Revealing the City of God

ΚΡῨΠΤΌΣ

κρῠπτός (Kryptos) is a Canadian writer and podcaster and an emerging authority on the politics of a new age. His writing can be found on the Substack account Seeking the Hidden Thing.

A Response to Paul Kingsnorth

Questions abound these days concerning the relationship between the Christian and the broader society. Should Christians be involved in politics? Is there a political role for the church? Underlying these questions, though, are some more foundational questions about culture, civilization, the nature of the church, and what it means that Christians are the people of God?

A recent article, written by author Paul Kingsnorth in First Things, provocatively entitled “Against Christian Civilization,” drew criticism from many. Some friends and I took issue with the piece and responded via a conversation on my own Christian Ghetto Podcast. In turn, Kingsnorth responded to ours and other critiques with an article on his own Substack titled “The Vagabond King.” He also took time to respond directly to my podcast in the comments on YouTube.

In this piece, I hope to help the reader better understand and evaluate the arguments he is making fairly and then respond to them. Essentially, the objection that I have is that once such a thing as the Christian community is called into existence, it must face the problems of culture, civilization, and politics. These are unavoidable. Until Christ returns, all these problems must be faced within the realities of the world of sin and misery. The Christian community has a long history of wrestling with these challenges. Let’s dive in and begin at the beginning by going through the Kingsnorth pieces with an eye to giving them a fair and sensitive reading.

Kingsnorth opens “Against Christian Civilization” with a personal reflection on a recent visit to the site of the Battle of Little Bighorn. Immediately the reader is drawn into Kingsnorth’s own attempts to grasp the “psychic reality of living through the end of your culture.” We are asked to try to put ourselves into the shoes of someone who is dealing with “the trauma of land theft.” This is a very persuasive rhetorical technique called “an appeal to emotion.” It is typically looked upon as a logical fallacy. Even while acknowledging that conquest has been part of the historical record going as far back as we have stories and accounts of the rise and fall of different people, the emotional appeal frames the argument in such a way as to generate sympathy for the Dakota people.

We are told the story of Ohiyesa who was urged to embrace this new dominating civilization and make it his own. He changed his name to Charles Alexander Eastman, becoming a writer, a doctor, a historian, and a champion for native rights. He also became a Christian. The setup using the appeal to emotion prepares the reader for the punchlines drawn from Eastman’s autobiography:

“…he tells of how he traveled around to meet many of his own people as a Christian missionary, telling the stories of Jesus and explaining the values of the faith. At one such meeting, an old man, after a long silence, stood up and replied to him. ‘I have come to the conclusion,’ said the old man, ‘that this Jesus was an Indian. He was opposed to material acquisition and to great possessions. He was inclined to peace. He was as unpractical as any Indian and set no price on his labor of love. These are not the principles upon which the white man has founded his civilization.’”

He follows up with this observation from Eastman:

“I have wondered much that Christianity is not practiced by the very people who vouch for that wonderful conception of exemplary living. It appears that they are anxious to pass on their religion to all other races but keep little of it for themselves. I have not yet seen the meek inherit the earth, or the peacemakers receive high honor.”

And the following conclusion, on the lips of Eastman, lays the foundation for much of the rest of the piece:

“It is my personal belief, after thirty-five years of experience of it, that there is no such thing as ‘Christian civilization.’ I believe that Christianity and modern civilization are opposed and irreconcilable, and the spirit of Christianity and of our ancient religion is essentially the same.”

Using this appeal to emotion, a contrast has been set up for the reader: The simple Native American tribesman understands the essence of Christianity and lives the essence of Christianity better than the Western European peoples who claim Christianity for themselves and for their civilization. An opposition is established, one that Kingsnorth does not qualify or challenge. Does this imply that the only form of Christian faith which is true and authentic is that which instantiates itself in a hunter-gatherer society? This wasn’t true in Jesus’ own day. Nor has it ever been true in any period in which the Christian faith has found itself. Christianity began as an urban phenomenon at the height of the Roman civilization. This is the danger of making arguments based on an appeal to emotion. It somehow feels good but doesn’t hold up under closer scrutiny.

At this point Kingsnorth turns to a quick overview of the formation of cultures and civilizational collapse. He begins by noting that today it is the West that is facing its own impending collapse. After briefly introducing Spengler and Toynbee’s theories of civilizational rise and fall, he settles on Christopher Dawson’s assertion that the West was a specifically religious construction rooted in and centered around the Roman Catholic Church. This elides a lot of questions that are open debates within the scholarship of civilizational life cycles. Even the idea that civilizations rise and fall in inevitable cyclical patterns, while generally accepted today, was a contested idea not long ago. It really was through the work of authors like Spengler that the idea of a single line of cultural development going back to the Greeks and Hebrews began to be contested.

