"Two Nations Under God?" by Matthew Milioni

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Welcome to Well of Life. We are excited to have you with us here this evening. And this talk this evening with Well of Life Talk is in collaboration with Followers of the Way Church in Boston, and also being hosted by Strength to Strength.

And here at our little Well of Life that we do at our café, where we invite students and others to come and talk about Jesus and the historic faith, there's a verse that really captures our heart for this. And it goes like this: "In fact, the water I will give him will become a well of water springing up with him in for eternal life." And of course, we know where that comes from, the interaction with the woman at the well. And that's our heart, is that this talk this evening would really inspire us to love Jesus more. It'll go beyond intellectual and into our hearts, because that's what really matters.

Because that's what our King cares about, is that in here, deep in our hearts, we're changed from the inside out. And earlier today, I was listening to my Bible while I was driving, and I was in Romans 1, and this verse stood out to me and spoke to me. And this is Paul here. Romans 1, verse 16 says, "For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek.

For it is in the righteousness of God, for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, 'The just shall live by faith.'" And again, our heart for this call, for this very important talk that we're kind of getting into some of the issues of our day, is that most of all, that Jesus will be lifted up because only He is worthy to receive glory and honor. And someday He will come home, He will come back, and we'll get to be with Him in the new heaven and the new earth. And we anticipate that when there'll be righteousness, we'll reign fully. So this evening, I welcome Matt Miliani here with us.

Welcome here. I can see you now, Matthew. Can you see me? Yeah, we can see you. All right. I'm sorry. Just kidding. It's really good to have you here, brother. Thank you for joining us. Matthew is there in Boston with others at the bridge. And of course, we have many other people joining us here. We have a big number of people on here this evening that are Zoomed in, listening at other locations beside here in State College in Boston. And we welcome you here for this talk.

By the way, before I forget, throughout the call, as questions come up, you can go to the chat button here and send us your questions. And then I'll have the incredible privilege of lobbing those at Brother Matthew at the end for him to answer. So please send us your questions, the simple ones and the hard ones, and we'll probably compile those somewhat and hopefully have maybe 15 minutes of some Q&A here at the end.

So Matthew, your talk this evening is titled this: "Two Nations Under God." Yeah, repeat, "Two Nations Under God?"

And then the subtitle is "Comparing the Competing Claims of Christian Nationalism Versus the Kingdom of God."

And as we know, we live in a time where the voice of Christian nationalism is rising and becoming very strong. Many people have moved far to the right in the political scene. And as kingdom Christians, we want to call us to consider what, how does Jesus want us to live in our day?

The title of this talk goes like this: "As the United States continues" I'm sorry, the description: "As the United States continues to divide into increasingly polarized factions, there is a war raging to control the identity and meaning of words like God, nation, Christian, freedom, and even good and evil.

How can we find our way to live out our values and identify without reinforcing" I'm sorry, "How can we find a way to live out our values and identity without reinforcing and taking part in the polarization and division that threatens to rip our whole social structure apart?" So Brother Matthew, we're looking forward to what you have to share with us. Could we just pause for prayer before we jump in?

Let's pray.

Father, we come to You in the name of Jesus, our risen Lord, our King, our Mediator, our Advocate, the One who is seated at Your right hand there in the heavens, the One who is right here with us, the One who deeply desires to see us be Your hands and Your feet. And Father, we see in Acts, Jesus, You are standing at God's right hand there. You care deeply about Your church. And Father, we live in a time when there's much opportunity for the church to be a bright light, to call people into Your kingdom. But Father, we know that we live in a time of much confusion and there's darkness that has invaded the church.

And so Father, we ask that You would give Brother Matthew much wisdom as he shares this evening, helps us to see and understand in a better way Your desire, Your heart for us. So bless this time and bless Brother Matthew. And we ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

All right. All yours, Matthew. Thank you, Brian. I don't know if I shared this with Brian, but I individually and we as a community have been praying about this exact subject for some time. And we've been wondering what our calling is to speak to these issues, to identify some of the problems that we see that are happening in the name of the church, in the name of Jesus, in the name of the kingdom of God. And these words and identities and the very big concepts associated with them have very different meanings depending on who is using them. And so we came up with this title, "Two Nations Under God." And we could have called it "One Nation Under Two Gods" or "Two Nations Under One God," or we could have played with all of those things.

