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The Conflict of Kingdoms: Church and State
60 Plays10 days ago
In a world of deep political division, how should we as followers of Jesus navigate national identity? And how should we think about not only partisan allegiance, but allegiance to the states we are born into? From the "Constantinian shift" to modern Christian Nationalism, the church has often struggled to balance the ethics of the Gospel with the demands of worldly power. Sometimes we have privatized the Kingdom of God, while at other times, we have sacrificed its uniqueness in order to seize state power.
In this episode, we strip away the layers of "Christian Realism" and "Two Kingdoms" theology and we urge American Evangelical Christians to rediscover the radical political identity of the early church and reject the spirit and propaganda of our age.
Resource Referenced: Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder, Moral Man and Immoral Society by Reinhold Niebuhr, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, The Schleitheim Confession (1527) (Anabaptist Statement of Faith), The City of God (De Civitate Dei) by Augustine of Hippo, Whether Soldiers, Too, Can Be Saved (1526) by Martin Luther
Interlude Music: Elysian Echoes by Ben Elson
Theme Song: Believe by Posthumorous
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Transcript
Introduction and Topic Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
It's the Reparidigm Podcast, and today we're having a conversation about how the Kingdom of God reshapes our identity and sets us as outcasts and aliens in our nation states today. We encourage Christians in our time to embrace this alien identity, to lean into the body of Christ as a political reality, and to ride or die with the ethics of Jesus.
00:00:20
Speaker
Enjoy the conversation.
Christian Allegiance and Worldly Powers
00:00:27
Speaker
Nick, I think Christians get really inconsistent messaging around how Christians are supposed to view their relationship with the powers of the world. Sometimes we hear that Christians are commanded to obey authorities.
00:00:39
Speaker
but other times we're told that they should obey God rather than men. Sometimes we're told that we're supposed to submit to the existing powers because they were established by God. Sometimes Christians are supposed to rebel against the powers.
00:00:50
Speaker
We say that we believe in the formal separation of church and state, but we also want laws based on the Ten Commandments. We look to God's instructions for Israel for guidance in establishing our own laws, but we also discount most of the Mosaic law because it was culturally or covenantally bound.
Political Implications of Jesus' Kingdom
00:01:06
Speaker
We read in the Gospels about Jesus coming and declaring a new kingdom, but we discount any real political implications that he might have had. Instead, we kind of focus on the spiritual, individualistic ways that we can obey Jesus' teachings.
00:01:20
Speaker
We read about the Jewish authorities handing Jesus over to a Roman governor for public execution as a political rebel, but we consider his death only in terms of forgiveness of personal guilt. We read that Jesus will return to crush the nations and bring his perfect justice.
00:01:35
Speaker
But then we look to our own nations for safety and security. We read that love for neighbor and enemy is the fulfillment of the law. But we're quick to set this aside when the powers of the world offer us safety and comfort.
00:01:47
Speaker
We do. I wonder where all this confusion comes from. i think maybe it's because we don't really take Christianity seriously as a political identity. Yeah, i think you're right. It's easy for us, I think, to miss the context of Jesus' ministry.
00:02:02
Speaker
He entered a tense political context and declared a new kingdom, establishing it through his ministry. This was a kingdom with a radically different approach to power, one that was incompatible with any of the existing power structures that he was interacting with during his life.
Ethical Conflicts and Dual Allegiances
00:02:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's key. Every kingdom provides an ethical vision for its citizens, a framework for what to value, like what is good, what is evil, what should be pursued, what should not be pursued.
00:02:30
Speaker
And because the vision of the world's kingdom stands in inherent conflict with the kingdom of Jesus, at least eventually at some point, it calls into question whether we can faithfully maintain a dual allegiance, one to the kingdoms of the world and then one to the kingdom of God.
00:02:46
Speaker
The early Christians would likely see this as compromise, what Jesus would maybe call serving two masters.
Early Christians as Outsiders
00:02:53
Speaker
Yeah, I think that early Christians saw that the church's position as being outsiders to the existing power structures was not just a symptom or an outcome of the way that the power structures of their day were, but it's actually a unique and identifying feature of the church.