When did the West begin? Spengler would have the West emerging around the year 1000. And a case could be made that the “Faustian” spirit which dominates Western culture, pushing it to press for the horizons in intellectual inquiry, conquest, and the acquisition of material goods, is in fact a rebellion against the limits imposed by a properly ordered Christian society (and, perhaps, nature itself). Instead, Kingsnorth draws on Dawson to see the West as stretching back to the very early days of Christianity, that what we experience today is the outworking of the expansion and decline of Christianity itself. How one frames and understands the relationship between this cultural phenomenon we call “the West” and Christianity will shape how they understand the problem.

Is the problem the very idea of Christian civilization and its rise and decline? Or was Christianity co-opted and/or attacked from within by a separate cultural impulse which originates alongside the church within a Christian society as a rebellion against it? This is a very lively and contested debate. How you answer this question largely determines your assessment of the idea of “Christian civilization” and what needs to be done in the present moment. Ultimately, Kingsnorth wants to suggest to us a course of action.

This discussion of civilization as a concept lays the groundwork for what could be a powerful argument had Kingsnorth narrowly focused on his next point. He notes that he is not the only one to have noticed the importance of the Christian faith to the West. Some, he will argue, are making a call to return to “Christian civilization.” We will soon discover that he is concerned with the instrumentalizing of the Christian faith, that is, the idea that a set of social rules, perhaps a morality, maybe a series of policy proscriptions, can be distilled from the Christian faith and used to repair our sick society, nurturing it to health. This is a project that has been tried again and again at least since Kant. It is the idea that the practical applications of Christianity, especially its moral teachings, can be separated from the faith. Cleansed of their supernatural superstitions, moral teachings can be put to service for the betterment of society. Frankly, I am with Kingsnorth on this. I think the attempt to instrumentalize Christianity has been a major contributor to its waning influence. The Christian faith is demanding and without genuine faith and a sincere pursuit of God, the attempt to turn it into a program for practical life advice, whether personal, political, or civilizational simply ends up with you hollowing out the faith and wearing it as a skin suit. But before he gets to the meat of that argument, Kingsnorth attempts to lay more groundwork.

This portion of the article opens with a question, drawing us back to the earlier point, that Christianity and civilization are opposed and irreconcilable. “What if God agrees with Ohiyesa?” This is a loaded question to say the least. Kingsnorth then goes back to God’s creating and the setting of the Garden of Eden. It is worthwhile to note that a garden is not a wild space. This is not untamed wilderness. A garden, we might say, is a civilized space. It is understandable that humanity, placed in this ordered, civilized place, is given the command to keep it and tend it. It evokes a picture of human society that is in harmony with the created world, and yet active and engaged in its wellbeing and upkeep. As someone who enjoys gardening, the idea of human society, its culture, and yes, its civilization, having its organizing center in the image and archetype of the garden is something that resonates at a deep level. This is not an accident. Kingsnorth, revealing his own biases and priors as an environmental activist, makes a point of emphasizing that we were vegetarian gardeners.

Having noted this, Kingsnorth then moves onto the Fall, suggesting that the fundamental sin in the garden is one of impatience which is not necessarily antithetical to the more common answer of pride. I tend to agree with him here. It is a compelling argument and one that gives weight to the idea that while human beings were created good, they were not perfected, in that God had a purpose for mankind. C.S. Lewis revolves the second volume of his space trilogy, Perelandra, around this idea, fleshing it out in story form. Part of God’s purpose, it is argued, that upon reaching the point of maturity — through obedience and living within the boundaries set by God, by trusting, having faith that God knew best — when God deemed us ready, we could then safely be given the knowledge of good and evil. But this would be on God’s time. Spiritually, the theme of waiting on God is woven through the scriptures. One quick example:

“Even youths shall faint and be weary,

and young men shall fall exhausted;

but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,

they shall mount up with wings like eagles,

they shall run and not be weary,

they shall walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:30-31)

But having made the point, Kingsnorth doesn’t really do much with it. It’s a shame, because integrating this theme of patience (and humility) and waiting upon God could have been the theological foundation for building a healthy Biblical understanding of culture, civilization, and its relation to the saving work of God among and for his people.

Instead, Kingsnorth marks the break in the garden as the decisive beginning of civilization. He explains it this way:

“And when we disobeyed, what happened? Farming happened. Work happened. Hunting happened. Metalwork happened. Murder happened. Cities happened. Civilization happened. It was all a deadly result of our Fall. Ever since we were expelled from this garden, it seems, we have been building great towers to the sky, trying, if subconsciously, to return to our true home. But always our towers are brought down, and our tribes are scattered.”

There is a subtle point here that Kingsnorth is missing, and it seems to lead him astray. He draws a contrast between the idyllic Garden of Eden and the subsequent world of sin and then asserts that all the artifacts of human activity after the fall are the result of sin. This here, it seems to me, is his key error. It does not seem to occur to him that the Garden is both a good space and a civilized space. To Kingsnorth, the Garden is without civilization. Civilization is what happens because of sin. But this is not the Biblical story. Even if it were granted that, chronologically, civilization entered after sin, it would not follow that civilization as such is sinful — a basic post hoc fallacy.

