The Redundancy of Nationalsim in Christ Plans

The Redundancy of Nationalism in the City Christ Is Building

Intro: Jesus the Messiah refuses nationalist capture

Ephesians warns against drawing nationalistic boundaries.

Ephesians 2:11–22 is one of the most important scriptures that reveal the heart of Christ, which is a kindhearted nationalist as opposed to the hate-filled nationalist heart. Paul reveals that Christ has broken down the dividing wall of hostility between God and us and created “one new humanity” in himself. When Christians seek to rebuild that wall between races, they are no longer doing the work of Christ but rather the work of Satan. The hateful nationalist sees only his or her own nation as the priority.  Yet, the cross does not simply reveal God’s willingness to forgive individuals. It, in fact, produces a reconciled people. It judges all, Jew and Gentile alike, to be sinners, reconciles all, both Jew and Gentile, to God, but also reconciles them to one another. The Church is therefore not a religious department within the nation. It is not subservient to the nation’s aspiration; rather, the church is a new humanity, a temple of the Spirit, a transnational body under one Lord.

Where we see nationalism being prioritised over biblical teaching, it will divide the church and prove to be ecclesiologically destructive because it has the effect of dividing what Christ died to unite. By making the unity of the body of Christ subservient to national interests, the church fails in its duty to love one another. In this one truth alone, we see that Nationalism can be a corrosive force in the hands of the hateful, because it trains believers to see fellow Christians from other nations as outsiders before seeing them as siblings. Where nationalism says, “My people first,” the cross says, “Christ has made us one.”

Nationalism clearly scapegoats the stranger, promoting the idea that for national renewal to be successful, there needs to be some kind of cultural cleansing, and removing the foreigner is often held up as the means of purifying the people. The message promoted alongside this is that, by doing so, the nation can return to a golden past. Unfortunately for the nationalist, the gospel is all about loving the unclean, be it culturally, practically or spiritually, and so we see Jesus reaching out to touch those ceremonially impure like lepers. Jesus eats with sinners and crosses racial boundaries to show that he comes to embrace through grace, not ancestry. Holiness before God, though Chris, is the only purity that matters in the kingdom, and holiness always produces love of our neighbour.

The Future is clear, the New Jerusalem is Christ’s goal.

Nationalism has nowhere to hide when Christ’s plans are revealed. The deceived Christian is embarrassed and does not know how to respond. The king, and citizen-forming Lord of the coming city of God, intends to allocate a room for his followers in the New Jerusalem. This redeemed city prepared by Christ is our future, a place where the Lamb will gather people “from every tribe and language and people and nation” into one worshipping commonwealth. This will drive nationalists mad. The purity of the nation is what they believe in. But in the New Jerusalem, there is no immigration policy; entrance is by salvation through Christ alone. This does not mean that nations, cultures, languages, histories, and local loves are evil. No, rather the nations bring their glory into the city (Rev. 21:24–26). Pentecost does not abolish languages or racial differences, but rather it fills them with gospel proclamation (Acts 2:5–11) and embraces them as one new man. In Pentecost, we see God’s love for all races. The New Jerusalem does not need nationalist self-defence because its gates are never shut. It does not need ethnic purity because nothing unclean enters it. It does not need a temple because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. It does not need national glory because the glory of God gives it illumination

The issue is not whether Christians may love their homeland. No, the danger is whether in our hands national identity becomes a rival gospel, or worse still, uses the gospel as a lever to declare God is with us and not with them: a different gospel which tells the story of a special chosen group, purity, destiny, superiority, grievance,  and national salvation that competes with the kingdom of God. A Christian should love their country as a place of stewardship. But Christians must never allow the nation to become the altar on which truth, neighbour-love, justice, and the catholicity and vision of Christ to gather all people into one community to be sacrificed.  

Defining the theological problem

Britannica helps us understand what nationalism is. It describes it not only as an ideology but also as a psychological attachment to a set of beliefs in which the individual demonstrates loyalty to the nation-state above other interests.1] Such beliefs can coach and train people to worship a collective self. It provides symbols of resistance, such as flags and songs, and it promotes martyrs to the cause and points out enemies. In addition to myths of origin (remember we all come from Adam and Eve), it stirs those on the margins of society who feel left out of societal progress and scapegoats the stranger as the reason for their humiliation. By shifting the blame in this way, ill-informed or gullible people are being taken in by the claims made. How sad it is then when it is Christians leading the charge of burning them out of their homes and crucifying them. It is clear how nationalism exploits others’ suffering to advance its political narrative, but unforgivable when Christians take up the same chants. The confusion of Christianity with national flags is not new, but when it happens, it has the danger of ending very badly. Christianity is not Western, Eastern, African, Asian, European, Jewish, or Gentile in ownership.

Understanding the seductive promises of Nationalism

Hate-filled nationalism is fascism and makes promises to draw the unsuspecting into its web. Here are just a few;

• Nationalism says you belong because of blood, soil, history, culture; the gospel says you belong through Christ’s blood and adoption by the Father. Therefore, biblically, the Church family comes before the national family. As the scripture says, do good to all people, especially those who belong to the family of God. How can it be good to support a policy that removes a believer’s legally won right for indefinite leave to stay? To do so is to betray a brother for the sake of politics.
• Nationalism says the stranger is a danger to your safety. The bible says the stranger may be Christ at your door. We are to welcome the stranger and bandage their wounds. Not call for repatriation because they are the wrong colour.
• In Nationalism, the past is mythologised, the bible makes clear the past must be confessed truthfully, we have all sinned and fallen short. Britain’s past is both commendable in places and terrible in others.