00:03:07
Speaker
It was intended to be the people outside of the power structures because it operated on a fundamentally different understanding of power. Yeah. yeah The church was meant to be the people dedicated to following Jesus' example. And this demanded exclusive allegiance to Jesus against any powers of the world.
00:03:25
Speaker
But of course, historically, the church hasn't always maintained this separateness from allegiances to the kingdoms of the world. In fact, I feel like the church throughout history has been pretty creative in how to, you know, kind of avoid the conflict of identities between kingdom of God and kingdoms of the world.
Church and State: The Constantinian Shift
00:03:42
Speaker
There have been a lot of really creative approaches to kind of untying this knot. Probably the one of the most prevalent approaches was just to join the kingdom of God to the state. And this is what we'd call Christendom. This is what happened, obviously, after Constantine in the fourth century and onward throughout medieval Europe and now on to today in various expressions.
00:04:03
Speaker
The wedding of the church with the state, instead of the church being a separate political identity that was often persecuted by the state, That wedding is referred to by historians as the Constantinian shift.
00:04:16
Speaker
It's the moment that the church traded its status as a persecuted minority for imperial power and protection. A deal with the devil's kingdom, so to speak. And when the church made this deal, it lost its ability to speak truth to power because it was then the power.
00:04:34
Speaker
For over 1,200 years, 1,500 years, longer than that, Western Christianity largely chose this marrying option. Let's just marry the kingdom of God with the kingdoms of the world.
00:04:45
Speaker
From Constantine through the Holy Roman Empire, obviously, and on into the Reformation and afterward, the church leveraged state power for doctrinal advancement, for its theological claims.
00:04:58
Speaker
Reformers like Calvin and Zwingli continued this Christendom model in their way, but on a smaller, like, municipal scale, maybe. But Calvin even supported the execution of theological dissidents like Michael Servetus, while Zwingli, interestingly enough, died on the battlefield fighting against Catholic Christians after trying to starve them to death.
00:05:19
Speaker
In these instances, the state's ethics of violence and coercion superseded the ethics of Jesus.
Reformation and Power Struggles
00:05:27
Speaker
Basically rendering the kingdom of God unrecognizable from the kingdoms of the world. It is interesting to think about from the perspective of an outsider to the Reformation, viewing this conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants and the way this got handled, there certainly wasn't anything uniquely Christian or uniquely Jesus following about the way those disagreements got handled. right They got handled exactly the way fallen humanity has handled every one of their disputes and arguments and struggles for power since the fall.
00:05:57
Speaker
you pick up swords and attempt to kill those who disagree with you. And then when nobody who disagrees with you is alive, then you've won. Yeah, like the Roman Empire dealing with the Gauls.
Non-Violence in Christian Identity
00:06:07
Speaker
I think we'd do well to remind ourselves that for the first 300 years of church history, the idea of a Christian state or Christian nation was an oxymoron.
00:06:18
Speaker
And we actually have no account from pre-Constantine Christian teachers encouraging even military service as a viable option for Christians to pursue. It was a much different relationship that the church had with the governing authorities than we have today. Yeah, we have plenty of writings, though, saying that Christians were to have no part in military or in any other government function that involved the killing or the death of people.
00:06:42
Speaker
As an early Christian writer said, whether you kill by the sword or you kill by the word, it makes no difference. Christians were intended. They were designed. It was part of their identity to stand outside of those existing power structures. That was how they witnessed to Jesus and the power that he demonstrated on the cross.
00:06:58
Speaker
Like we said at the outset, it's because they saw that the kingdom of God had different ethical demands than did the kingdoms of the world. And to mix and match those demands and those values together was a sign of unclarity at best, but infidelity or apostasy at worst.
00:07:16
Speaker
But of course, this isn't the only way that Christians have tried to alleviate the tension between living as citizens of the world, of the world's kingdoms, and living as citizens of God's kingdom.
