“Ecumenism” and Other Dirty Words

I have given them the glory You gave Me, so that they may be one, as We are one. John 17:22

 

     As I write this, Christian churches around the world have just completed their Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.  The event lasts from January 18^th through January 25^th each year, which, if you count on your fingers as I did, is actually eight days, not a week.

     Let me clarify, though.  January 18^th through 25^th is when northern hemisphere churches hold their eight-day week to pray for Christian unity.  Southern hemisphere churches celebrate it from the feast of the Ascension through the feast of Pentecost.  This year (2024), that’s from May 9^th through May 19^th, an eleven-day event held five months later.  Such feast-day markers wouldn’t work for northern hemisphere churches, since the Orthodox feast of Ascension is on June 6^th this year while Orthodox Pentecost is on June 23^rd, a spacing which would turn their week of prayer for Christian unity into an eighteen-day event.

     In summary: Even cross-church efforts to pray for Christian unity are embarrassingly ununified.

 

WHAT IS “ECUMENISM”?

     The spirit of ecumenism is the spirit of Antichrist.  Many people, especially new converts to Christianity, are naive concerning the evils of ecumenism.  This is a dangerous enemy of the New Testament church.  In fact, ecumenism is at the heart of the Devil’s plan for World Government (aka, the New World Order).

     Wait, did I forget to put quotation marks around that paragraph up there?  The above words actually belong to one David J. Stewart, compiler and author of articles at www.jesus-is-savior.com.  I selected his quotation because it captures the spirit of one extreme of reactions to ecumenism: that it’s really, really not good and plays a satanic role in many people’s “eschatology,” their expectations of the end times.

     (I neglected to put quotation marks around Stewart’s words because I wanted you to arch your eyebrows a little.  It’s good for the circulatory system, I promise.)

     Here’s the other extreme (I’ll play nice and use quotation marks this time): “Ecumenism is the name of a movement that promotes the recovery of Christian unity and works towards the vision of one undivided Church….  The vision includes the search for visible unity of the world’s Christian Churches and the move to make this goal the concern of all Christians.”  I pulled this quotation from www.anglicancommunion.org, where that denomination spotlights Christ’s desire for His followers to be one, even as He and His Father are one (John 17:22-23).

     Well, this is a pickle, isn’t it?  Either ecumenism is the very will of Christ or it’s a critical tool of the Antichrist.  How’s a girl to decide between such diametrically opposed opinions?  Could degrees in linguistics and some ancient Greek terms be of any help here?

 

YOU KNEW I’D GO TO THE GREEK

     The word “ecumenism” to indicate church unity has only been around for a century or so.  However, the word’s roots go back to New Testament scripture and earlier Hellenic writings.  The Greek term oikouménē gives us the English “ecumenical,” popping up a little over a dozen times in Matthew, Luke, Acts, Revelation, and other NT areas.  If you do a quick classical-languages dictionary search, you’ll find many translators render it as “the inhabited land.”  That’s not a bad translation … depending.

     When Luke 2 uses the term oikouménē to discuss Augustus Caesar’s taxation efforts, “the inhabited land” would be a decent translation, despite many Bible versions opting for “the whole world” as the translation in that verse.  “The whole world” is certainly a less-than-ideal translation.  Augustus wasn’t taxing the Han Dynasty in China or the Olmec peoples of Mesoamerica – he didn’t know they existed.  He was taxing his own empire, the only land he accepted as valid civilization.

     Two chapters later, though, Luke’s gospel again uses oikouménē when Satan tempts Jesus by showing “all the kingdoms [of the] oikouménēs,” a much, much grander use of the term, covering a lot more territory.  One assumes the Han and the Olmecs popped up for that display.  Here the translation “the whole world” is more fitting.