The Garden was a place of abundance, a world without scarcity. While humanity tended and kept the Garden, this work was not toil. It was free of curse and punishment. Because of eating the forbidden fruit, man’s existence became defined by death and finitude, God’s consequence for our disobedience. We were sent out of the Garden and now live under the active judgement of God:

“And to Adam he said,

‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife,

and have eaten of the tree

of which I commanded you,

you shall not eat of it,

cursed is the ground because of you;

in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;

thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you;

and you shall eat the plants of the field.

in the sweat of your face

you shall eat bread

till you return to the ground,

for out of it you were taken;

you are dust,

and to dust you shall return.’” (Genesis 3:17-19)

Under the judgement of God, man must face a new reality: Scarcity. He no longer lives in a world of abundance. No longer is his work a blessing. Work becomes toil, part of the curse of God. Man can no longer find rest from his labors. He must provide for himself. But woven into the fabric of his being is the memory, the archetype of the Garden. He is now cut off from God, alienated from him by his sin. Cast out of the presence of God. Sent away from the Garden. Yet, at the same time, deep within, he remembers his purpose, to reveal and instantiate the city of God.

Before talking about this, we must digress for a moment to talk about how time and causality work in spiritual realities. Biblical and spiritual realities are teleological, in that the ends determine the present. In the scriptures there are two ends, two paths, two ways, etc. There is the path of life and the path of death. There is the path of light and the path of darkness. There is the path of wisdom and the path of folly. The reality at the end of this path reveals itself in our present choices. Thus, when Adam and Eve took from the fruit, they were not merely just making a choice that would then have later consequences, the idea of cause and effect; they were instead choosing eternal death. This choice for death would now begin to reveal itself in their present reality. In this regard, there is fundamentally only one choice: Will you choose life, or will you choose death? This is why people’s lives can spin out of control so quickly. Once you have chosen death and destruction, that reality can press itself upon you with great force.

We have been taught by modernity and the scientific way of thinking that we live in a world of cause and effect. You make a decision, consequences follow. The way that you improve your life is through good decisions; step-by-step you will move closer to God. Because of this, we tend to think that if our life has gone astray, what we need to do is start making good decisions and our life will get back on track, headed towards a positive future. The idea is that you establish goals, point yourself towards those goals, develop a plan and then break it down into a series of steps and you will achieve your goal if you work hard enough. But that is not how spiritual realities work. In fact, this whole cause and effect thing is a lie meant to keep you trapped and apart from God, always trying to save yourself while telling yourself that you are following “God’s plan for your life.”

Spiritual realities are, as I have said, teleological, that is, the end determines the present. Thus, there is only one choice: Life or death. Because you participate in the sin of Adam, you are bound over to death and destruction from conception. There is nothing you can do about this. Nothing. The choice was made for you before you were born. The message of salvation in Christ Jesus, the “good news” is that something has been done about this by God “in Christ.” The core message is this: “repent and believe.” Repentance is the recognition that our life is on a path to death and there is nothing we can do about it. No amount of making good decisions will ever get you off this path. For that you need help. From God. Repentance is this realization. You are trapped and there is nothing you can do about it. It is the deep soul plea for help from God.

The good news is that “in Christ” there is help. Once you have come to know your condition and that you are helpless to do anything about it, you then are called to put your faith “in Christ.” I have put that in quotations to emphasize that Paul uses this phrase as a technical term. Salvation happens “in Christ.” We are called to believe that through the work of Jesus Christ, we have now been shifted into a new reality, a new state of being. We are “in Christ.” We are now on another path and the ends of that path are now beginning to be revealed in our life today.

“From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:16-17)”

We live in an in-between time. Neither of the ends of the two paths have fully revealed themselves in historical reality. The evil one can play on this to give you two lies. One is that if you dabble in sin, it’s just a small thing and you can always get your life on track later by making good decisions. You had that night of indiscretion but today it’s time to buckle down and make good choices. Sorry, it’s too late. You made your choice and picked your end. You can’t dabble around with sin. The other lie is that if you are “in Christ” and you have a bad day, you are somehow not lost again. This too is a lie.

Faith is seeing and believing this new reality “in Christ.” Before, you saw with human eyes. Now you see with the eyes of faith. You see who you are “in Christ.” And “in Christ” you are a new creation. You are not becoming a new creation. You are a new creation. Fully. Completely. The old has gone, the new has come. This is why, as in Hebrews 12:2, we fix our eyes on Jesus. We want to see with the eyes of faith this new reality that is “in Christ,” who we truly are “in Christ.” The spiritual journey is one of revelation. It is not a process of becoming something you are not; rather, you are revealing who you are “in Christ.” This is why you can say that you are a new creation. One more passage to illustrate this point:

“Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:1-3)

These verses perfectly encapsulate the point I have been trying to make. “In Christ” you have already been raised from the dead. You are “in Christ” already living in the new heaven and the new earth. Since this is your reality, set your mind on these realities. See them with the eyes of faith. You have already died, and your life is now hidden “with Christ in God.” I could go through many other passages that communicate this same reality, this teleological understanding of time and salvation, but this should be sufficient to answer the question of “Why does this matter?”