00:07:27
Speaker
Some Christians have just internalized the kingdom of God instead. Martin Luther actually attempted this middle path that largely resulted, I think, in the internalization of Jesus' demands for our public life.
00:07:40
Speaker
He was influenced, I think, by Augustine's City of God in this, which famously distinguishes between the Sivates Dei, the City of God, and the Sivates Terreno, the earthly city. And Luther developed his two kingdoms doctrine, I think largely influenced by him.
00:07:55
Speaker
He has this treatise called Whether Soldiers Too Can Be Saved. And Luther argued that a Christian could, in fact, serve the state's left-hand kingdom, the realm of the law and the sword, while remaining a member of the right-hand kingdom, the the realm of grace, the kingdom of God. And he justified Christians even killing as soldiers against the teachings of Christ, of course, provided that they possess a clear conscience when they do so. They believe the war is just, for example.
00:08:23
Speaker
That they perform the act as service to their office rather than like a personal vendetta. they're They're not supposed to harbor hatred in their heart for the enemy. And as long as they do it, ironically, in love, he says, specifically in defense of the weak and in punishment of the wicked.
00:08:43
Speaker
But by separating the inner person from the outer office of soldier, Luther effectively allowed the world's ethics, the kingdom of the world's ethics, to override Jesus' commands in public life. In this case, to love your enemy instead of killing them.
00:08:59
Speaker
Yeah, it seems like he carves out a sort of internal disposition and says, as long as Jesus' ethics rule right here, then you can go do whatever you need to go do for utilitarian ethic purposes out in the rest of the world.
00:09:13
Speaker
Just so long as that internal part of you, that disposition where you love or don't love, apparently, is held for Jesus. Yeah, it's almost like love is relegated to a feeling. As long as I feel love toward my enemy while I kill them, i can say that that is in keeping with Christ's command to, in fact, love my enemy.
00:09:31
Speaker
A more modern expression of this approach could be called like Christian realism or like a lesser evil approach.
Niebuhr and Justifying Violence
00:09:38
Speaker
In the mid-20th century, Reinhold Niebuhr challenged the idea that the Sermon on the Mount could be applied to statecraft.
00:09:44
Speaker
So he argued that while individuals should strive for Christlike love, nations are inherently selfish. Therefore, a Christian's duty to their neighbor might actually require using the state's power and its violence to check like a greater evil. In his circumstance, it was Nazism, so was easy to justify.
00:10:04
Speaker
I think this sort of thinking remains the primary theological justification for what we call just war and Christian participation in state coercion today. It's very similar to what Luther talked about in his day.
00:10:18
Speaker
As long as we have the right disposition, then we can you know go with the world's ethics on these things. As long as we don't hate like the world, we can do what the world does. Or as long as we have a Christian goal or end in mind, perhaps it's justified to fudge on the ethics of Jesus in route to that said end. It's interesting hearing you describe Reinhold Niebuhr's ideas here because like I agree with that completely when he says nations are inherently selfish or violent. It's like, yeah, I think that is exactly what Jesus came to speak against. He said, my kingdom is not of this world and that it functions in a totally different way.
00:10:54
Speaker
He was establishing a kingdom that doesn't operate like any of those selfish, violent kingdoms of the world. But it's just funny that he will then reason that, well, this is somehow justification that Christians need to participate in violence because the nations of the world are violent.
00:11:08
Speaker
And so support the one that's just a little bit less violent or less terrible. yeah Lesser evil. Yeah. I think that is the argument. Since we are orientated toward love and shalom and peace and wanting the restoration of all things of all people, since the kingdoms of the world will never produce that, we can at least get on board with the kingdoms of the world that are doing less of the opposite of that.
00:11:32
Speaker
The lesser evil kingdoms of the world. Yeah. And I think especially in a crisis, that can be a very powerful means of motivating and convincing people. Yeah, absolutely.
00:12:01
Speaker
But these aren't the only approaches. The Anabaptists had a quite different approach to their identity with the kingdoms of the world. Unlike Luther's version, the Anabaptists – or these are called like the radical reformers sometimes – they argued for a total separation of Christian identity from that of the state.