     A term meaning just Augustus’s territories in one place but the entirety of the world a few chapters later?  Two meanings of the same word?  Perhaps that shouldn’t be shocking to English speakers who park their cars to walk in a park and who left their phone on that car’s left seat so they could be mobile without their mobile… but what does any of this have to do with the unity of the Body of Christ, and whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing in modern times?

     Hang with me for one more linguistic juggle.  Our target term, oikouménē, is one of three koine Greek words for “the world.”  The others are kósmos, referring to the ordered, natural world, the entirety of creation itself; and gē, usually meaning the physical land, which we see used in our words geology and geography.  Oikouménē is distinct from those other terms because of its association with households and families.

     Oīkos is the Greek source word of our ecumenism term.  Oīkos is both the physical structure of a house and the household itself, the family that gathers within.  It’s the place; it’s the people.  We see this type of place-means-the-people application in English, both in secular use (“Fall of the House of Usher”) and in Scriptural translation (Paul’s baptizing of the “house” of Stephanus in 1 Cor. 1:13).  It’s a nuance that’s missing when we translate oikouménē as “the whole world” in our English Bibles.  Lost is the sense that it’s a word about people, our people, our homies and in many scriptural contexts our vast, extended human family.  We could translate the term oikouménē as “the realms of the human family” in place of “the world.”  That would certainly bring an original-language depth and beauty to such verses as Hebrews 1:6: 

… [W]hen God brings his first-born into the realms of the human family, He says, “Let all God’s angels worship him.”

 

SO, BACK TO TODAY’S ECUMENISM

     It strikes me that one of the main concerns revolving around accepting or rejecting ecumenism today is which version of oikouménē we are expected to adopt.  On the one hand, we could be like Caesar, reaching out only to the community we already know and inhabit.  On the other, we could be reaching out to the whole of Christendom through all the lands it touches.  Which is more likely?  I confess a bias toward thinking it applies to the whole of Christendom, since someone saying “I am in global unity with every one of my fellow Anabaptist Hutterites” doesn’t sound a lot like unity to me.

     So, let’s ask: Why is there Christian pushback against the idea of uniting the Christian family in its efforts to spread the Gospel and to share the fruits of the Spirit with each other and with the whole of the world?

     I suspect one of the issues is a suspicion about non-Christians the modern application of oikouménē might include.  Is it meant to embrace the beliefs of every religion and non-religion on the Earth, a literal acceptance of the entire human family?  The only sites online I’ve seen suggesting that meaning are those arguing ecumenism is a Satanic plot.  All the pro-ecumenism congregations I’ve read up on in my limited month of research seem only to mention other Christian groups as part of their outreach.

     But maybe it’s more limited than that, even.  Should “ecumenism” reach out only to those who are in our own genres of Christianity – a unity of mainstream Christians if we’re mainstream, of independent Evangelicals if we’re that, of all salvation-by-faith believers, of all who agree with us on the nature of God and Christ?  Paul uses the term oīkos, ecumenism’s Greek root word, in his Galatians 6:10 mention of “the household of faith,” but exactly who does the household of faith interact with as part of the acceptable family?  What are the boundaries?  Where are the property lines?

