I am not the one to answer these kinds of questions. Principles get very messy in those situations. How much the average German soldier bought into rebuilding the empire is hard for me to say. You would have had pious Germans acting on the assumption they were defending the fatherland. Much of what we know is after the fact, and even those facts tend to be magnified to score ideological points. All I know is that God will judge righteously, true believers are justified by faith alone in Jesus Christ, humble believers can find themselves in compromising situations, and at times Christians will end up on the "wrong side of history" as the saying goes today.
Why are so many Christians against Christian Nationalism?
- Thread starter erickinho1bra
- Start date
I am not the one to answer these kinds of questions. Principles get very messy in those situations. How much the average German soldier bought into rebuilding the empire is hard for me to say. You would have had pious Germans acting on the assumption they were defending the fatherland. Much of what we know is after the fact, and even those facts tend to be magnified to score ideological points. All I know is that God will judge righteously, true believers are justified by faith alone in Jesus Christ, humble believers can find themselves in compromising situations, and at times Christians will end up on the "wrong side of history" as the saying goes today.
Susan777
Puritan Board Sophomore
David, my point exactly. And how will these men be judged in the heavenly tribunal? And how will we Christians, who have (blindly?) given assent to a multitude of recent wars that by no means meet the criteria for just war be vindicated? If, in our opinion, the German people were morally required to sort through these claims and see the deception and reject them, aren’t we required to do the same? So I’m inclined to think that allegiance to the everlasting kingdom must always take precedence over the earthly kingdom when there’s variance in motive and purpose. We are too quick to ascribe righteous motives to our own actions and the prewar Germans stand as a reminder of how easy it is for fallen creatures to do that.
jwright82
Puritan Board Post-Graduate
I was in at the time, were you ever in? I don't remember that but terrorists, like the Vietcong I've heard, hide out amongst civilians for that reason. So if you have a better idea I'm all ears.
We were justified to go into Iraq.
There is a rumor that our 'naughty' Aussie neighbours want to launch an unjust war against New Zealand. Do my 'Murican brethren agree this would be an unjust war? 
joebonni63
Puritan Board Freshman
It always sounds good until it becomes the Vatican and you see what happens with abuse. The temple selling and buying outside the temple I am sure that started as a help for man to take care of things and then as time goes on it became Wall Street buying and exchanging currency with the price of gold being the main factor. What did Jesus think of this well he turned over the tables and tried putting the violators out of business. So with that said this idea starts out very strong and looks good then money and wars take over.
jwright82
Puritan Board Post-Graduate
The Allies made the town's people pick up all the bodies of the dead Jewish people in the concentration camps next to their towns. It's impossible that they didn't know what was going on, they didn't care.
There is a rumor that our 'naughty' Aussie neighbours want to launch an unjust war against New Zealand. Do my 'Murican brethren agree this would be an unjust war?
According to statistics given by AI we should be worried about a NZ invasion.
"There are approximately 75,000 Australians living in New Zealand. In 2018, the New Zealand census recorded 75,810 people born in Australia in New Zealand. This was an increase of 20.9% from the 2013 census and 20.8% from the 2006 census.
In comparison, around 670,000 New Zealand citizens live in Australia, which is about 15% of New Zealand's population."
jwright82
Puritan Board Post-Graduate
Completely off topic but what is the kind of on the street Australian's and New Zealander's?According to statistics given by AI we should be worried about a NZ invasion.
"There are approximately 75,000 Australians living in New Zealand. In 2018, the New Zealand census recorded 75,810 people born in Australia in New Zealand. This was an increase of 20.9% from the 2013 census and 20.8% from the 2006 census.
In comparison, around 670,000 New Zealand citizens live in Australia, which is about 15% of New Zealand's population."
HauerVos
Puritan Board Freshman
This might be a bit pedantic and overly-semantic, but your minimal definition abstracts the title "Christian" from its substance (confessing the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, belonging to the visible church, etc.) and reduces it to enforcing the law/bearing the sword. This feeds into the modern notion that Christianity is merely an ethical system, and it doesn't do the Church any favors.
Charles Johnson
Puritan Board Junior
You're not actually answering his question though, which is whether governing by the moral law is good, and if "Christian nationalism" entails that and nothing more.
On modern CN terms he absolutely is answering the question. Modern CN entails an establishment without a pre-established Christianity and a mere moral structure as a result.
