To Trust in Man or the Lord, that is the Question

To Trust in Man or the Lord, that is the Question

Feb 26, 2025 | Epistemology - Trust

As a young pup Christian in college in the Jesus Revolution days, I was born-again into a Scripture memory focused campus Christian organization. I memorized a very lot of verses, chapters of epistles and even entire letters, like Philippians, and chunks of other letters. I still have a box of those cards on which those verses are printed or written. Given life is life, I fell out of the habit of memorization and only slowly started memorizing Scripture again decades later when we moved from Chicago to Tampa. Not sure why, other than I realized anew what a “living and active” (Heb. 4:12) thing God’s word is. The first passage I was compelled to memorize was in the church bulletin in one of the services we attended when we got down here, King David’s doxology on the greatness of our God, I Chronicles 29:10-13. This passage has been a constant companion through the vicissitudes of life ever since. God’s word is indeed living and active.

My older self doesn’t seem as adept at memorization as my younger self, and I’m only memorizing verses or passages that mean something to me in the moment. The latest has to do with a theme I’ve come to realize is what the Christian life is all about, trusting in God, or not. I’ll get to the passage in a moment, but first I want to briefly explore why trust is the very essence of the Christian life. We have to go all the way back to the temptation Satan threw at Eve in the Garden (Genesis 3). The first thing Satan does, in the form of a very crafty serpent, is question what God had commanded Adam and Eve:

 “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

Well, in fact he did, Satan, so buzz off! Unfortunately, Eve didn’t do that and thought she could reason with the father of lies. When I read this passage I wonder why she was so easily seduced by the serpent. The blame must go to Adam. In Genesis 2, the Lord creates man, and Moses tells us about him:

15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

The Hebrew word for “keep” tells us why Eve’s encounter with the serpent was Adam’s fault. According to Strong’s:

The Hebrew verb “shamar” primarily means to keep, guard, or observe. It conveys the idea of careful attention and protection. . . . It implies a sense of diligence and responsibility in maintaining what is valuable or sacred.

Adam obviously did a terrible job of guarding and protecting the garden and the woman God gave him, the fall happened, and all its terrible consequences followed because the man didn’t do his job. All men are called to “shamar” their garden, whatever that is.

So, Eve’s on her own to deal with a crafty liar whose job is to get her to not only not trust in the character of God, but to rebel against his express command of not eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And not only does Satan impugn the character of God, but he also calls God himself a liar! 4 “’You will not certainly die,’ the serpent said to the woman.’” Oh yes you will. So the woman uses her own judgment about the tree, thinks it looks kind of appealing, and takes some and eats it. Adam having failed at Job 1, goes along for the ride, and sin, misery, death, and suffering are introduced into God’s perfectly good and ordered world.

In a nutshell, this is our same battle today, trust in the character of God or not, call him a liar or not, and experience the consequences one way or the other. It’s that stark, as are the consequences. Which brings me to Jeremiah 17:5-8. I will quote it in full, and then comment on the incredible contrast and what it means for our lives.

5 This is what the Lord says:

“Cursed is the one who trusts in man,
    who depends on flesh for his strength
    and whose heart turns away from the Lord.
6 He will be like a bush in the wastelands;
    he will not see prosperity when it comes;
he will dwell in the parched places of the desert,
    in a salt land where no one lives.

7 “But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord,
    whose confidence is in him.
8 He will be like a tree planted by the water
    that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
    its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
    and never fails to bear fruit.”

Cursed verses blessed; the choice is ours. Let’s see what that looks like in practice according to the word of God.

The Cursed and Blessed Contrast
First, let’s look at the contrasting words cursed and blessed. In Hebrew they connote divine favor or not. What they do not necessarily refer to, and this is absolutely critical, is circumstances. God’s favor, or disfavor, can’t be divined merely from circumstances, and we mistake God’s intentions if that’s what we use to judge them. Are they irrelevant? Of course not, given the obvious fact some circumstances are pleasant and others are not. Nobody wants to suffer, but suffering and terrible circumstances are not necessarily an indication of God’s disfavor, any more than pleasant circumstances, wealth and honor, are necessarily indication of God’s favor. The qualifier means they may or may not be, and wisdom understands the difference.

In fact as we see from the blessed man, unwelcome circumstances are perfectly consistent with God’s blessing, as are pleasant circumstances to the cursed man. This is counterintuitive to us because we’re human and we prefer pleasure over pain. Christianity frees us from the tyranny of circumstances because God enables us in some manner to overcome or transcend them so they do not determine us. In other words, circumstances are a superficial and often deceptive way to try to divine God’s intentions toward us. Can God use them to send messages to us one way or the other? Obviously He can because as Scripture plainly teaches, He is in control of all things, and He does that all the time. It’s called life.

The point is a simple one, if difficult to attain in practice: we are to place our ultimate trust in God alone, not anything or anyone outside of Him.

One of the great curses of the modern age, in the words of our Declaration of Independence, is “the pursuit of happiness.” The founding generation, steeped in a thoroughly Christian culture, read those words differently than we tend to today in our prosperous thoroughly secular culture. For them it was about purpose and goodness and independence, character, but for us it perfect circumstances. If we have pleasant circumstances we’ll be happy, if not, we’ll be miserable. If you want to be miserable, make happiness the purpose of your life. On the other hand, even if our circumstances are perfect, we’re not to put our trust in those circumstances for our fulfillment. It’s subtle, but daily prayer and thanksgiving for all the blessings God bestows upon us keeps us grounded. It gives us the proper perspective, that He not things or other people, is our ultimate reward, the ultimate joy that allows us to take joy, and enjoyment, in everything else. If we allow anything outside of Him to be our source of joy and fulfillment, we’ll be squeezing the joy and fulfillment out of them like water out of a wet rag.

Having said that, and at the risk of contradicting myself, God wants to bless us with good and pleasant things, as all parents want to bless their children with good and pleasant things. That wasn’t always easy for me to believe, or any of us really, but Jesus himself makes this perfectly clear (Matt 7):

11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! 

This can also be clearly seen from the beginning when God commanded the man and the woman to be fruitful and multiply; barren or dead trees don’t bear fruit. Women who couldn’t bear children were considered cursed because children were seen as the ultimate blessing in life, as indeed they are. (As an aside, we should want more little blessings in our lives.) The Pentateuch, the first five books of Moses, overflow with words of blessing and prosperity for obedience to God, and curses for disobedience. God’s law is not merely a means to drive us to Christ, but a means to blessing and true personal and societal flourishing. To live in alignment with God’s good, created order is the means to blessing.

Part of the reason for God’s curses and His judgment is to drive us back to Him to find true blessing and fulfillment, no matter what the circumstances are. When the boundary lines do fall for us in pleasant places our contentment is still in Him, not the circumstances. David teaches us this in Psalm 16:

5 Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup;
    you make my lot secure.
6 The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
    surely I have a delightful inheritance.

That’s why Jesus tells is to seek first God’s kingdom and His righteousness, and not to worry about all the other stuff. Do that, and everything follows regardless of the circumstances.

