A few days ago, somebody sent me this picture and I didn't really know what to think. And we've been doing some things here at Historic Faith where we were dealing with the politics and David Bercot and I did an interview last Saturday or a couple of Saturdays ago. But when I got this, I realized, you know, this whole concept of an Anabaptist kingdom perspective of politics really needs to be talked about.
Talked about not only for reasons, not only just for the fact that people like this, but for people in general, so that we can have an understanding of what early Christianity, what historic Christianity, the way the patristics, the way the early church looked at the church in politics. I'm Dean Taylor, and I'm president of Sattler College, and I'm also Assistant Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies here at Sattler College. But I'm also a student myself. So I'm here to learn with you.
I'm now back in school getting my doctorate degree in historical theology at Evangelical Seminary right there in Myerstown. Mark Draper is my advisor, and I am loving it. And I'm really enjoyed studying history at a deeper level and different things like that. Today, I'm going to talk about this whole concept of Christianity in politics. I'm going to try to stay out of non-resistance and other Anabaptist doctrines and just talk about politics.
I think there's a lot to be said and a lot of people are being interested even from evangelical and Catholic backgrounds, Orthodox backgrounds, and are saying it's time for us to look at a different worldview when it comes to Christianity and politics and that's great and that's what I want to talk about. So I'm going to divide this up in three ways. I just kind of got this stuff together, put it on my computer, said we've got to talk about this.
Grabbed up the people here at Sattler and said, okay, can you set up some recording devices? And so I'm going to be reading it from my laptop. I'm going to be showing you some of the slides here. I hope it works out right. But I'm going to try to do this in three parts. Each of about 45 minutes to an hour each. I started off with one as I know it was too long. I started off to two, that got too long and I got to three.
So in the three parts, the first part, I'm going to just talk about a kingdom worldview and I'm going to show you how that worldview, that paradigm is changing. I'm going to even show you a modern evangelical who's using that terminology, a changing paradigm. The second episode, I'm going to just go to the basics and look at the Bible and the early church and the early Anabaptists and look at their concept of this whole worldview of politics and the church.
And then the third one is probably the most exciting, probably the most interesting to most, but I'm going to be going through history, particularly World War I and World War II, and looking at some ways that the Mennonite Church and Anabaptists in general kind of really messed up with the when they got involved in politics. There's been times when they got involved with politics and I just think it's a really bad thing. And so I'm going to talk about that.
Okay, and I do want to make one disclaimer before I get into any of this stuff. I don't think it's like necessarily a sin to go vote. My biggest concern is that voting and getting involved with politics is a symptom of something much deeper and much bigger that we're missing. I don't think it's necessarily a sin. And so I want to say that right here at the beginning. I do think historically that churches that get involved in politics, it's end up hurting the world and it's end up hurting the church.
And I hope to show that through some of these talks. The other thing I want to get into is that I've done these talks before on some of these issues and sometimes I remember I was speaking somewhere at an Anabaptist Identity Conference, I think it was, and the brother said, " Hey, make sure you let people know that you recognize that, you know, the Republicans and the conservative parties have been getting a lot of attacks from modern popular culture." And I do acknowledge that.
I mean, it's crazy that the days we're living in. I mean, the actors are banding together to come against the president. There's all kinds of things with new political correctness, new breakdowns of the family, a new socialism, new types of militarism. I mean, who thought you'd start seeing people protest and then taking over entire cities a year ago? New vocabulary, here's one.
When I got, I was a missionary a couple years ago with Cam in Greece, and as we came home, my daughter needed to go to the hospital and just pulling up the computer that they wanted me to log in with, to the button of you know male or female, should be an easy thing. I had one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight choices. I mean, things are different and some abortion bills have been passed that have made abortion even easier.
You can see the standing ovation, the joy of, you know, seeing we're losing some ground there. There is certainly a cultural war that's going on. Witches are gathering to cast spells on presidents and Christian churches. And so the driving thing that comes up with us is, don't you think we should do something to show our support, to show our solidarity with the conservative Christian leaders and that kind of a thing, so-called. And I get that.
