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The Myth of a Christian Nation - Dr. Greg Boyd
129 Plays1 year ago
Dr. Greg Boyd sits down with the Reparadigmed Podcast to discuss Christian nationalism, the misinterpretation of faith in political actions, and the urgent need for a genuine Christian witness that transcends violence and political ideology. Our discussion sheds light on the historical misunderstanding of a 'Christian nation,' critiques the fusion of faith with political power, and calls for a return to the authentic teachings of Jesus Christ. Through examining the pitfalls of cultural Christianity and advocating for a radical, love-based approach to living out our faith, Greg challenges both the church and individuals to reevaluate their role in society. This critical exploration of faith, power, and the path to true kingdom citizenship is one that the evangelical church in America desperately needs today, as much as it did 20 years ago when Greg wrote The Myth of a Christian Nation.
Resources Referenced: The Myth of a Christian Nation, The Myth of a Christian Religion, Inspired Imperfection, The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas, The Subversion of Christianity by Jaques Roulou.
Additional Resources: ‘The Gospel’: how Israel uses AI to select bombing targets in Gaza and ‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets from The Guardian, US looking at report that Israel used AI to identify bombing targets in Gaza and Who were the World Central Kitchen aid workers killed in Gaza by Israel? from Reuters, Behind the numbers: Gaza’s unprecedented aid worker death toll from The New Humanitarian, Lavender & Where’s Daddy: How Israel Used AI to Form Kill Lists & Bomb Palestinians in Their Homes from Democracy Now.
Theme Song: Believe by Posthumorous
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Transcript
Introduction and Context
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Reparadine Podcast. Today we're sharing a conversation that we had with Dr. Greg Boyd. Dr. Boyd has authored many books, including The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Inspired Imperfection, The Myth of a Christian Religion, and the prequel, The Myth of a Christian Nation, which was the primary subject of our conversation. This is not a new book, but we think it has enduring significance for the evangelical church, and we hope you pick it up and read it.
Rise of Christian Nationalism
00:00:24
Speaker
Enjoy a candid conversation with Dr. Greg Boyd.
00:00:28
Speaker
You are a controversial figure, depending on who your YouTube video is. Two people in evangelicalism. Today we're not going to talk to you about any of your controversial beliefs. We're just going to talk about Christian nationalism. Easy peasy. So you wrote the book, Myth of a Christian Nation, over 15 years ago, almost 20
Faith vs. Politics Separation
00:00:46
Speaker
years ago.
00:00:46
Speaker
This is before it was cool to talk about Christian nationalism, before it was cool to critique Christian nationalism, before the MAGA movement and the former president's ascendancy to power. So what were you seeing back almost 20 years ago in the Christian culture and subculture that concerned you so much to write the book?
00:01:01
Speaker
For me, it started around the 2004 election, where I'd never seen the Christian evangelical powers come out so strongly and trying to encourage Christians to vote a certain way for a certain candidate, for certain policies. And what I found was that people in my congregation started asking me those kinds of questions like, why aren't you leading us and steering people how they should vote? Whatever.
00:01:25
Speaker
So what I was seeing is Christians starting to get caught up into the whole political system and starting to define their faith by their political involvement. And that's when I decided at that point that it's time to have a teaching lesson here, a sermon series where we talk about why we're not going to ever tell people how they should vote, direct them this way or that way or whatever.
00:01:47
Speaker
and it's called The Cross and the Sword, and that's what was the thing that gave birth then ultimately to the book, The Myth of a Christian Nation. But what I was seeing was what we're seeing now, but in a little more of an intense way.
The Myth of a 'Christian Nation'
00:01:58
Speaker
And that is that Christians who fuse their faith with their political solutions to the world's problems, and that has never worked good. And so I think it's very important to keep those two things apart. You have got your faith. That's wonderful.
00:02:12
Speaker
Political opinions, you know, I'm not saying they're unimportant, they're important, but how people translate their faith into a politics, how they vote and all the rest is a fairly ambiguous thing. People with the same faith, same love, same whatever, they can come up with different conclusions. And I think the kingdom is big enough to make space for that. It's got to be big enough to make space for that.
00:02:33
Speaker
You write in your book, many of us American evangelicals have allowed our understanding of the kingdom of God to be polluted with political ideals, agendas, and issues. For some evangelicals, the kingdom of God is largely about, if not centered on, taking America back for God. So what's wrong with that approach? Well, first of all, if you're going to take America back for God, if he supposes that at one point we were for God, this Christian nation, and
00:02:58
Speaker
When was that exactly? Was that before the importation of slaves, three million slaves? Or was that before or after we slaughtered the Native Americans or before we had Jim Crow laws and put the Indians on the reservation? When was this Christ time where we were turning the other cheek and loving our enemies and doing all the things that Jesus did? Because that's what defines Christianity. Our nation's never done that. No nation does that. And that's why the idea of a Christian nation is just, I think, a misnomer.
00:03:23
Speaker
Nations are nations, but the idea that you can Christianize one particular form of government or one particular ideology or whatever, that is what has been disastrous throughout history.
Historical Misuse of Christianity
00:03:36
Speaker
And this is how you get people who, Christians, professing Christians who go out and kill other Christians from a different nation because their king said, you got to kill those people. And so all of a sudden we have
00:03:46
Speaker
typical nation versus nation fighting each other, killing each other, but they're doing it under the banner of Jesus Christ who told us to turn the other cheek and to love our enemies and to never retaliate. What's wrong with this picture? It gets pretty screwed up when you fuse those two things together.
00:04:00
Speaker
Yeah, you also say in the book that you can no more have a Christian worldly government than you can have a Christian petunia or aardvark. What do you mean by that? Well, petunias and aardvarks are just inherently antichrist, so you can't have a Christian aardvark. There we go. No, it's like that. See, what's happening is that the label Christian gets slapped on all these different things. You have Christian t-shirts and Christian bicycles or whatever.
