Category Archives: Theopolitical

The Christian Existence: Contra Systemic Dualisms

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The right and left binary represents a dualism that genuine Christian theology rejects. Dualism generally says that there are equal and opposing forces, light versus dark, in a cyclical battle of yin and yang. The Kingdom of God is grounded in the reality of God become [hu]man. There is no dualism, no competitive relationship between the fallen and unfallen; all of reality is subsumed within the singular person of Jesus Christ. Thus, Christianity, the Gospel comes with different expectations. The Christian is not in a loggerhead with the darkness, per se; the Christian moves and breathes from within the atmosphere of the heavenly Zion. This reality is not of this world, and thus not of the dualisms that often frame this world system. We are emissaries of the living God in the risen Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. In that sense we move differently than others, not being shaped by what the world optically presents to us as if it gets to determine reality by brute presence.

The aforementioned should have an impact on the Christian existence in this world. It should keep us moving towards and from the upward call in Christ Jesus. Politics, culture wars, and the like should never be defined by the whims and whams of the base person, the profane systems of thought progenerated by this world system; the evil age. Jesus is already reigning at the right hand of the Father (see 1 Cor 15), and will come once and for all riding on His white steed with the sword of God proceeding from His mouth. Maranatha

Being Right About Jesus Versus Being Right About Politics

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Being right about Jesus and the triune God isn’t like being right about a political platform or position. When we do our due diligence to be right about various and contingent political platforms and positions, we must make judgments, with the Lord’s help. But being right about Jesus isn’t ultimately based on our judgments and positions, per se. That is to say: to be right about who Jesus and the triune God are has nothing to do with us. When a person arrives at a saving knowledge of God in Christ it isn’t based on judgments and verity; it is based on who God is for us before the foundation of the world. Being right about Jesus is ultimately a human impossibility. If God wasn’t right for us first all that we would have would be our own judgments and positions about an abstract “ultimate truth,” that potentially is “out there” (like the X Files). In politics, as the counterexample, things remain largely abstract. Indeed, the abstraction comes in at just the point that human governments and politics and politicos are in fact composed of by fallen contingent human beings who purely operate in the liminal spaces of human decisions. In other words, when a person makes a decision about a politico, and its respective position, they aren’t doing so from within a personal union, an intimate touch with said politico. At best, the person attempting to make a right political decision about a political person and their respective positions, might be a personal friend of said political personage (which is rare indeed). Even so, even if that is the case, even if we think we know someone, we can never fully have a hundred percent trust that this person might not be compromised by external forces; indeed, because the person is a fallen corruptible person with a capacity to fool themselves and others. And so, we do the best we can in regard to being right about a politician and the politico system and platform in general.

Contrariwise, as alluded to earlier, being right about Jesus, about the triune God, about God in Christ is not parallel with being right about the profane things of this world; even if those profane things are highly important in regard to the human flourishing, even before God; even as God has set up the framework wherein politico factors and human governments might function in an orderly way in this fallen world. Unlike political rightness (and other rightnesses), being right about God is first about God being right for us. God is first right for us, because God alone is Right. And from within this rightness, from within the inner-perichoretic-life of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, outflows, by His freedom, His election, His choice to not be God without us, but with us; Immanuel. And it is precisely at this primordial juncture wherein being right about God, on our end, is nothing like being right about a political position. God is first right for us, that we might be right for Him, in Christ. In this way, being right about God finds its ontic procedural ground in the very Being (ousia) of God as He has chosen to penetrate our inner depths, by choosing our fallen humanity as humanity, and through this choseness, taking our fallen humanity into the manger, into His lived life on this earth, through the death of the cross, and putting all of that history to death, our fallen history; then rising again, ascending, indeed, still in our humanity, indeed as His risen and ascended humanity is the first instance of archetypal humanity in right relationship with the triune God, and herein, making us right and righteous indeed, as He freely and lovingly tasted that we were wrong, that we were bad, that He might bring us into union with Him, making the impossible possibility possible, by which we might genuinely taste and see that God is good.

This is why being right about Jesus, is fundamentally different than being right about a political position; or whatever else we might lift up and use as for an example of a secondary and contingent matter of rightness and wrongness within this fallen world, within these yet fallen bodies. Even so, as God has made us right about Him in Christ, it is in and from this first fruited ground that we now, as Christians, come to have a capacity to make better and more prudent judgments about politics, political positions and people.

On Ethnic Israel and Jesus

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Given what’s going on with Israel and Iran I jotted down some thoughts (elsewhere online) on Israel and how ethnic Israel continues to relate to the Man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ.