I also admit that the President Trump has done some notable things, and I wanna say that. He's voiced many things that you could say that has tried to help causes of abortion and things like this. It's funny, you know, he went to, you know, hand out some Bibles with people going through some hard things and he signed it and got in trouble with that. But in some of the things that I've seen though, the church getting involved with that lure of his action there hasn't come out like a little differently.
For instance, Brett Kavanaugh, who went with all this, we heard about going into the Supreme Court and what he would help with abortion. Well, the first time we had an abortion law that was coming up, it seems like he went with the other side. The other things is just some mixed messages coming that don't really seem to make a lot of sense.
And when the Christian church backs these different political agendas, we're hoping to see, particularly in session three, it can really have repercussions on the church, on the nations. People say, " You know, if you're going to support these things, why should I even bother?" Particularly when they see us, it comes out that something evil that happened we're going to see like with Hitler and things like that. After that, we ended up with this virus, coronavirus, and we've been going through some terrible times.
Cities catching on fire, protesting in almost every major city. And then this, the debt to pay for all this stuff? Is somebody watching this? I don't know. This looks bad. I'm not an economist or anything, but that looks bad to me. And so we come right up to our presidential election that we have today, which gave me these pictures and got me just thinking. And yeah, that's why I'm here. I believe the system is broken. The system is broken. And I don't think I'm the only one that thinks the system is broken.
We're beginning to see many Catholic and evangelical Christian leaders began to question this paradigm, this given of Christendom. Here's a Washington Post article. Christians have lost the culture wars. Should they withdraw from the mainstream? That's an interesting question. Some interesting stuff here by Rod Dreher. And he's written some interesting books I'm going to talk about in just a second. You know, the culture war is lost.
And what's interesting and here's the point that I really want you Anabaptists that have kind of been tempted with some getting involved with this politics in a wrong way is that now is a time when many evangelical and Catholic scholars are beginning to say, you know, let's look at the Anabaptist view of politics and maybe we could do something better. But here's like, here's an example. Here's a little clip. One thing that I could change about Calvin? Well, there's probably several.
I think one would be I would love to have heard more from him about his conversion. If I could throw in a couple other quick things. I wish Calvin had given a greater hearing to the Anabaptists. I agree. And in that point, the pastor was talking about conversion. The interesting video goes on to talk about Calvin's torturing of heretics. So what is that kingdom and Anabaptist view?
Now I belong to a group of Christians and a tradition with Anabaptists and Kingdom people that have made a point on believing this early Christian concept that the church and the state just does not mix. And we've tried this and different people have looked into this and tried it many different times. But you know, I think after so many hundred years of it not working, maybe it's time for us once again to say, let's look at a different model.
And to the Anabaptist people that are listening to this and watching, I appeal to you. Please listen. Evangelicals, philosophers, Catholics, secular people are beginning to look, they see that the system is broken. It's not a time for us, for the world to see us jumping in and giving our allegiance to political things that are suspect and that could come out very, very wrong. Please stay tuned to the third episode in seeing some ways that this happened at different times and what that did for the church.
It's time for us to be very serious with this. Here's another thing. So right when I was starting to make this episode, I got this sent to me in the mail. What's this? Email. Who would have ever thought in Holmes County, huh? Make liberals cry again. Trump 2020. All right, it's clever. But on a buggy? I sped it up there. That flag's a little small, but it still counts. It sure does. It sure counts. And so does this. So why does it stand out? It stands out because it's not supposed to be there.
Even the world looks at this as a contradiction, a mockery, and it's another whole topic, but when I think of all the attention that's made over being cloistered and being separate and all this. And to see it end up like this, it makes me just really, I don't know, tremble inside. I think that last video, when I first saw it, I said, you know, if anybody ever asked me why we started Sattler College, I think I'll just show them this. We've lost something.
Still plain, but we've lost the very essence of what's deep inside. And we need to do something about that. Here's another one. Oh, I forgot this one. Yikes. Again, Amish girls, or at least you can see there's so many things, nice cell phone. You know, it makes me grieve. And here's the thing, and all kidding aside, it's stuff like this that when you lose your edge, when you lose your essence, when you lose why you're there, makes you end up potentially losing your lampstand. This is serious.