Cursed is The One Who Trusts in Man
Cursed is a strong, but accurate, word, reflecting the judgment of God against sin, and not trusting God is sin. God is not obligated to reward bad behavior, any more than we are obligated to reward our Children’s bad behavior. Parents who do not discipline their children do them no favors. When God’s first children, Adam and Eve, rebelled God pronounced curses, first on the serpent and the woman, then on the man. Everything in life became harder than God initially created it to be, thorns and thistles. Like me, you may have asked the question: but why can’t God just overlook the rebellion, why does His judgment have to be so harsh?

Let me answer this with some other questions. In a court of law if a judge let someone off who committed murder would you like that? Be comfortable with that? Think that was the right thing for the judge to do? Of course not because we all intuitively understand justice must be done, that wrongs must be righted, which means we live in a moral universe where right and wrong, justice and injustice are a fact of the reality we inhabit. We can no more escape the moral laws of the universe than we can escape its physical laws. Break the moral law, and we suffer the consequences. Let’s look the one who trust in man.

6 He will be like a bush in the wastelands;
    he will not see prosperity when it comes;
he will dwell in the parched places of the desert,
    in a salt land where no one lives.

The image is one devoid of life, devoid of thriving and blooming and fruit. Ironically, this cursed person could have all the most wonderful circumstances he could ever want, prosperity, but even then without God he can’t even see it. It’s like dreaming and working and longing for something for years, and then when you get it, it’s just a thing. It no more fulfills you than one meal fills you. The things of life, be they people or money or comfort or achievements or entertainment or possession or hobbies, or anything else, were never meant to be our fulfillment and joy, or ultimate purpose. All of these things are good, just not ultimate goods. Two of the great saints of Christian history put this truth in wonderfully poetic form. Blaise Pascal, 17th century Christian genius, says it this way:

There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made know through Jesus Christ.

And Augustine, the 5th century Christian genius and Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, put it this way:

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

People can stuff all kinds of things in their hearts, stuff them to overflowing, and still they will never be filled, never satiated, never satisfied because they are under God’s curse.

Blessed Is the Man Who Trusts in the Lord
The metaphors Isaiah uses are perfectly descriptive of the contrast, of the blessing, the thriving, the flourishing of this one who chooses, who is determined to trust in the Lord. We all know what trust means, but let’s look at a definition to dial in on its implications for us as we navigate the difficulties and challenges of everyday life in a fallen world among fallen people in a fallen body:

Reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence. confident expectation of something; hope.

How in the world can we have such confidence in God apart from the circumstances even as we pray and long for the circumstances we think we want? Because God isn’t looking to make His people happy, to give them circumstances that are pleasant and unproblematic, but to make them like Christ. In life I call this the pain of sanctification, and very often it isn’t pleasant, thus the reference to pain. Trusting God in such environments is difficult, to say the least, which is why we have to doggedly determine to believe in the goodness of God’s character and intentions toward us. How do we do that? Especially when things are darkest, and the struggles seem unendurable? We have to know this fact of existence of our life in Christ: Everything God does in our lives is for our good and his glory. Paul tells us in Romans 8:28 it isn’t 98% of things that “work together for our good,” but all things, one hundred percent of things. Is this easy? Of course not. Why should it be? Life isn’t easy for heathens either, so why should it be for God’s people? Assuming it should be has led a lot of Christians to become the cursed one who turns in trust to man because God isn’t measuring up to their expectations, which means the circumstances in their life are no to their liking. It’s a terribly shallow and short sighted way to look at existence, but an understandable one.

By contrast, if we look at the vivid picture presented to us in the tree planted by the water, it gets its sustenance, its life giving force from a source, from living water, that is ongoing and cannot be altered by whatever is outside of the stream. Strong living trees withstand storms or heat or drought because they are always being fed the water of life. No wonder my Christian life changed back in 2012 when I determined that every single morning I would get on my knees and pray and read the Bible. I have done that and it made all the difference. The realness of God has become more real than I can describe. My perspective on everything, literally, is always God. I can’t see anything in life apart from the connection to Him. When I hear great music, a melody that grabs me, I think God! When I look at creation, the most humble little flower, I think God! When I make a living daily working through the thorns and thistles, I think God! When I see other people and make them smile, I think God! When I walk alongside those who suffer I think God! When I see a professional golfer or baseball or football player do something we mere mortals can’t fathom, I think God! I could go on like this for hours, but I trust you get the point.

What Happens When We Get to Our Red Sea Moment
Most of the trust challenges we have in our lives are not dramatic, thankfully, but the choice in every moment dramatic or not, is do we trust the Lord, or not. Those times that do get intense present us with a seemingly intractable dilemma. We are all familiar with the story of the Exodus. Moses leads the people of Israel out of Egypt to worship God, and initially the Pharaoh allows them to go with his blessing. In fact, on the way out God inclined the Egyptian people toward the Israelites, “so they plundered the Egyptians.” Everything was looking fine, smooth sailing all the way to the promised land, then it wasn’t. Pharaoh changed his mind, sends his army out after the people to bring them back, and probably slaughter quite a few in the process.

You can read the narrative in Exodus 13 and 14. The Lord leads the people to the shores of the Red Sea, and in the opposite direction comes the army of the Egyptians. Uh oh! What now? If a situation ever looked impossible this was it. The question for the people of Israel was this: would they trust in the Lord or not. Moses implores them to the former:

13 Moses answered the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. 14 The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.”

Be still? What are you nuts? We learn previously that the Israelites were armed for war, and it would have been easy for the warriors to take matters into their own hands, but be still? Yep, that’s the plan. And you know the rest of the story. They decided to trust Moses and thus the Lord.

Chances are, our Red Sea moments are never so dramatic, but they sometimes feel that way. I’ve written here before about building the trust muscle, as I call it. We all know what it takes to make muscles stronger, breaking them down, injuring them if you will, so they come back stronger. It’s not a pleasant process most of the time, but the results are worth it. I’ll end this with something I pray and strive for on a daily basis, and which I’ve yet to attain, from Isaiah 26:3 :

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.

Perfect peace . . . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pietistic Gnostic Dualism’s Influence on Modern Christianity

Pietistic Gnostic Dualism’s Influence on Modern Christianity

Feb 19, 2025 | Culture, Theology

In a couple previous posts I wrote about what it means that the Christian’s citizenship in is heaven, and what it does not mean, and how the understanding of our spiritual home developed in the history of Pietism. This happened, along with the predictable consequences of waning cultural influence and the growth of secularism because of the Pietistic Gnostic and dualistic assumptions and teachings that came to dominate Evangelical Christianity. Most Christians are not aware they hold these assumptions, let alone how they affect the experience of their faith, or their views of the Christian mission in the world. Further, and the driver of the problem, is pastors who themselves hold these assumption and basically teach a Pietistic Christianity which truncates or narrows the Christian’s mission in the world in various ways. Most Christians see the world as a sinking ship, and our job is to rescue people because the ship is going down, likely soon.