00:04:25
Speaker
It just doesn't apply. The word Christian, if it means anything, it means Christ-like, or at least that's what you're aspiring to be, right? You're a follower of Jesus. And so it describes a person who's aspiring to follow Jesus, to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, full stop. That's what the word means. And so you can't have a nation that's aspiring to be like Jesus. Maybe individuals in the nation can aspire to be like Jesus, but
00:04:50
Speaker
America as a nation is not going to turn the other cheek and love our enemies and blows those who curse us. We bomb them. We slaughter them. That's what nations do. And when we start to label Christian on it, all we do is we just water down the meaning of the term, but we also give people reasons to never want to be a Christian. If they disagree with their politics, well, then they disagree with their Christianity. And now you put up obstacles for people coming to find new life in Jesus Christ.
00:05:18
Speaker
Well, I think to that point, you use vivid imagery to contrast the differences between God's kingdom and the world's kingdoms. This tit-for-tat nature of the kingdoms of the world, which you describe as this power under versus power over when looking at this difference between Christianity and the powers of this world.
Kingdom of God vs. World Kingdoms
00:05:34
Speaker
Or as you also call it, lamb power versus lion power, or the cross versus the sword. So why is the kingdom of God incompatible with any of the kingdoms of the world, even a kingdom that some might argue is a good kingdom?
00:05:47
Speaker
So not all kingdoms of the world are equal. Some are better than others. Some are more humane and more just than others. But the kingdom of God is distinct from all the kingdoms of the world, because it's a kingdom that is centered on, for one thing, the cross. The cross is the centerpiece where Jesus most discloses the character of God. And what he just reveals is that God is the God who's love. And the love is defined by the cross, which means God's essence is other-oriented, humble love.
00:06:15
Speaker
And Paul even says that the cross is the power of God. It's kind of power that God uses is this power of humble love. It's not the power of the might and the kings and the bombs and the bullets and the tanks and all the rest. That's the kingdom of the world. That's power over. You impose your will on others by conquering them ultimately.
00:06:33
Speaker
Whereas in the kingdom, we're not out to conquer anybody. We're out to serve. And we trust that the power of the cross is what's going to ultimately transform the world. It's not the power of bombs and bullets. We've been on that merry-go-round all of history. That's the tit for tat. You hit me, well, then I'll hit you twice. You hit me five times, well, then I'll hit your kid. Well, then you're going to bomb my whole family. So I bomb your whole village. So you bomb my whole nation.
00:06:56
Speaker
What's going on right now in the Middle East? It goes on and on and on and on. I kill you, you kill me. What a happy story. And it's redundant, all of history. And we never learned the lesson. We keep on thinking, if we just kill enough bad guys, well, then the world would be a good place. Yeah, however defined, right? Yeah, however the bad guys are defined, right? The bad guys are whoever opposes us. In the kingdom, Jesus is just the lover enemies and the blessed those who persecute us to do good to those who are against us. So the action steps here. And that is just as
00:07:26
Speaker
It's counterintuitive to all of us in a fallen world, but certainly counter to all of the kingdoms of this world. The idea of loving your enemy is weakness in terms of the world, but in the kingdom of God, it's our greatest strength. Yeah. We're actually dropping this interview in a series of conversation that Matt and I have had about power. We just called it power. Important topic. The focus of the conversations have been really about the power of love.
00:07:50
Speaker
and the power of fear, fear of death, fear of violence, and that coherence of nature. And the way that you described so well that fear of death, I guess the death power is just a recurring cycle that never ends, goes on and on and on. And the only way it ends is when somebody looks like someone like Jesus of Nazareth takes that violence into themselves, but does not pass it on to the next person, sacrifices themselves in love, which is what the church is called to replicate. Exactly.
00:08:19
Speaker
and see that that's the only thing that can break that cycle of violence. You're either going to do tit for tat and you keep on escalating up, or you opt out of it. It's like Martin Luther King said in his A Stride to Freedom. He said that the redundant lesson of history is that there's a cycle of violence that perpetuates itself. He goes, at some point, someone's got to have the wisdom and the courage to say, I'm out. We just opt out of the system. And if we die, we die.
00:08:47
Speaker
But I'd rather die than live in a world where I have to kill to survive. I'm not going to do it, you know? This has come up in several conversations, including with our interview with Caitlin Schuss, but it's the power of the resurrection that gives us liberty to then not fear the death that might come to you as you're laying down your life for the world. I think you're absolutely right. Which is such a key hope then for the Christian and so central, and it actually shapes our ethics and the way we live. It has to. It's not a way of saying what you just said. It makes a real difference whether you're living in a short story or an eternal story. Right, yep.
00:09:15
Speaker
And if you're living the short story, the American dream, you know, this is the only life you got. You got to grab all you can get, live your best life now.
Christian Ethics and Eternal Perspective
00:09:22
Speaker
And self-preservation is the number one priority, right? Because there's no other hope. You might have vague beliefs about the afterlife or whatever, but it doesn't impact your life. You just live as a secular person here and now. That's the short story. But we're called to, you know, be living with a view towards eternity that this goes on forever.
00:09:40
Speaker
And what I do now and how we interact now with the world, that shakes me for eternity.
00:09:49
Speaker
If that, if you really are living in that, and that's a reality. So it's not just that something you think about when someone asks you, Hey, do you believe in, you know, the afterlife, but rather it's something that actually informs, this is the narrative yourself talk. This is how you live. Well, then you, you lose your fear of death because it's not the end. Now you may be unpleasant and I don't feel like being buried alive and all the other crazy ways that people get killed. But, you know, but, but the death itself doesn't, I'm not afraid of that. Um, cause I, I, I don't believe for a second that that is the end.
00:10:18
Speaker
Yeah, with this alternative identity that we're supposed to have as the church in the world, you say in your book, we are to see ourselves as resident aliens. We're to live in the world, but not of the world. It just says Jesus wasn't of the world, but he was obviously in the world, I would add.
00:10:34
Speaker
And you say this, that preserving this alien status is not an addendum to our calling as kingdom of God citizens. It belongs to the essence of what it means to be a citizen of God. You know how when the church has lost this mentality, the church of resident aliens became a church of savage warlords.