And in this day and age, when things are getting really bad, people need to see the answers that come from Jesus Christ. And that's what we're going to look at today. So the audience that I have for these three series, three sessions on this topic, or I want to look at evangelicals. I mean, audience for evangelicals that are responding to this paradigm shift. But I am going to keep it to politics, not get into non-resistance. And the other one is a rebuke and a warning to my own people.
So some of you that are watching this will maybe understand this topic a little deeper from hearing just some of my concerns that I have crying out to our people who I believe are losing this. And here's the thing. As Jesus said, " Strengthen that which remains, which is about to die." Jeremiah put it this way. If you don't mind, I'm going to wear these goofy readers. They allow me to look at my computer screen without, you know, looking up like that. Jeremiah 2:13 put it this way and listen to it carefully.
" My people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me." In other words, forsaken me, my way, the fountain of living waters, and hewn for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water. I really believe that Christendom, that the Constantinian synthesis, the mixing of the church and state together is this cistern. But I thought, you know, as I got this together, this verse came to me. We should pray.
The Bible says in 1 Timothy 2:1 through 3, " I exhort therefore that first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings and for all that are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior. Let's take a moment and pray for our president and our leadership. Dear Heavenly Father, I do thank You, Lord, that You have given us government in this earth.
I do pray, Lord, that You govern this earth with Your Spirit, with Your hand. And I thank You also that You gave us Jesus, that Jesus Christ, that You came to this earth and gave us this answer for humanity. But God, I pray for the leaders of this world that they would govern rightly, honestly, and do your will. And I pray that the church would be unmolested and that it would be able to go strong and go forward. So God, I do pray that you would give me grace to present these things rightly.
Most of all, God, to encourage the saints of God in our church to stand on the teachings that you gave us and go forward with your kingdom. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. The system is broken. Let's talk about two kingdoms. Most everybody has, all churches have some form of two kingdom theology. The Catholics coming out of the Constantinian synthesis and coming up had polished that and made that perfect, perfected up until the time of the Reformation.
The Reformers when they came and stood on salvation by faith and took the Word of God and stood on these things, did some marvelous things in giving us the Word of God and giving us the Bible, but this concept of Christendom, they just accepted and brought it along with them. And it doesn't matter who they were, whether it was Zwingli or Calvin or Luther, they all brought their Christendom together and came that, and they ended up with a Protestant Christian Commonwealth, a Protestant Christendom.
And right from the beginning, it didn't go very well. In 1618, after right at the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, when they began to wrangle over how to read the scriptures, the whole nation and trying to use the countries to help them with their theological problems ended up the 30 Years War, and this was brutal nation against nation in the name of God. And it became a mockery to the world. This is Christianity, and this is Protestantism, and this is what has happened. And it was terrible.
The Anabaptists got caught in the middle of this from both sides, both the Catholics or the Protestants. So when you read like in particularly the records that are kept in the Hutterian Chronicles, and the diaries that they talk about more in Volume 2, and the diaries that they talk about, and this attack during this time is just brutal. It's unbelievable. I had to put like warning signs at the beginning of some of my, you know, pages here to make sure somebody would read how graphic it is.
These wars were terrible, done by Christians. And you know when you think of that back and forth, these different battles and this whole cry out of whose side are you on? It reminds me of this passage in Judges. In Judges 5:13, it says there, " And it came to pass when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand.
And Joshua went unto him and said unto him, ' Are thou for us or for our adversaries?' How many times in history, including today, is that the question that's being asked? Which side are you on? You know, I love the answer. I love the answer. And he said nay, but as captain of the host of the Lord, am I now come? That's who we want to be for. We want to be for Jesus. We want to believe that His ways and His cures for humanity are so much better than these different politics. But this is what kills me.
It doesn't matter which side you're on. You've got the right and the left, although the sides here, you know standing for things and coming out saying any self-respecting Christian would vote my side. MacArthur's literally saying, well, any real Christian's gonna obviously vote for Trump. You got Shane Claiborne, who wrote the book, Jesus for President, has now come out supporting for Biden.
I'm on Ron Sider's blog and you know appreciate a lot of what he's written but now just seeing them getting involved with politics. Guys, the cistern is broken. It's time to let Jesus be president once again. So let's see where the problem comes from. Let's go down deeper and let's talk about Christendom. All right, let's step back. I'm going to do this in just kind of a little survey of where this Christendom concept came from. All right, Constantine.