A properly eternal this-worldly vision and understanding of the mission of God, in the title of Joe Boot’s book, is something I myself didn’t understand even as a “worldview Christian.” I came across Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There in college, and became passionate about applying a Christian perspective to all of life. This, however, did not include the reign of Christ in this fallen world to take back territory, so to speak, from the devil, specifically for Christ advancing his kingdom on this earth as it is in heaven outside of the church. Inside the church is where kingdom stuff happened, or so I thought; outside was a wasteland. I basically assumed a Pietistic worldview, and believed those words in that old hymn, that heaven is my home, and I’m just a passin’ through. We went to a Christian worldview oriented church for a number of years, and in a sermon the pastor said any Christian engaged in “the culture wars” is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. That did not make me a happy camper, but I knew the Pietism that inspired it.

For those of us who believe God’s kingdom on earth most definitely means “culture wars,” we need to understand we are in the education business. In his book, Schaeffer speaking in the 1960s of the radical shift that had taken place in the world up to that time said, “If we do not understand it then we are largely talking to ourselves.” This is a temptation in the Reformed postmillennial circles in which I run. We’re a small pond compared to the ocean of Evangelicalism dominated by going-to-heaven-when-you-die Christianity, and we need to get this message out to our brothers and sisters in Christ who don’t know anything about it. I’m excited about the possibilities of success because of the Great Awakening happening all around us I wrote about in my previous book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward. America and the West in general, has reached the end of the Enlightenment and its logical offshoot, secularism. It promised everything and delivered nothing but misery and despair. People are looking for meaning, hope, and purpose, and only Jesus can ultimately give them that. A God-less, basically agnostic society seeks fleeting fulfillment based on circumstances, but even the best circumstances, every dream coming true, leaves people empty if Jesus isn’t the center of their lives.

I am convinced because of all this, we live in a time where Christians are open to a much more expansive vision of Christianity than the overly spiritual, personalized, other worldly Christianity they get at most churches. The gospel is so much bigger than me. I can get plenty of tips for Christian living, for growing in holiness and service to others from Pietistic Christianity, but nothing about transforming the world by bringing God’s kingdom and extending Christ’s reign in every area of life. And it’s not just a Christian worldview, but Christ’s reign; big difference. It’s about King Jesus, not just bringing Christian assumptions and perspective to things, as important as that is. In 21st century Pietistic Christianity consequences for this world are pretty much beside the point. The world will go on its merry way to destruction, and we’ll get as many out as we can in the meantime. What a horribly depressing conception of the purpose of God’s people on earth, about as inspiring as running into battle against an enemy with superior force, numbers, and weapons. Why even fight?

Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to change the Christian orientation toward this world, bringing heaven to earth instead of primarily toward the next and going to heaven. In order to do this, we need to understand the other two of the three words informing the Pietistic mindset, Gnosticism and dualism. These are deep and expansive topics, so this will be a brief exploration. Even though Gnosticism is dualistic, we will treat them separately because I see the Gnostic influence in the experiential and emotional side of Pietism, and the dualist influence more as a state of mind, a worldview, a way of looking at existence.

Gnosticism and the Search for “Secret” Knowledge
The early Pietists were influenced by Gnostic dualistic ideas of the ancient Greeks. All Greek thought was essentially dualistic, but Gnosticism was radically Platonic and became a thorn in the side of the church in its early centuries. Its influence continued in one way or another in Western thought through the Middle Ages eventually affecting the worldview of those who became Pietists.

The Greek philosopher Plato envisioned a world of transcendent, immaterial, eternal, and unchanging forms, the ideals of which could be found in the material world that are always changing and uncertain. The material world was created by what he called a Demiurge, a god-like figure who takes the preexisting materials of chaos, arranges them according to the models of eternal forms, and produces all the physical things of the world, including human bodies. The Gnostics adapted this term into their radical dualistic worldview, seeing the Demiurge as one of the forces of evil responsible for the creation of the despised material world and was wholly alien to the supreme God of goodness. In the Platonic understanding of reality, put simplistically, the material world is bad because it is material, and the immaterial world of ideal forms is good because it is immaterial. There is nothing at all like this in the Jewish or early Christian worldview which declared God’s material creation very good, even if distorted and marred by the fall and sin. Gnosticism took this anti-materialist mentality to the nth degree, where escaping it was the essence of salvation.

Gnosticism developed into a Christian heresy primarily active in the second century. The word comes from the Greek gnostikoi, meaning “those who have gnosis,” or knowledge. Gnosticism was a movement focused on a religious experience of gaining knowledge without the intellectual efforts of theology or philosophy, but through a revelation that reawakens knowledge (gnosis) of humanity’s divine identity. The concepts of sin, guilt, and redemption are irrelevant to this awakening because it is not something dependent on the work of God for man, but man’s inner being finding God. This radical dualism teaches that the key to salvation lies in a secret knowledge revealed only to the initiated few, and what separates man from God, the human from the divine, is an illusion that fades away with the enlightenment gnosis brings. Genuine self-knowledge is essentially an awareness of one’s own divinity.

As Gnosticism faded away in due course, it’s specific form of anti-materialist dualism remained an influence within Christianity down through the centuries. While certainly no Gnostic, Augustine, the great Bishop of Hippo (North Africa), was heavily influence by Plato’s philosophy, embracing a form of Neoplatonism, a knockoff of Platonism developed by third century philosopher Plotinus. Augustine believed in the soul’s superiority to and independence of the body, with the soul being superior in the hierarchy of reality. So, for example, sex was problematic because it was part of our material existence, and a necessary evil to propagate the human race. Gnosticism influenced monasticism in the desire for monks and nuns to isolate themselves away from the world and its material temptations that war against the spiritual. Initiates could spend all their time in prayer and the contemplation of the divine gaining a kind of secret knowledge (gnosis) that only comes from isolation and immersion. The mysticism of the Middle Ages naturally flowed from this mentality, inspiring early Pietists and their Gnostic tendencies.

Gnosticism is one of the innumerable answers in history to the most common question in human existence: Why? What Winston Churchill said of the Soviet Union applies perfectly to the conundrum that is life: It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Thus we see man throughout all of recorded history trying to unwrap the mystery, but never quite figuring it out. The reason is the benighted nature of human finitude; we are limited creatures. This is illustrated by the history of philosophy and religion, speculation upon conjecture going nowhere, educated guesses and arguments going in circles. C.S. Lewis spent his early years as an atheist, but found the answers he sought to why and other questions elusive, and the ones he got wanting. After he finally made his way to Christianity, he tells us why he embraced it in my favorite quote of his:

 I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Which brings us to the problem of evil, and Gnosticism.

Throughout all human history mankind has been driven by theodicy, better known as “the problem of evil,” trying to answer the why question by founding religions and philosophies of various kinds. None of these outside of Judaism and Christianity have been able to give a satisfying answer as to why evil, suffering, and death exist. Religion and philosophy are the means to deal with this horrible fact of existence.

