Life is Politics
Let's Get to Work
Happy Thanksgiving Weekend!
For anyone who has walked with me these past two decades, you’ve heard me say it until I’m blue in the face: “Life is politics.”
I say it especially to my beloved Christian and Jewish brothers and sisters who still believe they can neatly tuck their faith into a Sunday-morning box or a Shabbat candle’s glow and pretend the public square belongs to someone else.
While we whisper “separation of church and state” as if it were a shield, our adversaries have never stopped treating politics as their highest religion. From cradle to grave they weave their ideology into every classroom, courtroom, boardroom, and bedroom—never pausing, never apologizing, never surrendering an inch.
They understand what too many believers still refuse to accept: whoever controls the laws, the culture, the schools, and the courts controls the future of your children and the survival of your faith.
Retreat is not neutrality; it is unilateral disarmament. Silence is not humility; it is consent. So when I say “life is politics,” I am not asking you to worship the state. I am begging you to defend the very space where your children will be free to worship God. Because if we do not engage, someone else will—and they have already told us, without apology, that our faith has no place in the world they are building.
Life is politics.
And eternity is at stake.
Christine Reagan
Michel Foucault (French philosopher):
“Politics is in the streets, in the factories, in the prisons, in the schools, in the hospitals, in sexuality — politics is everywhere.” Many today paraphrase this as “Everything is political” or “Life itself is political.”Rudi Dutschke (German student leader, 1960s): Coined the phrase “the long march through the institutions” and insisted that all of life is political — personal choices, culture, language, relationships — everything must be viewed through the lens of power and revolution.
The New Political Community
Ancient Despair
In the ancient and classical world, from Xerxes to Augustus Caesar, a prominent, self-pitying, and fatalistic sense of the tragedy of life was endemic across all human societies outside of Israel. Despite the emergent pagan dream of political salvation from guilt and despair through a great leader who would unite, in themselves, the human and divine, an unyielding hopelessness prevailed – guilt remained in cycles of recurrence. Yet from Africa to Asia and Europe, man succumbed again and again to the demonic temptation, ‘to be as god’ by absolutizing the political community. The imperial man became the ideal for several thousand years, reaching a culmination in Augustus Caesar at the time of Christ. With the Caesars gradually deified, the coinage provided the official commentary and began to appear with the inscriptions, ‘The divine Caesar – the Son of God’ and ‘Saviour of the World.’ The Calendar Inscription of Priene (dated to 9 B.C), refers to the birthday of Caesar Augustus as “the beginning of the good news [euangelion] for the world that came by reason of him.” The emperor cult was established, and sacrifices to the emperor were made in temples throughout the empire. Augustus died fourteen years after the birth of the true Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Advent of Hope
When Christ, the true God-man, appeared (the true advent) and was confronted by the archdaimon Satan in the wilderness, he too was offered ‘all the kingdoms of the world’ if only he would bow down to the lawless one. This was a truly powerful temptation because it was for this cause Christ had indeed come (c.f. Rev. 11:15). But instead of acting autonomously and succumbing to the daimon of this world, he responded with the covenant law of God, ‘Away with you, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only you shall serve.’ (Matt 4:10).
God’s covenant law opens with the greatest and most revolutionary words ever heard in the ancient world:
Listen, Israel: The Lord (Yahweh) our God (Elohim), the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your soul and with all your strength. (Deut. 6:4). Then in Exodus:
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.”
“You shall have no other gods before me.”
“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in Heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing faithful love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.” (Exodus 20: 2-6)
We encounter here a shattering polemic against the ancient demonic myth of the creature as divine, of political man as ultimate lawgiver and saviour. Ethelbert Stauffer states it well:
The religious transfiguration of the creature is the ‘proton pseudos’, the first error of mythology, which is brought to light by the Decalogue. [1]
The law of God tells us that the triune God (using God’s personal and plural names) is the one and only Lord, and he is Lord over all.