Most everyone agrees, whether you're Protestant or Catholic, Orthodox, Jehovah's Witness, Mormon, or whatever, that a lot of things change with Constantine. Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing, a lot of things change. Just in a quick summary, Constantine was a good emperor. Actually, he was a brilliant emperor and he wanted political power.
Right before him, the church has gone through some terrible persecution, the persecution of Diocletian, and it was just really bad and Bibles were burnt and old manuscripts and bishops had apostasized and a lot of terrible stuff. Constantine then, for his own political reasons, was wanting to come in and liberate all of the empire and be the sole king. It was on his way down from Britain on down to Rome, he had a little encounter.
And in that little encounter, he looks up one day in the morning and says he sees this thing in heaven, the chi and the rho, the Greek chi in rho, and or across one of the records say across, one say the chi in rho. And he said over it was in this name conquer. So according to the records, he said, wow, this is my sign from God. I'm going to go in, but I'm going to go in and I'm going to conquer the name of Jesus Christ. He did.
And so he came in and in 312, he came in and here's the picture of the battle of the Milvian Bridge where he defeated the emperor and became king. And then when he did so, he told them I liberated you from your tyrants and I did this in the name of Jesus Christ. And they put the symbol on their swords, you see it on the coins, it's all over the place when you look at this but just jumping through a lot of that.
The interesting thing is the church loved it and I don't blame Constantine at all, he's actually brilliant. He reminds me of George Washington, you know, just a good leader with, yeah, leave that alone. But he reminds me of that. He's brilliant. But the thing is that I really fault right here is that the church, being so happy and being freed from all these terrible things, just took it hook, line and sinker. And they put him in charge of huge things of organizing the church.
So in 325, there was big debates over the nature of Christ and all these types of things. He said, " Okay, I'm gonna have an empire that's gonna be getting things right." And the church said, " Hey, can you help us and give us some influence to decide on how this goes?" And here you see a halo around Constantine here in this icon. He wasn't even baptized yet. Matter of fact, he didn't get baptized to his deathbed by the very group that he called a heretic at this conference, but that's another story.
But here they came up with the Council of Nicaea, which I love the Council of Nicaea, the Creed of Nicaea, but much more happened there than just this creed. They brought church and state together. The church used the state to solve a problem. The state used the church for its influence and things went bad. Right from there they were banishing people who just didn't agree and there was getting terrible.
So the question that I always like to ask when I go through history is, were there people that disagreed with this? You know Was there people that stood up against it? There was one that I found a very significant one, a Hilary of Poitiers. Guy's name Hilary. And so he was a rich pagan that had converted to Christianity, very passionate Christian with his journey of faith and everything. And he noticed it. Things have changed. Look at the years he was from, what, 310 to 367.
So he would have seen that transition period where he's watching the church get involved with the state. He's like, wait a minute, we're starting to use the state to solve our problems in a really bad way. And he wrote this, " The church now terrifies with threats of exile and dungeon and she who of old gained adherence in spite of dungeons in exile now bring men to faith by compulsion. She who was propagated by hunted priests now hunts priest in her turn.
This must be said in comparison with that church, watch this now, this must be said in comparison with that church which was handed down to us and which now we have lost. The fact is in men's eyes, cries, the fact is in men's eyes and cries aloud. It's lost, it's lost. After this, you see Cyril of Alexandria, although he did some great stuff. Theologically, he got involved with kicking the Jews out of the area, working and coming against persecution against pagan priests and pagan philosophers.
And then more divisions came up. And we get into one of the, of course, the most notable and incredible theologians of all times, Augustine. And here's the thing. If you've just inherited this Christendom, this Constantinian synthesis, and it enters your systematic theology unchecked. It enters like a virus that then has effects that are going to be bigger than you even realize. And Augustine made this mistake.
In his debates with the Donatist, he ended up not being able to control them with just his argument of skills, his debating skills. And so he decides that it's time to start using the politics and entering politics to handle these issues. And he made this quote, which I'll give to you, I'll quote for you here, which has gone down in history and ended up killing thousands of people because of what it represented. He said this, famous quote in history.