The phrase “problem of evil” developed in Western thought primarily because of Voltaire and his “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, or An Examination of the Axiom: All is Well” written in 1756. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 killed an estimated 60,000 people, and in the age of the so called Enlightenment, people were trying to wrap their minds around the horror. How could God allow such suffering and death? Voltaire put God in the dock and found him guilty of grave injustice. The problem developed as such: If God is good he would never allow such suffering, and if he was all powerful he would prevent it, but since such suffering exists he can’t be good, and since he can’t prevent it, he is not all powerful. So down through Western history this became primarily a problem for Christians trying to defend the God of the Bible, and even His very existence. Contrary to what many people think, this is not just a problem for Christians. Reject the existence of God completely and you are still left with the question, why?

Gnosticism gave the world a convoluted and complicated answer as I briefly referenced above, but it all comes down to matter is evil therefore there is evil and suffering in the world. Matter and the world must be escaped, and that is through this secret kind of mystical knowledge for the lucky few. The Gnostic tendencies for the Pietist come from this kind of experiential seeking for a knowledge that will confer on the Christian a means of escape from this messy, fallen sinful world. As a young Christian that knowledge came in the form of a little wire I imagined coming down from God into my brain and the zap! when I needed to understand something of spiritual significance. In a way, I completely envisioned it as bypassing my intellect and mental faculties which of course made it all more “spiritual” and thus valid. Few if any Christians given to Pietistic tendencies actually think through any of this. It’s just how they see their relationship to God mediated through the Bible.

There are many passages in Scripture that might give one inclined this way to read them in a Gnostic fashion. I’ll just reference an obvious one in Colossians 3:

1 Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. 3 For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

This has a Gnostic feel to it, but if you continue to read, “earthly things” isn’t referring to this material world at all, but to whatever belongs to our “earthly nature,” then he lists things like sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, greed, anger, rage, etc. He then tells them to put on virtues that are all encapsulated in love. Things above doesn’t refer to a place somewhere far off like heaven where we can escape through a quasi-mystical experience while we’re stuck on earth, but living this Christ-like life here and now.

Dualism and Two Reality Christianity
As I said, unlike Gnosticism, which I look at as the experiential aspect of Pietism, dualism isn’t about salvation, but a way of looking at the nature of things, a mindset, a worldview. I’m not saying Christianity doesn’t have its dualisms, it does. We can see these in good and evil, heaven and hell, body and soul, righteousness and sin, just and unjust, material and spiritual, etc. But these dualisms are firmly found in an understanding of the cosmos rooted in Scripture, that God is the all-powerful creator of the material world which he declares very good. Yet Greek language, and therefore thought, would have a profound influence on Christianity just as God planned it.

Since God doesn’t do coincidence, Christians inherited some of this dualistic mentality from the Greeks given the faith was born in a thoroughly Hellenistic, i.e., broadly Greek, culture. In the providence of God, three great cultures come together at a point in history before Christ was born. Paul tells us why in Galatians 4:

 4 But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

The Jews, the most ancient of these peoples, gave us God’s people and the covenant promises fulfilled throughout their history in Christ. The Romans brought the Pax Romana (Latin for ‘Roman peace’), the roughly 200 year-long period of relative peace and prosperity allowing Christianity to flourish. This included Roman military power, law, and technological prowess seen most importantly in the vast network of Romans roads allowing relatively safe travel throughout the empire which contributed to the swift spread of the gospel to the “ends of the earth.” And finally the Greeks because of the Hellenizing process started with Alexander the Great several centuries before Christ. Greek culture, including a universal language and worldview coming from Greek philosophy, influenced Christianity in profound ways. We can see this clearly in John’s gospel as he comes right out of the gate taking a Greek philosophical concept and transforming a Jewish understanding of God into a Christian one:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

There is a lot going on in this paragraph from a Greek philosophical perspective, most importantly is John’s teaching on who this Word, or logos, is. According to biblehub.com:

In ancient Greek philosophy, “logos” referred to the principle of order and knowledge. Philosophers like Heraclitus used it to describe the rational principle governing the cosmos. In the Hellenistic Jewish context, “logos” was associated with divine wisdom and the intermediary between God and the world.

John then takes this Greek idea and applies it to the divine preexistent Christ who is the ultimate revelation of God who not only governs the cosmos but created it.

Christianity also inherited and developed a dualistic worldview influenced by Greek thought. Some Christian thinkers have seen this as unfortunate, and something that distorts Christian faith and thinking, while others embrace it with proper qualifications. I would lean more in the latter camp, but it’s clear dualism taken too far gives us a bifurcated two story reality. There are various ways to describe this two-story version of the faith, but it breaks life into two competing realities. Picture a house where upstairs is all the important stuff, the truly meaningful and important things, real stuff, and downstairs is for the servants, the mundane reality we deal with every day. Even though it’s the same house it appears like two completely different houses, say upstairs is 19th century Victorian, and downstairs 1960s hip modernism. In Schaeffer’s words, upstairs “is above the line of despair.” Everyone without access to the stairs is stuck downstairs trying to find meaning, hope, and purpose. If you do have a pass, you can go upstairs when you want to access the things that really matter in life. You can see how a type of Gnosticism might be appealing to people who see reality as mutually exclusive forces, and places.

In a biblical view of things, however, there is only one reality, or as N.T. Wright in Surprised by Hope puts it speaking of heaven and earth, “They are twin interlocking spheres of God’s single created reality.” Most Evangelicals today, unfortunately, are so steeped in the Greek philosophical mindset, even never having read any of it, that saying heaven and earth are one reality almost boarders on the heretical to them. As Wright further puts it:

We think of heaven by definition as nonmaterial and earth by definition as nonspiritual or nonheavenly. But what won’t do. Part of the central achievement of the incarnation, which is then celebrated in the resurrection and ascension, is that heaven and earth are now joined together with an unbreakable bond and that we too are by right citizens of both together.

As I’ve said previously, the first generations of Pietists didn’t see material and spiritual reality as mutually exclusive, but this dualistic perspective was bound to grow over time, and the experiential and personal push of Pietism made sure it did. In my next post I will explore why this mentality, this version of Christianity came to dominate Evangelical Christianity in America.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The History of Pietism and Cultural Irrelevance

The History of Pietism and Cultural Irrelevance

Feb 12, 2025 | Culture

Pietism is the most important development in the history of Christianity most Christians have never heard of. It wasn’t high on my radar either until a few years back when I began to learn about its contribution to the rise of secularism in Western culture. Because of the Gnostic and dualistic nature of Pietism, the successful takeover of secularism in Western culture was inevitable. With the church, and Christians in general, focused on otherworldly concerns, culture and governing could be left to the godless. This was never the Pietists’ intention, but it was inevitable given their theological assumptions.

Both Pietism and secularism lead to the same thing: a secular society devoid of Christian influence. This might seem counter intuitive given the former is passionately religious while the latter is completely anti-religion. As we’ll see, Pietism has been a disaster for Christian cultural influence in the West, turning Christianity into a culturally irrelevant force. That was not at all the intention of its founders, or for most who subsequently embraced it, but it was the practical result of their understanding of Christianity, nonetheless.