If we remind ourselves of the earlier point about beings driven out of the Garden of Eden and the residual, archetypal memories that remain with us, we as human being carry with us both a memory of what we were and also of what we were to become. This memory is part of the loss, or we might even say, of the punishment for our disobedience. There remains with us a sense of what we could have been had we not sinned. This “aspirational” aspect of humanity is a good thing, but unfortunately even these aspirations are corrupted with sin. What this produces, then, is the aspiration for culture and civilization. We are trying to claim for ourselves, by our own effort, the city of God, Zion, the New Jerusalem. And as much as this may horrify Paul Kingsnorth, yes, the goal, the end, the telos of mankind is the city of God, Zion, the New Jerusalem.

Whether it is Ezekiel’s vision of the temple in chapters 40-48, or the countless references to Zion or the New Jerusalem in the Psalms or the prophets, whether it is the description of the New Jerusalem, the Holy City, coming down out of heaven prepared like a bride for her husband in Revelation, the goal is always described in terms of the heavenly city of God. This is the key point, though. It is God’s work, prepared by him and given to his people. In this regard it is like the saving work of Christ. Zion, the New Jerusalem, is a teleological reality that is the work of God revealed to us in and through Christ. So, much in the same way that our spiritual journey today is about revealing who we are “in Christ,” — realities like our resurrected self — so too is the collective spiritual life of the community of believers, who, because they are “in Christ” are now the people of God through whom God is able to reveal the first fruits of the New Jerusalem to the world, even if this is seen but in a mirror dimly.

Hebrews 12 describes the spiritual journey as the desire to live fully in the presence of God, to enter the Holy of Holies, using a number of images to unfold what that means. This particular section contrasts Moses’ ascent up Mount Sinai, where he both met God and saw his glory and received the law along with the terrifying appearance of God and the strict restrictions against anyone other than Moses to even set foot on the mountain, with our journey mediated by Christ:

“But you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.” (Hebrews 12:22-24)

The image presented here is that God himself lives in this city. It’s God’s city. This is the Holy of Holies. And because of Christ we get to dwell in God’s city with God. The goal of deification, of theosis, of union with God, is to dwell in God’s holy place, his holy city. The revelation of the city of God and our own spiritual journey of revealing who we are “in Christ” are the same journey, instantiated, incarnated, both individually and collectively in the people of God.

Having briefly worked through this, we can now properly understand what has happened all too frequently throughout history. Humanity is impatient. Just like in the Garden, we want to take and possess the things of God now! We don’t want to wait upon the Lord. So, we build Babel. And God knocks it down. We do this again and again, and over and over God brings our efforts to naught. This is the story of “history.” We can see this clearly in the modern idea of “Progress.” We will, using science and technology, build for ourselves the perfect society. We will end disease and scarcity. We can cast the vision, develop the plan, and then step by step implement this same plan and realize our goals. As an aside, this is basically how most successful seeker and mega-churches are built today. They are part of this same thoroughly modern utopian project, in this case the quest to build the perfect church.

The problem is not culture, society, or civilization per se, but rather whether they are products of human effort, or reveal the city of God, the New Jerusalem? All too often, we claim that we are doing God’s work, revealing his realities when in truth we are doing our own thing in God’s name. The church as the people of God, distinct from the institutional church, are intended to be the locus of this revelation of God’s saving work “in Christ.” In us as a people, and the artifacts we produce, the world is meant to see, even if in a mirror dimly, the glory of God’s heavenly city. I will say more on this shortly, but let’s return to Kingsnorth’s piece and continue to work through it.

He raises the question of God’s judgement against Israel for wanting a king. Without going into another long diversion, it is a conventional interpretive understanding that this judgement came because the people were impatient and sought a king before it was God’s time to provide one. They as a people were not ready. Thus, their kings would be exploitive and their rule heavy. Had they waited, their earthly kings would have revealed God’s divine rule among his people, instantiating and incarnating the heavenly archetype of the good king.

At this point Kingsnorth now moves into the heart of his critique, which, on its own, is a good point, one worth remembering, and one quickly forgotten. He draws on an old distinction, although without specifically identifying it, made by Augustine, between signs and things. God is properly a thing unto himself. Everything else is meant to be a sign that points us to God. Thus, as he notes, God is meant to be our object, not culture. Similarly, even something like scripture is meant to be a sign that points to God, not a thing in and of itself. It is a subtle point, but you are meant to be obedient to God not to the scriptures. Adhering your life to scriptures is not the goal.

They are not a policy manual for the good life. The goal of the scriptures is to point your life to God, such that your life reveals his heavenly realities. The goal of worship is not the feelings it generates, but that it draws you into the presence of God.

