Al Mohler vs Doug Wilson What Is A Nation Really? [Eschatology Matters]

0:00Four theologians walk into an auditorium in Moscow, Idaho. That's not the setup to a joke. It actually happened. Al Moller, Doug Wilson, Joe Rigny, and Paul Miller on one stage arguing about whether America is or should be a Christian nation. But here's one thing that struck me about this exchange. Everyone on that stage was arguing about what a nation should do. But the more important question that we need to start with first is what a nation is in the first place. And that question matters more than many may think. After all, Jesus used the word in the Great Commission and he attached it to the Church's marching orders. So what do we do? Well, welcome to season three of The World View. I'm Alex Cokman. If you're new here, this show is part of the EM Network. I'm also coming to you from the headquarters of ABWE, the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, a global family of ministries helping ordinary churches send and support gospel preaching missionaries and plant healthy churches among the nations.

1:03And this season, that word, nations is going to prove critical for us. But learn more at ABWE.org. Now let's get into the debate. On August 7th at the ICCU Arena at the University of Idaho, Canon Press convened a four-way debate called which way America? Mueller, Wilson, Rigny and Miller moderated by my friend Jared Longshore in front of roughly 900 people. It doubled as the launch for a book on the same topic with Roman Catholic public theologian Rusty Reno as the fifth voice, but he wasn't able to attend the debate. But the framing device was rather clever. Imagine it's the year 2099 and America has broken into regional nations. What should their governments each look like? A Wilson and Rigny argued for an explicitly Christian civil order. Miller defended classical liberalism and Mueller, and this is the part that made some headlines, floated a hypothetical constitutional amendment, acknowledging America's quote, essentially Christian character, while also insisting that

2:04there should be no established church. Now add to the backdrop the fact that it's America's 250th year. The White House has been running a year-long Freedom 250 celebration. In May, there was an all-day prayer festival at the National Mall to rededicate America to God. So the question of what America is, is it a people, an idea, a covenant, or maybe just an economic zone is suddenly everywhere. Now the pundit class treats this whole conversation as a fight about power who gets to run things, who's in charge. But underneath it is the definitional question that the West has spent 80 years refusing to answer clearly. Again, that question is what is a nation? And Christians can't dodge it. Because whatever your politics are, Jesus commanded his church to make disciples of all the nations in Matthew 28, 19. Nations are the focus of the Great Commission. So if we don't know what a nation is, we certainly can't fulfill our mission. So let's start with the word itself. Our English word nation comes from the Latin,

3:06Nat, or born. The same root gives us natal, native, and nativity. A nation at its root is a family of families. Related clans and tribes expanded over generations until they became conscious of themselves as a people, a branch of the one human family. We see this story throughout Genesis. Even before the human family is split apart at the Tower of Babel, in Genesis 10, we see the descendants of Noah spreading out by their, quote, clans, languages, lands, and nations. We see that refrain three times in Genesis 10. Clans, languages, lands, nations. This is the ingredient list. Here's a definition that I've used before. A nation is a constellation of land, lineage, language, law, liturgy, and culture. The particulars that together make a group of people conscious of itself as a distinct people. Notice what's not on that list and notice what is on that list. A nation is not the same thing as its government. Nations can survive their states.

4:13Poland got erased off the map for a century and never stopped being a Polish people. And a nation is not just reducible to race or ethnicity either. Scripture settles that relatively early on in the Old Testament. Rahab, the Canaanite, Ruth, the Moabite, they don't just live near Israel. They join Israel. Ruth says, your people shall be my people and your God, my God, Ruth 116. So a simulation is real as well. Nationhood has a front door. But, and this is the part where I differ with the general consensus. A nation is not just an idea. It's not just a proposition. For about 80 years, we've been told that America is a propositional nation, however, an economic zone or a creed with a zip code or a collection of zip codes. Anyone who affirms the proposition is an American in the fullest sense that proposition has to do with universal rights and so forth. But the actual people, their heritage, their religion, their ways, all of that is just decoration. The problem is that a set of ideas without reference to the people who hold

5:18them is self-defeating. Ideas don't just think of themselves. Ideas aren't born. Ideas don't bury their dead. John Jay in Federalist number two gave thanks that Americans were, quote, one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion. You don't have to endorse every implication of that sentence today, many, many generations later, to notice that the founders thought they were founding something for an actual people, not just administering a philosophy seminar with a military. And scripture takes the realist side as well. Paul says in Athens in Acts 17 that God made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined a lot of periods and boundaries of their dwelling place, Acts 1726. So God made the nations. They're not accidents of history and they're not sinful and we don't need to repent of belonging to nations. Their characters in the story that God is writing all the way to the end of that story where the kings