Before we go back in time, let’s clarify terms since few people are familiar with Pietism. We are not talking about piety, the good and necessary personal reverence or devotion to God, but a German Lutheran movement that developed in the early seventeenth century. Because of the influence of Pietism, secularism triumphed as Christianity became primarily inward and personal, eschewing cultural engagement for personal devotion. It took time, but eventually Christianity completely lost the world transforming power that overthrew the Roman Empire, defeated paganism, and gave the world the blessings of modern society.

Pietism and the Reaction to Scholasticism
Scholasticism was a rigorously logical method of teaching in the schools of Western Europe in the Middle Ages, dominating universities from approximately 1100 to 1600, and into the seventeenth century. All of the early Reformers grew up and were influenced by an educational system steeped in scholasticism, and thus their approach tended to the intellectual. Both Luther and Calvin were educated in the Medieval Scholastic system, and their theological works reflect that. Lutheranism and Calvinism, soon labeled Reformed, would not stray far from their intellectual and scholarly roots, until, that is, the reaction of the first Pietists to Lutheran Scholasticism. The influence of Pietism would go well beyond Lutheranism in the centuries to come because of its focus on experience and not theology or doctrine, allowing it to easily cross denominational boundaries to eventually become the default expression of Christianity in the modern world.

 In his book, Pietism and the Foundations of the Modern World, Justin Davis defines Pietism as such:

Pietism is the generic Protestant expression of experiential Christianity. Notions of mysticism, revivalism, and antipathy towards the world and established religious culture become the standard modes in which this experiential religion is expressed. Individualism is often identified as a central tenet of both Protestantism and modernity, and as such it is also key to understanding Pietism. Pietism is therefore shorthand for the prioritization of experience over rationalism and scholasticism for Protestants. . . . the term is an expression of experiential Protestantism in general.

 I can vouch for this definition in my experience of the Christianity I was born-again into when I was in college. The focus on the “spiritual” meant things of the mind were not so much disparaged, as ignored, although they could be seen as semi-dangerous to our relationship with Jesus. It wasn’t until after I discovered Francis Schaeffer and eventually Reformed theology that I realized this version of Christianity was anti-intellectual, anti-theological, and ahistorical.

Experience and feeling, a feature of Pietism, can turn into a kind of idol like anything else; it was something that haunted John Wesley throughout his life, morbid introspection. Martin Luther taking his que from Augustine, helpfully defined sin as Incurvatus in se, Latin for being turned or curved inward on oneself, so much navel gazing. Thankfully, Christianity offers us the best of both worlds, the heart and the mind, but the mind would prove no match for the rise of Pietism as Western Christianity developed over the next several hundred years. Davis adds that by the nineteenth century, “nearly every influential Protestant theologian . . . was impacted or confronted Pietism or its systems.”

The Founding Fathers of Pietism
Pietism had antecedents in the mysticism of the Middle Ages as Christians were looking for more experiential religious expression. Those Christians seeking an experiential religion by removing themselves from society became monks and nuns. Various models of mystical piety resonated with early Protestants even though the tradition was Catholic. Borrowing their thoughts and practices while putting them in the Protestant context, Pietists would make a kind of mystical experience an essential aspect of Protestant Christianity. Unlike other forms of Reformational Christianity, it wasn’t creeds, confessions, or synods, but experiences that scratched their spiritual itch. This will become abundantly clear in the centuries to come.

The founding of Pietism was a long historical process, but it is generally agreed while not the founder,  Johann Arndt (1555-1621) was foundational to the movement. A pastor, Arndt published a series of books starting in 1605 called True Christianity, in which he developed an experiential Christianity differing from previous mysticism in that it seeks a kind of union or merging with God, but something available to all Christians. Justin Davis writes,

In none of these works does he simply abandon himself to the idea that his experiences are those of a mystic, rather they reflect a newness of life that is far more open and common to every Christian.

Arndt finds little value in theology or doctrine not specifically in service to the renewed life of faith. Thus, “the true Christian must find the kingdom of God within themselves” rather than in any focus on the outside world or the wider church. This effectively transferred a person’s “salvation to the realm of moral endeavor” rather than the communal life of the church. His followers “focused on personal revivals rather than a revival of the church or the culture at large,” and his work came to dominate discussions not just in Germany but throughout Europe.

Philip Jakob Spener (1635-1705) built on the work of Arndt and is technically the founding father of Pietism. Serving as a pastor in Frankfort, Germany, he introduced something called Collegia Pietatis, or “piety groups,” thus Pietism. From these twice-weekly devotional meetings in his house, Spener published Pia Desideria, “Devout Desires,” in 1675, with six major proposals for reform and revitalization of the church. Spener’s reforms were pastoral and practical, easily adopted by the laity, but not popular with the German Lutheran Church who accused him of doctrinal laxity. Indeed, Spener considered doctrinal conflicts irrelevant and often harmful, which would be a hallmark of modern Evangelicalism in the centuries to come. To Spener, and Evangelicals in the future, religious and moral duties were far more important than doctrinal disputes.

We also see in Spener a kind of asceticism in his opposition to card playing, dancing, the opera, and theater, and his stress upon moderation in dress, food, and drink. This becomes a feature of the fundamentalism of the nineteenth and especially twentieth century, along with an undervaluation of the church’s liturgy’, sacraments, and clergy. We see the legacy of this in modern, stripped down services in many churches which consist of praise music and a sermon. It also wasn’t just his desire to reform the church separating him from Arndt, but his desire to confront the growing secularism of what was quickly becoming the modern world because of the effects of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).

Secularism was also given a push by French Philosopher Renes Descartes (1596-1650) and the development of rationalism, a radical, indeed revolutionary departure from the Middle Ages in which man began his pursuit of knowledge with God. Now, man would begin his pursuit of knowledge with man, as Descartes put it, Cogito Ergo Sum, or I think therefore I am. From Descartes sprung the period in Western intellectual history known as the Enlightenment, so called because man was supposedly coming out of what some thought “The Dark Ages,” and into the glorious light of human reason. On this freight train to modernism, secularism hitched a ride, and the Western world would undergo a slow moving irreligious revolution. Spener was determined to fight against that. As governments became more secular, it was the church through the preaching and the laity that would affect legislation for reform to create a more religious society. His embrace of Luther’s notion of a priesthood of all believers can be seen in a work he published in 1677 titled The Spiritual Priesthood, which would take Arndt’s more inner looking spirituality in a more outward, practical direction. Also, because of its lack of focus on a rigid orthodoxy, Pietism as it grew easily adapted to different theological contexts.

