top of page
Writer's pictureMarvin T. Brown

A Message to Christian Nationalists

Updated: Jul 26


 

 If I understand you correctly, you want to do “God’s will,” and that you know “God’s will” from the Bible, which is “God’s Word.”  In terms of different theories of interpretation, your view would be called an “originalist theory of interpretation.” 

 

This theory assumes that you can understand a text without understanding its context. Or to put it another way: To understand a ship in a bottle, ignore the bottle and focus exclusively on the ship.  If every text exits in some context—it was written at some time and some place—and if you assume that the context does not matter, then you must assume that we still live in the 1st century during the time of the Roman Empire

 

Some interpreters have done a masterful job of taking the text (ship) out of the 1st century context (bottle) and applying it to a 21st century context (bottle) but not with an originalist theory of interpretation.  Instead of ignoring the context, it’s the social context that reveals to them the meaning of the text, or to say it more accurately, they engage in a dialogue between the text and the context.

 

This becomes particularly significant when considering our democratic context.  If you examine the Bible closely, there is precious little about democracy.  You have kingdoms and empires.  Jerusalem was part of the Roman Empire in the 1st century.  Jesus never said a word about equal representation or the right to vote.  The first century bottle is filled with many stories and experiences, but not with democracy.

 

Years ago, I taught a university course on the Greeks and the Hebrews.  It’s the Greeks that gave us the idea of democracy.  It was practiced in the 5th and 4th century BCE in Athens, and we can read about its theory in Aristotle’s Politics, Rhetoric, and Ethics. 

 

Aristotle’s political ethics laid out how to find the “golden means” between the extremes. Courage, for example, is the mean between the extremes of cowardly and rash. Instead of the ethic of God’s will, it’s a human ethic that assumes the limits of human action.  The only virtue that does not follow the principle of the Golden Mean is Justice.  Justice is a balance of differences and either extreme is unjust.

 

Some argue that Christian nationalism is not democratic and even anti-democratic.  If you stay in the original Biblical bottle, you are probably both.

 

 

 

 

Comments


Follow The Blog

Thanks for submitting!

bottom of page