So, as Kingsnorth correctly notes, if you are focused on creating a “Christian culture” or a “Christian civilization” as a goal, you are directing your attention to earthly things in the name of God. You have made an idol out of your society. And like any spiritual reality, if you are focused on lesser realities, typically God will take them away from you, forcing you to wander in the desert until your attention is directed properly to him again. It is similar to the way he will take away the feeling of his presence when you have become focused on the feeling rather on God. Will you still seek him when the feelings are not there? It works the same with civilizations.

Kingsnorth then spends time fleshing out what this misguided focus on civilization as a substitute for God looks like. Essentially, it is the attempt to instrumentalize the good news in Christ, boiling it down to a series of moral teachings and policy prescriptions that can then be used to order society and create a “Christian civilization.” This is, and always will be, a simulacrum, an idol of wood or stone imitating the real thing but giving none of its reality. It is Babel all over again. He points to notables like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jordan Peterson and Steve Bannon who have expressed that they see value in “Christian civilization,” and the need to re-instantiate its values in society again. This has been, in many ways, the quest of modernity since at least Kant, to strip Christianity of its supernatural superstitions and pretentions so as to free up its universal moral teachings for the benefit of society. Unfortunately, Christianity isn’t a set of Kantian universals.

In the midst of this critique, he mockingly highlights some of Jordan Peterson’s critiques of Marxism where he urges the audience to stop fighting for “social justice” and focus on the business of attending to souls. Kingsnorth takes exception to this, arguing that the Bible is replete with calls to “social justice.” It isn’t. While the scriptures talk often of justice (the process of repairing broken relationships) and righteousness (the state of being in right relationship with God and your fellow man) both of which are closely related, it does not speak at all of the concept of “social justice” as drawn from Marxist theory. I mention this only because Kingsnorth himself falls into the same trap as the people whom he is critiquing, that of instrumentalizing the Christian faith as the pursuit of “social justice.” He states with emphasis that “This is Christianity.” He then goes on to argue that Peterson calls for a “masculine” gospel and this is a bad thing. Does this mean that Kingsnorth is advocating for a “feminine” gospel as a good thing?

Having made this point that the instrumentalized Christianity of someone like Peterson is bad, he then returns to the idea that civilization itself is evil, arguing that the Garden of Eden is the ideal, asserting that, “For most of that time, we were closer in our lifestyles to the picture painted in the Garden of Eden.” This is, frankly, a form of reactionary thinking. It mirrors Marxist utopianism, but instead of sweeping away the current order so as to usher in some unknown utopian future, he looks to sweep away the current order to re-instantiate a utopian past. In this case, Kingsnorth is thinking that there is, between the fall into sin, our being sent out of the Garden, and the building of the first cities, some idyllic near-Edenic state in which humanity lived. If we could just live this way, somewhere between Eden and civilization, we could then pursue God properly once again.

This, though, is a lie. As we have noted already, as part of his being cast out of the Garden, man now lived under the active curse of God, central to which is that God imposed scarcity upon us. The earth would no longer give up its abundance willingly and easily. Man was faced with the problem of feeding himself. Because of sin, the very first story outside of the Garden is of one brother murdering the other because his brother seemed more favored by God. The world was suddenly and irreparably a hostile place that had to be dealt with if humanity was to continue. Thus, farming, herding and hunting. Thus, walls for protection.

Thus, gathering together into larger groups for protection and sharing the labors of food production. These come to man because of sin and living under the judgement of God. With them come also the aspirations to overcome scarcity by means of these same societies. So also, the quest for beauty in their artifacts. Sin tempts man into using society and civilization to overcome his condition on his own, by his own efforts. And as we have argued, this is doomed to failure. Man cannot save himself, even by means of civilization. We cannot create the heavenly city by our own hands. The cycle of civilizations can be viewed as the re-enacting again and again of the story of the Tower of Babel. But just because mankind is trying to imitate heavenly realities by building them with his own hands rather than by patiently waiting on God to reveal these heavenly realities both today and in the life to come, does not make civilization itself an evil.

But the often-subtle difference between trying to build the heavenly city ourselves versus allowing God to reveal the heavenly city in our lived reality today, combined with humanity’s capacity for self-deception, does not thereby make Kingsnorth correct when he says, “It is not just ‘modern civilization,’ as Ohiyesa wrote, or indeed Western civilization, that seems opposed to the Christian Way. It is all civilization.”

Surely, Paul Kingsnorth does not mean God’s heavenly city is included in this assessment? He is closing the door on the idea that is even possible to instantiate today who we are “in Christ” at all. This, I believe, runs counter to the gospel.