Finally, in its development, Pietism would not be limited to Lutheran Germany. Prior to its appearance in Lutheran circles, a Pietism without the name is found in the work of highly influential English Reformed theologian William Perkins (1558–1602), considered the “father of Puritanism.” Coinciding almost exactly with the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603), Perkins’ life influenced a whole generation of English churchmen and English piety. The focus of Perkins’ life and ministry was developing piety in others, his students, parishioners, fellow pastors, and readers. From his influential position at Cambridge in his preaching, teaching, and especially writing, he proved a gifted popularizer of Reformed theology.

His books outsold those of Calvin and Beza in England, and he became the first English theologian to enjoy a wide readership throughout Europe with books translated into several languages. He was also the first English Protestant theologian to be published North America. The English Puritans escaping persecution made their way to the New World in the great Puritan migration to New England from 1620 to 1640. “Anyone who reads the writings of early New England learns that Perkins was indeed a towering figure in their eyes,” wrote Perry Miller. Perkins and his followers were “the most quoted, most respected, and most influential of contemporary authors in the writings and sermons of early Massachusetts.” In fact, Jonathan Edwards was fond of reading Perkins more than a century later.

Perkins shows us that piety and intellectual rigor are not mutually exclusive. The problem, however, was that Pietism the movement tended to see them as exactly that, or if not, then at least in tension. Too much intellectual effort and you were in danger of your heart growing cold, but that’s not the way knowledge works, as is the case with any of the good gifts of God. As Tim Keller said, idolatry is turning good things into ultimate things, and that can happen with anything. Even though Perkins wrote extensively on theological topics, his teaching and exhortation on pious Christian living made the biggest impact in America where various forms of Pietism across denominational lines would come to dominate Evangelical faith. Add that to our next “founder,” and in due course Pietism would become the default Evangelical experience for Christians, as it was for me many years after these men lived.

John Wesley and the Institutionalization of Pietism
The man most responsible for bringing Pietism to dominance in Christianity is the impressive if problematic John Wesley. Prior to learning about Wesley, I would never have connected Pietism with the development of the modern world, leaving the blame, or credit as the case may be, for that on the Enlightenment. But both historical phenomena had a fascinating symbiotic relationship through time to give us the modern world. I’ve argued here previously that Pietism and secularism are two sides of the same coin.

Wesley was born in 1703 into a strict Christian family, attended Oxford University, and eventually became an ordained priest in the Church of England. In 1729 he returned to Oxford for a fellowship, joining his brother Charles in a religious study group derisively called the “Methodists” because of their emphasis on methodical study and devotion. The “Holy Group,” as they were also known by those who mocked them, were active in doing good works in the community and intense in their religious devotion. In November 1735 these concerns would compel Wesley to take a trip to Georgia to oversee the spiritual lives of the colonists and be a missionary to the Native Americans, in addition to seeking his own salvation of which he was still not assured. The trip would be filled with terror and doubt in the middle of which he would encounter a Pietism lived out that challenged his weak faith.

Specifically, Wesley encountered a group of Moravians, also called United Brethren, from what is the modern day Czech Republic. They were initially followers of Jan Hus, who foreshadowed the Reformation to come and was burned at the stake at the Council of Constance in 1417. Wesley’s trip to George was a failure, his dream of what he would accomplish turning into a nightmare. A couple years later he fled back to Britain. Even in his interaction with the Moravians, he still did not have assurance of his salvation, until he met another Moravian, a missionary himself heading to Georgia, Peter Bohler. Wesley was told he had no saving faith, and still hoped to become righteous by virtue of his own deeds, lacking true faith that comes in an instant, bringing rebirth and certainty of salvation. Talking to Bohler he was convinced he didn’t possess saving faith. This realization was Wesley’s real Evangelical conversion.

From this point on, age 35, Wesley would proclaim the good news of salvation by grace through faith, which he did in any pulpit he could find. The Church of England, however, did not like such displays of what was called at the time, “enthusiasm,” and he became persona non grata. This reaction was the opportunity to jump start the Great Awakening in England, something that had already been happening in America with Jonathan Edwards starting back in New England in 1734 with a series of sermons on “Justification by Faith Alone.” Initially Wesley worked with groups of Moravian church societies, but in 1739 when he got pushback there as well, George Whitefield persuaded him to go to the unchurched masses. It is difficult to convey to modern readers how radical Wesley was in the eyes of the religious establishment of his day. Any religious work done outside of the established parish churches was suspect because there could be no control mechanisms against “enthusiasm.”   

Even as Wesley became an itinerate preacher whose endurance was legendary, his mission wasn’t only saving souls, but keeping Christians accountable to live and grow in a life of holiness. To that end he developed rules for the Methodist Societies, and association within these societies had little to do with doctrine outside of the broad contours of a kind of “mere Christianity.” In due course Wesley would send lay preachers to the American colonies, where Methodism grew quickly and over time would become one of America’s largest denominations, though in time dividing over various issues.

How Pietism Came to Dominate the Evangelical Church
This was a complicated several hundred year cultural and sociological process, but in due course American Protestant Christianity would become a thoroughly Pietistic Christianity. The first Great Awakening had a profound impact on the spread of the distinctives of Pietism. George Whitfield (1714-1770), arguably the greatest evangelist ever, would preach the new birth and holiness throughout the American colonies as well as in Great Britain, arriving in America in 1738 after Wesley left. Through the spreading Great Awakening Pietism eventually was institutionalized in various Protestant denominations, The conversion experience would always be the driver, and a commitment to personal holiness would follow. My conversion and early Christian life would fit the Pietist mold to a T.

And speaking of holiness, Wesley’s striving for and obsession with holiness led him to preach something few Christians today have ever heard of, perfectionism. Eventually, holiness movements in various forms would have broad influence in Evangelical Christianity in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Also called the higher life, or victorious Christian living, it often included a “second blessing” which would eventually be integral to the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. Wesley’s teaching on perfectionism would not only inspire holiness teaching, but become an underlying assumption of modern fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. That was the case when I was a young Christian. Nobody I knew or heard overtly taught perfectionism, but it expressed itself in what I came to call moralism. Christianity was defined in practice as morality. I’m all for morality, doing good and right, living in obedience to God’s law, which is fundamental to Christianity, but Christianity is far more than morality.

This conception of Christianity is about jumping through hoops, and if you jump through all the right hoops, you can feel good about your faith and your relationship to God. It basically turns Christianity into a form of legalism, and given I’m a sinner guilt was a constant companion in my young Christian life no matter how hard I willed myself to overcome my sin. Even though perfectionism wasn’t overtly taught, I had imbibed Wesley’s theological assumptions. It wasn’t until my mentor led me to a book by the great Princton theologian B.B. Warfield called, Studies in Perfectionism, that I learned about the history of the holiness movements of the last two hundred plus years.