00:12:18
Speaker
They argued that the state is outside the perfection of Christ. In this view, the state is ordained by God only for the fallen world in order to maintain sort of like a modicum of order through the sword.
00:12:31
Speaker
While the church is a contrast society. that operates exclusively by the ethic of the cross.
Anabaptists' Radical Separation
00:12:39
Speaker
Nonviolence. Communal sharing. One theologian arguing for this approach says that Jesus' death was a political act, but it established a new way of being human that rejects state-sponsored violence entirely. It's amazing to me how much that sounds like early Christian writers and that Anabaptists actually lived that out.
00:13:01
Speaker
At least sometimes. There are examples of them not doing so. Yeah. Surprise, surprise. Famously, they are known as Anabaptists because they sought to re-baptize people in the Church of Christ who'd been baptized into the state church as infants.
00:13:15
Speaker
In other words, the re-baptism was a political act, saying we are of this other kingdom. Exactly. yeah a baptism out of the state church, in a sense. And into the kingdom of God, the true church. That's exactly right.
Church as a Distinct Political Entity
00:13:27
Speaker
A more modern synthesis ah of these ideas is provided by Stanley Hauerwas, one of my favorite theologians today. But he suggests that the church shouldn't even try to... fix the state, or certainly shouldn't try to run the state.
00:13:40
Speaker
Instead, the church's primary political task is to simply be the church. Hauerwas specifically argues that the North American church is currently in like a post-Christendom exile and needs to stop trying to be the chaplain of the state, thinking that it can work together with the state to accomplish good ends.
00:14:00
Speaker
But instead, the church needs to start seeing itself as political reality that stands in contrast to the kingdoms of the world. The church as polis, he would say. a kingdom in its own right, for sure, with its own liturgies, with its own values, and with its own future hope. That's in contrast to the liturgies, values, and future hopes of any of our nation states or kingdoms of the world. Mm-hmm.
00:14:24
Speaker
It's interesting that that sounds so extreme within our religious climate today, that removal of the church from state. But when you look at Jesus' ministry, that's exactly how he lived it out.
00:14:35
Speaker
He was constantly demonstrating power and authority, and never once did he go attempt to shape the Roman Empire to be a more godly kingdom. or even go try to influence the Sadducees to become rulers who were more in line with God's plan.
00:14:49
Speaker
He stayed completely outside the existing power structures of the world through his entire ministry until the existing power structures executed him as a political rebel. Yeah. And notably, he didn't take up the sword either and take the Maccabean approach. Yeah. Which was particularly surprising because he had people who surrounded him with messianic hopes. Yeah. That was exactly what they were looking towards a messianic figure to accomplish for them. Yeah. They would have loved to see it.
00:15:15
Speaker
I think we see all three of these different approaches I described being advocated for today by different evangelical Christians in our country. Many evangelicals choose sort of like ah what I'd call like a warm, fuzzy Jesus. Maybe that's a little bit too disparaging, but I'll have my warm, fuzzy Jesus with my coffee in the morning and I'll have my own private kingdom of God. This effectively neuters the scope and the power of the kingdom of God, reducing it to a personal mental health therapy or what's been called by some folks, moralistic therapeutic deism. Hmm.
00:15:51
Speaker
Such that it has nothing to say really about the Christian community's public civil life. So this is the approach that Luther took, where you basically find a small part inside of yourself where you're going to remain obedient to Jesus' commands. Your devotions in the morning, get a line. And then when you go out into the day to vote or to interact with the real powers of the world, then you've checked that box off. And Jesus' teachings place very little demand on the way you actually function in the world.
00:16:17
Speaker
Have Jesus-like feelings as you use the world's ethics. Yes. And conversely, of course, we see, i think, a rise in restorationist, theonomist, post-millennial theology in our context today, often called Christian nationalism or something like that.
00:16:33
Speaker
And this is basically a return to Christendom. There's popular figures today advocating for Christendom 2.0. One of them just preached to the Pentagon of the United States military before they now started a war.