But the point is that there is a competing claim for what nation the church is a part of and who the God is that is over that nation. And so I want to address those things and talk about them with you all tonight. I don't know exactly who the audience is for this message. I don't know who's in State College. I've had some of our friends come here so I could have some people to talk to, not just a camera. And I'm grateful for them.

I don't know who will watch in the future as we put these videos out and who's on a live stream to see. But I don't want to assume too much except for that we're addressing these issues from a Christian perspective. I think that in the conversation about Christian nationalism, Americans have a lot to say, a lot of legitimate things to say. And there's a political version of this conversation about what Christian nationalism is and what it's doing and whether that's a good or a bad thing. There's a lot of political conversations to have around Christian nationalism. But that is not my calling here tonight.

I feel like my job is to

try to stand for the soul, not of the nation. It's not my calling to stand for the soul of the nation of America. It's my calling tonight to stand for the soul of the church and who and what we actually are. I don't approach this issue from a detached outsider's perspective. I did not grow up in a home that embraced a kingdom theology. I grew up in a Baptist home. My grandfather was in the military during the Second World War. I have family members who have served in the military. I grew up in a Baptist church where Christian nationalism in the '80s and '90s wasn't crystallized in the same way that I'm seeing it crystallized today, but it had begun.

The moral majority movement was really entrenching the ideas of Christian nationalism and Christian participation in politics in kind of a new way in the late '70s and the early '80s. And that's the time when I was growing up in a Baptist home. So I'm very familiar with the ideology or the identity or the movement, however you want to define it, of Christian nationalism. I grew up being taught that America as a nation was favored by God and that God had orchestrated the events that brought about the nation of America.

I was brought up to believe that the God of heaven endorsed violence when it was necessary and that it had a legitimate role in the hands of the Christian, that the Christian government, the Christian soldier, the Christian policeman, or the Christian defender of his family all had a legitimate function to play using violence to stand up for right and to stop evil. And I accepted all of these notions. I didn't argue with any of them. I had no inclination that there was anything wrong with any of those ideas until, as a grown man, I converted and actually became a Christian.

And when that happened, when I fell in love with Jesus and His teachings, I began to ask myself a lot of questions about those exact ideas. So tonight, as we consider those things, I don't want to preach to the choir. I don't want to strawman the arguments of Christian nationalism. It is a broad movement, and there's a lot—and I think it's a spectrum. We'll work a little bit to try to define what we're talking about.

I think there's a spectrum of Christian nationalism all the way from the best American is also a good Christian all the way to the identity of Christian and American are indistinguishable, that they are part and parcel of the same kind of identity. That's a spectrum of Christian nationalism. And there's a lot of stops along there. But I want to consider things. I've spent a lot of time in the last several days examining the arguments and the thoughts of Christian nationalists. Some of them are self-professed, and some of them are accused of being Christian nationalists but don't say it openly. But the ideas of the merger of the identity of Christian and American are what's at—is what we're talking about when we talk about Christian nationalism tonight.

And so as we talk, I have an argument to make with the case that's being made that I think is winning a lot of people over. And I want to make an appeal before we're done. So let's talk about who the Christian nationalists are. We kind of need to define some of these things. There's an organization called the Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI.

They do polling on religious attitudes. And according to their numbers—and these numbers are fairly stable. They do it every year, as far as I can tell. And from about the early 2020s, '22 to '24, their last survey, these numbers are pretty consistent. And what they found is that 10% of adults in the US, one out of ten, are what they would consider adherents to Christian nationalism, and 20% are sympathetic to Christian nationalism. So if we lump those categories together of adherents and people who are sympathetic to Christian nationalism, that's 30%, three out of ten Americans, adults.

That is no small constituency. It's a very, very large number of people. 51% of people who attend one or more religious service a week are either adherents or sympathetic to Christian nationalism. That means that slightly over half of people who are in one religious service a week find themselves somewhere in that spectrum of Christian nationalism.

That, again, is kind of a shocking statistic.