There is also a dualism inherent in Pietism that causes Christians influenced by it to tend to reject political or cultural influence as biblical imperatives. It wasn’t that way with the early Lutheran, English, or American Pietists. They very much saw their faith as logically having an impact for the good on the societies in which they lived. Unfortunately, because of their thin theology and focus on experience, any Christian societal impact could not be sustained, and thus secularism eventually came to dethrone Christianity in the West.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Our Citizenship is in Heaven Really Means

What Our Citizenship is in Heaven Really Means

Feb 5, 2025 | Eschatology, The Gospel

When I became a Christian in the fall of 1978, born-again as we used to say, it was into the kind of Christianity described by three words: Pietistic Gnostic dualism. It was a campus ministry where I imbibed what I now see as an over spiritualized version of Christianity. I look back at the time fondly, living among a group of young people who took their faith seriously, but eventually I realized they saw the important things in life being the spiritual, like Bible reading, prayer, church, evangelism, and the like, and everything else being less important. It was implicitly a bifurcated take on reality, something divided into two separate spheres, some things are in the sphere of the spiritual and thus important, and other things in the sphere of the material and mundane, and thus not so important. I say implicitly because I’m not sure this was ever overtly taught, but I started to see reality through a Christian lens perfectly described by these three words.

Because of this, I want to consider Philippians 3:20 & 21 and how my young Christian self interpreted this passage, and how most Christians do so today as well.

20 But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so they will be like his glorious body.

Back then, my citizenship being in heaven obviously meant heaven is my home, where I belong, where I feel most comfortable. I don’t belong to this messed up old fallen world which, after all, belongs to Satan. As we’ll see, it doesn’t mean that at all, but it sure sounded to me like it did. From a Pietistic Gnostic dualism perspective it made perfect sense. The old hymn says it best while getting it exactly wrong:

I’m but a stranger here,
Heav’n is my home;
Earth is a desert drear,
Heav’n is my home;
Danger and sorrow stand
Round me on ev’ry hand;
Heav’n is my Fatherland,
Heav’n is my home.

The hymn was written by Henry Bateman in the mid-19th century when the concepts from these three words were coming to dominate the Evangelical church in light of the Second Great Awaking. As dispensational premillennialism and fundamentalism began to dominate the church in the 19th century, all but taking it over in the 20th, the words of this hymn became axiomatic. Of course heaven is my home! Verse 20 would bring others to mind like I Peter 2:10, where Peter calls Christians foreigners and aliens, or sojourners, the idea being someone residing in a strange country, just passing through. This idea appears to be confirmed in Hebrews 11, the great hall of fame of faith. Speaking of Abraham, the writer says:

10 For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

Clearly, that’s not the city I now live in on this earth. The writer seems to make it even more clear, using the phrase like Peter that these heroes of faith “were aliens and strangers on earth,” and then telling us:

16 Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

That settles it! This earth is not our home, which is off somewhere else not here, a spiritual heavenly home, and the point of the Christian faith is that when we die we get to go there. Jesus even told us in John 14:2:

My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?

Clearly, Jesus is telling us this place is off somewhere else, not this earth, and this place is where we’ll go when we die.

Then if we combine all this with passages in the New Testament telling us this world belongs to Satan, it has to be an open and shut case. For example, Paul calls Satan “the god of this age” (2 Cor. 4:4), and “the ruler of the kingdom of the air” (Eph. 2:2). The Apostle John tells us, “the whole world is under the control of the evil one” (I John 5:19), and he also makes a strong contrast between “everything in the world,” and those who do the will of God (I John 2:15-17). As horrible as the world can be, it seems kind of obvious it fulfills the phrase often ascribed to some of it, a hell hole.

Looking back I can see why all of this this would have made sense to me, but I’ve come to realize it’s a distortion of the biblical message of the kingdom, in fact an upside down distortion. Jesus came not that we might escape this world for heaven, but that we might be part of him bringing heaven to this fallen world through us. God in Christ is making this world our home because God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son for it. It’s a package deal, us, the people he came to save (Matt. 1:21), and His creation, which as Paul says is “groaning as in the pains of childbirth,” (Rom. 1:22,23) itself to be redeemed with our bodies at the resurrection. This process of making it our home started at Jesus’ first coming, and will ultimately be fulfilled at his second. The big disagreements in the church are about what happens between these comings and what it all means.

The Biblical Orientation of the Christian Life
As we consider the dominant other worldly perspective of most Evangelical Christians today, the question before us becomes one of the proper, biblical orientation of the Christian life, whether our focus is this life or the life to come, and even what these concepts mean. The are two reasons these verses in Philippians are so important to the Christian life in the 21st century. One is the improper interpretation, and the other is the contrasting proper interpretation which completely changes the orientation of the Christian’s life. The contrast is powerful and instructive. In the improper interpretation, it’s like we’re living in a foreign land where we don’t speak the language or know the customs, and we’re constantly longing to go home where we belong, to the familiar, the beloved, the comfortable. In the proper interpretation, we are home in this world, living where we belong, among the people we know and a culture of familiar sights and sounds and feels, even as we seek to improve it and make it a better, more heavenly place to live.

Because of Pietism, these verses tend to be interpreted by most Evangelical Christians in a dualistic way, in effect making us so heavenly minded we become no earthly good. That’s overstated, but it’s imperative we understand the point. In Francis Schaeffer’s image, modern Christians live in a two story reality where upstairs is the important spiritual stuff, that which is related to faith, and downstairs the mundane, material, not so important stuff, and everything not related to faith. I’ve heard this version of Christianity compared to red double decker buses in England, with the spiritual and important stuff on the upper deck, and the not so important mundane and material stuff on the lower deck. Thus we get the term dualism, or the idea of two separate parts or ideas determining how we understand and live our lives. I add the qualifier Gnostic to dualism because we’re seeking a kind of secret knowledge about that other spiritual life apart from this world. Whether we think about any of this consciously or not, it does affect all of us.

The correct orientation gives us an exciting fundamentally transformational and engaging vision for our lives, while rejecting an escapist two-story Christian mentality. Think about it. If we view this life, this world, like a sinking ship eventually going down, or a burning building, our instincts are going to be to get the heck outta here! If we see our efforts to save the ship or the building as futile, how motivated are we going to be to put in the effort to transform it? This is the reason a few years ago I stopped praying for revival. I know what you’re thinking. I’m so earthly minded I’m no heavenly good! Actually, I decided I needed to expand that prayer, so now I pray not just for revival, which Christians tend to view as people being saved so when they die they can go to heaven, but also for renewal, restoration, and reformation as well. I call it praying the four Rs. Notice I don’t pray for revolution because the objective isn’t change into something new and different, but a fulfillment of God’s created order toward its perfect ends. Notice each of the additional Rs don’t seek metamorphosis, a worm into a butterfly, but transformation into fulfillment of what God always intended his creation to be, very good.

This is what God has done in redeeming and reconciling His creation to himself, reversing the effects of the fall “far as the curse is found,” in the words of Isaac Watts’ great Christmas hymn, Joy to the World. The four Rs are a prayer, but it takes more than prayer. We must add our efforts inspired by those prayers to bring to fulfillment God’s grand design in the cultural or dominion mandate given to Adam in Genesis 1:

28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

We are to fulfill the mandate in the second or last Adam (I Cor. 15:45) where the first failed, which is an exciting vision for the Christian life, especially in contrast to the escapist, we belong somewhere else version of Pietistic Christianity. The question is which vision or version is Paul communicating in these verses.