00:16:46
Speaker
This is very much a real movement. The Secretary of Defense or War, he is an avowed Christian nationalist. One thing that I do appreciate about this approach is that it takes very seriously the Christian call to be its own politic in the world.
00:17:01
Speaker
I think it misses the boat in that it totally fails to recognize that Christians aren't called to function like the other powers of the world. They're not called to be agents of God's vengeance. So it's like, yes, the Christian church is supposed to be its own political reality.
00:17:17
Speaker
We're going to wet it up with the state and see what we can do. Yeah. That's the confusion. Yes. Yeah. They recognize that the church is supposed to be a political entity. But then they said, we're going to make it just like every other political entity.
Erosion of Jesus' Ethics
00:17:29
Speaker
Yeah. I like those tools that you have on offer over there. Yes. Those tomahawk missiles look rather useful. Yeah.
00:17:36
Speaker
Yeah. there Jesus is the one who commended Peter for cutting off the sword and told him, get back at him. But I think both of these methods actually lead to the same thing. And that's basically the obliviation of Jesus's ethics in the world and kind of the obsolescence of Jesus's authentic kingdom.
00:17:54
Speaker
Both pathways lead to the death of the church as a witness to new creation. One approach makes the faith powerless against the world's propaganda, and the other approach makes it identical to the world's kingdoms.
00:18:08
Speaker
One thought that just keeps regurgitating in my mind is that if we choose the kingdoms of the world to be allegiant to them, we are choosing the losing side in eschatological terms, right? We're choosing the old world that Jesus's kingdom came to displace.
00:18:25
Speaker
But remember, there's a third way. By choosing to boldly live as a different political entity, consistently living out the kingdom ethic, the church acts as a resident alien society, as Hauerwas puts it, that exposes the state's pretensions and and it showcases what new creation is like.
00:18:45
Speaker
So let me see if I'm getting this right here. You're saying the church is supposed to look weird because it's supposed to witness to a totally different version of power that Jesus demonstrated. Absolutely.
00:18:57
Speaker
So if we make Christianity into just kind of a philosophy that we follow in our heart, then we don't actually live differently in the world and we lose that witness. Yep. If we try to make Christianity like the powers of the world so that we can go try to get stuff done, we've also lost that uniqueness and we lose the witness too.
00:19:15
Speaker
but We lose the Christianity itself. It turns itself into something else while just maintaining a facade of the original thing. So in our context, yeah, we'll still use Jesus' language.
00:19:29
Speaker
But we'll be painting crosses on our bombs, much like the Crusaders put crosses on their shields as they went into battle against the enemy, instead of laying down our lives in love for our enemy and our friend.
00:19:43
Speaker
And by the time we've done that, we just have a different religion. We don't have the real thing anymore, even though we still use the same symbols and signs. If we're supposed to be members of a unique kingdom, and then we make that kingdom not a real kingdom, something we just follow in our hearts, we're not able to witness the way we're supposed to.
00:20:00
Speaker
And if we make that unique kingdom just like any other kingdom in the world so that we think we can go get more done, then we also lose the ability to actually witness to any alternative power. Yeah. And again, i think when our friends and our loved ones find this approach radical, is the word you used, it may be helpful to remind them and to remind ourselves that this is the oldest version of the faith that was expressed by the early Christian writers.
00:20:23
Speaker
One that recognizes that if Jesus is Lord, Caesar can't be. I mean, that just is viewed as a radical approach in our context today. You know, if if we're really to extract ourselves from state identity, to not consider ourselves patriots or whatever of the kingdoms of the world, to not celebrate our military's exploits, the killings, the assassinations, the bombings, it's seen to be too radical to prioritize Christ's ethics when they conflict with the national interests. And that's usually where the rubber hits the road.
00:20:56
Speaker
When Jesus commands us to love our enemy and the state commands an airstrike instead, the pushback against nonviolence is often animated and ironically aggressive.
00:21:07
Speaker
But I think that rejecting national allegiance and allegiance to any kingdoms of the world, I don't think that's actually a radical like end goal at all.