• Agreement over the nature of God?  A number of Christians wouldn’t consider themselves fellow household dwellers with Latter Day Saints and Jehovah’s Witnesses, since neither group sees Jesus as part of the Godhead.  How far does that extend?  Do we exclude those of a Oneness tradition, who see God in an indivisible, singular entity with no Trinitarian breakouts into divine Persons?  Do we exclude followers of John Calvin, the Reformer who insisted there was no human element of Christ distinct from the Word nature of Christ, thus making human and divine indistinguishable natures?  Do we exclude higher-criticism theologians who search for the Historical Jesus as distinct from the Scriptural presentation of Christ?  And do we exclude the Health & Wealth-ers who see God’s nature as a cosmic Door Dash delivering goodies to all who ask in faith?  Is that a concept I want in my faith household?
• Agreement over the nature of salvation?  Perhaps our acceptance of ecumenical interaction – and our boundaries -- should be determined by our soteriology (which is a fancy word for our theology of salvation).  After all, salvation’s what it’s all about, right?  Shall we exclude those who insist that a physical act of baptism is necessary for the salvation of our souls?  Contrariwise, shall we exclude those who say it isn’t required by a God who saves through faith alone?  Should we reject those who add on a requirement for ongoing sanctification after rebirth?  Should we boot any congregation not requiring evidence of the fruit of the Spirit in Christian walks?  What about tongues-speaking – are you “in” if you do, “out” if you don’t?  And what if a church baptizes babies?
• Agreement over the nature of assurance?  If there’s a congregation that doesn’t accept that salvation is permanent – “Once Saved, Always Saved” – do we need to make sure we don’t have ecumenical fellowship with such doubters?  If there’s a denomination that insists salvation was determined and foreordained from before the foundations of the Earth were laid, do we count them out?  If they’re softies who think even Catholics can be saved, shall we avoid being unequally yoked with them?  And if they don’t share our futurist, catastrophic end-times eschatology and rapture ideology, do we cut them off?
• Agreement over the nature of worship and church structure?  If I hop on board with this ecumenism thing, what do I do about churches that have those old-fashioned pipe organs and almost no guitars?  Am I expected to tolerate a church that has more video screens than hymnals?  What if their congregation votes, votes mind you, on church direction, rather than submitting to the strong leadership of a singular apostle?  And if they have youth ministers and a separate youth ministry – a church structure found nowhere in the New Testament that has led to horrific outcomes in numerous Southern Baptist churches – must I come into forced ecumenical fellowship with them?

 

HOW TO GET THERE: COUNTING THE WAYS

     A whole section of questions!  I haven’t done that in a while.  I think I decided to write it that way because I have no answers to the real question: Can Christian denominations ever really get along if they have doctrinal differences?  The lines that can never be crossed are different for each group, and overcoming them would require significant revival throughout all corners of the Body of Christ.

     That would include revival for Mr. David J. Stewart, the gentleman I quoted without quotation marks up top.  This is a brother in Christ who looks with far more than suspicion on anyone who would utter the words, “My prayer is that they may be one.”  Such unity, in Stewart’s eyes, is evidence of an end times Whore of Babylon world religion poised to stamp us all with sixes and make us kneel before Illuminati altars.

     But he’s an obvious case.  What about the less blatant barriers to unity?  We’d also have to convince Trinitarians that they can find some footing with Oneness believers.  We’d have to convince Southern Baptists that it’s not the end of the world when Lutherans baptize their infants in family acts of dedication.  Christians who accept evolution would have to embrace die-hard Creationists.  United Methodists would need to tolerate the gambling habits of Bingo-loving Catholics (I mean, seriously, what is it with Bingo and those guys?  Is it their eighth sacrament or something?)  I, myself, would have to embrace the Pentecostals who told me that my failure to get healed of my childhood deafness and muteness means I can never have the Holy Spirit in my non-tongues-speaking Christian life.

     All my misgivings aside, however, here seem to be the only paths I can imagine toward ecumenical unity.