38% of adherents and 30% of sympathizers—these were polled separately—38% of adherents to Christian nationalism and 30% of sympathizers agree with the statement, "True American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country." That's also from the same research data. And it's important to note in discourse about these issues, oftentimes—and I feel like not always fairly—the words are used, "White Christian nationalism." And there is a white Christian nationalism. There is a racial component to Christian nationalism that is racist. That is a very real phenomenon. I don't know how many people are a part of that particular spectrum of this movement, but a lot of Christian nationalists are Latinos and African Americans and other minority groups of people.

So it's not purely a white movement. Also, it's not purely a Reformed Calvinist movement. The Christian nationalist movement has adherents who are—I think that usually the people we think about and we talk about when you talk about Christian nationalism are Reformed, particularly Presbyterian people. Doug Wilson is becoming a much more famous preacher and has a movement of churches, Presbyterian churches that are associated with the movement of Christian nationalism. He is also connected with a church, a new church in DC, where Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, of the Department of War, is a member. And there's been media lately connecting them, the two of them, that they've been connecting themselves to each other.

So again, I want to—as we look at those numbers of who we're talking about and how much of a movement it is—and I think that's what feels different about it from the early days of the moral majority movement or my childhood in the fundamental Baptist churches—is that this movement has grown precipitously, I think, in the—I think part of that—this is my own speculation—part of that is because of what happened in our country during COVID. And part of it is from the political effects of the Trump administrations, both the first and this one.

So again, we're going to define this as the merging of American and Christian identities. At its simplest terms, I think that's the easiest way. And I think that's something that a Christian nationalist would not take exception to, that to be American is to be Christian, that those two things should go together, that in order to be a good American, you would have to be a good Christian, or at least some form of Christian, that those identities should merge together in some form or another. So why is it growing so much? Why is there an increase in this movement? Why is it affecting even the communities that I'm familiar with, communities who historically have been peace churches and have natural inclinations not to be political and not to be swept up in these ideas?

Even among those communities that I am either friends with or acquainted with, the ideas of Christian nationalism are sweeping in among us. And to see ideas of Christian nationalism coming in among historically non-resistant and Anabaptist and kingdom people is surprising and sad. And I think that many people who are beginning to espouse the ideas that are associated with Christian nationalism would not fill out the survey saying that they identified as Christian nationalists. I think they are—we can talk about who that is and why that is later.

So I want to look at the arguments of why I think this movement is growing. What have the Christian nationalists been saying that is compelling people, that is bringing people into that movement and causing it to grow? And how do we feel about those arguments? I think there's quite a few, but I boiled down the ideas of Christian nationalism into a few main categories.

Three. We'll consider three because of the time. I have many, many more things to say than will fit within this space. But for the sake of tonight, I want to look at three main arguments for Christian nationalism. And I'll name them here, and then we'll discuss them in kind. One, the first argument of Christian nationalism is that God made the nations. He prescribes their borders, and he orders the world according to nations, and he wants those nations to be good or moral. We can exchange those ideas.

He wants the nations, the nation, any particular nation that someone is in, to be good and moral. That's why he established nations. And there's no better arbiter or practitioner of the good than the Christians. So he makes the nations. He wants the nations to be good. So the Christians should be doing that within the nations. The second argument is that Romans 13 is clear that God has ordained the civil power, the magistrates. And so God's people should be exercising that power. If that power comes from God, then the people who are Christians should be exercising that power because it's God's power. Third, I think is a critique of Christian that Christian nationalists would make is that when Christians withdraw from civil life, from civil policy, from civil government, the nation declines in moral decay or in immorality, in however you want to define those things.

So let's look at those three claims. And I highlighted these three claims because I think a lot of people are listening to these claims. I think a lot of people hear that in a sermon at their local church, and they say, "Yeah, that's right.

Governments are ordained by God, so that's God's power. So we should be in that place because we're God's people. So God's people should be exercising God's power." These kinds of arguments are being made to good effect across our country. So let's look at them and compare these claims with what we think is right. So the first claim is that God made the nations and wants them to be good and moral, and so we should rule morally as Christians. The problem here, a lot of times people will appeal to Acts 17, and let's just—I'll read that real quick.

In Acts 17, it says this—there's other places, of course. This is Paul at Mars Hill. And it says, "God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands, neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he giveth to all life and breath and all things, and hath made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth and hath determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation, that they should seek the Lord, that happily they might feel after him." So we see here in Paul's preaching this idea that God has made the nations.