6:22bring the glory and the honor of the nations into the New Jerusalem. Revelation 2126. The redeemed multitude in Revelation is counted from among every nation and from all the tribes and peoples and languages in Revelation 7.9. See also Revelation 5.9. So heaven does not dissolve the nations. Heaven rather gathers them together. Now for some objections though. In our current environment, there's a lot of opposition to the idea that nations are real and not just abstractions. Many and for good reason want to avoid the extremes of the conflicts of the 20th century. But there's a difference between making nations real and making them supreme or ultimate, making them the object of our worship. Scripture sees the nation as a real creature, something that's real and good and firmly rooted in God's providential order. And Israel's story confirms that both tribalism and empire are extremes on either side of the

7:26spectrum that also need to be condemned. Andrew Fuller, William Carey's sending church pastor and hardly a jingwist said plainly, if my country cannot prosper but at the expense of justice, humanity and the happiness of mankind, let it be unprosperous. So clearly there's a way to have real nations without making them supreme or ultimate. Loving a real people is not idolatry. Worshiping one is. The test is whether your nation sits under the law of God or above it, but that doesn't make a nation any less real. And to my mission-minded brothers, notice that the people group movement in missions. I'm talking Ralph Winter, the Joshua Project, Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in the 70s, all of that context depends on exactly this realist definition of peoplehood, people's defined by language, heritage, culture and the like. Missiologists have been operating on a biblical doctrine of nationhood for 50 years while the political theologians are you'd about whether or not that definition even exists. But now let's

8:30boil it all down. What does this mean? How should we apply this to our lives? Well first, it means that you should be unimpressed when someone waves off the entire cultural discourse right now and dismisses an expansive position on the lurch of Christ as Christian nationalism and thinks that just asserting that label scary as it is is enough to shut down the whole argument. No, we need to define terms first. What does it mean to be Christian as a people? What does it mean to have nations? What is the nature of the Great Commission? These are real concepts. Real peoples, not just ideas are the ones that God calls us to love, serve and reach. And we need to press in for real definition. Secondly, it should reorient the entire debate. The interesting question is not just what a hypothetical 2099 constitution would say and whether it would mention Christ explicitly. The question for us now is whether there will be a people left at all. Families, churches, customs, a shared moral order

9:34for any constitution left to govern. Constitutions grow in soil after all. Christianity is what fertilize the soil of the West and it can do so again if we accept our duty to be an influence, to be salt and to be light. And thirdly, to change how we pray. When we pray for the world, we pray for the Lord's kingdom to come as He teaches us in His prayer. And when we pray for the nations in our missions services in church, we're not just praying for 200 colored shapes on a map. We're praying for particular peoples, souls and collections of souls, families of souls. We're praying for the Han people in China, the Uighurs, the Pashtun, the Japanese, and yes, Americans. Families of families, each with a language that God intends to hear praising His Son in the Eskitan. And remember, a nation is not something that we get to invent or construct. God made the nations.

10:39They're good. They're a part of His design, even though they're marred by sin. God assigned their times and their borders. And God gave His Son the nations as an inheritance. Psalm 2.8, the Father says to the Son, ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage. Which raises the obvious next question. The nations belong to Christ. What exactly did He tell us to do with them? But we'll cover that in next week's show. Everything everywhere, all at once. The family, the church, our nation, and all the nations.

11:39Every issue is framed as urgent. Every cause is a cause for moral outrage. And that pressure, while it hasn't produced more faithfulness, it's led to more guilt and confusion and instability. But the good news is Scripture does not treat love that way. In Scripture, God orders our obligations. He orders us to love, and then He shows us the right way to go about that. Love begins with Him, and then it's practiced in the household, strengthened in the local church, exercised tangibly in one's own community, and finally carried outward to all the nations. But when that order is ignored, well, discipleship at home collapses and missions abroad, loses all credibility. So in order to love, I make a case for recovering that biblical order. Not as an excuse to withdraw from society or stop loving people that are hard to love, but as the only way to sustain faithful obedience to the Great Commission over time. This book is written for pastors, parents, missionaries, and ordinary Christians who simply want clarity instead of slogans and marketing. There's also a companion workbook for individuals,

12:44families, and church groups that want to apply these truths to real life. So you can find all that at orderedtolove.com. You can get the book from Founders Press, visit the link in the shownotes, or go to orderedtolove.com. Orders are being fulfilled right now. Again, go to orderedtolove.com.