Augustine Reason when he was trying to debate with the Donatist, he says, " It is indeed better that men should be brought to serve God by instruction than by fear of punishment or by pain." It's better that we do things by instruction instead of by punishment or pain. Watch what he says. But because the former means are better, the latter must not therefore be neglected. So yeah, you can do instruction, that's better, but let's not lose punishment and pain. The latter must not be therefore neglected.
Many must be brought back to their lord like wicked servants by the rod of temporal suffering before they attained the highest grade of religious development. And then he has the audacity to quote Jesus' wedding feast, compelling verse to go to be missionaries to all the earth or compelling people. He said, " The Lord Himself orders that the guests be first invited, then compelled to his great supper." This is quoted in the Middle Ages for the persecution of heretics. It's quoted in the Reformation time.
And this kind of sea of allowing this Constantinian synthesis, this Christendom of mixing the politics of the two worlds together, really did a lot of damage. He took it a little further. He was on a council, council of Carthage in 404, acting, it was a bishop acting as this, and deciding it's time to hand it over formally to the state.
And he said this in 404, " It is now full time for the emperor to provide for the safety of the Catholic Church and prevent those rash men from terrifying the people who they cannot seduce." And there was another edict that went out and formally and it was terrible.
The historian Edward Gibbon, the iconoclastic historian Edward Gibbon, and his what is the decline and decline in fall of the Roman Empire goes on and says that after that edict went out that like 300 bishops with thousands of deacons and other ministers were torn from their churches, stripped of their possessions, and banished to remote islands. If the ministers decided to stay, they were put under strict laws regulating every part of their lives.
Furthermore, furthermore, all the members of their churches, both in the cities and the country, were deprived of their rights given to other Roman citizens. The rights were given to other Romans, the rights that were given to other Roman citizens. Large fines and so the looking at this, what I'm trying to show by giving you these quotes, I'm wanting you to see this virus, this splinter in your mind that yes, something is wrong. Something's wrong.
And it's been wrong since for a long time, since this Constantinian synthesis. And even in our systematic theology, if we don't let the Jesus Christ, His ways, the teachings of Jesus enter our systematic theology and just accept the Christendom idea, we're going to end up with some of these problems that you're going to see in this series. So after that, Rome fell through lots of different things and North Africa here and Rome and all the different places, it got ugly.
And then it went kind of underground for a while. The Germanic tribes were much more tribal and small, but then finally the Orthodox came up and came back and by the year 800, things got back on track for Christendom. And on Christmas Day, December 25th, 800, Pope Leo III, crowned the Frankish king, Charlemagne, as emperor. And this was again a renewal of this mixture of the church and the state together.
And the way they used each other and the Frankish people and after following this is just so unspeakably brutal. It's hard to imagine. And so this goes, we come in now to the Middle Ages in the year 1000, a little later, and now we're beginning to be able to do real theology, you know, to do systematic theology and to set back and to do some of those things. And one of the famous leaders and of course fathers, if you would, of systematic theology is Thomas Aquinas.
Thomas Aquinas really loved getting into categories. He has a brilliant mind for explaining things and describing things and all of that. And he did lots of talks and books and things like that. But the virus was still there. The virus of Christendom was still in his teachings. And here it comes out in odd places. And here's one on what do you do about heretics? What do you do with them? Remember what Augustine said, and so now he's developing Augustine.
One writer said that all the Middle Ages was nothing but a footnote of Augustine. So Augustine was extremely influential in the Middle Ages and to the Reformation and to today. But this virus was there and you see it coming out also in Thomas Aquinas. And he would write these objections and then he'd have his answers. It was his own objections, but in his matter of logic, this is the way he would do it. So he wrote this in his discussion over what to do about heretics.
And he said, objection would be, number one, it seems that heretics ought to be tolerated. I mean, we should tolerate a heretics, right? The apostle says, and he gives some of the verses there. I answered that, if forgers of money, like a counterfeiter, and other evildoers are forthwith condemned to death by the secular authority, well, much more reason is there for heretics. You get it. As soon as they are convicted of heresy, to be not only excommunicated, but to be put to death is what we should do.