There is a right-wing movement among some so-called MAGA people who are highly antisemitic, or we could more accurately say: supersessionist. They have bought into the old rhetoric that Israel as a nation ceased to exist in 70AD, never to reunite again. But her ethnicity has always been vouchsafed in the Man from Nazareth (see Jeremiah 31). Her ethnicity transcends itself in its purpose as the Messiah bearer for the world. And yet, the promises made to the fathers remain irrevocable (see Romans 11:29). If the nation of Israel, as a people group ceases to be, this would entail that the Man from Nazareth, the Son of David, would cease to be. But since He cannot cease to be in his particularity as a regionalized man, then neither can the nation that bore him cease to be in its perdurance before God. And this is why, I would suggest, that whether leftist or rightist, antisemitism has continued to exist down throughout the ages. The Enemy of our souls seeks to kill, steal, and destroy anything that stands for the ultimate purposes of God; including the Jews. Rightists are just as malevolent as the Leftists, and of the spirit of this age; in the kingdom of darkness rather than in the kingdom of the Son of His love. The pattern has always been: “to the Jew first, and then the Gentile.” That motif has never changed.

Jesus is the true Israel; the Jew from Nazareth. The church is only the true Israel for supersessionists and some Catholics.

The whole Kingdom of Christ is contingent upon the fact that Jesus is the Son of David. That’s where his free election to be human was and is situated. Jewishness wasn’t abrogated by the ascension of Christ, Jewishness was amplified by the expansionism of becoming the one (Jesus) for the many in the organic fulfillment of both the Abrahamic and New Covenants, respectively (and all the covenants in between, Davidic in particular). The nation or eretz (Land) of Israel today isn’t the Kingdom, per se; but it is a foreshadowing and demonstration that God remains faithful to His promises; for the Jew first, then the Greek. Political Israel today isn’t the Kingdom of Christ, but it is a demonstration of God’s faithfulness to His Word; which He willingly descended into in a Jewish body by design and grace. Only a Gnostic or Marcionite could think that God emptied His “human shell” at the ascension. No Christian of canonical principle would ever affirm that ethnic Israel was superseded by the coming of the Son of Man. Lots of rubbish being pushed around in the “Christian” church on this.

The Miracle of Gospel Time and the Antidote it Provides for Our Political Time

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God’s covenant life of grace is the inner reality of the external creation and order that we are agents within as His creatures. This implicates everything; especially history, politics, theology, so on and so forth. God’s life of grace joins His life of eternal-time with the tangent of ‘calendar-time’ in such a way that the latter finds all of its predication in and through the former. One thing this does is that it at the same miraculous time universalizes and particularizes time and history all in the same go. That is to say, it so expands the horizons of the so-called space-time continuum that it ends up being an inane posture to think that our experiences of our personal-times could serve as the fulcrum for our perception of reality to begin with.

An application of the aforementioned notion on the relationship between eternity and time, as that is conjoined within the miracle of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, could be to use that as the basis for the Christian’s approach to matters related to politics, and everything else. In this time, in 2024 in America, we are currently faced with a POTUS election whose ramifications for time to come seem to circumscribe and even eclipse all of time, and all of reality for time to come. And yet in light of the miracle of the incarnation, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, such happenings are relativized by the greater and realer time of God’s time, God’s predication of the world in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. If nothing else, the greatness, the ineffableness of God’s in-breaking, and His continuous in-breaking, into this world, into “our” supposed time, ought to place all the fears and anxieties of these times into the womb of the Father where time in reality was first birthed for us in the Theanthropos, the Godman, Jesus Christ.

Here is how father and son duo, Alan and Andrew Torrance, write about these matters as developed in the theology of Karl Barth:

An additional positive point that comes up in Barth’s discussion of the moment is that the unity that God establishes between eternity and time is a unity with the whole of time—a unity that holds together in the past, present, and future in the oneness of God’s historical narrative. The idea that moments such as the moment of resurrection and the moment of faith are interconnected in the whole of time is again incomprehensible to us. This is because our thinking is caught up in and conditioned by the “stream of time,” preventing us from seeing the bigger theological picture sub specie aeternitatis. Insofar as we reduce history to our immediate experience of it, we close history off from the one who unites it as a whole. In so doing, we hold ourselves back from seeing that we are living in “the invisible New Age” in which “each moment in time is a parable of the eternal ‘Moment’.” As hard as this is to fathom, the fact that God, for Barth, unites Godself with history means that “every moment in time bears within it the unborn secret of revelation, and every moment can be thus qualified.” Time, he writes, “is swallowed up in eternity,” which means that flesh is swallowed up “in the infinite victory of the Spirit.” Therefore, every event in history must be understood according to the unity that the eternal God establishes with history and for history.[1]