00:10:56
Speaker
how do we practically take steps to identify ourselves primarily in our country right now as aliens and primarily as Kingdom of God citizens? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:11:10
Speaker
I want to first note that I didn't come up with the term resident aliens. That goes back to Stanley Howard, where credit is due. But I love that idea that we are, in a sense, aliens in this present world
Christians as 'Resident Aliens'
00:11:22
Speaker
order. Now, it's not like we're aliens because we live on a different planet. And we're going to go to a different planet when we're done. No, this is our world. This is where the God created. And ultimately, it will be our home. But in its present world order, in its falling condition, this is not our home.
00:11:36
Speaker
And so Paul says that we're citizens of the kingdom of God. In fact, we're ambassadors of the kingdom of God. And ambassadors of reconciliation, 2 Corinthians 5. And an ambassador, you know, if you're an ambassador to a different country, your job is to represent your nation.
00:11:52
Speaker
That's that is your job and not to get over involved in their politics and all their issues to solve all their problems If they ask your opinion you can give it but your job is to manifest this different country to represent it So also we're to represent the kingdom of God the kingdom that is coming, you know And someday the kingdom will define every square inch of the cosmos and they'll all be consistent with God's love but our job is to do that now to be the already and it's the not yet and And that's how we let our light shine. So you asked what things can we do to you know do that?
00:12:22
Speaker
And my response would be, don't try to be an oddball. Don't try to be, you know, weird. Groups that do that just because there are groups that do that, you know, the church I was first saved in. And they had all these rules about, you know, how you had a dress and how do you look whatever because we have to be a witness. And so the girls were never allowed to cut their hair, for example, and they had to wear dresses all the time. And they thought they're witnessing to the Lord. And you probably couldn't wear red glasses or something.
00:12:47
Speaker
They probably did have rules on that, but I had an afro at the time, believe it or not. I used to have a lot of hair. It was a big afro when I came to Christ in 1974. And the first thing they had to go was that of hair.
00:13:02
Speaker
They think they're witnessing to folks, but also doing is being weird. People look at that and go, why would you dress like that? So don't try to be weird, just try to be Christ-like, and that will make you weird. That will make you weird. And when you start living in outrageous generosity instead of hoarding,
00:13:23
Speaker
Start including God and all your decisions. You know, Lord, where would you want me to live? Rather than do I just want this house and can I afford it? We're supposed to be under the Lordship of Christ. So to be submitting your questions to God and walking. You're going to walk in a different way than other people. And that is our witness. And that was by God's design. That's what's supposed to attract other people into the kingdom. It's the beauty and the attractiveness of this humble servant Christ-like mindset that we're supposed to be cultivating. That hungry people see it and they go like,
00:13:51
Speaker
I want what that guy's got, you know? So instead of focusing on not being like the world, just start being like Jesus. Start being the community of Jesus, and you will probably find yourself and your community is a little bit odd, is a little bit not like the surrounding culture, whether it's American culture or any other country on the road.
Conformity with Christ's Example
00:14:11
Speaker
To strive to be Christ-like is a strive to be the most loving version of yourself as possible. This is what we're to be doing for our life goal should be conformity with Christ, which means our daily goal should be conformity with Christ, which means our moment by moment goal should be conformity with Christ. And so I right now am going to be trying to be as loving as possible as I'm doing this interview because that's the call. It covers everything.
00:14:34
Speaker
And when you live in that, when that's your bullseye moment by moment, your life starts to take on a different flavor and you start serving. You'll start noticing ways you can serve others and the ways you can help the earth, you know, start picking up garbage that maybe isn't your garbage because it's not your earth either. It's his earth and our job is to maintain it. So, you know, there's all sorts of ways the spirit will lead you to be different.
00:14:55
Speaker
We see with the early church when they tried to follow and live like Christ, they developed some weird reputations.
Political Division in the Church
00:15:00
Speaker
They are called these cannibalistic incestuous atheists. What sort of labels do you think our country would put on Christians today if we as a community really tried to live this out?
00:15:12
Speaker
Um, well, you don't have to put it on hypothetical. And then there are people who already say this. Uh, but the, one of the things that, well, when I talk about nonviolence and our call towards nonviolence, I immediately get the accusation that the early church got and that that's, um, I am not patriotic. Uh, you know, I, I benefit by living in America, but I'm not willing to pick up a gun and fight for it. That was kind of CS Lewis's critique of the pacifists as well.
00:15:38
Speaker
that they only exist in countries that allow them to exist by propping up their nations with the use of violence. But see, as much as I love C.S. Lewis, I disagree with him on that point completely. Jesus was not living in a comfortable environment when he taught pacifism. And the early church was not living in a comfortable environment when they practiced it, and they got martyred for it.
00:15:58
Speaker
But it was the criticism of the rest of Rome, Celsus, talking to Origen, a second, third century theologian. That's what he's accusing him of. You Christians, you enjoy the Pax Romano, the piece of Rome and all the benefits that go with it, and yet you're not willing to get out there and fight.
00:16:14
Speaker
And Origen's response was, well, this doesn't make us unpatriotic. We serve our empire in different ways. We're not going after the particular wars that you guys are going after. We go after the one who's the cause of all wars. And our battle's not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, Ephesians 6, 12. But you will get a charge of being unpatriotic. You'll get accused of being weak, of being irrelevant,
00:16:42
Speaker
All the ways, the benchmarks that people use to say, you know, how are you a success in this world? How do you gain power in this world? How do you get influence? How do you win? Well, if you're not doing that, you'll get accused of being weak and irrelevant and all the rest.
00:16:56
Speaker
You discuss in your book Jesus calling of Simon and Matthew, and without forcing either of them to change political views, they both were to have a home in his kingdom and were to take an active role in his ministry. You then pose the question, what are we to make then of the fact that the evangelical church is largely divided along political lines? The Christian position is declared to be Matthews among conservatives, Simons among liberals. So how do we fix this partisan division problem in the church?
