Pastoral Query: Christian Nationalism

I’ve been asked to address the notion of Christian Nationalism. Our source is Scripture first, and then conviction, though the convictions I share on this subject are shared by several in our Radix Fidem community. We’ve actually discussed this in the past, so my answer is not news.

We promote God’s revealed agenda. But this question bounces off several layers. Biblical Law is not the whole of God’s revelation on things. His first revelation was utterly personal in the Garden before the Fall. That stage has been set and remains the fundamental nature of things. The Fall broke that personal connection. Once the Curse of the Fall was pronounced, the only connection offered came with the Flaming Sword — Biblical Law. The initial approach to restoration is through that provision. You restore the revelation of God by first embracing His judgment on human nature. Revelation came incrementally since the expulsion from the Garden.

A major thesis of Heiser’s Unseen Realm is that God gave up on the idea of governing mankind at large. At the Tower of Babel, He passed over the bulk of human nations to His Elohim Council, and began working toward founding His own nation, starting with Abraham. The eventual result of His own nation, Israel, established as a living revelation of His will for all humanity. The failure of Israel to be that revelation by choice did not prevent God unveiling things progressively until it was finalized in the appearance of His Son. Israel rejected the Messiah, but He is still the capstone of revelation to mankind. And His revelation restores the inherently personal nature of communion with the Creator.

The common English usage of “Christian” does not line up with the biblical definition; the term means “following Christ”. A human nation cannot follow Christ. Even if everyone in that nation individually followed Christ, the nation as a whole could not. The gulf separating human government from the Kingdom of Heaven is unbreachable. Christ eschewed human political concerns. The Cross ended the one and only divinely sanctioned national government in human history. Following Christ ignores any concern over national government, relegating such things to a matter of mere tactical consideration in pursuit of individual redemption. By definition, “national redemption” does not exist.

The first moment you introduce a national identity, the issue of faith has been compromised. The Kingdom of Heaven demands you set aside all human identities in favor of spiritual identity. It is not possible to conduct national government according to the gospel. The gospel flatly rejects the concerns of human government. Instead, Christians are advised to play along until they cannot, and that conflict is inevitable. A national government subject to gospel requirements must inevitably cease to govern. You cannot reduce Christ’s reign to rules or laws. Law is mercy, but grace cannot be reduced to law.

As the final end-all revelation of God, Christ pulled together a lot of previous revelation. Some of that revelation turned out to be only an approximation. Jesus pointed out how some of Moses was moderated to account for human weakness as a mere matter of practice, but fell short of God’s true intention. Any law code is inherently limited, and as a fundamental matter of such law, the individual must embrace biblical mysticism in order to understand law as law. Genuine mysticism is a heavy burden, but so is the rest of every law code God delivered to mankind. If you resort to mere human sense and reason to handle your duty to God, you will fail. That was the whole point of the narrative of the Fall in the Bible. Every law code requires that you be heart-led, because it’s not about the law code, anyway. It’s about that personal connection to God.

The whole point of a law code is to provide a frame of reference for approaching the task, guiding the operation of heart-led mysticism. The law codes and their condemnations of sin came first in history, as the means to awaken consciousness of our fallen condition. If you took the law code seriously, you would of necessity dig into heart-led mysticism, and that would in turn put you in the place to hear from God personally and individually. The law codes were never meant to be free standing; they were all intended to be a record of how revelation communities lived. The communities were meant to be the law personified, the law code that outsiders could “read” and recognize their sins. A covenant community is a living call to redemption. Israel was meant to be God’s living Bible, but failed. Christ Himself became that living Word as the final solution to the problem of human failure. Having a revealed code, tested and found true when they obeyed, wasn’t enough to keep Israel on track.

Indeed, at any given time in Israel’s history, a significant portion of the nation based on a law code did not rise to its demands. There were times when only a small minority struggled to keep the nation on track. And yet, the promised blessings came because of that small minority, typically the national leaders. Far too many of the common folks were whipsawed back and forth, lacking any strong internal motivation to stay faithful. The history within the Bible itself shows that governing by a law code will not work on a human level; it requires people who are personally committed to God.

While there exists a sort of law code as part of the revelation of Christ, the door has been closed on using such a law code to govern a nation. The revelation of Christ flatly rejected the notion of a nation under God, as it were. Yes, in theory you could rule a nation by that law code. Even if you got it off the ground, it would fail in due time. You will not get divine backing for such a project. That avenue is closed forever. The very best you can hope for is to implement some portion of this implied law code in a group small enough for a single elder to lead. And New Testament history shows how shaky that proposition is. The only way any kind of code can be implemented is via God’s revealed preference for human government: a Hebraic styled feudal family household. It rests on the Two Witnesses — priest and king, or pastor and elder. That is the only form of human organization Christ will bless by His Presence. As we see in human history, it does not scale well. It’s not supposed to; that’s part of the message of the Tower of Babel.

God will bless and promote a valid church government, but there remains that fundamental element of believer’s volition to keep it going. It is human activity; there is a human element. Any failure to stay faithful by any single individual becomes a defiling presence that weakens the hedge of divine protection. Once the hedge is opened, blessings are choked. Any truly valid covenant body will be wracked by crises, and it so happens they tend to occur in cycles. The system itself includes variables without an actual moral failure. A valid representation of a Christian law code must include a provision for individual convictions, and the Bible warns that there is an inevitable variation in human conviction with unavoidable conflicts. That’s because it’s part of the testing that God warns He will always conduct while we live in this world. The larger the system gets, the more unstable it must inevitably be as convictions proliferate, even when you are relying utterly on God.

The point was never human government in the first place. Human government is required, even knowing it will never work properly. God’s revelation never included a genuine expectation of success in that area. That is, while a given generation of national leaders may well be highly motivated to please the Lord, in the bigger picture, we cannot avoid flaws creeping in that weaken the system in one way or another. We should not expect any such nation to last more than a limited period of time. And given the context of how humanity has drifted in recent centuries, the problems have only gotten worse.

All things considered together, under the best circumstances, a Christian nation is impossible today.