And then our second claim about Romans we'll address specifically. But the problem with using these passages about how God has set up the world and the ordination of men is that nations is being used in a modern political sense instead of a biblical sense. In the biblical sense, this word nations means the ethnos, the people. And the reason that Paul is appealing to the ethnos, to the people, and all of the people coming from one person, from one blood, he makes all people. He's uniting all of humanity. This is not a division that Paul is using in Acts 17. This is a unification of all peoples back into one from God. That's the point. And we'll talk much more about division and unity.

But when we see ethnos, the use and function of ethnos in the Gospels, and especially in eschatological terms, in the apocalyptic literature about the end of the age and what's going to happen and how God has saved people from every kindred and every tribe, from every ethnos, this is the point to using these frameworks of ethnicity. It's not that they're supposed to be that God made these divisions and wants them all separate. It's that God is calling his people from every ethnos. He's bringing us back into one place. And that's a very important differentiation between what we would teach and what the Christian nationalists would teach, is that the purpose of Jesus and his ministry is a central thesis.

The purpose of him coming and doing what he did, a central purpose of that, is to break down all of the barriers and partitions that men have made and to bring us back into one people under one king, under one Christ as one people. This is the point to the ethnos language.

So it's a misunderstanding of those things to begin with. This view of nation, like this, "I'm an American and you're Chinese and you're Ugandan and you're French," that isn't something that we're trying to establish. That's already established. What we're trying to do in Christ is to be this one people. This view of nation as American or French or Russian, this view of people within this category is functionally and definitionally schismatic. It is creating schisms in the church. And this is one of my major critiques of Christian nationalism. It creates a schism in the worst sense of the word. It creates a schism in the body of Jesus Christ. And we are defining ourselves as American Christians or Russian Christians or French Christians instead of Christians.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians that we aren't even supposed to use the apostles' names for our identities. Don't say, "I'm of Paul or I'm of Apollos or I'm of Cephas," because we didn't die for you. Don't call yourself after us. But I'm going to call myself after America or after Russia or after France or Germany, that that's going to be my identity. This is far too small and schismatic of a view of what God is doing in the world.

And think about this for a minute. If Christian and American are supposed to be a merged identity, what is the African identity supposed to be? What is the Asian identity supposed to be? What is the Russian Christian supposed to be?

So for the Christian in Russia, if I'm a Christian nationalist in America, what is the Christian in Russia supposed to do? Is he supposed to become American to be a Christian? Well, no, I don't think any Christian nationalist would say that. They probably would say that the Christian in Russia should become a Russian nationalist and make Russia like God wants it to be.

Okay, well, let's think about that for a minute. Let's take for a case a Russian Christian today and a Ukrainian Christian today. And those Christian nations or potential Christian nations, both of them have some Christian identity, those Christian nations are at war with each other. And so now the two supposed Christian brothers, one Russian and one Ukrainian, in service to their national identities, will pull out guns or bombs and destroy each other's lives and families and health and all the things that God intends for life.

So how are those people supposed to be Christian nationalists within their respective countries at war with another Christian entity? Do we suppose from our Christian nationalist friends that wars would cease if we were all Christian nationalists?

Maybe they would make those claims, but there's no historical precedent for any of that. What of the Lutheran German Nazi and the American Baptist GI in 1944? When they meet each other, how are their identities supposed to interact with their behavior? Are they supposed to be acting as nationalists or as Christians? Because the claim is right there. You have to choose one or the other. If this is my Christian brother in Christ, who am I to kill him? If he is my competitor as a nation, my nation against his nation, then I have to kill him or stop him or maim him or hurt him or whatever.

So which identity wins? And we see from this that these identities, there has to be an order to them. They can't both be mixed together.

It is clear to me that God is intentionally breaking these exact identities and making us one people. This is the whole framework for tearing down the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile. Those are stand-ins for the other identities aside from Christ. And every identity, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free, male or female, all those identities are being subjected and put down under my identity as a Christian. And if that's so, then my obligations, my allegiance, my devotion, my obedience, and my behavior is dictated by what Jesus says, not by what my nation says.

Let's look at Romans 13. Romans 13, it's a classic text that we look at in regards to these issues. It says, "Let every soul be subject to the higher powers, for there's no power but of God. The powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God, and they that resist shall receive themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works." Remember, he says this, "Rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Will thou then not be afraid of the power to do that which is good? And thou shalt have praise of the same, for he's the minister of God to thee for good.