And he quotes Jerome for his backing. For Jerome commenting on Galatians 5:9, where it says a little leaven, you know the bread, says, " Cut off the decayed flesh, expel the mangy sheep from the fold, lest the whole house, the whole paste, the whole body, the whole flock burn, perish, rot and die." Strong. And it was strong. They used his words against the Waldensians that came just a little bit later after this period. Okay, but wait a minute, what if they come back? Okay, what if they repent and come back?
He answers that too. Objection. It would seem the church ought to, in all cases, receive those who come back from heresy. I mean, you remember Peter, you remember, you know, all those different examples, and he answers that too. And he does give reason for one, one return, but after that, he doesn't like it.
So he says, " For this reason the church not only admits to penance," means you come back and you go through some things that the church would have you do to penance, those who return from heresy for the first time, but also safeguards their lives. I mean, you make sure that nobody kills them. But when they fall again, this is, you know, strike two, when they fall again, after having been received, this seems to prove them to be inconstant in faith.
Therefore, when they return again, they got renewed and they went back and now they tried to come back again. If they return again, they are admitted to penance. We let them come in and do the church and go through penance but are not delivered from the pain of death. So let them go through penance for their own spiritual problems, but then let's kill them. And that gives them the ability to be able to be in the church and to be in heaven. And this was the same reasoning that Augustine gave.
Again, this virus that we see in their systematic theology that has gone through the ages. So we get into the Reformation period and these brilliant I will dare say godly men who you see read. You can read these guys and wrangle with God and faith and standing for faith and coming against the systems of this world. But they just received Christendom. They just took this virus without questioning it, without going back to the scriptures.
And so whether it's Luther who writes his first his things against the peasants and calls, they said, hey, this is a great day where just by killing peasants, you get a ticket to heaven if you die in battle. It sounds like the Crusaders. He goes on to write against the Jews and talk about burning down their synagogues and getting them out of town. He says that Anabaptists deserved the death sentence. Thank you very much, it happened.
We go into Zwingli who right there was where the Anabaptists were studying with him in a Greek study class and then kept going. He calls for their execution. Why? Well, because they didn't want to because Conrad Grebel didn't want to baptize his daughter and Felix Manz ended up was killed by them, drowned by the hands of people who were only 10 years in the Reformation converted drowning the Anabaptist because they only wanted to have adult baptism on conversion. How?
Because the state, you see, they're used to having the state solve their problems. And that's the problem. He died in battle, by the way, Zwingli did. His successor, Bullinger, this is on the wall of the Grossmunster actually. His successor Bullinger was the one there witnessing Felix Manz being drowned and being put under the water.
Writes and this actually writes in a journal, a watercolor type of drawings of all the details of how these Anabaptists did this and he talks about it and becomes one of the main leaders of the confessions of his era, of Child of the Calvinists today. And when you read about his things on persecution of heretics, it's like, how did you not read Jesus? It's time for us to reconsider this systematic theology. There's a virus in it that must be rooted out.
And Calvin, Calvin who wrote thousands of pages and most famous for his work on the Holy Spirit and talks about Jesus and all these things, but created this Christendom that a Protestant Christendom that ended up persecuting the Anabaptists leading to many thousands of death and then literally responsible for the death of Servetus, who was burned at the stake.
Now the history say that Calvin actually wanted just to drown him and not to burn him at the stake, but by his pleading, you can read the letters, it's easy to find. They all had a two kingdom. Luther thought it was like, you know, you can kind of like change hats. So while you're in the church, it's completely separated. There's the king hat and there's the church hat. We keep those completely separate.
The reformer guys of Switzerland thought that was a little inconsistent and tried to make a Christian Commonwealth. The Puritans did a lot of things in trying to bring this Christian Commonwealth together and right down the street here hung people in the common. It's a problem. And it's a problem. I know what you're saying. Things are different. You're supposed to be a historian and you got to know one of the big rules of history is you can't judge that period by today's period and that's not fair.
You got to understand there's a lot going on there and you can't you can't throw them under the bus. Okay. Things are different now. But I think there's enough of this that we're able to say, okay, it's more than that. It's more than that. And here's the problem. Here's the problem. The same theology given similar circumstances, stay with me here. The same theology, given the same circumstances, given similar circumstances will very likely once again create the same result. Do you hear what I said?