• COMPROMISE: Accept that someone’s view of God’s nature or particulars about salvation vary from yours, and make peace with it.  If you’ve read my last blog post, you’ll probably guess that I see this as the least likely option for Christendom as it’s now constituted.
• DOMINANCE: Having one church exert power and authority over another to change its doctrines.  Lately this has been done in covert ways, groups seeding existing churches with members of their own congregations to take over from within and change policies and doctrines.  This practice of “steeplejacking” eventually leads to the hijackers taking power and severing ties with the congregation’s denomination.  Haven’t heard of it?  It’s a thing.
• COMPARTMENTALIZING: This approach, unlike compromise, has more of a psychological denial element to it.  It’s a type of selective ignoring – you preach that a Catholic will burn in hell on Sunday, then stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him the next Tuesday to protest outside an abortion clinic.  This “don’t think about it too hard” approach has been somewhat successful in limited social efforts, but hasn’t really made inroads into shared worship, fellowship, and mutual acceptance overall.
• CELEBRATING THE SIMILAR: This would be the flipside of compartmentalizing – tallying with other believers all of the faith elements distinct Christian groups have in common.  Where do we overlap?  Let’s rejoice in that.  What’s our shared heritage?  We’ll build bonds from there.  Where will we spend eternity?  We can laugh a thousand years from now about how petty we used to be.  Who is on the throne of our hearts and our lives?  We’ll make that, make God, the first item in our makeshift credos of unity.  In effect: I don’t have to compromise what I believe in order to rejoice in common ground with you.
  
  

     Will it be easy?  I dunno.  But I recently felt a glimmer of hope by the examples of a duo of preachers in the virtual world of Second Life, one a Trinitarian and the other a Oneness pastor.  The first spoke publicly about the second, saying (I have to paraphrase, since I wasn’t taking notes at the time): “I’ll be a Trinitarian my whole life, but that man is a great guy, my brother in Christ, and you just know that the Lord is using him!”  That same week (and for several Sundays after), I heard the Oneness pastor ask all of us in his virtual church building to pray for the churches in Second Life, all of the churches, because they’re all trying to bring Jesus to the visitors on that virtual platform.

     I know I’ve leaned negative during much of this post.  I close it on that positive note, though.  Seeing a couple of guys with completely different takes on the existential nature of the Godhead speaking with generosity and love about those with different doctrines, I retain a small ember of hope for long-term Christian unity that may, in the end, overcome the exploding divisions of the past 300 years.

     “Of the increase of His government and of peace there will be no end,” says Isaiah 9:7 in a passage I sincerely feel maps the non-catastrophist future of His church.  “The zeal of the Lord of hosts will accomplish this,” it promises.  His zeal – not my efforts, not an ecumenical movement, not steeplejacking operations or hostile takeovers, but Him and His zeal.  As I learn to celebrate other believers’ similarities without sacrificing my own faith community’s standards, I might be able to join in on that zeal and contribute to the increase of peace.  I long to see the swords beaten into ploughshares, the wolf living with the lamb, the Calvinist leopard lying down with the Armenian kid.  I’m one who sticks her nose into dangerous doctrinal areas of discussion, so I especially hold out for Isaiah 11’s promise that a child can stick her hand into the adder’s den with no harm, no foul.

            That’s my eschatology.  That will truly be a time (to borrow from Acts 17:6) that “turns the oikouménē, the realms of the human family, upside down.”

 

Marana Tha,

Yolanda Ramírez / YoYo Rez

The Death of Christian Nations

 

The demon Screwtape explains how to trick a Christian into entangling faith and politics during wartime:

“Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the 'Cause,' in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war effort or of pacifism.”

   ~C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

***

       I write today as a temporary resident of Switzerland, but one whose roots run to another country far from where my family now live.  Can I claim an insider’s perspective to my country of origin?  Perhaps not, since time and distance have separated me enough to force a more detached perspective.  Indulge me, then, as I look in from the outside:

       My forebears founded a Christian nation.  That nation became a global power, the global power, boasting the most advanced culture in history.  They felt strongly that their nation should be a light in the darkness, a city set on a hill, a land where government was led by faith and where faith enforced support of the right kind of government.  A perfect place?  No, not yet.  The strangers among them, the immigrants, the ones who couldn’t be trusted … those were the problem.  They were unclean, dirty, disgusting even.  Their faith and their patriotism were suspect.  They either had to accept Christianity – and, mind you, Christianity in its right form – or they could just get out.  Love it or leave it.  There’d be no separation of church and state, and there’d be no doubting the path, the righteous destiny, that the Holy Spirit had laid out for this great, patriotic experiment we called the Empire of Spain.