The advent of Christ brought to light the promise of his covenant-Word to end the tragedy of past guilt and open the way to the future. This is the meaning and mystery of the incarnation of the Son of Man, the Messiah King. It is here that God answers the myth of the ancients by both fulfilling and dissolving it. Yes, man is guilty! And yes, only the universal empire of the God-man can overcome guilt and realize justice by establishing his kingly throne, upholding his righteous law and providing, as priest, endless mercy, the forgiveness of sins, by meeting the demands of justice in full. Through Christ, the gospel of the Kingdom has conquered the wearying cycle of guilt; sin is paid for; justice is satisfied, and the King is on His throne. His righteous law-Word is smashing the myth of self-deification from East to West, North and South as His kingdom rule extends through all the earth:
He will not fail nor be discouraged,
Till He has established justice in the earth;
And the coastlands shall wait for His law. (Is. 42:4)
The New Political Community
It was necessary for the fulfilment of his promises to inherit all the earth that the appearance of the King and announcement of his expanding Kingdom would produce a new people, a holy city. The God-man thus established, at his coming, a new redeemed community.
The word politics comes from the Greek polis, meaning city-state. These original small city-states were founded when families and tribes agreed to unite around a common worship. The city was developed as a sanctuary for this worship, and so the formation of a new political community was an overtly religious act. The polis became the centre of administration of justice and the residence of the king. As they expanded, they became the political centres that determined how society within villages, towns, and cities should be governed.
Because the Christian ‘gospel’ (euangelion) – a political term for the heralding of a king coming to the throne or a major political victory – declared the birth, death, resurrection, ascension and victory of the true King, Christianity is inescapably political in its implications (it is not a-political). The gospel establishes the true society, for the kingdom of Christ, the city of God, is the true social order.
The ‘people,’ the demos, in the ancient Greek city-state aspired to be free citizens organized into a body politic, and it is from demos (people) that we derive the English term democracy. When the demos assembled as a political body to deal with the public affairs of the city-state, it was called the ecclesia from about the fifth century BC onward. It is most revealing then that the Word the Holy Spirit chose in the Newer Testament to refer to and characterize the assembly of believers – the body of Christ – was ecclesia, an explicitly political term! Lots of other words were available but were not used. The ecclesia is not a cultic term – simply a group meeting in pious devotion to a given deity – but a political term that means we are called out of an apostate order of sin and rebellion, into a new political community, with a social order based on God’s law-Word, called the kingdom of God. As the people of God, we are the gathering of the freemen of the New Jerusalem, concerned with its public manifestation.
This is also why the early church was persecuted by Rome. It was not because Christians celebrated the ‘cult’ of Jesus. Rome had no problem endorsing numerous religious cults. Hadrian built temples in Christ’s honour, and even the Emperor Tiberius had at one point proposed to the Senate that Jesus be consecrated as a Roman god. As a mystery cult, ‘Jesus worship’ was not seen as a threat. Rather, Rome’s rejection of true Christianity and persecution of the church stemmed from its view of it as representing a rival political order to the Roman Empire. Therefore, the proclamation of Christ’s Lordship and His law-Word as the law of the kingdom was treated as a political offence (cf. Acts 17:5-8).
The modern Christian church in the West has largely ignored all of this and spiritualized the gospel of the kingdom away into total abstraction from the socio-political culture around us. The reality, however, is that the gospel is not an individualistic message of soul salvation with some socio-political implications, but the opposite. It is a cosmic message of redemption, the realization of a new Kingdom and social order on earth, that has personal implications.
The Western churches’ unfaithfulness in this regard has meant that discipling nations in the kingdom of God has been reduced mainly to tidying up or ‘cleaning up’ the status quo of secular humanism. But as Stephen Perks has rightly put it:
[T]he Lord Jesus Christ did not come into this world to provide secular humanism with a laundry service. He came to claim the kingdoms of this world for himself as his rightful inheritance (Ps. 2:7-9) and he commissioned his church to disciple nations.’[2]
It’s time we recovered the New Testament’s understanding of the advent of Christ and the calling out of his Kingdom people.
[1] Stauffer, Christ and the Caesars, 24
[2] Stephen Perks, The Politics of God and the Politics of Man: Essays on Politics, Religion and Social Order (Taunton: Kuyper Foundation, 2016), p. 61
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