00:17:22
Speaker
It really is a indictment on the contemporary church that in Jesus' followers is Matthew, the tax collector who's the conservative of the conservatives, preserve the status quo, etc. And then Simon, the zealot, and they spent their spare time assassinating tax collectors. And so they're farther apart than a communist, a capitalist could imagine being.
00:17:41
Speaker
And yet Jesus calls them to be part of their disciples, and we don't read a word about that dispute. Jesus doesn't weigh in like, oh, well, you know, Matthew's a little more correct here, or whatever. It's a non-issue, which that itself tells us that when you have Jesus in common, your opinions about how to run the government in this fallen world are secondary importance, if not
00:18:05
Speaker
third importance, if not completely irrelevant.
Unity through Focus on Jesus
00:18:07
Speaker
It's just like, because you have Jesus in common. And with Jesus, now you're building for a new world, a completely different world order, not tweaking the existing world things. And yet here we are with differences that aren't nearly as extreme as Matthew and Simon, but we have
00:18:21
Speaker
two sides of Christians saying, you're not a Christian because you vote this way. And it's just, what it is a testimony to is that the lordship of Jesus and the beauty of Jesus is not important enough to us. Because the way to relativize all your opinions about everything else is to maximize your opinions about Jesus. But if you don't have a big center, Jesus, for example, then everything else rushes in to fill the vacuum.
00:18:44
Speaker
And so if he's not for support, well, then your opinions become very important. And how to solve this problem, that becomes ultimately important.
00:18:52
Speaker
What needs to happen, it's going to have to be the Holy Spirit doing this because I don't know any program that could possibly bring these sides together. But it's going to be a move of God that begins to heal that divide. Or God's raising up something that's going to be completely
Internet Echo Chambers and Division
00:19:06
Speaker
different. Right now, I think that's what's happening. That's my hope that the Spirit raises up a movement like that. Right now, part of the issue is that
00:19:15
Speaker
And this is not just for the church. This is for the country here in America. But with the creation of the internet, you now get to... For the first time in history, you can live your life and not have to confront people who disagree with you. In a complete silo. All you do, yeah. And the only facts you get...
00:19:32
Speaker
are the facts that come through through the silo. And it's just so, I had a discussion last night on a class that I teach here at Willows Church. And a person, God bless them, you know, they're coming at it from all sincerity, but he was trying to make the case that industrial farms are actually good for the environment.
00:19:48
Speaker
And it's like, what industrial have you done? Because everything I've read on this, and I've read a lot on it, it's one of the major contributors to the greenhouse gas emissions, to the acidification of the oceans, and all the rest.
Guided Debates in Love
00:20:03
Speaker
But in the universe he lives in, somehow he got the idea that it's good for the environment because cows eat grass and otherwise, I mean, it was just, how do you talk when you don't have any agreed upon facts?
00:20:16
Speaker
And this is a national problem. I mean, I don't know how, how do you run a country when people are living in different realities? So I'm not, I can't solve that problem. But for the church, the one shared reality we ought to have is Jesus Christ crucified. You know, Paul said, I don't, I resolved to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ crucified that contains it all.
00:20:37
Speaker
our identities in Christ, not in being Republican or Democratic or the National Socialist Party, whatever, it's found in Jesus Christ. So that should be, we should be able to talk about all these things in a calm, loving way. If you can't talk about politics and gay rights and abortion and every other topic in a calm, loving way, something is seriously wrong because scripture tells us to do everything in love. 1 Corinthians 16, 14, do everything in love.
00:21:05
Speaker
And so I always tell people that if you're in a debate, theological or political or whatever, your goal, and like I just said, our goal moment by moment has got to be to be the most loving version of ourselves as possible. So whenever you're in a debate, your goal has got to be the most loving version of yourself in that debate as possible. Your first job is to love, which means your job is to listen and to be curious and empathize and try to get on the inside of the person's mind. Because you can't even critique of you unless you really
00:21:35
Speaker
understand it from the inside. Yeah. Wouldn't, wouldn't you think that wisdom would be achieved knowledge or actual knowledge would be achieved if we had more of that love centered debate, I guess, not only in the church, but in the country. I mean, I was actually just talking about this with my friends last night, this just this concern that we're siloing ourselves off into tribes basically. And probably they're going to keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller because that's what tribalism does. But, but
00:22:02
Speaker
we don't listen to the data whatever the data are we have our own people who give us their data and then if the wrong person gives data you just you just don't trust trust them it doesn't matter if they can prove it or not you just don't trust since the wrong person saying it's more about who's saying it than what is objective or what is true and.
00:22:22
Speaker
Man, I just, and you're right. This isn't particularly in the church. This is definitely all over the culture. You would hope that the church could be a bulwark against that divisiveness in our culture because we have something at the center, like you said. Exactly. Something that grounds all of our realities.
Modeling Civil Discussions
00:22:36
Speaker
I completely agree with you. In fact, we're talking about doing this in the next couple of months as we're heading up to the election. But
00:22:43
Speaker
in this polarized environment that we in America find ourselves in. If the church was able to host discussions about all these difficult things in loving and kind Christian ways, that itself would be such a counter-cultural witness. You talk about being alien, you would look alien if you could do that.
00:23:02
Speaker
We are partnering with an organization called Braver Angels. And it was started in 2016 just because some folks, one of the founders goes to our church here, but felt like our country is headed towards disaster unless we learn how to talk to each other and have some decency around this and some listening skills. And so they've started this and they host these debates between all these, I mean, all the hot issues.
00:23:30
Speaker
And they have a moderator to keep it contained. And they have intelligent people out there defending positions that I would think... Sometimes I'm just amazed like how good a person can defend a position that strikes me initially as being so utterly, utterly implausible. But it's just good to learn and stretch. The first goal of any discussion shouldn't be, how can I win? Or how can I look good? It ought to be, what can I learn? Be curious about other people's view.