Part of the problem is his conception of Jesus. Rather than seeing Jesus as born into a family of carpenters, commoners who had a business and trade of their own — I hesitate to use the phrase “small business owner” because of how it is encumbered with the utopian bourgeoisie ideology of free markets as the pathway for overcoming scarcity — Kingsnorth portrays Jesus as a “barefoot carpenter.” It is just such an odd characterization, as if his mental image of Jesus is akin to a modern-day hippy activist. He presses this contrast between Jesus and civilization: “When we read the life of Jesus of Nazareth, in fact, it is impossible not to see a man who was, in some fundamental sense, uncivilized.”

He then goes on to allude to a series of passages, torquing them, misusing them, overapplying them, wrongly applying them, misrepresenting them and just plainly making things up:

“He did not tell us to get good jobs and save prudently. He told us to have no thought for the morrow. He did not tell us to generate wealth, so that economic growth could bring about global development. He told us to give everything away. The rich, he said repeatedly, could never attain the Kingdom of Heaven. He did not tell us to defend our frontiers, or to expand them. He told us never to resist evil. He did not tell us to be responsible citizens. He told us to leave our dead fathers unburied and follow him instead. He told us to hate our own parents and to love those who hated us. Every single one of these teachings, were we to follow them, would make the building of a civilization impossible.”

It would quite literally take a piece as long as this one is already becoming to sift through Kingsnorth’s slipshod, careless, disingenuous, self-interested and dishonest use of scripture. His claim that God did not command us to be responsible citizens is simply erroneous:

“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience.

“This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.” (Romans 13:1-7)

This passage is not just clear, but echoes threads that run through the entire scriptures. The heavenly city of God which will be fully revealed in the last days are part and parcel of the mystical journey of the individual and the community. We are meant to reveal it, instantiate it, incarnate in this world as the first fruits of who we are “in Christ.” Additionally, many of the structures of society, of civilization, are a provision of God’s grace for the world, a restraint against evil. As flawed as civilization can be in a sinful world, as much as it is an idol of human creation, God also uses it as part of his general provision for the nations.

I am thankful for the reader’s patience, and I really wish that this were the end of the problems of Kingsnorth’s article, but he continues, equating “the world” with all manifestations of civilization, as if to participate in civilization is to join in the evil one’s opposition to God. He seems to equate the kind of civilizational Christianity for which he was rightly criticizing Peterson and others with the societal artifacts produced by Christians as they genuinely seek to reveal who they are “in Christ” to the world, characterizing Christianity as unworldly and otherworldly.

To emphasize this, he points to the temptation of Jesus, the devil’s offering to Jesus all the kingdoms of the earth. This is a fair point. Many good men have been seduced into thinking that they can use power to build something approximating a Christian civilization. Jesus rejects the devil because he knows that the plans of his Father are the New Jerusalem, the heavenly city. Jesus knows that he cannot build the heavenly city from the earth upwards, that it can only be revealed by the Father in his time.

Kingsnorth then returns to the theme of personal transformation, but even here his characterization of the Christian life is flawed. He sees repentance as a form of self-transformation: “Transform yourself. Turn around, change your mind, change your heart, change your way of seeing. And through that: Change the world.”

As we have discussed above, the fundamental problem is that we cannot transform ourselves. We cannot alter our telos, our end, on our own. Repentance is, on one level, the recognition that we are on the wrong path aimed towards the wrong end; but it is also the deep realization that there is nothing that we can do about this ourselves. We cannot transform ourselves. As we discussed above, after repentance, we have to believe that our end is transformed “in Christ.” In this, I agree with Kingsnorth that this, at its heart, is a mystical journey. If there was an unfortunate downstream effect of the Protestant Reformation, it was that we largely abandoned the mystical journey in favor of a more practical faith, a rational faith, one comfortable in the modern western world.

I also don’t disagree with him that cultures are built by accident. They are the set of artifacts, the byproduct, of fixing our eyes on Jesus and allowing him to reveal who we are in him to the world. But it is a fair critique to say that Kingsnorth downplays what happens when Christians and the Christian community live faithfully and succeed in instantiating something of the New Jerusalem here and now, the first fruits of the future life in the new heaven and the new earth. In his follow up piece, he continues to place Christianity in opposition to modern civilization. I am sympathetic to this.

But he over-extends his point to say: “Christianity is, and always has been, a radical counter-culture.” And: “This is why Christians have always been outsiders — even when ‘Christianity’ was nominally in power.”

Kingsnorth struggles to embrace a world in which Christians might succeed and become the culture, the civilization, even if this is imperfectly instantiated. This idea that the Christian is always an outsider, always the one who is pure, who is not corrupted by worldliness, like those others who are claiming the mantle of Christianity, is dangerous, a recipe for purity spirals and a lot of self-righteous behaviors. This aside, even if Christians remain in the minority, even if they are “counter-cultural,” they always remain a society, a people, a nation unto themselves. This has implications that seem to make Kingsnorth uncomfortable.