But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid, for he beareth not the sword in vain, for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore you must need be subject not only for wrath, but also for conscience." And he goes on. We could continue reading, but the point is clear. And we can see there what case the Christian nationalists are making.

That these ministers of God, who is a minister of God but them of those of his people? Who is a minister of God but the church? And so we have to try to reconcile from the Christian nationalist perspective that some Christian ministers are bearers of the sword and bearers of revengers of vengeance with wrath.

But we start to run into problems as soon as we start to critically analyze that claim. Namely, that Jesus tells his people in the Sermon on the Mount that we have to love our enemies. And it's not a flippant statement. He says that we should love our enemies, do good to them that hate us. We should pray for those who despitefully use us and persecute us. And he tells us why.

It's not even evangelistic in its motivation there. He says, "So that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven, for he makes his Son to rise on the evil and the good, and he sends his reign on the just and the unjust."

The reason Jesus tells us that we're supposed to love our enemies, that we're supposed to pray for those that do wrong to us, and we're supposed to bless those that would destroy us, is so that we can be as his people, like God is, that we are good to everyone. The rain is good for the evil and the righteous. The sun rising tomorrow is good for all of humanity. And his people, the church of Jesus Christ, is a blessing to all nations. That's the promise of Abraham, a blessing to all nations. Every place where the church is, those people will be a blessing to the place where they are, just like the sun rising and the rain falling.

So that's a big problem. How do I execute vengeance and bear the sword and do that? Those are competing claims, so we have to reconcile that somehow. Well, the other problem is if we just stick with Romans, we don't even add Matthew in. The other problem that we have as soon as we start to examine Romans 13 is that we have to look at the immediate context of who is this talking about and to whom is it written. The immediate context for this passage, the power that is God's ordained minister in Romans 13 when it is written is the evil, wicked emperor Nero.

Nero is God's minister for good. Nero bears not the sword in vain. Nero is the one that we should not have terror of, that he's there from God. Nero is there from God to reward good and punish evil. Now, how do we reconcile that?

So I ask my Christian nationalist friends, whenever we have this conversation, if you're going to talk to me about Romans 13, you need to explain to me how Nero is all of those things before we can talk about how the church is supposed to be those things. Because what we find is that the function of government has happened and does happen in every place where there is government.

There's a book that I'll cite here, but I won't go into, that I often recommend to people, Leonard Bertoin's Anatomy of a Hybrid, talks about this at length, and I highly recommend it. But suffice it to say, wherever governments are, whether they are Pharaoh's Egypt or Nero's Rome or Donald Trump's America or Chairman Mao's China, wherever governments are, they serve the same function as far as God has ordained them. And that function is to create an order. And they do not need to be Christian to make that order. In fact, there's a good argument to be made that when the Roman Empire tries to Christianize this order, that that's when it begins to decay and fall apart.

But that's an argument for another day. The fact of the matter is, wherever governments are, they do the same things. They create a structure for a society of people where generally there's these human kind of bottom lines for a government. You can't steal from the market. You can't indiscriminately use violence against your neighbor. You can't take women and do what you want with them. You can't do all kinds of things. And this happens in every structured society. The society is structured by whatever government is there to do those things so that there is an orderly society to prop up the expenditures of that state structure. It's a self-correcting system. And this is the beauty and the elegance of how God has separated powers, that he has created an ordained structure, including Nero and every wicked ruler and righteous ruler, ones that are trying to do good and ones that are trying to do bad, are functioning the same way in that they create this stable order for every society.

That the Egyptians and Pharaohs' day have a world that they live in where there's some sense of order and law. But that doesn't mean that it would have been a better order if the church had run Egypt. So there's some major questions about Romans 13. We need to reconcile the claims that Jesus gives us with Matthew 5. We need to wrestle with why the language of Romans is they and you. They bear not the sword in vain. They, Nero and his people, bear not the sword in vain. You should do these things. That language is built into the structure. And we need to deal with these concepts of separation of powers. Bertoin calls them conserving grace and redeeming grace.