Citizenship in the Ancient Roman World
The history of the Ancient city of Philippi is central to how we should understand our Christian mission in a fallen sinful world. A city in Macedonia (modern day Greece), Philippi was originally founded in 360 BC and named Krenides which means springs. Shortly thereafter it was conquered by Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, who renamed the city after himself. He saw its potential commercial importance due to neighboring gold mines and its position along the great royal trade route running east to west across Macedonia. The Third Macedonian War (171-168 BC) marked the end of its Hellenistic period when Philippi was conquered by the Romans, and continued to develop its significance in the Roman Empire.

Because of that significance, one of the most important battles of antiquity took place there in 42 BC. Following the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44, his heirs Mark Antony and Octavian, called the Second Triumvirate, confronted the forces of his killers, Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus, outside the western walls of the city. In effect, it was the end of the Roman Republic, as both Brutus and Cassius committed suicide in a losing cause. The battle was part of a long series of civil wars in the Roman Republic that would eventually turn into the Roman Empire ruled by one man, a Caesar. In the decades following, Octavian and Antony released some of their veteran soldiers to colonize the city, and in 27 BC when Octavian was proclaimed as Emperor Augustus, he reorganized the colony and established more settlers there. Philippi was now developed as a colony of Rome, administratively modeled on the Empire’s capital, governed by two military officers, the duumviri appointed directly from Rome. It can also be seen in the city’s layout and architecture as a colony resembling a “small Rome.” Phillipi is also indicative of how Rome developed regions into the larger Roman Empire to extend its influence.

The military and political history of Philippi is the contextual metaphor for Paul’s words to the Philippian Christians in these verses. The Apostle visited Philippi in 49-50 AD on his second missionary journey. As Paul and his companions were traveling they intended to take a turn and visit Asia, but Paul had a vision of a man begging them to come to Macedonia, so they went left to Europe and forever changed Western history. Luke tells us (Acts 16),

12 From there we traveled to Philippi, a Roman colony and the leading city of that district of Macedonia. And we stayed there several days.

We learn through their visit about the highly valued status of citizenship in the Greco-Roman world, conferring rights, privileges, and responsibilities within a city-state or the Empire itself. Without it, a person had no rights or recourse to abuse by the state. We see this play out in Paul’s experience as the city’s magistrates give him and Silas their version of non-Roman citizenship justice. They are both in fact citizens of Rome, so we can see the stark contrast of how Roman citizenship confers benefits not offered to non-citizens.

Paul became a Roman citizen at birth because his parents were citizens, and he used that to his advantage when he had to, as we see here in Philippi. A slave girl had been following Paul and his companions for many days, harassing them to the point where Paul had finally had enough and exorcised her. She lost her money making power to predict the future, resulting in Paul and Silas being arrested, “severely flogged,” and thrown in prison. As the men were singing hymns to God at midnight, there was an earthquake and the prison doors flew open. Thinking the prisoners escaped, the jailor was ready to kill himself, but Paul told him not to harm himself because none of the prisoners had escaped. He famously asked what he must do to be saved, and he and his family became the second converts in Europe after Lydia and her family.

The next morning Paul and Silas were told they were allowed to leave, and that’s when Paul played the citizenship card:

37 But Paul said to the officers: “They beat us publicly without a trial, even though we are Roman citizens, and threw us into prison. And now do they want to get rid of us quietly? No! Let them come themselves and escort us out.”

The city magistrates got nervous when they heard this because punishing and putting a Roman citizen in prison without a trial could be capital offense. Trying to appease Paul, they escorted them from the prison and asked them, nicely I gather, to leave the city.

Citizenship in Rome and in Heaven
From this story and the history of Philippi, we can see the dynamic at work Paul had in mind when he used the phrase, “our citizenship is heaven.” Here is what he did not mean. You citizens in Philippi, your real home is Rome, Italy, itself, and your goal as a Roman citizen is to go back there. You’re only here in Philippi for a short time, so don’t get used to it because you will only really belong when you get to Rome. Here, in contrast, is what he did mean. As citizens of Rome, you are creating in Asia Minor a little Rome, bringing all the dynamics of Roman civilized society and order to an outpost that knows nothing of the blessings of Roman citizenship. In that way, the Roman Empire and its influence and blessings will flow well beyond the city’s borders.

Notice Paul also says, “we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ,” and not we eagerly await going to heaven to meet our Savior there. It would be the same as saying we eagerly await Caesar to come from the capital of the Empire to visit the outpost we’ve been building so he’s just as at home in Philippi as he is in Rome. He will be looking to see how successfully Philippi has been in replicating Rome as an outpost of the First City.

The first thing we need to know and then be continually aware of is Christ is King. In Matthew 4 after his baptism in the wilderness and at his most vulnerable after fasting 40 days and nights, Satan comes to tempt him in various ways.

8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. 9 “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” 10 Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”

Prior to Christ accomplishing his mission, Satan was the king of the world, the earth and its kingdoms belonged to him. The most radical and momentous moment in human history was about to happen, and nothing would ever be the same after. Only without the eyes of faith do we not realize the radical revolution that took place only a few short years after this cosmic confrontation. In Acts 17 when Paul and Silas were in Thessalonica, the words of the Jewish leaders captured well the consequences of what Christ accomplished when they say in exasperation, these men “have turned the world upside down.” More like right-side up!

Christ officially became King, experienced his coronation, at the ascension, something we read about in Acts 1. If you happened to see the coronation of King Charles III of England in May of 2023, you’ll get a small sense of what the coronation of Jesus must have been like when he ascended to heaven. We read about it 500 years before it happened in Daniel 7:

13 “I saw in the night visions,

and behold, with the clouds of heaven
there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
14 And to him was given dominion
and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom one
that shall not be destroyed.

Many Christians believe this is a future event that will happen at Christ’s second coming, his Second Advent, but Paul in Philippians 1 doesn’t allow us that interpretation:

That power is the same as the mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, 21 far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. 22 And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.

The conclusion from the plain text of Scripture and supported by the entire history of redemption, is that Christ became King of this world, dethroning Satan, at his first coming. Further, his rule and reign started then, not just over the hearts of Christians, but as both these passages proclaim, over every single thing, every single person, and every single power spiritual and temporal. I’ve always loved how Paul seems to be saying his rule in the present age is so obvious, so accepted by Christians, they have to be reminded his rule is also for the age “to come.”

This absolutely essential aspect of Christian theology is all but ignored in Evangelical Christian churches. For most of my Christian life, the ascension never stood out to me as an indispensable theological foundation of the Christian life. From this foundation we live our lives in confidence, optimism, and the hope of victory both in this life, as well as in the one to come. That age to come will be in a resurrected body on this earth, redeemed, renewed, and reconciled to its Creator. In that hope we “eagerly await a Savior from there” when Jesus not only comes to visit this earthly colony of heaven, but because we have made it a “little heaven,” he will make heaven of the entire earth!