HauerVos
Puritan Board Freshman
1. Yes. Governing by moral law is a universal obligation, not solely a Christian one. While the duty is intensified if leaders openly profess faith, all magistrates—ordained by God for the common good—bear this responsibility.
2. No. In my experience, most CNs push beyond moral governance to require explicit public prayer in the name of the Triune God, "worship" at partisan conventions, and forcing nonbelieving public servants (public school teachers) to lead prayer. These practices violate the third commandment, the RPW, etc. This is the most common form of CN you'll find in America. Most self-described CNs wouldn't step foot in a NAPARC church (apart from a few PCA congregations).
Having recently preached on the 3rd Commandment, this may well have become the aspect of Christian Nationalism that bothers me the most, and it's an aspect that seems to be common to most forms of it. I don't want unbelievers teaching the Bible to our children, nor do I want them leading our children in public prayers. Nor do I want unbelievers to be forced to invoke God's name or offer him worship, because all of this necessarily represents vain uses of God's name. As does using God's name, or the Bible, or Christianity, merely as a means of gaining credibility from a particular segment of the population, or of riling up one's base.
Frisian Gardener
Puritan Board Freshman
I believe the CN response would be that the public school system in its current form is to be abolished immediately. The majority view is likely that education belongs to the parents' sovereign sphere and is not delegable to the state (Deuteronomy 6:7, Ephesians 6:4) and that introducing state schools was a bug, not a feature, of past iterations of Christendom. The minority view would be that many years from now, something like the Old Deluder Satan Law can be introduced in a properly established or covenanted state, but a condition for a teaching job would be something like a credible statement of faith and membership in good standing in a local church.
Charles Johnson
Puritan Board Junior
The law wouldn't require insincerity in prayer. It would require prayer. If the teachers are insincere, that is a defect in them, not in the law.
Samuel Rutherford proves that one should no omit duties like prayer because of a lack of sincerity and a "straitness" of heart. Praying with the lips but not the heart is closer to the command than doing neither.
davejonescue
Puritan Board Junior
Isaiah 29:13-14? Doesnt this mean that God not only doesnt honor insincerity, but takes offense at it? Its one thing for an otherwise fervent believer to be in a momentary "mood" of not feeling it, and a person who could care less about God at all. I was of the opinion too that fake prayers of the unbelieving are blasphemous.
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Charles Johnson
Puritan Board Junior
I agree insincerity is sinful. But complete and total atheism is worse.
At present, it is actually illegal for teachers to pray in the classroom.
darrellmaurina
Puritan Board Freshman
@erickinho1bra : What @ZackF writes here is the core of the problem.
In a United States context, we routinely conflate the concepts of "nation" and "state" (or perhaps "government" is better, since we use the term "state" in a very specific way, for historical reasons, though our "states" have for at least a century and a half functioned more as political subdivisions than how they were originally envisioned).
Erick, if you look at world history, or even European history, there was an era of over a thousand years during which "the Italian nation" referred not to a government over a specific region but rather to an ethnic group. Likewise, "Germany" until the mid-1800s meant a region of Europe, not a specific government.
People like Wolfe are arguing that the biblical term "ethnos" means "nation" in the older sense of the word. If we're talking in the 1950s to the 1980s about Germany being one nation divided by the Iron Curtain into East and West, or talking today about the same for North and South Korea, there's some meaning to that approach.
Where things get messy is that European countries such as Germany and France and Italy, thanks to falling birthrates and lack of available young workers, are importing large numbers of people from other countries to do menial work. Historically that meant immigrants from lower income European countries. Belgium, for example, would import workers from Italy to labor in the coal mines, and while there was (and to some extent still is) significant prejudice against Southern European and Eastern European immigrants to wealthier European countries, some assimilation has happened. Even a very ethno-nationalist country like France has had several political leaders from elsewhere in Europe, and a key figure in France's hard-right anti-immigrant party is of Italian ancestry.
But what should be done about immigrants from non-Western nations like Africa or Asia to Europe? Or Turkish guest workers?
Even liberal and largely secular countries in Western Europe are being forced to confront hard questions about what it means to be "French" or "German" or "Dutch" or "Italian," and those questions get particularly problematic when the immigrant is ethnically African from a former French colony, or living in the Netherlands but from the former Dutch colonies in Indonesia.
We don't typically think that way in the United States. We have a very long history of immigration and assimilation, and even ethnic groups that didn't assimilate and lose their ethnic identity (blacks, for example, descended from those dragged to America as slaves, not coming by choice) almost always identify as American citizens today.