Theologically, nationalism tries to give the Christian a temporal version of what Christ has already given: identity, belonging, destiny, security, memory, mission, and hope. Yet I understand that before I am Nigerian, Scottish or Black, I am a Christian.

Babel to the New Jerusalem

Genesis does not begin with nations; what we see is that history starts with a man and his family. Humanity comes before national boundaries are created; it is not the fundamental human identity. Genesis 1:26–28.

“he made all the nations (ethnos), that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the borders of their lands. Acts 17:26 (NIV) — 26

Note Christ not only makes nations, but also appoints their times, boundaries and lands, but none of this is permanent.  Only his kingdom will endure forever. Nations are not eternal sources of identity to be protected. and set against the nature of each individual, no passport outranks the imago Dei. However, Babel reveals to us how humanity without God always wants to build its own empire in defiance of God. Nationalism can slip into Babel’s sin, a nation devoid of obedience to God’s basic commands to love their neighbour. So God scatters them, causing the plurality of nations to effectively restrain the absolutism of empire. The answer to Babel is not nationalism. The answer is Pentecost.

Abraham & Israel were elected for blessing, not superiority.

Genesis 12 teaches us the rationale behind a divine call. When God calls Abraham, He promises to make him a great nation. But behind that election is not ethnic exaltation; it is a missional purpose. He is to be a blessing to all earthly nations (Gen. 12:3). Election is a vocation for service. Israel similarly is chosen, for priestly mediation to the nations. This is why nationalism is so dangerous. It veers away from divine missional purpose to protectionism. It borrows the language of being chosen, talks of being oppressed, while rejecting the command to bless enemies, instead of welcoming strangers, it rejects them. losing in its behaviour the testimony of the good news of acceptance in Christ. When Israel is called, it is to the same missional purpose to bless other nations, as Exodus 19:5–6 reveals, Israel is meant to be a kingdom of priests who stand before God on behalf of others.  

Zion is not a tribal possession but a destination for all nations.

If Israel had fulfilled its missional mandate, then even now we would see the nations streaming to Zion to learn about the Lord. Zion was never about one nation. Isaiah 2:2–4 imagines multitudes coming to learn God’s ways, bringing an end to wars with swords beaten into ploughshares. Isaiah 56:6–7 includes foreigners in worship and says God’s house shall be a house of prayer for all nations, demonstrating God’s welcoming heart for all peoples. With similar promises in Zechariah 8:20–23, with nations and cities coming to seek the Lord. Micah 4 echoes the vision of peace among the nations. Note the prophetic hope is not the annihilation of the nations but their healing. before they become redundant in the new Jerusalem. However, God does judge the nations for their violence, arrogance, idolatry, and injustice.

Historical warnings

From history, we pick up our last set of warnings about Nationalism as an Idolatrous emblem. First, we see how the Crusades and their fusion of Christian symbols with military conquest brought divisions in Christendom. Later consequences included the deepening of the division between Eastern and Western Christianity and resentment in the Islamic world.[2]  The theological failure here is severe; the crucified Messiah becomes a banner for conquest rather than the Lord who commands us to love our enemy. The Crusading error is to think that the kingdom advances by coercion, domination, or the humiliation of enemies. Next, we saw the error of “German Christians” and the Nazification of the Church

In Nazi Germany, the right-wing “German Christians” embraced nationalistic and racial aspects of Nazi ideology and sought a national “Reich Church” that supported a Nazified Christianity. The true Confessing Church emerged in opposition, and at great cost. The Barmen Declaration insisted that the Church’s allegiance belonged to God and Scripture rather than a worldly Führer.[3]  The Barmen Declaration remains one of the clearest theological responses to nationalist capture.[4]

The lesson is sobering: the Church does not usually fall into nationalism by openly denying Christ. It falls by adding another revelation beside Christ: the nation, the leader, the race, the party, the destiny, the crisis, the emergency. It then falls into the trap of associating that with the gospel. And finally, the apartheid of South Africa. The Dutch Reformed Church allowed itself to be bound to Afrikaner politics and supported apartheid, an evil system that institutionalised racial separation. South African History Online notes that the DRC was expelled from the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in the 1980s for its support of apartheid and later labelled apartheid a sin.[5] The lesson is that nationalism can become a theological factory for justifying hierarchy. Once the Church allows racial, ethnic, or national identity to govern its reading of Scripture, theology becomes propaganda. Apartheid was not purely bad politics. It was failed ecclesiology, failed anthropology, failed Christology, and failed eschatology.

Nationalism distorts Christology

Christian beware, when Christ is invoked to bless national ambition but ignored when he commands love for enemies and obedience to his word in its many forms, including hospitality, then we can be confident he is being used for political ambition.  When the Church allows itself to become an extension of national culture, it has stopped living for Christ. When worship becomes patriotic theatre, then mission becomes cultural safeguarding. The stranger is demonised as a devil threat rather than a neighbour whom we should love. The global body of Christ becomes secondary to national belonging. How can such Christianity evangelise other nations, nations it wants to evict from their midst?  Nationalism’s biggest weapon is fear, fear of loss, replacement, humiliation, invasion, decline, and impurity producing in some Christians political idolatry as opposed to perfect love which casts out fear (1 John 4:18).

What dangers should you watch out for? When the sins of the nation are minimised while the sins of outsiders are magnified, you can be sure scapegoating has started. Make a decision to love the alien, outcast, stranger, for in so doing, you might win them to Christ. But, Hatred never won anyone to Jesus.