Episode Details

Rob Reiner, known for his role as “Meathead” in the 1970s sitcom All in the Family and for producing movie classics like The Princess Bride, recently announced a new documentary he helped produce about the dangers of Christian Nationalism. According to Reiner, opposing abortion and the LGBTQ agenda are central tenets of Christian Nationalism. Several evangelicals, current and former, are featured in the documentary. 

It’s always strange when a non-Christian explains to Christians what is and what is not true Christianity. Even stranger is when professing Christians who have abandoned Christian moral teaching about creation, sex, and marriage—as is the case with a few of the experts interviewed—are asked to define Christian faithfulness. All of this means that believers need to have a better understanding of this contentious idea, which has gotten so much attention in recent years.  

A helpful place to start is to understand the place of nations in the Christian concept of the world.  The first use of the Hebrew word for “nation” appears in Genesis 10 in a listing of nations that descended from the sons of Noah. It’s notable that this first reference comes before the Tower of Babel, when God created more nations by confusing the languages and scattering people across the Earth. Nations, it seems, were part of God’s plan for humanity even before the rebellion at Babel. And, in that story, the dividing into tongues and scattering of people is described more as an act of mercy than judgment, to prevent humans from doing all that was possible as one people. 

In Genesis 12, God tells Abram that his descendants would become a great nation, and that, through them, all the nations of the world would be blessed. The Old Testament frequently refers to the Jewish people as a nation and uses the same word to describe the kingdoms and empires around them. 

In the New Testament, ethne, the Greek word for “nation,” most famously appears in Jesus’ instructions to make disciples “of all nations,” which is a fulfillment of God’s original promise to Abraham. Also interesting is that in the New Testament, language about nations seems to exclude “empire.” Though ethne can be translated either as “people group” or “nation,” the two are related. Historically, the word “nation” referred to a relatively homogenous group, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically. Each kingdom of the ancient world mostly consisted of people of a single nation. Thus, ethne can refer to a people group within an empire, but not to empires themselves which contain multiple nations. 

Nations are also present in biblical descriptions of the coming Kingdom. So, it seems that something of the nations will survive into eternity. For example,

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