These are deep considerations, but important ones if we as Christians are going to faithfully fulfil our role as witnesses to God’s meritorious works for us, for this world in Jesus Christ. It ought to keep us from being swallowed by the fear of the absolute immanentizing of this world, as if its own inner source and reality is all there was, is, and is to come. The point, ultimately, as this world, and all that happens within it are predicated by God’s life and redemption of this world, as this world has become God’s world, both as He originally created, and then recreated it from the flesh and blood, from the Eucharist of His life for the world as that has been eternally generate in the bosom of the Father by the hovering and creative movement of the Holy Spirit. The takeaway, for one thing, ought to be that nothing and nobody is greater than history’s reality as that reality has always already been such in the face (prosopon) of Jesus Christ. Christians have a hope and redound that this world currently needs in ways that this world does not understand without God’s Self-revelation and our witness to that as we repose in the surly concreteness of Christ’s life for this world. Ultimately, what I am getting at with all of this, is that we ought to continue to remain and “occupy” this land, this time, as God-worshippers. This is the basis and telos (purpose) of all of reality, of all of time as that has been gifted for us through God’s pre-destination for us, in His free and gracious election to not be God without us, but with us in the humanity of Jesus Christ. If knowledge of this reality reigns supreme in our movings and breathings we will offer this world, at this time, at God’s time for the world in Christ, a hope that the principalities and powers could only dream about in some sort of perverted parody of self-actualization.

[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 210.

A Brief Soliloquy on the Phantom of the Lesser of Evils

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The “lesser of two evils”–on a slippery slope–reduces to utter chaos and travail. At some point on that slope, the Christian in particular, must step off before oblivion hits. At some point the realization must hit that within the current framework–whatever that is at the time–there must be a “redline,” which indicates that the most prudent thing to do is to jump off the slippery slope onto the solid ground of Christ’s kingdom. Canaan kept devolving, devolving, devolving, and on the logic of the “lesser of two evils” Christians would continue on with compromising, compromising, compromising, to the point that their convictions of two decades ago, for example, now look like the opposing party’s of that time. On a scale of “evil,” how can this approach consistently be one of a “lesser of two evils,” when the goal posts of evil are constantly being shifted and downgraded into something even more intense? Evil is evil. A compromise with evil is a compromise with death.

“The kingdom of His beloved Son”: On the Non-dualist Reality of the Kingdom

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“For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, …” Colossians 1:13

Do you see how this is not a dualistic scheme—like light versus darkness, good versus evil? Christianity does not operate in a dualistic frame of reference. It presents the world and the church with the fact that everything in relation to God in Christ is asymmetrical; and asymmetrical in a way where there is no comparison between who He has offered for Himself in the eternal Son become flesh in Jesus Christ, and every other thing in this world that is contingent (indeed upon the sustenance of His Word, Jesus Christ). There is no us versus them in the city of Man vis-à-vis the kingdom of His beloved Son. There is no contest; there is no competition between God and fallen humanity—which the incarnation of God in Christ ought to make eminently clear to all of us. God is God and nobody else is. We aren’t in a Greek drama where humanity simply replicates the battles of the gods in the pantheon above; the “good gods” versus the “evil gods.” We inhabit and participate in a world, in the life of God, where God is God without any competitors. As we have bowed the knee confessing that Jesus Christ is Lord, we have been transferred into an economy of God’s triune Life that is seated high above all the principalities and powers of this earth (with their demonic dragon breath behind them). We are the Victors because Christ was first victorious for us, that we might live in His victoriously resurrected and ascended life for us at the Right Hand of the Father. Don’t let this world fret you into thinking otherwise.

The Primacy of Christ’s Seed: Contra Christendoms, Nationalisms, Traditionisms

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Barth appeals to the primacy of Jesus Christ in all things. In one instance, in his Church Dogmatics, he is developing what it means to understand that Jesus is God’s ultimate plan for all of creation, all of history; which ultimately entails a disruption from all else, even as all else is taken up into the life of Christ as God’s history for the world. Here Barth is in the process of developing his treatment on such things, with particular reference to a doctrine of time vis-à-vis eternity. We will pick up with him mid-paragraph:

