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must use its newfound “power over” to compel (by force)
The Holy Roman Empire was about as violent as the Roman Empire it aspired to replace. It just carried out its typical kingdom-of-the-world barbarism under a different banner and in service to a different god.
Augustine was the first theologian to align the church in an official way with the use of the sword,
it happened to be against a fellow Christian grou...
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Augustine now justified the use of force by arguing that inflicting temporal pain to help someone avoid eternal pain is justified.
Since God had given the church the power of the sword, Augustine reasoned, it had a responsibility to use it to further God’s purposes in the world just as a stern father has a responsibility to beat his child for his own good.
gospel.15
If the end justifies it, the use of violence as a means to that end is justified. (This is, in essence, Augustine’s “just war” policy.)
This set a tragic precedent for handling doctrinal disagreements for the next thirteen hundred years.
Protestant Reformation. So long as they remained a persecuted minority, Reformers generally decried the use of violence for religious purposes. But once given the power of the sword, most used it as relentlessly as it had previously been used against them. Indeed, with the exception of the Anabaptists, every splinter group of the Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries spilled blood. Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, and other Protestant groups fought each other, fought the Catholics, and martyred Anabaptists and other “heretics” by the hundreds.
Christians coming to the long-inhabited land of America participated in the slaughter of millions of Native Americans, as well as the enslavement and murder of millions of Africans as a means of conquering and establishing this new land for Jesus.
“manifest destiny”
Europe...
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when Christians try to enforce their holy will on select groups of sinners by power of law, they are essentially doing the same thing, even if the violent means of enforcing their will is no longer available to them.
In fact, a kingdom-of-God citizen could (and should) argue that the Christian version of the kingdom of the world was actually the worst version the world has ever seen. For this was the version of the kingdom of the world that did the most harm to the kingdom of God. Not only did it torture and kill, as versions of the kingdom of the world frequently do—it did this under the banner of Christ. If violence and oppression are demonic, violence and oppression “in the name of Jesus” is far more so.
the deceptive power of the sword. While God uses the sword of governments to preserve law, order, and justice, as we have seen, there is a corrupting principality and power always at work.
Most of the slaughtering done throughout history has been done by people who sincerely believed they were promoting “the good.” Everyone thinks their wars are just, if not holy. Marxists, Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, Islamic terrorists, and Christian crusaders have this in common.
“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” MATTHEW 20:25–28
Having accepted the falsehood that we must run the world, we seek to get hold of the mantle of power. Consequently, “discipleship” gets transformed: “following Jesus,” rather than denoting a walking in the way of the humble Suffering Servant, denotes being “spiritual” as we seek to wield power over our fellows…. Christians become convinced that they are pursuing the purposes of God by pursuing the purposes of the empire. LEE CAMP2
At center stage in this auditorium stood a large cross next to an equally large American flag.
“God Bless America.”
How could Jesus’ self-sacrificial death be linked with flying killing machines?
regardless of how they might benefit from its outcome?
Taliban Muslims raising their guns as they joyfully praised Allah for the victories they believed “he had given them” in Afghanistan?
ask the question why the loss of freedom to the Kuwaiti people mattered so much to our government while the loss of freedom to millions of others around the globe does not? For example, less than two years after the Gulf War, nearly a million Rwandans were barbarically massacred in a three-month period. Though the American government and other Western governments possessed detailed information about the genocide as it was unfolding, we did nothing.
place undue trust in any version of the kingdom of the world,
don’t these inconsistencies at least call into question the claim that we as a nation operate with purely altruistic motives?
doesn’t it suggest that, like every other version of the kingdom of the world, America looks out primarily for its own self-interest? And shouldn’t this curb our confidence that God is always on our side and shares our excitement over “winning”?4
My critique is rather toward the American church. We expect nations to be driven by self-interest, but we shouldn’t expect kingdom people to applaud this fact,
how can kingdom people not grieve the loss of Iraqi lives as much as the loss of American lives? Didn’t Jesus die for Iraqis as much as for Americans? Don’t they possess the same unsurpassable worth that Americans possess?
love even for our nation’s worst enemies?
hope—the fusion of patriotism with the kingdom of God I witnessed in that July Fourth video
We have come to trust the power of the sword more than the power of the cross.
The thinking is that America was founded as a Christian nation but has simply veered off track.6 If we can just get the power of Caesar again, however, we can take it back.
If we can just protect the sanctity of marriage, make it difficult, if not impossible, to live a gay lifestyle, and overturn Roe vs. Wade, we will be getting closer. If we can just get prayer (Christian prayer, of course) back into our schools along with the Ten Commandments and creationist teaching, we will be restoring our country’s Christian heritage. If we can just keep “one nation under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance, protect the rights of Christians to speak their minds, get more control of the liberal media, clean up the trash that’s coming out of the movie and record industry, while
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we will have won the culture war
For we, being the true people of God, know God’s will better than others and, thus, know better than pagans what is good for a nation.
This is precisely why they continually tried to fit Jesus into the mold of a political messiah.
God’s mode of operation in the world was no longer going to be nationalistic.
no significance in nationalistic allegiances, so no longer would there be “Jew or Greek”
we, as American citizens, might personally decide to weigh in on these issues politically, we should not attach the label Christian to this activity?
which is all well and good so long as we don’t christen our views as the Christian view.
And since to whom much is given much is required (Luke 12:48), do we not have a spiritual and moral obligation to use this opportunity to the full advantage of the kingdom of God?
to shirk the opportunity to rule because we are afraid of compromising our kingdom calling is irresponsible, pharisaical, and cowardly.
don’t the mostly empty, large church buildings in these countries testify to the long-term damaging effect that Christian rule has had on the church?
The best way to defeat the kingdom of God is to empower the church to rule the kingdom of the world — for then it becomes the kingdom of the world! The best way to get people to lay down the cross is to hand them the sword!
an immediately accessible triumph which can be manipulated, just past the next social action campaign, by getting hold of society as a whole at the top.
The words and acts of the founding fathers, especially the first few presidents, shaped the form and tone of the civil religion as it has been maintained ever since. Though much is selectively derived from Christianity, this religion is clearly not itself Christianity. ROBERT BELLAH1
inaccurate for the simple reason that Christian means “Christlike,”
there never was a time when America as a nation has acted Christlike.
