Messianic Politics

No.240: December 13, 2024

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Dear Friends,

I thought I would share with you my prepared remarks delivered last Saturday at CCL’s Annual Symposium on the topic of Messianic Politics.

Enjoy!

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For those of you who regularly attend this CCL Annual Symposium it may seem like I am slated (or doomed) to speak on the same topic every year. There is a reason for that: I seem to be stuck in a peculiar purgatory where Andrew Sandlin assigns me to speak on the same topic every year.

Oh, the specific targets change, but they are but variations on a theme. Last year I spoke about the new revolutionaries, the so-called “post-liberals” on the “New Right” who seek to use “extra-constitutional” measures to bring about a mighty, almost redemptive transformation of the country and—according to some of them—install a “Christian Prince,” whose jurisdiction knows no limits. And this year I am to speak on “Messianic Politics.” Like I say: same topic.

Nevertheless, I need not rehash an old story. What we might call “Messianic Politics” transcends that particular instance of it. The history of the past century alone, with its mass delusions of communism, fascism, and national socialism ought to signal to us that the temptation is ever-present to conflate civil powers with divine powers. One could go back much further, of course. From the Roman Imperial cult to the Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon all the way back to the Tower of Babel itself, bodies politic have organized themselves in truly idolatrous fashion, fancying their kings or princes or Caesars or politburos or “Führers” as nothing less than gods walking on earth. The philosopher upon whom Marx built his system of “dialectical materialism,” G.W.F. Hegel, called the State “God walking on earth.” And that is also what Stephen Wolfe in his book on Christian Nationalism calls his ideal Christian Prince: “the nation’s god.”

The relationship between Christianity and politics, the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of men has been one long, unending, heated debate in Christendom, from Augustine’s Civitas Dei onward. And I can hardly resolve the question to everyone’s satisfaction (or perhaps even my own) in our time today. But I would like to share some reflections that I hope will help us to navigate the difficult path of pursuing a God-honoring politics that resists the temptation to give civil powers idolatrous, godlike status and prerogatives.

We find a classic text in Jesus’s famous admonition: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” For all of my life Christians have been battling a terrible distortion of Jesus’s words. Namely, the idea that Jesus is granting to Caesar—civil powers—a kind of autonomy from the will and authority of God. This has been, and is, what secularists wish Jesus to have meant. Leave religion out of it! They find here not just a separation between the church and the state, a description of differing “spheres” or levels of authority, but a separation of the civil realm from God, religion, and morality altogether. Secularists find in these words permission to treat the civil order as a matter of pure Deism: God is kicked upstairs and out of sight, and does not concern himself with the affairs of men. Which, of course, just amounts to making Caesar—or the “State” in other forms—god.

It is right and necessary for us to insist that this is a great distortion of Jesus’ words. He is, after all, the King of kings and the Lord of lords. Those are some of the most profound genitive constructions in the annals of written language: of kings, of lords. He, the Second Adam and true God-Man seated at the right hand of the Father, is the absolute and ultimate authority before which every knee of every lesser authority must bow. His authority extends to every square inch of all creation, and that includes civil realms. Even King David, “God’s King,” the “nation’s god,” if there ever was one, recognized this: “The LORD said to MY Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.’” David knew himself as a subject of his own offspring.

But, my friends, it behooves us to appreciate that this is not the only possible distortion of Jesus’ words. Yes, separating civil authority from the kingdom of God is a recipe for idolatrous, messianic politics of the sort you find in secular progressivism. But do you know what else is a recipe for idolatrous, messianic politics? Conflating, blurring, or merging together civil authority with the kingdom of God. To put it another way, losing the ability to distinguish or spot divergence between the two. You see, sometimes in our haste and our zeal to keep from falling into the ditch on our left, we clumsily plunge directly into the ditch on our right. Friends, Jesus very clearly does distinguish the things of Caesar and the things “of God.” Jesus, in other words, denies that Caesar has god-like authority, god-like possessions, and god-like prerogatives. Caesar’s power and domain is not coextensive with God’s kingdom.

Isn’t it remarkable how both distortions of Jesus’s words amount to the same result? Separate Caesar from God and he simply becomes a god unto himself. Identify the “things of” Caesar with the “things of” God and … Caesar simply becomes god himself. I’ll call this “Political Deism” and “Political Pantheism” and they are simply two sides of the exact same coin. They are both forms of messianic politics—that is, they invest in civil powers divine prerogatives and soteric (salvific) significance—they attribute to Caesar what belongs to God. It is messianic because the civil ruler always—always—promises “deliverance,” whether it is deliverance from poverty or famine or war or persecution or economic competition or immigrants or “Jews” or—more common in our own day—from pronouns you didn’t invent, and even from the ordinances of nature and creation itself like your biological sex. There is always a utopian paradise just around the corner that will liberate you from whatever bondage you feel. Eric Voegelin famously termed this “immanentizing the eschaton,” the promise to bring the new heavens and the new earth into the here-and-now. This is a vision of the State or civil powers as an agent of redemptive history.