And they have their mutually exclusive powers where one begins, the other ends. And the way to say that is that magisterial authority uses as its currency coercion and violence. The implied violence is how the state controls men to keep them from becoming animals, to keep them from degrading into warlords and chieftains that just whoever has the most power can rule everyone within his reach. Governments are designed to prevent that from happening. And they use the sword and wrath and real and potential violence in order to do that. But that is a mutually exclusive claim with what the job of the gospel is, which is to compel people's consciences to repent, to choose to repent, and to receive the grace of Christ and to be baptized in remission of their sins so that they can become different people who do not need the sword of the state to compel them not to act like animals.

The third claim is that Christians belong in public life. And to this, I must confess that I agree. Christians do belong in public life. Christians have civil, social responsibilities. The question is, what does it look like for a Christian to practice civil responsibility? Does it mean to bear weapons? Does it mean to stand in defense at the border? What does it mean?

The idea that the Christians withdrawing from the levers of power, from the mechanisms of coercion, is a withdrawal of civil responsibility is a false accusation and a false dilemma. I have found that the last time I voted in a presidential election was George Bush Jr.'s second term.

It's the last time I voted for a president.

And my life, from the time that I voted in that election till now, any particular week, month, or day, I am tenfold more civilly involved in my community and the people around me than I was when I was outsourcing my authority to vote for a commander in chief of the United States.

Civil responsibility, from the Christian perspective, is not ignorant of evil. It's in the trenches with evil. It is ministering daily, face to face and hand to hand, in combat with evil in the world through loving care of broken people. This is civil engagement of the church. And this applies not just to America, but to whatever nation the Christian people find themselves in. My civic responsibility is to love my neighbor. My civic responsibility is to care for the poor. My civic responsibility is to heal the sick and to visit those imprisoned and to care for the souls of the people around me for the good of Jesus Christ and his kingdom. That is my civic responsibility.

Hating my enemies is not my civic responsibility. Shooting people is not my civic responsibility. Holiness is my civic responsibility. And I will not outsource virtue into legislation.

Let me say that again. I'm not going to outsource virtue to legislation. What virtue I create in my life and in my world and in my community will be the direct impact of my hands loving and caring for people around me. It will not be because I have appealed to Caesar. I have appealed to a governor. I have appealed to D.C. for them to write a law, to send police, to make them do what I think is more.

That is withdrawing from civic responsibility, if you ask me.

Let me read to you a description of Christianity in the second century. And some of you may know this once I start reading it. But this is a very famous piece of writing from sometime between 130 and 180. And I'm going to read a few things from it.

And you tell me if this description sounds like Christian nationalism. It says, "For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country nor language nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own nor employ a peculiar form of speech nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity.

But inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary method of conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners.

As citizens, they share in all things with others and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do others. They beget children, but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven.

They obey the prescribed laws and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned. They are put to death and restored to life. They are poor, yet make many rich. They are in lack of all things, yet abound in all. They are dishonored, and yet in their very dishonor are glorified. They are evil spoken of and yet are justified. They are reviled and blessed, insulted and repay the insult with honor. They do good, yet are punished as evildoers. When punished, they rejoice as if quickened unto life. They are assailed by the Jews as foreigners and are persecuted by the Greeks, yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred."

This is from the Epistle to Diogenes. And that description does not fit with the concept of Christian nationalism. It does fit very well with the life and testimony of Jesus Christ and the apostles. It is a continuation of their work that he started.

How should the church leaven and affect the world around us? Because this is really the competing claim. Should the church grab hold and rest the levers of power in order to use the violence and potential violence of the state to create an order that is pleasing to God? That's the claim of Christian nationalism.

Let me read you the next section from the Epistle of Diogenes.

"To sum up all in one word, what the soul is in the body, Christians are in the world." He goes on to describe what that means. And I'll paraphrase for you that the way that the church is intended to leaven evil in the world, because we're not ignorant of evil, we know it and we see it. We interact with it from in, within, and without.

The soul or the conscience is maybe the way we would write this today. The conscience in the body has no power.

My conscience can't affect my nerve impulses. It can't move my muscles. It can't do anything to my body. My conscience cannot control anything in my body. And there is nothing that my body can do to stop the voice of my conscience.

