In my last article, I made the case for one simple proposition: Jesus Christ did not separate spiritual and political matters, as he himself is the ultimate embodiment of matter and spirit in one synchronous conception, the Word becoming flesh.
This caused a flurry of drawn-out, blog-sized comments in the comment section objecting to a strawman version of the point I was making. Here are some examples of what I’m talking about:
Politics are not incompatible with Christ but rather political positions that attempt to hijack and commandeer his teachings while simultaneously discarding his person.
Commenter Deus Vult asks why Jesus never lectured the crowds about how the Romans ran the empire if he was indeed so politically involved:
A really misguided essay. Put simply, if Jesus cared about politics, why did he never once lecture or question the Romans about how they ran their empire? Instead, Jesus tells his Jewish followers and the Gentiles to treat each other with love (best summarized by Paul in Romans 13 as, “do not harm your neighbor”).
Jesus’s solution to the plague of sin was to provide each person with a path to salvation; clearly, God’s population-based (and more political strategy) of the Old Testament leaders communicating his will to the Tribes of Israel did not work, because the Israelites routinely flouted His will.
Jesus compels each person to choose either a path of faith, love, generosity, charity, repentance, and most importantly, obedience to God’s will, or a path of sin, death, and eternal damnation. Jesus was not a hippie preaching platitudes; he was a serious man telling the rest of to take responsibility for who we are and what we do or suffer the consequences. That he took responsibility for all my sins and sacrificed himself on the Cross so that I might have eternal life makes him the ultimate man in my view. And real men (and women) don’t wait for political solutions to their sins, which slap them in the face every day.
The Lord’s path actually obviates the need for political solutions. Our culture is sick with sin, and we attempt to legislate away things we find objectionable, only to find that half the population embraces the noxious. We cannot solve the sin of murdering babies, for example, through political means. We need to turn back to the Christ who came to fulfill God’s law, not abolish it, and who venerates marriage, family, children, and male leadership.
Rollin L cites Jesus’s famous “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and what is God’s unto God” message:
In answer to the question of paying taxes to the Romans, Jesus made the point (by asking who was pictured on the coin produced) that what was Caesar’s was Caesar’s and what was God’s was God’s. There is also the point that the Jewish Priests were using Roman coin, not commonly used by the Jews as I understand. Hmm.
The point made in this article, if taken to the logical conclusion, should address the question of why Jesus did NOT lead a rebellion against Rome, if he was all about politics.
Here’s the key. In the United States, the Supreme Law of the Land says that all power not assigned to the federal government is reserved to the states and the people. With regard to issues such as abortion, that is exactly what we fought nearly 50 years to restore. For those who think that the federal government should, by statutory law, govern a matter that is clearly left to the states, I would tell you that you are badly misguided and defy you to point to anything in the teachings or example of Jesus that suggests that the laws of a nation should be disregarded when there is already a mechanism in place to deal with the issue.
All that makes you is a statist, one who despises local governance in favor of the diktat from an overbearing federal government. Murder is immoral too, but we don’t have federal laws on murder (outside of rare, specific instances that cross into federal jurisdiction) and there is a reason for this. We deliberately do not allow a national government to take that authority away from the local communities and the states. Go do the hard work of fighting in your state and working to end abortion by changing the culture, just as the enemy did to make it so common. Don’t be lazy, just do it the proper way, respecting the Constitution.
And Douglas Fouts wants to see if we can take the truth of Luke 5: 31-32 and build policy around it (shouldn’t be too hard as we’ve seen how political physicians can get in recent memory):
The article is fine for what it is. There really isn’t an application here and there rarely is. Let’s say that you reached someone with this message, there doesn’t seem to be anything to build upon.
For starters, I see the word “revolution” used in his last sentence. Define your terms. In the beginning he said that Christ brought in a “spiritual revolution”. Define that, in great detail. Define a political one. Over history, political revolutions are something that i wouldn’t have wanted to be part of. The outlier might be the one in the United States. The one Christ brought should be laid out in detail. I would suggest that this were to happen it might give them some pause as they try and fit the political one into Christ’s work.
One example; he talks about Christ. Let’s start with a single basic truth. Luke 5:31-32 “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance”
Now take that truth and see if you can build that into the “political revolution”. Go back and have Him tell you why He came.
