detractors, and to his followers, that people should give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. (Mark 12:17) I don’t see Jesus confusing or conflating what is Caesar’s and what is God’s, but the idea of Christian nationalism does both.
The very term, Christian nationalism, blurs the lines between what is Caesar’s and what is God’s. It suggests a conflation of biblical and political principles. It creates confusion that results in (or from) not knowing where politics end and Christianity begins.
I have the same issue with the way people use the term, evangelical. Originally, the term had a purely religious and theological meaning. Today, media and political pundits ascribe a political meaning to it. For the majority of people today (perhaps), the meaning conflates political and religious ideas into a confused mess that can mean very different things for different people.
As for a definition of Christian nationalism, I “asked” Bing’s Copilot for help. The resulting definition is my starting place for the rest of my thoughts today (not that I think it is a particularly good definition):
“Christian nationalism is an ideology that seeks to fuse Christian religion with a nation’s character.”
I would agree that Christian nationalism is an ideology, but ideologies do not seek. (People do.) (So much for the power of AI.) It seems more accurate to say that Christian nationalism is an expression of Christianity and of nationalism that fuses the two ideologies together. Whether people seek to fuse them, or simply do fuse them, together may be splitting hairs.
Having become a Christian in college in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, I can attest to the organic nature in which patriotism fused with my own newfound beliefs in the milieu of the post-Jesus Movement. I didn’t seek or set out to fuse them together. They just became entangled.
Before I became a Christian, I grew up pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, as did all public-school students in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The Fourth of July rivaled only Christmas on my list of favorite holidays. Parades and flags and fireworks were the traditional rituals of the observance of nationalism and those rituals continue today.
Columbus Day served as reminder of our good fortune that God-fearing explorers with perpetual good will braved stormy seas and the specter of a flat earth to discover our fair land. Thanksgiving was encouraged as reminder that God ordained these things and established our manifest destiny in His good graces.
The groundwork for nationalism was laid in my life long before I became a Christian. I am a Boomer who was educated in an atmosphere of post-war optimism, but I am also a late Boomer. I was born on the cusp of the tumultuous 1960’s.
I witnessed the backlash against that post-war patriotism on the nightly news. The protests and protest songs, the burning of American flags, the “sit ins” and “love ins”, and increasing counter cultural attitudes pushed back against that patriotism institutionalized in the 1950’s and ingrained in my educational experience in the 60’s.
Many people in the American Church resisted the rising tide of rebellion against conventional norms, both in the Church and outside the Church. Many people clung reflexively to patriotism and national pride in reaction to the countercultural protest and unrest.
If traditional churchgoers were like the older son in the parable of the prodigal son in that time, the protesters were like the (younger) prodigal son. Our focus may be drawn to the excesses of the younger son, but we realize in the back of our minds that the older son is prodigal too.
My own story links up with the Jesus People Movement. The Jesus People were countercultural prodigals who found Jesus. They repented, turned from their rebellious ways, and embraced the Ancient of Days, God who became incarnate and died for the sins of the world.
I became a believer in 1980, and I joined a church with roots in the Jesus People Movement in 1982. The “radicals” who got saved in the early days of the church had long turned from their rebellious ways, when I joined them, and they had settled into a cultural conservatism that belied their former years.
Sometimes, we throw out the baby with the bathwater. Sometimes, in rescuing the baby, we take some bathwater in. Their newfound cultural conservatism was turning political and patriotic when I arrived. It was a patriotism not simply informed by secular pledges of allegiance; it was a patriotism that was infused with biblical blessing and mandate.
I spent six years in that church formed by hippies who migrated to the northeast in the late 60’s and early 70’s and found Jesus on their way.
These people had turned from flower power to a higher power, from the Rolling Stones to Randy Stonehill, and from sticking it to the man to worshiping the God who became man in Jesus and died for us.
When I joined this church, the original members had already closed their candle shops to become landlords and insurance salesmen. They no longer lived in communes where they shared resources in common. They were no longer long-haired hippie freaks. They had stable families and businesses and owned their own houses.
With their conversion, they repented of their sins, and they rejected their former radicalism. In rejecting their former radicalism, they embraced a newfound conservatism that included a renewed sense of patriotism.
While I was living with them, I saw the influence of the Moral Majority take hold. The post-war patriotism of the Baby Boomer generation turned religious when hippies converted, rejected their former radicalism and were welcomed into the church by older prodigals who championed the Moral Majority.
I also saw portents of a darker future. On the edges of that idyllic, “New Testament church” with communal roots from a more radical past lurked associates of the John Birch Society and sundry other political influences.
My church embraced politics as an expression of working out God’s purposes in our local community and to the ends of the earth. But the path to the kingdom of God is always a narrow one. We don’t have to wander far from it to find ourselves invoking God to work out our own purposes in our local community and to the ends of the earth.
Christian nationalism involves a blurring of the lines between God’s purposes and our own purposes. Christian nationalism is a form of syncretism – the blending of Christian belief into a new system, or the incorporation of other beliefs into the expression of our Christian beliefs.