They live on a different plane from each other. And the conscience continues to witness right and wrong. It says even of the heathens that their own conscience is either accusing or excusing them in Romans. So the conscience has this effect that it has no physical power, but it can't be stopped. And this has been the right and legitimate place of every church in every nation in every age, is to be the conscience of the world around them, to speak like our consciences do to our bodies and to our minds, to speak what's evil and what's righteous, to communicate those things to the world around them.

And just like the conscience, which sometimes we try to shut it up and silence it and suppress it, the world has done this to the conscience of the church. The only thing that stops this effect is if the conscience loses its bearing.

If my conscience loses the ability to tell right and wrong, I lose the ability to tell right from wrong. And if we as the church lose the ability to tell right from wrong to the world around us, the world will lose its moorings. And I think this is actually what's happening. It is not the withdrawal of the Christian from civil life that is causing the world to be at the brink of burning around us. I feel this. I feel like the world is at the brink. I feel in unprecedented times.

And why is that? Is it because the Christians have abandoned civil life? Far from it. There has never been a time in my lifetime when the Christians have been more engaged, more powerful, more dominant, and more in control than literally today.

Today, the people who are claiming the name of Jesus have more power than they have ever had in my lifetime. And is the world better? Is there more peace? Is there more grace? Is there more holiness? Is there more righteousness?

I don't see it.

Hebrews 11 is one of the texts I'd like to look at quickly. Just a few verses.

And this is my last argument before I make an appeal. In Hebrews 11, this is the chapter of the heroes of faith. And my argument is that Christian nationalism is not a faithful position. It is not coming from a place of faith. That Christian nationalism is actually putting it's abandoning faith and choosing to force an outcome.

Sarah, when she hears that God has promised that she'll bear a child in her old age, in her very old age, laughs. She becomes Sarah from Sarai.

She can't believe by faith that this will happen. And so she uses her own ideas and her own way to cause the promise of God to happen. And this is playing out still today. The implications of that lack of faith in Sarah are playing out even today.

And similarly, there's a call to faith to believe that Jesus is uniting humanity, that he will use his mechanisms to create good in the world, that his people will be able to change the world around them without being like Sarah and taking the reins and making it happen. And the call of the Christian nationalist is the opposite. It's to make it happen, to use whatever mechanisms we can grab in order to make what we think should happen happen. So let's read in Hebrews 11. It says in verse 3, let's just start one. "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen." It's the things we believe that will happen, more than believe that we have confidence will happen, but they're not there yet. "For by it, the elders obtained a good report."

In verse 3, "Through faith, we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." And I worry that the Christian nationalist position is that we have to make these things appear. We'll use the mechanisms that are appearing right around us to make the supernatural kingdom that we think should be.

If we jump down to 6, "But faith, without faith, it is impossible to please him, for he that cometh to God must believe that he is and that he is a reward of them that diligently seek him." If we seek after him, if we do what he says, there will be reward.

And I want to look at Abraham. "By faith, Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for inheritance, obeyed, and he went out not knowing whither he went. But by faith, he sojourned in the land of promise." It was his promised land, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise. "For he looked for a city which had foundations, whose builder and maker is God." In verse 13, "These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off and were persuaded of them and embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on earth.

For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly, wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city."

The end of that chapter says, "God having provided some better thing for us that they without us should not be made perfect." He talks about this role of faith. What is the call of faith for the Christian nationalist? What's by faith and not by sight? When we're resting the levers of power, when we're in the White House, when we're in the Congress, when we're in the Senate, when we're in every level of the government, what is faith building?

What are we apprehending by faith? Where is the city whose builder and maker is God? Where is the place that we left and could have gone back to, but we proved by our lives that we were pursuing what God was making, not what men could make?

Here's my appeal. It's right for you to ask the question, whoever you are listening to me today, why should I listen to you?

It's a legitimate question. Who am I to speak to you about the fate of American Christian identity and the soul of the church? I'm not a senator. I'm not a politician. I'm not the secretary of the Department of War. I'm not a bunch of things.

In fact, I'm kind of the opposite. I'm a sheet rocker. I'm a father. I'm a husband. I'm a newly ordained bishop of a small community of Christians.

I don't have any of those things that those people have. But what I do have is a testimony of how meeting Jesus Christ in real terms radically changed who I was. It made me from being a person who hated people to a person who loved people.

My love for Jesus, the Lamb of God and the Prince of Peace, radically changed my life. I used to fight a lot when I was young.