The problem with what is now being called "Christian Nationalism" is that too often the people who self-identify as Christian Nationalists are more interested in ethnicity than they should be.
I'm not accusing Wolfe of that. I've had some interaction with him online, though not much, and I've seen enough to believe that what he wrote has been taken by others beyond what he had written. I'll leave it to others to decide whether Wolfe has been misunderstood or whether he was being deliberately ambiguous. The case can be made, and has been made, both ways.
What I will say is that I do not believe the ethnic category is helpful for Christian conservatives in a modern American political context.
I'm well aware of Dr. Donald McGavran's homogenous unit principle. The concept was around long before Wolfe, and has at least some roots in broadly evangelical missionary work. I know enough about Korean and Chinese immigrant churches to the United States -- let alone the Dutch Reformed -- to know that Wolfe has a point about the "ethnos" being relevant in church life. It's a point that most Americans today don't like very much, but that's not Wolfe's fault.
But I do believe focusing on one's bloodlines and how they distinguish us from others, rather than focusing on the Blood of Christ and how it unites us, is exceedingly unhelpful in a multiethnic context such as what we have in North America.
If I were a missionary trying to plant an English-speaking church for Western expats in Japan or Korea or Taiwan, I might have a less negative view as an ethnic minority "white guy" in a country where "being Japanese" or "being Korean" is almost though not quite entirely identified with being of Japanese or Korean ethnicity and culture and language.
Wolfe has a point when he says that's the way nationhood has been understood for most of world history, and is still understood that way in much of the rest of the world.
Fine. Trust me -- I know a bit about what it means to be a neorangmori (a not-nice word used by Koreans for Americans).
But nationhood is not understood that way in the United States, and hasn't been since at least the early 1800s, and I would argue hasn't been since the annexation of the Dutch in New Netherland (now New York) and the French fur traders and trappers west of the Alleghenies, and then more French with the Louisiana Purchase, and the later acquisition of Florida, Texas, and the American Southwest with large numbers of Hispanics. Not to mention lots of German and Scottish immigration in colonial days, followed by Irish immigration in the early-to-mid 1800s.
Whatever else the United States may be, we are multiethnic and have been for at least two centuries.
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darrellmaurina
Puritan Board Freshman
Jamey Wright is right.
This isn't Russia or Nazi Germany. Soldiers (or sailors, airmen or Marines) who "indiscriminately" kill people can expect to be court-martialed and spend serious time in Leavenworth.
Have such things happened? Yes. The My Lai massacre isn't fiction.
In the last five decades, several major things have changed for the better, among them the following:
1. We have an all-volunteer military. Nobody is forced into uniform and while reality means bad people will sometimes enlist for bad reasons and do bad things, the systemic underlying problems we faced during some of our previous conflicts, the ones that gave America a black eye, simply do not exist today. We do not have a military force composed of people who are wearing a uniform they don't want to wear, hoping to avoid deployment, and once deployed, wanting to get back as soon as possible. (No, that is NOT attacking Vietnam vets any more than it would be attacking WW2, WW1, or Civil War veterans. The problems in Vietnam were a small minority who gave others a bad name. But there is an important difference between conscript militaries and volunteer militaries, and that difference is that "bad apples" are far rarer because people have to volunteer to wear the uniform, be vetted and tested, and accepted only if they not only want to be in uniform but also meet the standards.)
2. Yes, there are cases of people in an all-volunteer force who do bad things. Abu Ghraib happened. I live and work outside Fort Leonard Wood, where a previous commanding general was the man sent in to clean up that nightmare. After his time cleaning up the mess, he became the commandant of the Army's Military Police School and then Fort Leonard Wood, and after that became the Army's provost marshal general, i.e., the "top cop" responsible for investigating and stopping abuses. The modern military does not tolerate people who commit such crimes, and promotes those responsible for stopping them.
3. There was a day when lack of communication was a very real barrier to investigating and prosecuting war crimes. In today's world where cameras and cell phones are ubiquitous even in combat conditions in places like Gaza and Ukraine, do we really think Israeli (or American) soldiers will get away with covering up war crimes? Even in Vietnam, word of the My Lai massacre leaked out because too many people had seen what happened, and eventually led to an investigation that exposed what had happened.
Here's the big difference between the US military and the nightmare cases you will sometimes read about in other countries.