       In time, England kicked Spain’s butt under the banner of yet another Christianity.  The rest is history, apparently doomed to repeat its cycles of one Christian nation causing the deaths of others.  That said, I apologize on behalf of my 1490s Spanish ancestors for all the Jews, Muslims, and fellow Christians we killed to make our nationalist Christian point.

 

GOD AND THE NATIONS

       How do Christians develop the idea that God will select their nation of birth as His preferred venue for the faith?  In my formative years, I regularly came across the idea that my home, the United States, was the “New Israel,” God’s select nation of chosen ones.  Those promoting this idea seemed to be either (A) end-times desperados anxious to find a starring role for the U.S. in their apocalypse scenarios or (B) Christian nationalists, a Dominionistic wave of budding theocrats.  The idea seemed odd to me in my early believing years.  To my mind, these people had flipped Christ’s great commission on its head.  Instead of going forth to make disciples of all nations, they wished to make a nation with all disciples, no exceptions.

       But I can’t indict the U.S. for doing anything unique here.  The love affair between Christendom and state traverses time and geography.  I opened above with Spain’s church-state marriage as one example.  England, too, has a long and bloody history of conflict among Christian factions vying for control of the monarchy, and the King of England remains the titular head of the Church of England to this day.  During the French revolutions, the church was made a department of state and all church lands became government property.  In Iceland, citizenship in the year 1000 required one to become a Christian, and the Evangelical Lutheran sect is its state-funded national church today.  Lutherans also hold a national-church funding lock in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and other Nordic realms.  The Greek state pays the salaries of Orthodox clergy.  Argentina does the same for Roman Catholic bishops and subsidizes their schools, all while making it nearly impossible for smaller religions to acquire government recognition.

 

DON’T I USUALLY WRITE ABOUT SCRIPTURE?

       It’s true, I use this blog space to reflect on Scripture and share a few linguistic insights about the text.  I’m trying to do that today.  I’m having trouble, though, because of one big barrier: Scripture has nothing to say about Christian states.

       Jesus had no sermons or parables about overthrowing non-believing governments.

       Paul didn’t urge the conquest of countries and the imposition of an official religion.

       Most important: the word “nations” never occurs in the New Testament.  At least not the word “nations” as you think of it.  More on the Greek-word stuff near the end.

 

CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION

       When Jerry Falwell, Jr. was fasting for forty days in the Judean desert before beginning his messianic ministry … or maybe it was Franklin Graham, I have trouble keeping track of the sons of godlike figures … Satan came to him to offer three temptations: one of personal comfort (“Have some bread instead of putting up with self-sacrifice!”), one of pride (“You’re at the tippy top of your church, so no fall can hurt you!”), and one of power (“At the summit of this highest mountain, all the world’s kingdoms are within your grasp!”)

       I dunno, maybe that Falwell tale’s apocryphal.  It’s telling, nonetheless.  Personal comfort, pride, and power-grabs are the ingredients for cooking up just enough rebellion to make some Christian groups decide Jesus was mistaken when he claimed His kingdom was not of this world.  Consider the musings of this U.S. citizen below, whom I’ve entirely made up:

       PERSONAL COMFORT: “They’re building a mosque just five miles from my apartment!  How am I supposed live with that, and how can the government allow it?!  It’s even worse than when they went ahead and rented an apartment to that gay couple in the building right up the street from mine.  I can barely tolerate this after going through a whole shopping season of hearing ‘Happy Holidays!’ when all I should be hearing is ‘Merry Christmas’!”  I’m living in persecution all the time!  I got grievances!  Somebody needs to do something.”

       PRIDE: “This is a Christian nation, so I’m gonna get one of those American flags with a cross emblazoned on it.  And then I’ll get a cross with a flag draped on it.  Then I’ll slap identical decals of those on my gas-powered vehicle to let those Socialist God-haters in electric cars know just how much the Bible promotes capitalism.  My first trip will be down to the school board meeting to protest how they don’t preach the Bible in public schools.  Never read the book much myself, but I stand up for it in this Christian nation of mine!”