00:21:17
Speaker
I think it's maybe just the beginning of following Christ. It's kind of entailed in conversion.
Call for Separation from State Identity
00:21:24
Speaker
That's why I feel a profound personal sense of grief. I find myself asking this all the time.
00:21:30
Speaker
Would we even be recognizable as Christians to the early church if you were to transport one of them to our time? We take such a shockingly different approach to state allegiance than they did.
00:21:41
Speaker
It's interesting hearing you talk about this kind of radical call to extract ourselves from state identity. I like the way you put that. And when I think about Jesus in his original context, like that must have been how his teaching sounded as well.
00:21:54
Speaker
People looking to a Jewish Messiah who was going to take up arms and reestablish the kingdom of Israel over and against Rome did not like a lot of the things that Jesus was teaching. There probably were some that viewed it as weak.
00:22:06
Speaker
Yeah. In order to accept Jesus as Messiah and believe the things that he was saying would have required that they give up so much of their political identity.
00:22:16
Speaker
The hope that they had for safety and security in the world, that safety and security through a new kingdom of Israel would have been something that they would have had to felt like they gave up on. I think that's probably part of the reason that it was so hard for so many faithful Jews to accept Jesus.
00:22:32
Speaker
Yeah, and he was subverting the wrong people and the wrong systems. He was subverting those who would seek to throw off Rome by violent rebellion. He was subverting those who did have status within that system, the Sadducees, you know.
00:22:46
Speaker
He was subverting all the wrong folks. Like, he was supposed to go after the Romans, not go after, you know, the power structures of the Second Temple Jews. Yeah. Like he could have taken either side
Jesus' Subversion of Power Hopes
00:22:56
Speaker
of the politics there. He could have kind of gotten into the Sadducees and said, hey, let's find a way to get along with the existing power structures and make a better life for ourselves here and now. Let's buddy up with them and make the best of it. Or he could have gone, you know, found a group of zealots who wanted to go start an armed rebellion. Other messianic figures did exactly that. He knew a guy.
00:23:14
Speaker
One of them followed him. That was part of one of those groups. Had one in his crew. Absolutely. But he didn't. And what he does do is just entirely surprising to everybody. take up your cross and follow me, didn't have all of the theological ideas around the cross that we have today.
00:23:31
Speaker
It was the Roman instrument of executing political rebels. Yeah. To put Jesus' words in that context, this was an extreme call to extract oneself from a state identity or from a national hope or from any kind of trust or confidence in the powers of the world.
00:23:48
Speaker
Yeah, when your national enemy forces you to do something, ask him how his day was, you know, give him your coat, give the extra mile, make sure he's doing all right. We're all broken in this world. Make sure that guy's doing all right.
00:24:02
Speaker
Yeah, that radical message of Jesus demanded a conversion in his context. Romans were called to abandon their allegiance to Rome and the emperor for a new kingdom and a new king of kings.
00:24:13
Speaker
Jews were called to leave behind their community, suffering persecution from their family and friends, giving up that hope that they would have had of a new kingdom of Israel. Yeah, and all their social capital along with it.
00:24:26
Speaker
And that's why I said, i think rejecting allegiance to the kingdoms of the world and state identity, whatever you want to call it, I really do think it's tied up in the inception point of becoming a follower of Jesus. It is tied up with conversion.
00:24:42
Speaker
Like we said, the Anabaptists saw it that way and that's where they baptized people again out of the kingdoms of the world into the kingdom of God as they saw it The early church saw the emperor as a beast controlled by the devil, right? That's what you see in Revelation.
00:24:58
Speaker
But we have a love affair with ours. Like we're not even close to having the same attitude toward our worldly leaders, especially the ones we, you know, preferred and elected. And neither do we have the same understanding as the early Christians did about their empire itself in their time.
00:25:14
Speaker
We really love ours and view ours as our big fuzzy teddy bear friend that we want to cozy up to They didn't. They're like, this thing's from the devil and God's going to displace it someday when his kingdom comes and rules over all.