If the theology hasn't changed, and you start to get a world that's in trouble or a world going crazy, similar circumstances, you're very likely going to end up with a similar result. And that's what really worries me. I've seen it, we'll see it in World War I, we'll see it in World War II, and we're seeing it today. And when I see Anabaptists and Kingdom people, even in their closets getting involved with this kind of cure, we're going to lose this generation over things like this. Ideas have consequences.
Ideas have consequences. Yes, Jeremiah, for my people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me the fountain of living waters and hewn themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water. Now, bringing it up to modern times. I'm coming towards the end here. Give me about 15 more, 15 minutes, no more than 20. I want to take you up now just a little bit through the processes that people come to in our modern concepts in a theological world of the church mixing with the state.
This guy, Abraham Kuyper, whoa, great theologian, great man of God, and he's famous for this great, for lots of things, but I think he's probably most famous for this truly excellent quote. He says, " There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry mine." Admittedly, a very good quote, a very powerful quote. But the way he means it with this Constantinian synthesis is dangerous. This whole concept is considered the Kuyperian worldview.
Today you hear around theologians, they'll say, " Do you have a Kuyperian worldview?" And what this means is this idea again of that you believe that Christians should get involved and they should redeem everything. They should redeem the arts. They should redeem the culture. They should redeem everything. And sometimes it gets a little ridiculous of the everything. But he's missing the concept, number one, the early Christian concept of separation, and we'll get to that in either section two or section three.
But there's a bigger, even more dangerous, more, dare I say, sinister thing in this Kuyperian concept and it comes out of Kuyper himself. When you go and look at further into his writings, this great noble concept, how would he do? Remember what I said? The same theology in similar circumstances could very likely create the same result.
Well, looking at his writings, the same Kuyperian worldview said this, " You know, if coercion by the state would, if coercion by the state only worked, we would, not for one minute, one moment, hesitate to employ it. I butchered that, let me say it again.
If coercion by the state only worked, we would not for one moment hesitate to employ it." Looking at very practically, " Yeah, what's wrong with persecuting people?" And then a little bit further, a little bit further, he said this, " I do not draw back if someone should say, well, then you desire and propose that if need require it, idolatry and similar sins, be punished capitally. If need be," Kuyper says, " Very certainly." The Kuyperian worldview is wrong.
And I know what you're saying, well, you don't have to go to the excesses, but you're not hearing me. The excesses, the whole concept is wrong, and we're taking as a given, this Constantinian synthesis, this Christendom has this virus in it, in its systematic theology, and it's coming out generation after generation.
Now, going further into more modern times, Richard Niebuhr, in my program, Mark Draper had me reading this Richard Niebuhr's " Christ and Culture" and I'm so glad I did because it really let me see the 1940s and the 1950s and made me understand even the 80s of what was coming out of this.
And the whole idea of basically Christ in culture is that there's been too many groups that have been separated and when you're separated you lose your relevance and if you're too weird you lose your relevance and we need to be able again to have this Kuyperian worldview and come in and make the influence of politics and Christ in culture then gives this.
I was just recently I was looking for there's a Presbyterian church that gave this nice graph and you can see here Neo Anabaptist New Mountainous oh excuse me new monastics and Anabaptist Amish out here being more counterculturalist but also losing relevance and that all of this that we need to try to find the center. But here's the thing. Today, modern evangelicals, church today are beginning to question this and saying, you know, I don't think it worked. From here we ended up with the moral majority.
This is a picture of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell who started Liberty University and the idea that we would get this intermixing of we'll get a bunch of lawyers, you know we'll graduate a bunch of lawyers, we'll get a bunch of politicians, we'll start this moral majority thing and we'll take over and we'll Kuyperian this world. He's wrong. It didn't last a generation.
And now just recently we see in the headlines his son shamed and the college shamed and what was been happening at this college, we've lost the culture war. I honestly can't imagine why so many Anabaptists go to this college. But okay, obviously I'm very much prejudiced. Okay, so we'll send that aside. But this idea, this whole concept needs to be challenged and it is starting to be challenged and I'm so thankful.