He can’t wrap his head around the idea that the heavenly city is the telos of mankind, and has been from the beginning:

“[Peter] Leithart is a cautious proponent of civilizational Christianity, which he believes has a Biblical mandate in the Genesis instruction given by God to humanity, to ‘make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground’. Leithart is defending what we might call the ‘from the Garden to the City’ narrative, in which humanity was always destined to plunge into its civilizational project, the endpoint of which will be the ‘Heavenly Jerusalem,’ God’s version of what a good civilization should actually look like. ‘Heaven is a city,’ Peter Leithart wrote in an email to me. I’ll admit that the thought makes my blood run cold.”

Leithart stands within the witness of scripture and the long history of Christian interpretation and theology. Even when Kingsnorth is willing to admit that Christians living their faith as the people of God will produce a culture, his description of how this happens is bound by a materialist frame. He is not able to integrate an “otherworldly” mysticism with the real world lives of people:

“I understand that people want to live in good cultures. So do I. And I do believe in Christian cultures: I think they can be real, if temporary and imperfect, things. The question is how they are created. A culture is not the same as a civilization. The latter is built from the top-down, by the use of coercive power. The former emerges from the bottom-up . . .”

Kingsnorth seems to think of civilization, a bad thing, as something authoritarian, imposed from on high by people, and culture, a good thing, emerges organically from below. But as we have seen, a true Christian culture does not emerge from below. It emerges from above, from God, “in Christ.” It comes because people are allowing God to reveal in them the resurrected life which is lived in the new heaven and the new earth, with the heavenly city of God at its center. It is a radically top down happening.

Although more could be said, I think this fairly presents and critiques both of Kingsnorth’s articles. Before we close this up, I think it is important to ask what happens if Christians are successful, not as revolutionaries or reactionaries or some forever hyper pure counter-culture, but in actually just doing the right thing, pointing themselves to who they are “in Christ,” thus revealing in their lives this new reality of the heavenly city within the community of believers? The world we live in is still sinful and will be until Christ returns. How does this affect the instantiation of the heavenly life in the people of God? What happens if Christians grow in numbers such that their community is the majority? What if the Christian faith comes to encompass the whole of a society? And even if the Christian community remains a minority, what does it mean that we as Christians are a complete community unto ourselves, a society? What does it mean to be the people of God living in a world still under the shadow of sin and misery, under the judgement of God?

Let’s begin with the most obvious of things. I will assume that Paul Kingsnorth does not mean for Christians to starve to death, run around naked or die from exposure due to lack of shelter. If that is the case, Christians, as a community, must concern themselves with the business of feeding themselves, clothing themselves, and providing shelter. Throughout all of human existence, this has meant banding together into groups to hunt, farm, and make the items necessary to live in a world where scarcity is an ever-present reality. In many ways, Kingsnorth’s frame could be considered a luxury belief in a world where he does not worry all that much about where his next meal is coming from, what clothes he will wear, or the soundness of his dwelling. These are the necessities of life.

Additionally, we live in a world of sin and evil where there are dangerously violent animals and people. This means protecting oneself and one’s loved ones. An organized defense is always better that than fighting alone. Building defenses is always better than leaving oneself defenseless. And to say that there is never any instance where Christians might find themselves in a situation where they would need to defend themselves is, on its face, patently silly. To give one example, on October 10, 732, Charles Martel, in the battle of Tours, fought off an invasion by Umayyad Muslims. If Charles had lost that battle, it is very likely that there would be no Christian Europe, no West and we would not be having this discussion. It is ok to thank God that Charles Martel took up the sword to defend the Christian Frankish peoples against Muslim invaders.

Let us lay out another situation. Suppose there is a Christian community, a distinct minority living within a nation that is pagan, perhaps even hostile to the Christian faith. This nation is facing difficulties and its rulers, looking around within the kingdom for advice and wisdom, seek out the leaders within this Christian community for advice. Perhaps they even elevate a few members of this community into key leadership positions. These Christian leaders know it is unlikely that anyone in the pagan ruling elite will be converting to Christianity anytime soon. So, what do they do? They would likely try to distill their Christian faith into a form where it could be applied to the current situation without there necessarily needing to be a broad pagan conversion. Can they benefit their society? Can they save this society from the troubles it is facing? Even if the realm is not facing troubles, can they move within the realm of power while keeping their Christian faith? No one said it would be easy, and the corrupting temptations of power are there, as is the dangers of instrumentalizing the gospel we noted above, but is the Christian forbidden from this? Can this not be a calling, a vocation, like any other? This situation looks remarkably similar to that of Joseph, Daniel, or Naaman. The story of Joseph is told in such a way that he is portrayed as the first instantiation of the “savior” archetype that later finds its complete fulfillment in Jesus.