       POWER: “I’m running for office because our nation was founded on the Bible.  My political party needs to be a party of nationalists, and I’m a Christian, so I say it proudly: We should be Christian nationalists.  Then our persecution will end.”

 

A LITTLE DECONSTRUCTION

       It’s odd to see personal discomfort cast as “persecution” by American Christendom.  There’s more than a slight disconnect between the Jesus who said, “If anyone sues you for your shirt, give him your cloak, too” (Matthew 5:40) and the Jesus follower who complains that being required to mask up at the supermarket during an epidemic is a violation of his religious liberty.  “If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two,” says Jesus in the very next verse.  “Never give an inch!” American Christendom retorts.

       I know, it’s not all of America’s Christians.  But have you scrolled through any social media lately?  It’s certainly the louder ones.

       As for the tired “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” grouse: The English word “holidays” derives etymologically from the words “holy days.”  Store greeters are literally wishing someone joy during the holy days.  Meanwhile, “Merry Christmas” means “I want you to be happy at the Roman Catholic mass being celebrated for the Christ.”  I suppose that works well for the one in five Americans who actually are Roman Catholic.  But even upping it to one in four by tossing in the Episcopalians with their Christmas mass doesn’t change the irony of Protestant anger and their feelings of retail-store persecution.

       As for the likelihood of power garnered by Christian nationalist politicians being able to end all this alleged persecution?  History reports that it’s just the opposite.  When Christians take government power, the real Christian persecution begins.

 

THE BIGGEST PERSECUTORS OF CHRISTIANS

       The Roman Empire persecuted Christians for 300 years.

       Christians with government power persecuted Christians for the next 1,700 years.

       We forget our history.  It’s more convenient to forget.  It pains me to reflect on the endless examples of Christian-on-Christian violence that used state power to flex temporal church muscles.  There are too many examples.  The turbulent Council of Chalcedon led to thousands of deaths over dozens of decades, all thanks to disagreements over the true nature of Christ and the Trinity.  Several of the early Crusades were not fought solely against Muslims, but also against Christians of the Eastern empires.  The gloves came off after the Reformation: the German Peasant’s War, the Thirty Years War, the Hessian War, the Eighty Years War, the Nine Years War, the Savoyard-Waldensian War … there’s far too long a list of Calvinists killing Armenians killing Catholics killing Reformed Church members killing Orthodox and so on.

       Some historical apologists reason that religion was often used as an excuse to go to war, not as the main driver of conflict.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  From my point of view, the argument is moot.  Once religion and secular politics have been so interwoven as to become indistinguishable, it doesn’t matter which one is the engine and which is the gas.  Government is the faith and the faith is the government, and all who disagree with either are committing treason against both.

       Other apologists argue that all those ancient (to us) sects of Christianity were the wrong kinds of Christians – CINOs, Christians in Name Only.  “Their national faith was the wrong faith, fake faith.  Mine is the right Christian faith, and would actually work without persecuting others if we controlled the state.”

       Again, maybe.  Maybe not.  A test of that would be to have U.S. public schools required to begin their days with a Christian prayer in a hypothetical U.S. now declared to be a Christian state.  How long would I last in Alabama if I chose to open with a “Hail Mary” Christian prayer, followed by a round of the Christian rosary with all my Alabama public school kiddies?

       “Aha!” I pretend to hear someone say.  “Those are Catholic prayers.  We’re talking about Christians.  Catholics aren’t really Christians.”

       Ay, there’s the rub, as Hamlet might have soliloquized.  For all the talk we as Christians hear of the U.S. being a Christian nation, the counting of actual Christians gets pretty flexible depending on context.  Pew Research’s 2022 comprehensive surveys on U.S. religion came up with 63% of Americans identifying as Christian.  That was down from 75% ten years earlier.  “See?” it’s tempting to say.  “That’s still practically a super-majority!  We’re a Christian country!”