Rod Dreher wrote this interesting book called The Benedict Option and he's written many articles, The Culture War is lost. It's dogged out a lot because people are saying, oh, you want to cloister like the Amish or something, which is not right, Amish. I'm glad you're coming out, but you shouldn't be coming out in politics.
But he's written this the Benedict option and what he's saying in there and he goes out of the way to say it plainly is that we should be separated from the world system and not use those systems but stand like St. Benedict did and hold these truths and propagate them with institutions, with missionaries, with life, with schools, with churches, with communities, and take back over. And this is people are starting to say things like that. This guy, even more so, I just recently got this book last year, Craig A.
Carter, who is a professor of theology at Tyndale University, wrote this book, " Rethinking Christ and Culture," this is Niebuhr's book, and gave some challenging things. Here's a quote that he said, interesting.
He said, " I grew up in fundamentalism and have watched many of my peers journey toward a more liberal expression of Christian faith." But for some reason, even as I became discontented, he's now in the fundamentalist, even though I became discontented with anti-intellectualism, the lack of social concern, the separatism, the individualism, the shallowness, and the legalism of my fundamentalist background, I was never tempted by liberalism.
I seemed instinctively to know that it was much too much like what I was troubled by in my own background, even though it tried its best to appear different. Indeed, it tries too hard and protest, I think, far too much. I have come to see that both conservative and, watch this now, I have come to see that both conservative and liberal Christians have made peace with modernity their own way, and have, for the most part, accepted dutifully the place that modern Christendom designates for religion.
We'll give you this spot as a prop for the morale of the nation-state in public and a consolation to individuals in private. Wow. I hope there's some Anabaptists reading this book. He goes on to say, rather than engaging in debate on a level of specific social ethical issues like war, abortion, or for something, for example, or even debating on the different levels that Niebuhr gives. He says this is the intro to his book.
" My intention is to move to the third level," and this is what grasped me and I put it into the title of this series, of this session. The level of questioning the Christendom assumption that lingered just out of sight behind Christ and culture. I contend, listen now, I contend, Craig Carter says, that we are on the verge of a paradigm shift." End quote. And I pray that he is right. He brings up Soren Kierkegaard writing about the Dutch Republic and a lot of his writings poured out against this church and state.
He brings up Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was seeing the Hitlers and saying like this mixing of the evangelicals, and I'm gonna show you some pictures of that in session three, with Hitler is terrible. And all this is happening and at what cost? At what cost? And the whole point was remember that we were supposed to be relevant, that the whole idea of the moral majority was that we were gonna influence, that the separated groups were not doing their job.
But then he ends up saying, what could be more irrelevant than Christian leaders who beg the government to pass laws to coerce their own church members into caring for the poor or refusing the abortion temptation when those Christian leaders cannot convince their own flocks to do these things on the basis of the Bible? So now the church is lost in the influence even in our own churches and we want the state to pass laws to control our own church members. Yes, at what cost?
Carter makes the argument that remember Jesus in the wilderness and the temptation narrative, what did Satan ask Jesus or offer Jesus? One of the most significant things is he offered him, he said, " Look," and he took him to a high place and he said, " Look, I'll show you all the kingdoms of the earth. You can just have this if you just bow to me." Jesus rebuked him, refused that temptation.
And Carter says this, " Would a technically, would a technicality," he says, " would a technicality like bowing the knee to the devil really be so important compared to the tremendous good that Emperor Jesus could do as a ruler of the whole world? Did not God want the Messiah to rule the world? Was Jesus not called to be the Messiah?" Jesus said no to the devil's offer. Jesus said no to the devil's offer, but the bishops of the Christian church in the fourth century said yes, and Christendom was born.
What we're going to look at tomorrow and this next session is this idea of the early Christian, the Anabaptist, the kingdom idea of the relationship between the church and the state. We're going to be looking at the words of Jesus. And my prayer, my prayer is that through the Word of God and the reading of Scripture, that this virus would be cured.
I pray that the leaders of this world, excuse me, the Christian leaders of this world would use these times when we can plainly see that giving our allegiance to this mess that we call American political system will wake the church up to realizing there's something wrong in the system of our systematic theology. So please see the next session where we look into these things and see what the Word of God says. Thank you.