At any rate, as a human ministration it is related to the work of Jesus Christ in the same way as in the Old Testament the human act of blessing is related to the real word of blessing which has its power only from God, and which can therefore be uttered only by God Himself. However that may be, the birth of the Christian life “of water and of the Spirit (Jn. 3.5) signifies a direct relationship of the individual Christian to Jesus. He does not follow father and mother or the line of his ancestors, but, taken out of this succession, or at any rate in independence of it, he follows Jesus. He believes that there is one holy catholic Church, and that he may be a living member of the same. Yet he does not believe in the Church, but in the Holy Spirit, who is consubstantial with the Father and the Son. He does not therefore honour and accept the Church’s tradition and order in becoming a Christian and confessing himself to be such, but he places himself behind and confesses the beginning which all ecclesiastical tradition and order can only serve, and which he can now recognise and receive as his own beginning. He believes, thinks, speaks and acts therefore, not as the member of a so-called “Christian nation,” but in gratitude to the Lord that even in his—in no sense Christian—country He has community, by and to whose ministry among this people he himself is called.[1]

This kicks against some of the Christian zeitgeist online right now; which is an extreme turn into postmillennial theonomy. But these types of immanentist turns are exactly what the true Gospel confronts, contradicts, and brings an end to. In the Gospel there is a mediated immediacy, in Christ, to the living and triune God; one that allows the Christian person to live before God rather than anyone else. To find a ground for Christian identity in anything other than the immediate and direct life of God for the world in Jesus Christ is to collapse and thus conflate God’s ways with the contingencies and particularities of the accidents of history; in the sense that Christian identity, in such a frame, begins to predicate God’s ways and in-breakings upon an a prior set of foundations and structures that He has not laid in Christ, but that we have laid in the power of our wit, albeit in the name of Christ.

Barth isn’t saying that salvation history isn’t important, that the historic Church isn’t important, that the catholic creeds aren’t important; He is simply noting that they aren’t the ends or circumscriptions of the reality they are ostensibly pointing beyond themselves and to, in their respective reality, as is all of creation’s, in Jesus Christ. The point is, there is no authority that supersedes the viva vox Dei (voice of the living God); that there is only one authority for the Christian person, as an individual member in the body of Christ (I Cor. 12.27), and His name is, Jesus Christ. The Christian’s birthright isn’t through a nation, an ethnicity, a Christendom, a political party, a ‘blood and soil,’ or anything else. The Christian’s birthright has been seeded in the seed of God as that was given life by the hovering work of the Holy Spirt within the womb of Israel, within the womb of Mary to be sure, but these only as vessels for the ultimate and prime reality of all of reality who is Jesus Christ.

I have grown very weary of being confronted with supposed ‘Protestant’ ‘Reformed’ ‘Lutheran’ ‘Anglican’ ‘Baptist’ ‘Wesleyan’ et al. ad infinitum theologies that end up being nothing more than appeals to some type of socio-politico construct that has been ostensibly harvested from the past as its best repristination for the 21st century church. There is an oppressiveness about all of this to me that does not evince the Spirit’s presence, which is liberty. Indeed, we are a social and political animal as creatures, but our end is not defined, or should not be defined, by this type of extension into space and time. We have been born directly from above, alongside the Son’s freely elected humanity for us, within the womb of the Father by the Holy Spirit. And it is from whence that we have our whither and warp in this fallen and decrepit world. It is by the blood of Immanuel’s veins, quite literally, that we have life; no matter what state, country, or church tradition we inhabit; if indeed we have such life at all.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §47 [585] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 146.

Contra a Christian Nationalist Christendom and the Crusades

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A few weeks back there was a debate on X with reference to the Crusades. Unsurprisingly there are certain Christian Nationalist groups who are promoting the legitimacy and value of the Crusades (and not Billy Graham’s); attempting to justify them in the name of Christ. This all makes sense in the sense that these folks want a resurgence of a certain type of Christendom, primarily of a Protestant hue. I responded thusly,

The Crusades were a function of a Catholic ecclesiopolitical state. They were ostensibly carried out in the name of Jesus Christ; and for the preservation of the Gospel and all its entailments. The last thing Muslims saw, as the sword came crushing through their skulls, was the cross on the crusader’s shield. This was not done in the name of Christ, ultimately; but in the name of a sectarian Latin church who asserted that its authority was simply a prolongation of the incarnation of God on earth. This assertion is neither Christian, or Holy; and therefore, cannot be justified in the name of Jesus Christ.