       Now start asking questions.  Are Mormons considered Christian?  If your faith says no, we’re down to 61%.  How about those salvation-by-works Catholics?  Shall we discount them as American Christians?  That would drop us down to 42%.  And what about those mainstream Christian churches, the ecumenical people who don’t even mind praying with imams and Buddhist monks?  Out they go, and we’re now tickling 30%.  There are also those fringe groups, though, the ones with weird ideas like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists and Christadelphians and Christian Scientists, and … Well, that nudges us down to 23%, mostly evangelicals.  About 16% of the nation is White Evangelicals.  About 7% is Black Evangelicals.  But the Black ones tend to vote differently from the White ones, so …

       As Americans (including me, as a temporarily displaced one), we believe our nation was founded on religious freedom, first populated by those fleeing persecution.  We embrace that as an identifying principle of being American.  However, we need to remember that the persecution being fled was Christian-on-Christian oppression.  It wasn’t oppression by atheists.  It wasn’t attacks by Islam.  It was flight from a Christian sect that didn’t appreciate the Reformed ideologies of our Puritan forebears.

       That was step one in the New World’s taming of the Christian-on-Christian violence that had run rampant for centuries.  After failed attempts by Puritans at some New World oppression of their own, the age of Christian auto-persecution began to wane.  How did it wane?  Not, to our shame, by the force of Christian faith, hope, and love, but by the power of secular democracy.  Our government’s First Amendment, which (when read carefully) stands in stark contrast to our faith’s First Commandment, shut down all possibility of Christian sects using state power to kill each other.  We were the world’s first nation of Christians that didn’t feel the need to launch a Christian state.

 

I SAID NATIONS AREN’T IN THE BIBLE, RIGHT?

       Nope.  I said nations aren’t in the New Testament.  Yes, the word “nation” appears in many of our New Testament translations, and I even quoted one earlier when I referenced Matthew 28:19 and the great commission.  But our modern idea of a nation – a multi-city group of citizens within a protected border with their own army and leadership – has nothing to do with the Greek word ethnos that is so often rendered as “nation” in the New Testament.  There was a word for a bunch of citizens behind a border with leaders and an army: basileia, a kingdom, the sort of thing Satan was offering Jesus in the desert (See?  I really did know it wasn’t Jerry Falwell, Jr.)

       The Greek ethnos and its variants are most often translated as “the Gentiles” in the New Testament, despite popping up as “the nations” in a few dozen spots.  Like our word “ethnic,” is refers to a group with shared customs and cultures, and in its plural form it’s better seen in the New Testament as a reference to all the diverse, widespread, and non-Jewish peoples of the world.  Not the governments; rather, the cultures and the people.  Not the nation states; rather, the humans, the lost and hurting ones.

***

       Our job is not to conquer states to Christianize them.  There will never be a Christian politician who arises to honestly declare in place of Christ, “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).  The great commission does not send us to the basileias, the worldly kingdoms, but to the ethnesin, the people and cultures within the kingdoms of this world.  How do we engage that world?  Jesus promoted a holy life by means of persuasion and stories and parables and discourse.  Whenever anyone around Him tried to enforce morality through the wielding of law and punishment, he stepped in to redirect the legalistic minds among his own people.

       And when they demanded He be a worldly king and that he shed the blood of Israel’s enemies, He sidestepped the political role.  Yes, there’d be bloodshed, but it wouldn’t be the blood of His enemies.  It would be blood for His enemies, in service to the only kingdom He’d sponsor, the one that is not of this world.

       So why are we still so tempted to take Satan up on his offer of power over worldly kingdoms?

 

Maran Atha,

 Cosmic Parx, a.k.a. Yo Yo Rez