I could develop example after example, creating scenarios where, if one acquiesced to Kingsnorth’s concerns, many of which are justified and for which I have similar concerns, it would entirely forbid Christians from ever acting outside of a kind of monastic life of prayer. There are many Christians who share this concern with the political, with power, with the dangers of instrumentalizing the Christian faith, and with turning the idea of a Christian civilization into an idol that is pursued apart from God but in his name, that they will retreat from society. Quietism is the label that is given to this posture. Even if the Christian faith is otherworldly and is a narrow path, this does not remove from us the obligation to reveal the Kingship of God and the Kingdom of God in which we now fully participate “in Christ.” Ours is not a Gnostic faith. We are meant to instantiate and incarnate in time and space who we are “in Christ.” Part of that is revealing the properly ordered rule of God over all things. It begins within the Christian community as the people of God, as a holy nation, set apart to be the locus of the first fruits of the new heaven and the new earth.

The Old Testament people of God were given three roles in society that were taken up and fulfilled in Christ, that of prophet, priest, and king. All three of these are meant to reside within the people of God, the community of believers. There are two main roles, that of priest and that of king, both of which get instantiated within institutions. The priestly roles of ministering grace and teaching the people is centered in the institutional church. This is the aspect that we are most familiar with. But within the Christian community there is also a need for the role of the king. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 6, upbraids the Corinthian community for taking each other to court as Christians. His response is not simply to tell them to get along, but rather, to tell them that within their own community they can manage their own political affairs. They do not need to go to pagan courts. They can have their own judges who can adjudicate disputes among the believers. This is a decidedly political activity and is part of the “kingly” role. But there are other aspects to this role of king. We generally think of “church discipline” as something belonging to the institutional church. But we should properly think about it as part of the kingly role, which is separate from that of the priestly, operating in conjunction with and alongside of the institutional church, but still within the Christian community as a whole, but within the political sphere of the king to “do justice.”

Additionally, this kingly role also takes up the protection of the people. Someone may be called to martyrdom. This is a long standing and well-worn path for many believers throughout history. Properly understood, though, martyrdom is a martial act not taken. As Christians we cannot demand that others martyr themselves. And, as we have seen in figures like Charles Martel, that while there is a time for martyrdom, there is also a time when it is appropriate to fight. The call to arms, even if it was never intended by God in the Garden, does, on occasion, become a necessity in the world of sin and evil. Jesus never condemned soldiers for being soldiers. He did condemn them for abusing their office for personal gain. But the sin scarred world is a dangerous place and there has always been the need for those who would stand in the gap with a willingness to lay down their lives to protect others. And in every society, Christian societies included, the need for magistrates who wield the power of the sword does not disappear. In the pursuit of justice, wrongdoers still need to be punished. This remains a necessity as long as we live as a society in a world affected by sin, including a Christian society.

Both the priestly and the kingly role generally have the backing of institutions. In that regard, both participate in structures of power with all the temptations of earthly power. The third role, the prophetic, functions to call both of these institutions, and the people who fill those offices, to repentance and obedience. The prophet, though, almost always acts without the backing of institutional power. It is not by accident that the prophets often found themselves on the outs with the kings and other notables whom they called to account. Being a prophet is dangerous work. Nobody likes being taken to task for their misdeeds and their misuse of power. We tend to romanticize the prophet and see ourselves in this prophetic role, “speaking truth to power.” But few of us ever actually operate in this mode. Many who are pastors who think of themselves as prophets would be better off to understand that this is not their role. They are priests who teach the people and minister grace to them. This is good and necessary. Few have what it takes to be a prophet. But my sense of it is that Paul Kingsnorth, perhaps because of his work as an environmentalist, sees the church as primarily a prophetic body.

This is a common misunderstanding and mistake. Others see the entirety of the Christian community as some mix of the priestly and the prophetic but are quite willing to pass off the kingly role to a secular state, refusing entirely the whole realm of the political within the community of believers. One notable effect of this is that discipline within the church community, not just the institutional church, but the society of believers as a whole, is almost nonexistent today. We no longer do anything tough. We certainly don’t speak truth to power. If anything, our priestly leaders spend an inordinate amount of energy bending and adapting themselves to power, making themselves obsequious and subservient to secular power.

It is important to understand this, especially today. The church needs the three offices of prophet, priest, and king to be robust as a society. Just as we are revealing who we are “in Christ” personally, so too we are revealing the kingdom and city of God as secured “in Christ,” and we are also revealing the offices of prophet, priest, and king as fulfilled “in Christ.” I believe that the Christian community has survived as its own unique civilization for 2000 plus years, instantiated within various cultures and societies, as both majority and minority, as the dominant cultural force as well as a persecuted minority. Others have tried to imitate us without the need for genuine faith. People have preached Christ for gain or used his name as a means to gain power for its own sake. Yet, all through this, the Christian community, as a society, as a civilization, has survived and will continue to survive and even thrive, especially when it is pointed to Christ and seeks first of all to reveal to the world, within the flow of earthy events, the first fruits of the future life secured for us “in Christ.” One of the main tasks of Christian living within the Christian community, the society of Christians, that is, the people of God, is to reveal to the world the city of God, the New Jerusalem. Our calling is not just one of otherworldly escape, but to the messy work of revealing the civilization of God to the world. We are the first fruits of future life already secured for us “in Christ.”