00:23:56
Speaker
And the more offensive the view is, the more curious. Like, really, tell me how that works in your mind. Not in a scoffing way, but generally. Like, how does a human being put the world together that way? You talk about the popular slogan, Take America Back for God. And you alluded to this earlier in this conversation as well, but, you know, Take America Back for God.
00:24:14
Speaker
If we're to take America back for God, like you say, then that implies that it was God's in the first place. This is kind of my question to you,
Critique of 'Christian America' Narrative
00:24:22
Speaker
though. Dodge out of it if you want, but do you think we evangelicals actually believe this Golden Age revisionist theory or is something else going on? Because it seems to me just to be ludicrous. Yeah, yeah. It strikes me as ludicrous, too.
00:24:37
Speaker
But there are many people who have this idea. God bless her. I don't mean to slam her in particular, but like Palin. And she said, the great thing about America is that it didn't matter where you came from, what gender you were, what color you were, what your background was. When you got to America, everyone was equal.
00:24:57
Speaker
That's just patently untrue. It's revisionist history. I like, you know, what universe, I know she later uncorrected a little bit. Yeah, there were, you know, some of our funny followers had slaves, you know, and yeah, there were, but those were the exceptions. That's a common refrain though. It's not just like a right wing thing per se, although it's maybe more on the right wing, but it's a common refrain amongst politicians that this place is and always has been a place for everybody, a place of equality.
00:25:20
Speaker
The city set on a hill, the last great hope of the world. But it is part of the mythos, and part of it comes from the Puritans who came over here, did see this as the new world. They thought that this was going to be the beginning of the millennium. Jonathan Edwards and those guys, they all, that's why they called it New York and New Hampshire, because this is the new version of the old York and the old Hampshire. And they really did have a kind of this
00:25:47
Speaker
Kingdom vision of America being this city and hill then that got fused with the founding fathers ideology, which is much more deistic, you know, and they
00:25:58
Speaker
I mean, some of them, it'd be a stretch to call them Christian because George Washington would walk out of service when they gave communion. He just thought that was barbaric. But then it creates this kind of mythology that America was founded as this Christian nation. When our phony documents, John M. said,
00:26:17
Speaker
Especially, this is not a Christian nation. There's no official religion here. That's what we're getting out of in England. We don't like that. And yet, when the two sides came together, the more secular founding fathers with the Puritan mindset, it's created this idea that
00:26:35
Speaker
We're the light of the world and the best hope of America and all that, which if you just think about it, it's really idolatrous.
God's Name and Political Agendas
00:26:42
Speaker
There's one light of the world, his name's Jesus, you know, and no nation should claim that position, I don't think. Yeah, we've talked about that on the podcast. It's a little bit offensive to take Jesus's words on the Sermon on the Mount and then just start applying them wholesale to your political entity, reality, nation. It's come on. I think it's a form of taking the name of the Lord in vain.
00:27:04
Speaker
It's when you take the name of the Lord and you use it for something that is mundane. You're using it for vain purposes. He's dragging it through the mud. And dragging it through the mud. When we try to give our own positions divine authority, that's what we're doing. God's on my side. God agrees with me. God is for us, not you. That's taking the name of the Lord in vain. And we're seeing a lot of it today.
00:27:25
Speaker
In your book, you quote Soren Kierkegaard stating that the worst form of apostasy is when Christianity becomes an aspect of culture. You say perhaps it would be a benefit to the advancement of this kingdom if America looked as pagan as it actually is.
Cultural Christianity Critique
00:27:38
Speaker
So why is this type of respectable cultural Christianity so damaging to the authentic Christian faith? Good. And Kierkegaard is the best one to read on this. I went through a Kierkegaard phase when I was in college and just read everything he ever wrote. I was in love with Kierkegaard. Was that while you had the afro?
00:27:55
Speaker
No, this is, I'd already been Christian, so I was wearing the decent hair. Although I let it grow back a little bit later on. But he was in Denmark and he had this Christian nation. He was living in this, it was supposed to be a Lutheran nation. And he just writes the scathing critique of this Christianity has become a cultural veneer.
00:28:18
Speaker
And at one point he says we ought to just ban the Bible from being read for a hundred years so that maybe in a hundred years from now when people started reading it, it could actually mean something. Because as we're so used to reading it just as a pompous little thing in church and it means nothing. I mean, he was really... But yeah, he had a point. The kingdom Christianity is about is this...
00:28:36
Speaker
other culture that God, the other world that God's bringing into this world, you know, and it's this other way of living, this new way of living, it's radically different from everything that's already out there. And the worst that can happen for it is to become ornamental or just kind of a, you know, what happens is that when you have a veneer of Christianity,
00:28:54
Speaker
It functions like an immunization or a vaccination where you get just enough of the truth that it immunizes you against the real thing. It's like you get a flu vaccination, you know, you have protection. You get a little bit of the flu just enough so your body thinks, oh, you got it, the real thing, and then you're protected. What happens is people hear this gospel, you know, well, if you just believe in Jesus and you go to heaven, you die. That's the gospel here.
00:29:18
Speaker
And oh, by the way, if you're really a Christian, then you should vote this way and do this, whatever, whatever. And so you have this kind of surfacing Christianity. So then when you hear someone preaching the real gospel, you think you already have it, and you don't need to be open to that. And maybe you'll even dismiss it as being kind of extreme or fanatical or whatever. I think being a missionary in America is one of the hardest places to be a missionary because
00:29:44
Speaker
It really would be to the benefit of the kingdom if somehow that veneer of Christianity got removed and we could see just how materialistic and self-centered and individualistic and narcissistic and violent we really are as a culture. If the culture became unvaccinated from the gospel, then we might be able to catch the real thing. Yeah, exactly. The virus of the gospel might actually have a way
00:30:09
Speaker
with the culture. It's true. I think that's exactly it. Jacques Lal is another one who's really good on this if you read his The Subversion of Christianity.
Church's Historical Alignment with Power
00:30:18
Speaker
His first sense in the book is, how did Christianity become its opposite?