The Tale of Two Evils: One Greater the “Other Lesser”

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The lesser of two evils model is a mythology. Evil is simply evil. The mass murder of babies in the womb is the epitome of evil de jure. There is no “scale” or quantification of evil that can ever balance out sheer evil. One problem with committing oneself to a lesser-of-two-evils model is that it becomes a slippery slope; as this presidential election perfectly illustrates. It is a slippery slope because within the winds of the cultural mores we all become conditioned in ways that are increasingly beholden to comparing this level of evil to that level of evil; but when this is done, we can become persuaded that compared to this evil over there this evil right here isn’t so bad. In fact, after a while living in this type of pressure cooker, we easily become entwined and melded into the juices of the cultural wash. The only way out is to look at evil as evil, compared to God’s holiness Self-revealed in Jesus Christ, and make our decisions from this Holy Ground of God’s life. It is His alien righteousness for us that ought to be the frame we see the world, and the “choices” it offers us, through. When we move and breathe in this way, we come to have the capacity to simply say, No! And we live a life of continuous repose upon God’s Word rather than the culture’s word baked into God’s Word.

A pushback to this might be: “well, this is too idealic and pie-in-the-sky.” But the opposite is actually the case. In fact, trusting God’s Word, living as seeing the unseen as the seen, is the only way a Christian can truly move and breathe and have their being in this shifty and shadowy world of dissolution. This is not to say that we don’t have difficult decisions to make living as Christians in a fallen world; indeed, it is to say the inverse. It is much more difficult to live a life that the basic human senses cannot penetrate; to live by the faith of Christ. The fallacy of the lesser-of-two-evils model is that it presumes that a person has the capacity to weight this evil against that evil, this amount of evil against that amount of evil, and discern which side of the scale is the right side. But what if one evil is so being-shaking, what if one evil, in a basket of many evils, so utterly strikes at the being of God, the being of Life itself, that it becomes impossible to weed through to the point that we believe we can come to the conclusion of what weighted side is more acceptable than the other? What if there is an evil that like yeast becomes so intracule to the total loaf of bread that its pervasiveness becomes inescapable; to the point that it finally becomes absolutely necessary to simply trust God? To move beyond the supposed possibility to divine between the evils, and simply recognize the LORD has not given us a viable choice to choose.

The Soylent Green of American and Global Politics

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God’s judgment, I would suggest, entails false choices often times. In this case, America is faced with a POTUS decision wherein Kamala Harris&co. seemingly are the archrivals of humanity all the way down. But then there is Trump. Trump has radically changed his tune in regard to abortion. He supports the accessibility of the abortion pill by mail; he has had the RNC, effectively, change their official platform on abortion and the abortion pill; he is for abortion in cases of rape and incest. Not to mention, he gave us the lockdowns, warp speeded the deadly vaccines, and is for the legalization of the recreational use of marijuana; among other things. We are where we are even with Trump in power for four years. Clearly, the leftists have done everything they can, even in an attempt to take Trump’s life, in order to keep their power intact. The leftists clearly are intent on destroying the United States of America as a country. They are so far wayward that they will literally stop at nothing to “win.”

Either way as I look at it there is no choice this presidential election. Our country, along with the rest of globe, is so underwater in the cesspool of immorality of every kind, that the only hope this old world has is Jesus Christ. It is not possible for me to vote for someone who supports the mass murder of babies in the womb, no matter what the alternative is. As I’ve written on before: the “logic of death” that funds abortion does not stop at the exiting of the womb; it carries into every other aspect of life. Whether Trump or Harris is the president said logic will be informing every decision they make. One is more masked than the other, and less dramatic, as far as immediate results, but just the same, both have the blood of the masses of dead babies on their hands. And to boot, they both, respectively, will offer the land the spilled blood of the masses (outside of the womb too) in regard to the ‘covenant of death’ they both (the DNC and RNC) have signed with the blood of the babies.

I’m afraid we have become too conditioned, too ‘frogged in the kettle,’ to see outside of the sheer wall of Soylent Green we have become ensconced within. When abortion becomes just another “issue” the plot has seriously been lost. In my view, it is better to simply recognize that as a global people, and in particular, as Americans, we are reaping what we have collectively sown; we are reaping death rather than eternal life. What convinces me of this is who God has given us for our presidential candidates. In this situation, under God’s judgement as we are, I think it’s best to recognize that, just as king David did after his sin with Bathsheba, and commit ourselves into the merciful hands of the living God. I do not believe the Lord is asking us to vote this time, as if some type of civic, or even kingdom mandate. Instead, He is asking us to wait on Him rather than on the depraved heart of men and women that has led us to where we are currently. I believe we are in the thralls of a Romans 1 judgment at the national and international level. As such, there is no human to “vote” for at this point; at least not at the POTUS level.

Let God be true and every man a liar.