In a recent podcast conversation I listened to Skye Jethani speaking with Brian Zahnd who mentioned his disillusionment with American Christianity at one point in his pastoral career. (Beginning at about 54 minutes into the podcast) Zahnd shared that he came to a place where he thought, “Jesus deserves a better Christianity than what I have experienced.”
What Zahnd may have been talking about is the kind of consumeristic Christianity that grew alongside the Charismatic renewal as the turbulent 1960’s gave rise to the Jesus People Movement and leveled out into a new style of conservatism and the allure of the Prosperity Gospel. that was his world, and it was partly my world as well.
I can relate to Zahnd. Though I grew up Catholic, I became a Christian in college and plugged into that environment – a more or less loosely associated connection of independent, charismatic churches in the 1980’s that had grown out of the Jesus People Movement. That religious culture was variously impacted by PTL with Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, the Christian Broadcasting Network with Pat Robertson who ran for President, and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, which became a political rallying cry.
And then I went to law school.
Influences during my time of “growing up in the faith” in my twenties included the prosperity gospel and right-wing political groups ostensibly intending to bring our country back to its “Christian roots”. These influences focused on gaining prosperity for ourselves and regaining power and control that we perceived we were losing in our society.
Brian Zanhd described a period of time in his life in which he began trying to “untangle American Christianity from Americanism”. I was forced into that same position by law school and what I learned about our founding fathers.
Today, someone might call what I experienced “deconstruction”. I began to see things from other perspectives. I began to see that separation of church and state was a mechanism that people hoped would protect the church from the state, as much as anyone hoped it might protect the state from the church. I began to see a disconnect between the things Jesus said and the ways we twist them to suit our own ends.
In more recent years, I have come to see that “empire” isn’t the way of Jesus. Empire is the way of the world. Jesus said his kingdom isn’t of this world! Jesus preached an upside down kingdom that many Christians warp into a religious version of an earthly kingdom.
Jesus rejected the temptation of empire in the wilderness. When the devil offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor (Matt. 4:8-9), Jesus responded this way:
“Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”
Matthew 4:10
The podcast focused on “Americanism”, understandably, because that is the cultural milieu in which we live in the United Stated of America. Americanism, however, is indicative of tendencies that are common to all human beings. These are the tendencies Satan tried to capitalize on when he tempted Jesus in the wilderness with the promise of power, influence and privilege.
These human tendencies are antithetical to everything Jesus taught:
Consider others better than yourselves;
Love your neighbor;
Love your enemy;
The parable of the Good Samaritan;
The greatest among you will be servant of all; and
Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but give to God what is God’s.
(God’s ways are not our ways, and His thoughts are not our thoughts.)
We naturally are attracted to what is familiar. We naturally advance our own interests. We naturally protect ourselves and our own kind. We naturally see ourselves as the good guys. We assume the best about ourselves. We identify with our own people, and we have a hard time protecting others from ourselves because we don’t see the need to protect them from us.
People were no different in the 1st century. Jesus was well aware of this human tendency, and he addressed it head on with his first followers.
The first time we see him doing that is right after the temptation in the wilderness in which the authority and splendor of all the kingdoms of the world were offered to him. The next thing Jesus did after leaving the wilderness was to walk into his hometown synagogue, pick up the Isaiah scroll, and read from it:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Luke 4:18-19
When he finished, he sat down, and he said, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing”. (Luke 4:20)
At first, the townspeople spoke well of him. They were even amazed at his words. Their amazement began to wane when someone remarked, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” (Luke 4:22) Then, Jesus dropped a bomb on them:
“Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ And you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’”
Luke 4:23
They did not even have time to process what Jesus just said when he added, “Truly I tell you … no prophet is accepted in his hometown.” They still didn’t understand, but they they were about to become really agitated.
With the next words Jesus spoke, Jesus picked a fight when no one was (yet) in a fighting mood, but he knew what was in their hearts. It is the same thing that is in our hearts, if we are not careful to root it out. I think you will see what I am getting at if you read on.
“By faith [Abraham] made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise.”
Apocaliptical scene to the Rome cityscape matte painting
I go back from time to time to the early “church fathers” for perspective. Most recently, I have focused on what we call The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus (the “Letter”). Even when translated from the Greek language in which it was written, the words and thoughts ring foreign to our American ears.
As I read this early Letter, I am impressed that Christians in the 21st Century have much to learn from 2nd Century Christians. They lived into the message of Jesus in ways that we seem to have long since forgotten
We don’t know who the author was. The Greek word, “mathetes“, merely means “student”. The person or ruling family to which the letter was written is also uncertain. We only know it was written in the early to mid 2nd Century.
The Church had grown slowly but steadily into the 2nd Century. Persecution ebbed and flowed around those early Christians, but they were more generally ignored and almost universally despised. In many ways, Christians were a complete oddity. They didn’t fit into the pagan (Greco/Roman) culture or the Jewish culture.