00:30:23
Speaker
And the answer he gives is that we just blend in with the world, and he shows how throughout history, and there's always exceptions, praise God for that, but the tendency has been for whatever country Christianity's in, it adopts that country, adopts the ideology of it, and we defend the country, go out and fight for the country, and does all the things that countries have always done. It's just that now we're doing them in Jesus' name.
00:30:46
Speaker
And that's what happened with Christendom in the fifth century. As soon as we inherited political power from Constantine, well, we started doing what other countries always do, conquering and all the rest, but now we're doing it under the banner of Jesus, which simply ruins the witness of Jesus.
00:31:01
Speaker
Yeah, you repeat a refrain in the book that the kingdom of God always looks like Jesus. My kind of question to that is, you know, if that's the case, then we will be opposed to all that does not look like Jesus. We will work against or at least hold with, you know, at arm's length, anything that doesn't look like Jesus. That seems to me to cause us to stand sort of opposed to any of the political realities as they stand now or any of the
00:31:28
Speaker
political figures as much as they're all fairly screwed up. Doesn't that just make us irrelevant if we're against everyone who's immoral, everyone who's unethical, everyone who's hungry for power? Doesn't that just exclude us and make us irrelevant in the culture if we actually took this approach to politics?
00:31:46
Speaker
Well, I would say, did it make Jesus irrelevant? Because we're to be like Jesus. And it seems to me that Jesus had a completely different way of doing everything. It didn't buy into the ways of the world, but he did it in a way that was loving and that attracted people who were hurting and hungry for the message that he had to offer.
00:32:04
Speaker
Paul says this. What business is of mine to judge those outside the church? Our businesses take care of business and the church. We're not called to be superior or to be looking down on folks as though we're less sinful or that church isn't some kind of holy club.
Focus on Self-Improvement
00:32:20
Speaker
We're all the do-gooders and we're opposed to all that sin out there. Now, we're opposed to sin, but we got to start with ourselves. You know, nothing's more irritating and more of a turnoff to non-Christians than the Christians who go out of their way to try to pass laws against other people's sins while they don't even wink at their own sin. I mean, the Bible mentions gossip and slander, verbal sins, much more than it mentions homosexuality, if I can go there. I know you wanted me to stay non-controversy, but I couldn't help it.
00:32:49
Speaker
But we don't think about gossip. YouTube channels are built on gossip, and they're called discernment ministries. Oh, great. That's wonderful. You're on those channels, by the way. I imagine I am. But yeah, we slander people, and we just thought, oh, that's just kind of normal. We're not perfect. But then when it comes to certain things, we decide that
00:33:11
Speaker
We're going to raise a banner of righteousness and pass laws against those folks. And it just comes across as hypocritical and pompous. Jesus didn't do that. There's a self-righteous way of being opposed to sin, but there's a loving way of being opposed to sin. And the loving way is that you don't oppose sinners. You don't like, no, you oppose it in your own life.
00:33:29
Speaker
And maybe that models it for other people, but to say that the kingdom looks like Jesus, more specifically, I think it looks like Jesus Christ crucified because the cross is like the center of everything is about. So it's always loving. It's always humble. It's never arrogant. It's always servant. It has that flavor. And if you have that flavor, you never get arrogant and cocky. But I think you always do stay relevant because everyone's hungry for love. You talk in the book about this American tendency to see ourselves as like the moral guardians of culture.
00:33:57
Speaker
to be the people who are, you know, kind of keeping America in line with God's will for... Moral guardians. Yeah, exactly. So why is that so problematic both, you know, within the church, the way that we think and act, as well as regarding our witness to the world? Yeah. Yeah, you know, the thing is that Jesus, I don't recall any place in the New Testament where Jesus or the Apostle Paul or anybody tells us, hey, be the moral guardians for society at large.
00:34:25
Speaker
No, judgment begins at the house of God, 1 Peter says. Discernment is kind of criminal. That's the word, discerning. We're to be discerning that with each other, with ourselves, in appropriate context. You know, because this is the bride making herself ready for the coming bridegroom, and we're making our lives compatible with the eternal kingdom of God that's coming. But nowhere are we supposed to be out there dressing up the world. If Paul specifically says, that's not his job.
00:34:49
Speaker
Now, sometimes people quote Ezekiel about the watchtower and the watchman, and if you don't point out their sin, then their blood is on you. Well, yeah, but that's because you're in the Old Testament and you're dealing with an Old Testament covenant, and that was one of the jobs of the watchers in the Old Testament covenant, so it's appropriate there. When the prophet points these things out, that's what a prophet's supposed to do.
00:35:09
Speaker
In this cultural context, we don't have a system set up where we don't have recognized moral guardians. We have people competing to be the moral guardian, and they have different ethics to go with it. But that is not our calling. Our job is to... And Jesus says, why are you going around looking for the dust particle in your neighbor's eye when you've got a tree trunk coming out of your own eye?
00:35:30
Speaker
I mean, think about what that means in terms of our mindset. It's so opposite the world. Because the mindset of the world, and unfortunately, it's the mindset of a lot of the church, is our sins are dust particles, but yours are the tree trunks. And Jesus says, no, flip that.
00:35:48
Speaker
You consider your own shortcomings to be the tree trunks, and whatever you see in another person's eye is a mere dust particle by comparison. And there's got to be a million dust particles in a tree trunk or in a log. And so consider your own sins to be millions of times worse than what you see in somebody else. See, if you doubt that mindset, you can't possibly look down on anybody.
00:36:10
Speaker
You can only look up and expect this. Yeah, like with Paul, I am the worst of all sinners. And 1 Timothy 1, 15 and 16. And he says, this is a saying that's worthy of everyone to confess.
00:36:20
Speaker
that Jesus Christ came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am chief, of whom I am the worst. That's a confession we should all be saying. And it's not about groveling, oh, I'm scum, I'm no good, there's not one good thing in me. No, that false piety. No, he's not saying objectively, you are the worst sinner on the planet, like worse than Adolf Hitler, but he's saying he's giving us a mindset. Assume this I'm at the bottom mindset. And yeah, that way, that's the very definition of humility.
