The Politics of God’s Kingdom

The Political Nature of the Christian Gospel

According to the modern idea of the distinction between religion and politics, religion and politics are two separate realms or spheres of human life.  Religion is personal, interior, and otherworldly, while politics is public, corporate, and this-worldly. These two realms may have some kind of mutual influence or relationship, but they remain sharply distinct nonetheless.  This idea is so ingrained in the modern mindset that it is simply taken for granted by most modern people of every religious belief or lack thereof. If this idea is true, and if Christianity is a “religion,” then Christianity must be confined to the religious sphere and be something personal, interior, and otherworldly.  But is this really an accurate understanding of the Christian gospel?

According to the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth was not the founder or inventor of a new religion.  The purpose of his ministry was not so that people could have new personal religious beliefs or personal religious experiences.  According to the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, that is, the anointed king of Israel.  He came preaching the imminent coming of God’s Kingdom in and through what He was doing.  He inaugurated God’s Kingdom through His ministry, suffering, death, and resurrection, and now He is reigning as Lord over all creation.  Having ascended into Heaven, by the Spirit He leads His Body, the Church, to continue to advance God’s Kingdom in the world, and when He comes again in glory He will judge (that is, establish justice in) the world and fully consummate the establishment of God’s Kingdom on earth.  This is the good news (the “gospel”) that the New Testament proclaims. All of this (Messiah, Kingdom, Lordship) is thoroughly political.  

In spite of the thoroughly political nature of the New Testament’s message, there is a widespread assumption among modern Christians that Christianity is about “religion” and therefore not about politics.  This assumption has nothing to do with what the first-century Jews who wrote the New Testament were actually saying and everything to do with the modern distinction between religion and politics, which is then anachronistically read back into the New Testament, distorting our understanding of its message.  Concepts such as the Lordship of Christ and the Kingdom of God are routinely understood in a figurative or metaphorical sense to refer to “religious” or “spiritual” ideas rather than as the New Testament intends them to be understood: literally.  

If Christianity is understood as being about personal religious beliefs and experiences and not about politics, then its message can leave the kingdoms of this world and their way of doing politics untouched; but if Christianity is understood in a truly biblical way as being about the establishment of God’s Kingdom on earth as a replacement of the kingdoms of this world, then its message fundamentally challenges those kingdoms and their way of doing politics, replacing it with something quite different.  New Testament scholar N.T. Wright succinctly summarizes the New Testament view of politics in this way: “When Jesus died on the cross he was winning the victory over the “rulers and authorities” who have carved up this world in their own violent and destructive way. The establishment of God’s kingdom means the dethroning of the world’s kingdoms, not in order to replace them with another one of basically the same sort (one that makes its way through superior force of arms), but in order to replace it with one whose power is the power of the servant and whose strength is the strength of love.”^[1]How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels (New York: HarperOne, 2012), page 205.  The Christian gospel is not merely about things that are personal, interior, and otherworldly (a personal relationship with God and an afterlife); its message is very much something public, corporate, and this-worldly.  

The Church as Political Community

What is the church?  Most modern Christians would say that the church is a religious institution or community.  It is there to help facilitate people’s religious or spiritual experiences and to provide for their religious or spiritual needs.  The church may influence how its members participate in the realm of politics, but it itself is not a political entity. But is this a truly biblical way of understanding the nature of the church?

In order to answer this question, we must turn first to how the people of God are conceived of in the Old Testament, and then examine how this is developed in the New Testament.  In the Old Testament, God’s people are identified with a particular political nation, Israel. God’s relationship with the corporate entity of the nation of Israel is always primary, while His relationship with individual members of that nation is secondary.  While there is a distinction of role between the political office of king and the priestly office, there is certainly no “secular” sphere, and the king’s role is just as “religious” as the priest’s role is. In the New Testament, there is a significant change in how God’s people are defined, but it is an evolution and reformulation of the Old Testament view of God’s people as a political community, rather than a repudiation of it.  The New Testament term “church” (Greek ekklesia), after all, is a translation of the Old Testament “assembly” (Hebrew qahal) of God’s covenant people.  The apostle Paul is quite clear that the church is not a brand-new entity that replaces or exists alongside God’s covenant people Israel; rather, the church is faithful Israel, into which Gentile Christians are now grafted through faith in the Messiah (Rom 11:17-24).  In the New Testament era, God’s people are no longer defined by ethnic descent; they are defined by faith in Jesus the Messiah.  But God’s people remain a political community still.  

Thus, from a New Testament perspective, the church is not a religious institution that provides an opportunity for individuals to have personal religious beliefs and experiences.  Rather, the church is fundamentally a political entity, a holy nation, the people of God (Eph 2:19; 1 Pet 2:9-12). While no simple identification between the visible church and the Kingdom of God can be made, the church is the entity in and through which God’s Kingdom is established in the world.  As citizens of heaven (Phil 3:20), its members find their primary political and national identity in the church as the people of God, rather than in any worldly nation. This means that Christians, as members of the church, are called to visibly and corporately embody a different politics than the world’s politics: the politics of Jesus’ Kingdom.

Jesus’s Kingdom and the Kingdoms of this World

During Jesus’s trial before Pontius Pilate (John 18:33-40), Pilate asks Jesus “Are you the king of the Jews?”  Jesus avoids giving a simple, direct answer to this question, not because he only claims to be “king of the Jews” in a merely metaphorical, religious/spiritual sense, but because he recognizes that Pilate assumes that claiming to be a king necessarily indicates the intention of raising a military rebellion against the Roman Empire, and Jesus has no such intention.  Jesus is truly a king, but his Kingdom is not established through those sorts of methods. When Jesus tells Pilate, “My Kingdom is not from this world” (v. 36), he does not at all mean that his Kingdom is “otherworldly” and therefore is about leaving this world behind to go there. Rather, what He means is that His Kingdom is a real kingdom in this world and for this world, but its origin is from God, and therefore it has a different nature and operates based on different methods than kingdoms that have their origin in this fallen world.  Jesus immediately clarifies just how the methods of his Kingdom differ from that of worldly kingdoms: “My Kingdom is not from this world. If it were, my followers would fight to keep me from being handed over to the Jewish leaders” (v. 36). All the kingdoms of this world operate on the basis of violence and bloodshed, but the nature of Jesus’s Kingdom entails repudiating such methods, even in order to prevent the King from being unjustly arrested, tortured, and killed. Instead, Jesus’s Kingdom operates on the basis of love, truth, and self-sacrifice.  In fact, it is precisely through King Jesus’s suffering and death on the cross that His Kingdom is established!  

As participants in Jesus’s Kingdom, then, Christians are called to follow Jesus on the way of the cross and to always use methods that are consistent with the nature of Jesus’s Kingdom: the methods of love, truth, and self-sacrifice.  They are called to give their political loyalty first to the Lord Jesus and His Church, rather than to any worldly political entity. And they are called to boldly and joyfully proclaim the wonderful (political!) good news that Jesus the crucified one is truly Lord of all.