00:25:27
Speaker
I think many of us would not rejoice at all if we saw our empire fall and so many people across the earth get justice. But, you know, our pocketbooks would be implicated in that fall and we wouldn't rejoice at all.
00:25:39
Speaker
Yeah. I think we American evangelicals, at least, have often redefined Christianity to be compatible with the propaganda of the world, resulting in kind of an impotent faith that can't stop or say anything about genocide and starvation or resource exploitation.
00:25:59
Speaker
We just merrily go along with it. i think we cling to this compatible faith because we're comfortable and maybe we're scared. We're scared of what we could lose. Embodying Christ's life, his radical generosity, his costly burden sharing, his intentional peacemaking in our communities and in and among our friendships, our communities, etc.
00:26:21
Speaker
All these things cost social capital, and I'm not sure we're willing to pay the price sometimes.
Challenge to Worldly Values
00:26:27
Speaker
If our faith can't form an identity that stands against the world's value structures, though, i think it's a dead or a very weak faith.
00:26:35
Speaker
A very sickly one. It's at best ah moral therapeutic deism. Yeah.
00:27:08
Speaker
How will we take up our cross and give up our actual lives if we're too timid to even lose modicum of power in the present world order? This is an indictment, I think, of our faith.
00:27:21
Speaker
Yeah, if we take our call to follow Jesus seriously, then we certainly can't be placing our identity in any nation or empire power of the world. That's just trusting in one of the temporary, these fallen human structures that are operating on a faulty premise that Jesus exposed.
00:27:37
Speaker
Doing this is placing our hope in sinking sand, and it leaves us empty in our attempt to witness to the world. If we're going to proclaim that Jesus is the true King of Kings who freed us from the fear of death, then we go running to the violent worldly powers for protection every time we feel threatened.
00:27:54
Speaker
Our witness isn't worth very much. Yeah, we sort of give away the game when we live in fear like everyone else does. When we support the empire's interests that conflict with the teachings of Christ, we may just feel like we're being good patriots or whatever, but I think the reality is we're living in fear.
00:28:12
Speaker
We're living within the system that fear and death has set up. Might makes right. Strength makes security. Killing makes peace. We're living by all of the same rules and ideas that were firmly established before Jesus came.
00:28:27
Speaker
Nothing about the way we live out Christianity is actually witnessing to any kind of newness or anything that is uniquely Jesus following in the world. The elemental spirits of the world's fallen order. But like I said, there is a faithful way.
00:28:42
Speaker
And I think now more than ever, we need to walk the faithful path. We need to tell the truth and not compromise on the ethics of Jesus. Too many people are dying not to.
00:28:54
Speaker
The kingdom of God just isn't situated within the right-left partisan paradigm that we live in in our country. And it's not even situated within the, you know, United States versus X country paradigm that we live in.
00:29:09
Speaker
If Jesus's ethic cuts left, then it cuts left. And it is what it is. And if it cuts right, then it cuts right. The kingdom systematically displaces the social dominance hierarchies that the world runs on.
00:29:22
Speaker
I think it's time for us to stop legitimizing the state as a provider of identity or as ultimately a provider of peace. I think sitting in that right-left partisanship for a second could be helpful.
Critique of Political Systems and Power
00:29:35
Speaker
It's not that the right or the left doesn't line up neatly with Jesus' teachings because they just haven't quite gotten each of the issues right, but that in their very approach to power, they are opposed to what Jesus has taught.
00:29:48
Speaker
If your preferred political people do not exemplify laying down their interests in behalf of the other, then they're not doing it Christ's way. Period. End of story.
00:29:59
Speaker
And that's that, like have nothing to do with that. If it doesn't look like love, then it's not of Christ. If it looks like fear, then it's not of love because there's no fear in love.
00:30:11
Speaker
This stuff isn't all that complicated, really. The New Testament talks a lot about it. We just need to consistently live it out and, I think, be faithful to it. It's easier said than done, but that's what the community of Jesus should be for, to remind one another that we're members of a different society, we have a different identity, we have a different calling card.