00:36:51
Speaker
So let's talk a little bit about just war theory. You say in the book, everyone thinks their wars are just, if not wholly. So even in the face of gross injustice, should Christians never participate in war?
Just War Theory and Christian Ethics
00:37:04
Speaker
So there's two different questions there.
00:37:07
Speaker
The one is about just war itself. People can debate the merits of this, and I'm not a philosophical specialist on this, whatever, but. Sure, just give us your opinions. My unbridled opinion. I don't see how just war accomplishes as much because, as you mentioned, no one goes to war thinking, hey, this is unjust.
00:37:24
Speaker
Cashes go fight for injustice they all think they're right and so in just war, you know, you have some things you got to go through. It's got to be a checklist. You've tried all alternatives and all these other kind of things and that's fine. I mean, that's good. But the idea that you only go to war if it's justified. Well, you always feel justified.
00:37:42
Speaker
And if you start saying, well, surely this is justified, we're justified killing for this, now you have to answer to Jesus when he tells us that without any kind of conditioning, without any kind of fine print, any exception clauses, he goes, love your enemies. And when he's talking to Jews in the first century and you say enemy, first thing people I think of are the Romans.
00:38:03
Speaker
And the Romans are oppressive, and they reign with terror. That poxel amount of the piece of Rome was held together by terror. When they got mad at some insurrectionists that went into their hometown, rounded up a bunch of people, random people, and crucified them, just to say, hey, you really want to mess with us? This is what we do. Stay in line. The Romans are the one group that almost all Jews hated. And yet Jesus talking to a Jewish audience says, love your enemy. And bless those that persecute you.
00:38:29
Speaker
That that opts out of just war theory. What happens is the way the reason is usually gone among Christians is that, in a sense, it seems very obvious that you'd be justified killing to protect yourself or your loved ones, obviously. Well, then it isn't obvious you should protect your neighbor. If you protect your neighbor, shouldn't you protect your state? Concentred circles working their way out. That's it. Why not the whole nation?
00:38:49
Speaker
And so if you start from that, it seems obviously true Jesus is wrong here or doesn't apply here, but then we talk our way into really out of his command altogether. And so the only enemies we're left with are grouchy mother-in-laws and maybe a neighbor. And we think, oh, love our enemies. Okay. But Jesus' call is a lot more radical than that. And so to pursue loving enemies is to render the whole just-worth thing irrelevant.
00:39:14
Speaker
So from where I'm sitting, whenever someone asks me this kind of question, if they themselves are like, I'm thinking about enlisting, what I'll do is not say, no, you can't. I'll just say, are you a follower of Jesus? And they say, yes. It's like, okay, well,
00:39:30
Speaker
Whatever your conclusion is, you have to integrate this teaching into it. How do you make sense out of Jesus' commands to love your enemy's pole in Romans 12 and all the rest, and think through that? And more often than not, if someone starts to think through it, they'll realize that, no, it's not consistent with you being a follower of God.
00:39:50
Speaker
Not always, I have people who join the military and I don't judge them.
Detachment in Modern Warfare
00:39:54
Speaker
I'm not their Holy Spirit, but my job as a teacher is to lay out, here are the issues you gotta think about if you're gonna be doing that. The trouble is that most wars are fought mostly by people who haven't given a single thought to whether it's just.
00:40:07
Speaker
They're 20 year old kids who you just want to pay off a college education So they sign up in the thing and their captain says shoot that guy Even though you don't know that guy even though you have got no grief with that guy So you got to kill that guy because our boss says that that guy's got to die They're heavily trained not to think about it. Exactly. It's gotta become I've seen soldiers who are interviewed on this thing in your mind You play it like a video game and nowadays with drone attacks. That's how you do it. You're just like it's just like a game and
00:40:32
Speaker
Or we offload our killing to the AI itself to make the determination who needs to die and who doesn't. I don't know why we do that. I think it's maybe to make us feel like our hands are clean because it wasn't us. It was the AI who did it. Did you hear? There's an AI you heard about. It's being used in Israel. Program Lavender and Where's Daddy? I haven't heard about those. What I had heard about was it's called The Gospel.
00:40:58
Speaker
And that really grieved me. Yeah, I heard about that, too. And it targets. It tells you who to target. And I don't know how it operates. But right now, it is not allowed to pull the switch and kill anybody. You have to have a human being to make sure. Verify for one second before it can give approval. Yeah, yeah. And that's how those relief workers, I'm sure, those three trucks got bombed with killing the seven relief workers. Anyways, so we remove ourselves from the gore of warrants. And in some ways,
00:41:26
Speaker
There's a real disadvantage there because you just forget you're even killing people. Back in the good old days, you had to go face to face with a knife. You got to fight each other and cut each other's head open. Now it's just a blip on a screen. It's interesting. It really is because I do wonder if we would justify the ratios of
00:41:41
Speaker
non-combatants,
Humanity as God's Image-Bearers
00:41:43
Speaker
right? Non-evil people. They're not even doing anything. Three-year-olds that were killing people like my daughter, if she happened to be born in the wrong place, well, you know, she would have to go. And so I think we get to such a weird place like that. I think in part because, well, we're not actually going in there with a bayonet and killing a child. We're just dropping a bomb from 40,000 feet. And it's collateral damage. You know, and the thing is, I'm not going to
00:42:09
Speaker
I'm not, I used to think I was smart and I realized I'm an idiot. And so I'm not going to try to run the world. Being a Christian, a kingdom follower does not make you smarter at anything. It might make you dumber. When it comes to the ways of the world, I think it'd probably be make you dumber. Cause I don't like, I don't trade in the commodity on just war. Okay. So I'm not like, cause it's irrelevant to me. I got my marching orders. And so if I was put over, you know, if I had to make a decision about what a just war was and it wasn't, I probably be not the best person to talk to.
