The Gospel is greater than politics. This might seem an interesting claim to make in light of my recent appeals to use the analogy of the Gospel as a space for thinking Christian theopolitical positioning. But this has always been my position in all things as a Christian: That Jesus is Lord; not Caesar, not Obama, not Trump, but JESUS! It is clear from Scripture that the ‘kings of the world’ are at the behest of the Lord God in Christ. The revelator writes thusly:

¹⁵ Then the angel said to me, “The waters you saw (where the prostitute is seated) are peoples, multitudes, nations, and languages. ¹⁶ The ten horns that you saw, and the beast—these will hate the prostitute and make her desolate and naked. They will consume her flesh and burn her up with fire. ¹⁷ For God has put into their minds to carry out his purpose by making a decision to give their royal power to the beast until the words of God are fulfilled. ¹⁸ As for the woman you saw, she is the great city that has sovereignty over the kings of the earth.” –Revelation 17:15-18

This serves as one example, one important example of how the kings of this world system, even the final Antichrist himself, are subject to God’s purpose; a cruciformed purpose in Jesus Christ. At the very end, which may be now (who knows, save God), the swamp-monsters, and even those claiming to tame them, in this great drama of human imagining, are in fact carrying out God’s inexplicable purposes vis-à-vis the very evils that would seek to thwart and overcome the Kingdom of Christ.

According to the ever insightful, Barth, all of God’s works for us, for this world, are grounded not in an abstract nature (that would be the Beast’s apperceptions), but in His inner-life of Grace. This is what funds all that happens in this world system, even if that often remains an aspect of the so-called Deus absconditus (the hidden God). Even in the midst of the chaos seemingly winning the day in the current moment, the eyes given by the faith of Christ (pistis Christou), the Deus revelatus pro nobis (the revealed God for us) tells us that it isn’t an untamed independent and deterministic ‘nature’ where the fittest will win. No, the Logic of God’s Grace in Christ for the world tells us a different story: it tells us that nature is subject to, and even re-created by God’s gracious disruption of it through His assumption of it in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. This is what God freely pre-destined for Himself in the election of humanity for Himself in Jesus Christ. This is the reality that steers all of reality. It isn’t the group who has learned to master or tame an abstract nature in such a way that they become the master’s of the universe; although this has been the lie that has shaped humanity ever since Adam and Eve (Gen 3). In God’s economy, His oikonomia, the always already reality has been that this creation, has been predetermined to be freely governed by God and His ways rather than our self-possessed ways. Barth offers this summarizing statement about the reality of God’s grace, and God’s election for us as the very sum of the Gospel:

The doctrine of election is the sum of the Gospel because of all words that can be said or heard it is the best: that God elects man; that God is for man too the One who loves in freedom. It is grounded in the knowledge of Jesus Christ because He is both the electing God and the elected man in One. It is part of the doctrine of God because originally God’s election of man is a predestination not merely of man but of Himself. Its function is to bear basic testimony to eternal, free and unchanging grace as the beginning of all the ways and works of God.[1]

Try as humanity will, humanity and divinity are bound together in the indestructible union of humanity and divinity in the singular person of Jesus Christ; an independent humanity can never make this the reality in itself. That battle has already been won. This is God’s Grace for us; to ‘be us that we might become Him’ in Christ through adoption as His daughters and sons.

What we see in the world today, particularly as that is given expression in the principalities and powers, otherwise known as political leaders, is a constant attempt to undo the incarnation; to undo God’s grace, and collapse that reality into their own self-generated and projected conception of self-divinity. That is what fallen nature does, it attempts to unravel the miracle of God’s grace, of the triune God’s humiliation for us by becoming humanity, and take by force and self-will, shaped by a vicious self-love, what belongs to the living God alone.

When I look out on the landscape of the current climate in the world right now, the above is what I see. I see a humanity, no matter what ‘side’ attempting to be self-dispensaries of God’s grace, as if they are grace themselves. But when this sort of rebellion is attempted it only can give expression to the sort of metastatic cancerous chaos we see attempting to swallow the world whole. The world needs the fresh oxygen of the Holy Spirit’s breath breathed into it, such that the ‘Krebs cycle’ can be restored, and God’s order for humanity might be experienced in the penultimate ways we hopefully can continue to inhabit in anticipation of the final eschatological moment of Kingdom come.

[1] Barth, CD II/2:1.