Something called Christian Nationalism has been on the rise of late. Different folks define the phrase differently, particularly if they are a friend or foe of it. Some use the term to describe any form of political engagement from a Christian perspective. Others use it to refer to identifying a modern nation with Christianity, even as one would identify a Christian individual as a “Christian.”
Without presuming to offer a detailed analysis, it’s this latter usage that interests me in this essay. I will consider the phenomenon of Christian Nationalism from historical, global, biblical and practical angles and draw a lesson out of each.
A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: THE KINGDOM ADVANCES THROUGH WORD AND SACRAMENT
The witness of the early church exposes us to a sort of culture warrior, but one who contrasts rather sharply from what’s usually meant by that term today.
According to the preeminent Roman historian Tacitus, Christians “got their name from Christ, who was executed by sentence of the procurator, Pontius Pilate, in the Reign of Tiberius. That checked the pernicious superstition for a short time, but it broke out afresh—not only in Judea, where the plague first arose, but in Rome itself, where all the horrible
To continue...read the full-length post originally published on this site.
