Gary answers a listener question about the tension between God’s kingdom and man’s kingdom.
Christians have always challenged the world when it was deep in the stench of paganism and ideological darkness. In the past, such conditions have brought out the best in the Christian worldview and those who extended it to the broader culture. Christianity infused the world with the light of the gospel and its call for the redemption of sinners and their sin-stained world. This vision of Christianity seems lost on many of today’s Christians.
Anti-Christians are killing off their future via abortion and choosing not to have children. Homosexuality and transgenderism (and all the other genderisms) are folly and self-destructive. When men and women are cutting off their genitals to identify as the opposite sex, we must ask whose civilization is coming to an end.
A biblical worldview includes politics, the civil dimension of biblical government and everything else. The British poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) makes the point:
Yet there is an aspect in which we can see a religion as the whole way of life of a people, from birth to the grave, from morning to night and even in sleep, and that way of life is also its culture….It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have—until recently— been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. . . . If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes.[1]
The entire Bible speaks about the subjects of governments and politics just like it speaks about everything else.
Restoring the Foundation of Civilization
There are many Christians who will not participate in civilization-building efforts that include economics, journalism, politics, education, and science because they believe (or have been taught to believe) these areas of thought are outside the realm of what constitutes a Christian worldview. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Buy NowGary answers a listener question about the tension between God’s kingdom and man’s kingdom. The two always seem to be at odds, but abandoning or ignoring the earthly authorities because of their persecution isn’t the answer either. The tension is real and the work can be difficult and frustrating, but the Gospel is the solution.
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[1] T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949), 29, 126.