When bad people do bad things in the US military, and they get found out, they get prosecuted and their example is trumpeted all over the place to warn others what will happen if they do likewise.
Total depravity is real. As Calvinists, we know that. Take an 18-year-old from a messed-up family background, give him a gun with little guidance on how to use it, and tell him, "That's the enemy, do what you want with them," and it's a recipe for what Russia is doing in Ukraine.
That's why we do SERIOUS training in the US military, not only the technical aspects of how to use weapons and tactics, but when and why, and when NOT and why NOT.
Not everybody will do things the right way. That's reality. But it's what differentiates our military training from that of most of our adversaries.
The two major modern exceptions to the rule that conscript militaries are inferior to all-volunteer forces are Israel and South Korea. Both are near-unique situations of small countries surrounded by large and dangerous enemies that pose a clear and present danger that makes the need for armed defense obvious. Both have highly developed national identities, and in the case of Israel, a clear sense of purpose and rightness of its cause. Both have had conscription for their entire history as an organized state, and military service has become part of their national identity. I'd be hard pressed to think of any parallel in Europe other than the earlier history of Switzerland, and there are enough differences that even the Swiss example doesn't really apply.
I don't think the examples of South Korea or Israel are replicable anywhere else apart from the extremely unusual conditions that gave birth to those two nations, and even then, they'd work only for small countries with small populations confronting not only a truly existential threat but a recent history of actual armed warfare on their own soil that gave birth to the country.
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Brother this arrangement would have clear advantages for Australia. If Australia became another Island of New Zealand that means the All Blacks would become your Rugby team. Do you agree that this would be to your advantage?That would be one way for NZ to become more successful. Like Philip of Spain getting nearly 50% of income from the Netherlands. I imagine the outcome would also be the same.
For the benefit of our American friends we
have plenty of bickies too
Brother this arrangement would have clear advantages for Australia. If Australia became another Island of New Zealand that means the All Blacks would become your Rugby team. Do you agree that this would be to your advantage?
darrellmaurina
Puritan Board Freshman
Brother this arrangement would have clear advantages for Australia. If Australia became another Island of New Zealand that means the All Blacks would become your Rugby team. Do you agree that this would be to your advantage?
For the benefit of our American friends we
have plenty of bickies too
Yep, I sometimes have been known to tease NZers and Aussies using language implying you're all the same. I'm definitely aware of your "bickies," i.e., bickering!
Just remember, many (perhaps most) Americans couldn't find New Zealand on a map, many couldn't find Australia, and a high percentage of those who can do both of those things incorrectly think you're the same country already. Yeah, I know that Puritan Board readers are likely to know more than the average American about world affairs. By definition, people here read, care about details, and are highly likely to have an interest in the church outside the United States.
That's not a typical American, for better or for worse.
And yes, I'm also well aware that lots of Canadians and Latin Americans will correctly point out that they are part of "the Americas" too. But I chose my word for a reason -- the US has become so dominant in world affairs that we often forget that we have neighbors right next to us who are also "in the Americas." Imagine how little the typical "United Statesian" (SIC) knows about the world beyond our neighbors.
Funny you chose this word. A few years ago I did some negotiations with one of your countrymen:
I replied:
This may be what 'merica needs:
This is how we could nicely tie this together. Why not shift the US Canadian border down to Mexico. This would give Canada 50 extra Provinces and King Charles III would rein over the whole of North America.
Americans who are ignorant about other countries would be quickly educated about King Charles III other realms. Better still, Americans would once again repeat the Biblical phrase "God save the King"
Brother, I know I do my fair share of stirring. But I showed great kindness to one of your countrymen when he was teased by a naughty New Zealander a few years ago.Stephen, you are getting a good workout with all that stirring.
I was at a conference and an Australian man and his teenage son came to NZ to the conference (from the Blue Mountains, NSW). One naughty Kiwi saw this Australian teenager and thought he would tease him. He told him that we have a burger at NZ MacDonalds called a Kiwi burger. This is true. He told this Australian that it is called a Kiwi burger because we kill our native bird, the Kiwi, and put it in a burger!!!! This poor teenager came to me with a worried look on his face wondering if this was true. I showed great kindness to my new Australian friend, purchased a Kiwi burger for him to enjoy. He saw that the Kiwi burger consists of good Ole NZ tuckerI told my Aussie friend that next time I am in Australia he owes me an Aussie Burger.
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