00:42:38
Speaker
Well, right. I'd say, no, let's call the party completely off. Yeah, well, exactly. You're already stepping into that fallen way of thinking, that tribal way of thinking, that, you know, my citizens are more important than their citizens, my three-year-olds more important than their three-year-olds, my mother is more important than their mothers. You have to adopt that. Which you can't do if you're a Christian, right? Nope. All people are the image of God. That's it. We're supposed to have a perspective on humanity that transcends nationality and ethnicity and all the other isms and classism and all the rest.
00:43:07
Speaker
to see people as people. In the image of God, people for whom Jesus died, they're for people who have got unsurpassable worth. And our job is to reflect our agreement with God about that opinion by how we treat people and engage with them and think about them and all the rest. That's the gospel right there.
00:43:23
Speaker
So, I mean, some people look at the history of the Western church traditions since the time of Augustine, and they see generally a very different approach to the warring powers of the world, obviously, posting Augustine.
Western Church's Political Alignment
00:43:34
Speaker
So with your argument for nonviolence, basically, I guess, anti-militarism type of stance, are you really arguing that so many of these people in the Western church tradition have just been wrong?
00:43:46
Speaker
Yeah. And that is exactly what I'm arguing. I'm not saying they're not saved or anything like that. I don't have any... I leave all that to God. But my job is to say, what is the kingdom and what is not the kingdom? And in a world with a lot of competing voices saying, oh, here's the kingdom, here's the kingdom.
00:44:06
Speaker
My job as a pastor as a theologian is to say no the kingdom always looks like Jesus It always looks as if the aroma of the cross the self sacrificial love. It's other oriented. It's always humble So whatever it looks like that to that degree, I'll say it's kingdom. Whatever doesn't look like that I'll say it doesn't look like the kingdom and it doesn't matter what people profess see words
00:44:29
Speaker
Your mother told you, actions talk louder than words. And they really do. I don't even care what a person professes now. Look at their life. And so you look at the church. And there's some great things that have been done in the name of the church. We began hospitals and orphanages, and we did a lot of good for the world. But you look at the 100 Years' War and the... Crusades. The Inquisition, the Crusades, and all the rest. Look at the torturing devices that the church sanctioned to
00:44:59
Speaker
And it's unthinkable. How did the followers of the one who said, love your enemies and turn the other cheek become the ones who cut off people's heads? Blowing them all away in the name of the Lord. You quoted, what was that, Jerry Falwell said, yeah, blow them all away in the name of the Lord. See, that's taking the name of the Lord in vain, I think. But yeah, so I do think the church from the fourth century on really got off track in certain fundamental ways.
00:45:26
Speaker
There have always been groups that held fast, and I think were sincere in all that, but for most of the time they were the minority, a big minority. The official church, which usually persecuted that minority, it became the kingdom of the world but with a Christian veneer, and that was tragic.
00:45:42
Speaker
So our last question for you today.
Love in Political Discussions
00:45:44
Speaker
What advice would you give to somebody who's listening to you and is convinced, yes, to follow Jesus is going to look a lot different than it has been done sometimes in American Christianity. As they go into this next seven months, as we go into an election season, they're going to have conversations with other believers. They may even be pressured by, you know, people in their lives that they trust, that they love, say, oh, you have to line up and think and vote a specific way. Otherwise, you're not really Christian. I got it. What kind of advice would you give?
00:46:11
Speaker
to those people as they enter those conversations. That's probably the most important topic we could talk on because that one's practical, it's where people are at, and this is where the rubber hits the road.
00:46:21
Speaker
Let me first talk about how not to do it. If you go into a conversation about politics, and you're assuming you have some skin in the game, and just the people who get involved in these conversations do, if you think it's your job to save America, then you'll turn into a butthead. If you think it's your job to prove that you're right, you're going to be a butthead. If you think it's your job to just look good because others are listening, you'll be a butthead. You'll fall into the arguing.
00:46:50
Speaker
But if your goal is to be the most loving version of yourself as possible, you'll have a very different outcome. Now, you're going to have to swallow your pride and all that. It's not your job to save the world. It's your job to represent the kingdom. We are our resident aliens here. We're ambassadors, okay? So in a real sense, this isn't our country and this isn't our world.
00:47:08
Speaker
It's ours, it's coming, it's gonna be the transformed version of this world, but it's coming and our job is to represent that. And so the way you win an argument is by doing it as loving as possible, whether you convince the person or not. To be as loving as possible means that you're curious, you respect the person or the other person. You maybe think their ideas are completely screwball, but be curious about how they come to those conclusions. And probably it's because in their silo,
00:47:35
Speaker
that this is their credibility. It makes sense. Well, get inside that silo and find out what it's about. And then maybe in a loving way, you can talk them, coach them out of it a little bit. Have you ever considered this? Have you ever considered this? But once you get mad, once you raise your voice,
00:47:51
Speaker
This is the thing we're locking in. This is worth the price of admission right here. Our brain, we have a lot of different compartments, but two fundamental ones are our reasoning is all done through our prefrontal lobe cortex. And then we have the amygdala, which is our fight or flight reflex. Once your amygdala activates, your prefrontal lobe cortex shuts down.
00:48:12
Speaker
So when you get angry, nothing productive rationally is going to come out of this. I mean, have you ever seen somebody really angry and all of a sudden stop and you're saying, oh, wow, that's a really good point. No, that stops reason. So you have to stay calm, keep your mingle down. If you ever do get triggered, then you might want to say, listen, can we take a break for a little bit? Because I'm kind of getting triggered there.
00:48:36
Speaker
and seek to get triggered, and that means you're not no longer shooting to be the most loving version of yourself as possible. In a sense, that's the only goal that really matters. The way I tell people here at my church, there's some frequency that if you're ever in debate and winning the debate becomes more important than loving the person, do the kingdom a favor and shut up. Shut up. That's good, yeah. Shut up, because even if you win the debate, you've already lost it. The goal's got to be love.
00:49:02
Speaker
Amen. Yeah. I think that's all the questions we had for you. Thanks again for sitting down with us. It's been my pleasure. Thanks a lot. It's been a lot of fun. God bless you guys.