00:30:31
Speaker
And it's one that leads to life not only for ourselves, but for our friends and for our loved ones and for our society. We have the privilege of showcasing what that restored sort of communal life looks like and what we hope it will look like across the whole globe someday.
00:30:48
Speaker
But to give up that privilege of carrying forth the the the signpost of the kingdom of God is deeply saddening because we have such a high calling, such a privileged calling.
00:30:59
Speaker
It's a shame to throw that away and to pick up a banner of the world. a banner that's not going to give any life that the previous kingdom didn't give and the previous kingdom before that didn't give. They never provide the good life, the eternal peace.
00:31:13
Speaker
They never have. They never will. All empires fall. All kingdoms fall. But in the body of Christ, we think we're showcasing a kingdom of peace, of shalom that will never fall. And I don't think we should substitute that for anything less.
00:31:27
Speaker
Definitely demands a shift in placing our hope in a future resurrection and in a future restoration, a future justice, giving up some of that demand that we have for comfort and security here and now.
Living by Kingdom of God Values
00:31:40
Speaker
So all this talk about the kingdom of God being real, you know, living in this kingdom and rejecting the kingdoms of the world. i mean, it does sound kind of crazy unless you're on the inside. You know what I'm saying? Oh, yeah.
00:31:51
Speaker
And it can sound scary, too. Like, oh, shoot, what is this new group going to do now? Because there's a lot of cult type groups that have done some nasty garbage with this type of like separatist mindset, you know? What kind of Kool-Aid are you doing? Exactly.
00:32:07
Speaker
But I think it's important that we remain clear what our ethics are, that they're rooted in the teachings of Christ, that they're ultimately non-violent and we wish no one harm.
00:32:18
Speaker
In fact, we will be the ones protecting the people in all of the kingdoms of the world, even those allegiant to those kingdoms. We will be the ones not dropping bombs as the kingdoms of the world go to war.
00:32:30
Speaker
We will be the ones not dehumanizing as the kingdoms of the world slander. We will actually be the glue that kind of holds the world together, at least on some level.
00:32:40
Speaker
We will be the ones at least holding back somehow from being unleashed on the world. Yeah. So what would sort of like a ah manifesto for the kingdom of God look like?
00:32:54
Speaker
We will live in love. We will remain kind, but we won't shrink back. Our cause is political, but it's Jesus's cause. A different world order entirely. We confess that Jesus is Lord.
00:33:06
Speaker
To name Jesus as Lord is to recognize that no nation or earthly power holds ultimate authority over our lives or our ethics or our future. We are citizens of a global kingdom that exists across and beyond all arbitrary borders.
00:33:22
Speaker
We resist two kingdoms' logic that suggests that we can serve the world's ethic in public while following Jesus in private. We reject the sword. Where the state calls for the destruction of enemies, we follow Christ's call to love them.
00:33:38
Speaker
We embrace the way of the cross, loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us. When push back against scarcity, where the state promotes competition and wealth accumulation, we practice radical generosity and costly burden sharing.
00:33:54
Speaker
We oppose propaganda. We refuse to let our identities be shaped by the principalities and powers of partisan warfare. Our identity is found in being baptized into the body of Christ, nothing else, not our passport and not the voting booth.
00:34:10
Speaker
We recognize the state's existence in a fallen world, but we refuse to marry the church to its power. We'll not use the state to coerce theological belief. We'll not seek Christian nationalism, because the kingdom of God can't be built with the tools of the world.
00:34:25
Speaker
We'll live as resident aliens, a contrast society that shows the world a different way to be human. And our goal is not to win the culture war or any other war, but to embody new creation.
00:34:38
Speaker
We commit to being a people of unwavering kindness in our culture of rage, intentional peacemaking in our culture of violence, of bold witness when the cost of following Jesus is our social capital.
00:34:54
Speaker
As my guy Stanley Hauerwas said, the church doesn't have a social ethic. The church is a social ethic.
00:35:33
Speaker
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