Christianity was centered in Jerusalem until the Roman war against the Jews and the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. Christians scattered at that point, though Jerusalem remained one of many hubs of Christian life. The 2nd Century was a time of decentralization and spreading out throughout the Roman Empire and beyond – into areas of Africa and Asia, some of which were controlled by the Roman Empire, and some not.
According to the Letter, Christians were not physically, culturally, or linguistically distinguishable from the people in the many places in which they lived. They were distinguishable in other ways:
“But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers.”
The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus chapter 5
The most distinguishing feature of those Christians, according to the author of the Letter, was their “striking method of life”: they lived as strangers in their own countries. Though they were citizens in those countries, they “endure all things as if foreigners”.
We might be tempted to think that the “uprootedness” of early Christians was merely a product of rejection and persecution by non-Christians, but the Apostle Peter suggests otherwise: Christians are a “royal priesthood” and a “holy nation” who live as “foreigners and exiles” in this world. (1 Peter 2:9,11) This echoes the writer of Hebrews, who described all great people of faith as “foreigners and strangers on earth”. (Hebrews 11:13)
These passages in the New Testament epistles highlight a fundamental trait of Christians in the world at that time. But not just at that time; Jesus spoke to all his followers (including us) when he said, “[Y]ou are not of the world” (John 15:19), and, “My kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36)
How strange are these words and concepts to modern Americans! From the earliest days of our youth, we are taught about our freedoms and rights as American citizens. In contrast, 1st and 2nd Century Christians enjoyed some rights as citizens of the various countries in which they lived (maybe not as robust as the rights we enjoy), but they lived as if they had none. And, this was their “distinguishing “striking” feature as a people! It is what made them stand out.
They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. 2 Corinthians 10:3 They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven.
the Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus chapter 5
Second Century Christians lived as if they were really not of this world. And, this “feature “striking method” of living was noticeable. They adapted and fit into their surroundings and culture wherever they lived, except for this one thing: they lived like they were not citizens of the countries in which they lived – even if they were actually citizens.
They were outsiders wherever they lived because they lived like citizens of heaven. They fit in wherever they went, but they stood out by their allegiance to loving God and loving others. How strange and foreign that may seem to us!
Many people bristle at the Christian idea of sin, and many people fault Christianity for its emphasis on sin. Richard Dawkins criticized Christianity in his book, The God Delusion, that it’s all about sin, sin, sin. His sentiment seems to be a popular one.
As a long-time Christian, I have a “robust” view of sin not just because I have robust respect for the Bible. I see sin in myself, and I see it in mankind, generally. I see it as a fact, like gravity, that makes sense of the foibles, failures, and futility of people and human systems I see in the world.
Not that people are incapable of doing good. Even who do not believe in God can do good. Even in doing good, though, I believe most of us do it good “selfishly” – because it makes us feel good; because of peer pressure; because we want people to honor us; because we want other people to be nice to us; or simply because of the utilitarian ideal that it makes the world a better place for me and my tribe to live in.
Most people, I assume, would be uncomfortable with my assessment. Maybe what I see in myself shouldn’t be “projected” onto other people. Maybe I am right, though. I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t think it is a fair assessment.
I think one issue people have with the idea of sin is that they don’t know what to do with it. It doesn’t fit into an evolutionary paradigm that celebrates the progress of humanity from primordial ooze to ape to rational being.
Absent a cosmic redeemer, people have no “solution” for sin. Reject the One, and the other makes no sense. Many people don’t want a cosmic redeemer interfering with their self-determination (even people, ironically, who believe we have no self-determination, because we merely dance to our DNA).
People don’t see any “value” in sin. The idea of sin makes people feel uncomfortable. They blame the concept of sin for making them feel bad about themselves. When people measure their goodness against others, they either feel shame or self-righteousness, because they see themselves as better or worse than others.
People blame judgmental attitudes, intolerance, lack of empathy for others, and a host of other evils on the Judeo-Christian concept of sin.
On the other hand, do people who have rejected the Christian concept of sin stop feeling bad about themselves or stop being self-righteous? In my experience, no, they don’t.
Abandoning the idea of sin doesn’t seem to help people not feel bad about themselves, and it doesn’t stop people from being self-righteous. People still compare themselves to others. People still struggle with self-image, and some people still seem to think themselves morally superior to others even after rejecting the concept of sin.
The Christian vocabulary that includes sin has no place in alternative cultural constructs, like cultural Marxism, and the host of critical theories that flow from it. Judgment of others, however, is baked into those constructs, and virtue is signaled for group approval in ways that seem, to me, just as inimical as any bad church environment.
People are shamed and labor under judgmental attitudes perfectly well without the help of Christianity. In fact, I believe the shame and self-righteousness is even worse because other cultural constructs lack the Christian concepts of redemption, grace, and forgiveness.
But, I believe in sin simply because it makes sense of all my experiences and everything that I see in people and the world that is run by people. I have never thought of sin as a value proposition, other than to think that sinfulness is generally bad. I have certainly never thought of the idea of sin as good!
Navigating by Faith 