Have we really reflected why Christ came? Can we articulate it? Can we even define who Christ is? Most of the United States says they are Christian, but have no idea who He is outside of a few generalities. Can they even tell you how to enter into the New Covenant?
Each of these commenters fundamentally misses the point of my argument (granted, maybe I wasn’t clear enough in my writing).
The fundamental authority of Christ
If you paid attention to the original article, I deliberately pointed out that I wasn’t going to be quoting from scripture (although I could have) and that instead, the focus needed to be on his person. There was a reason for that.
One of the fundamental objectives of my argument was to remind Christians and make the case to non-Christians that Jesus Christ is the authority in both heaven and earth; that everything outside of that, his teachings and any other scriptural quotes, is supplementary. Obviously, scripture is important, as it’s written in 2 Peter 3: 16-17:
“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
But as all the apostles of Christ understood if Christ was not indeed who they understood Christ to be, then none of it mattered. As Paul writes in the first letter to the Corinthians:
“And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” (1 Corinthians 15:15-17) [emphasis added]
All of the Law, all of scripture, all of Christ’s teachings hinge on the nature of his person; that he’s God. That’s what gives his teachings weight and authority.
Politics are not incompatible with Christ but rather political positions that attempt to hijack and commandeer his teachings while simultaneously discarding his person.
And now, coincidentally, I have a real-life example to demonstrate that.
Jesus as a communist
A notable communist, Marxist-Leninist content creator and political commentator who goes by the name Infrared Haz has recently written an extensive piece on X specifically about how (you guessed it) Jesus Christ was actually a communist.
I encourage you to read the whole thing, but let’s break down some of what he wrote
He starts by making Jesus out to be exactly what the commenters thought I was making him out to be: a worldly political revolutionary. Now, his Marxist rhetoric aside, his argument starts out reasonably enough.
Jesus’ disciples did embark on a cross-continent journey to convert the masses to Christianity, which had massive destabilizing effects within the Roman Empire politically (hope that answers your questions, Deus Vult and Rollin L). But this is where things get dicey.
Quote mining
He quotes from Acts to demonstrate how the apostles actually lived their faith by selling all their goods or dividing them all among each other. Basically, he’s making the point that the apostles of Christ did not believe in private property and that this communistic essence of early Christianity was erased from the religion later on, sterilizing it as “purely spiritual.” As a result, the spiritual was divorced from “actual reality.”
This is the ironic part, because here it is Infrared Haz who is divorcing Christianity from reality with his decontextualized quote mining.
If we take a look at the beginning of the chapter in Acts 4:8-12, we see Peter give a divinely inspired monologue to the Pharisees who were questioning the miraculous works of the apostles:
“Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, ‘Rulers of the people and elders, if we are being examined today concerning a good deed done to a crippled man, by what means this man has been healed, let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead—by him this man is standing before you well. This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” [emphasis added]
The apostles attributed the effectiveness of the miracles to the person of Jesus Christ. They didn’t believe in the abolition of private property for the sake of abolishing private property.
They believed in the supernatural divinity and godhood of Jesus Christ, which then informed them of all their administrative and social decisions henceforth. If they sold and divided up all their goods, they had good reason to! They were under immense scrutiny and pressure from the powers that be. And to whom were those powers directly antagonistic to? Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity. Not communism, capitalism, or any other -ism.
This is a common trend lately (and throughout history) to cast Jesus Christ as a “prophet” of modern religious and political inventions.
“Jesus Christ was actually a communist.”
“Jesus Christ was actually a Muslim.”
And this is all done as a way of indirectly diminishing and denying the supernatural godhood of Jesus Christ. The apostles like Peter and Paul would rebuke commentators like Haz for separating Jesus’s teachings from his position of ultimate authority, not praise him!
I hope this follow-up article serves to clarify the position I originally espoused. Jesus Christ is a political revolutionary, not for the sake of simply being a political revolutionary, but because politics is spiritual. And he is God incarnate. Without him, without acknowledging who he is, you don’t have a political platform to begin with. A house can only be built on rock, not on sand.
Faith, Christianity, Garen christopher kaloustian, Render unto caesar, Jesus christ, Abide
