Hi, I’m Scott Davis
a Thought Leader. Mentor. Change Agent. Father. Tech Junkie. Husband. Motivator. Christian. Software Engineer. Fiction Author.

Above All Rule #4: No Bloodline Buys the Mercy Seat

Part four of seven. Last week I argued that a substantially Christian people will naturally come to express its convictions in its public life. That argument is worth very little if it cannot be distinguished from a very different claim, often made in the same vocabulary, that a particular ancestry carries a superior standing before God. The distinction cannot be made by assertion alone, so I want to state it carefully.

Christian Nationalism Is Not Ethnic Supremacy

One objection to Christian nationalism is that it can become entangled with ethnic nationalism, treating a particular ancestry as though it confers a superior claim to a nation or to God’s favor. That danger is real, but it is not inherent in the conviction that a nation should acknowledge Christ.

I do not believe any tribe possesses an inherent spiritual superiority over another. No bloodline purchases a place before God, and no ancestry gives anyone a claim on the mercy seat. We are all sinners in need of the same grace, and salvation is found in Jesus Christ rather than in our genealogy.

The church itself testifies to this reality. Christ is gathering a people from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation. Our unity in Him does not depend on shared ethnicity, and no earthly ancestry places someone closer to the throne of grace.

That conviction should shape how Christians think about the nation. If a nation is to be Christian, its defining characteristic should be its acknowledgment of Christ and its commitment to ordering public life according to Christian convictions—not the supposed superiority of a particular bloodline.

This does not mean that national borders, citizenship, cultural inheritance, or a government’s responsibility toward its own population are meaningless. Those are legitimate subjects for political and theological discussion. But they must not be turned into claims of racial superiority or hereditary spiritual privilege. The line between the two is worth drawing carefully, and it falls where ancestry and culture part company.

Christianity cannot be reduced to an ethnic inheritance. One can possess a Christian ancestry without possessing Christian faith, just as someone from a people with no historical Christian majority can be brought into the kingdom through the gospel.

The relevant question is not which bloodline has the strongest claim to a nation. It is whether the people of that nation acknowledge the authority of Jesus Christ.

A Christian political vision must take seriously both the particular responsibilities of civil government and the universal scope of the gospel. It must reject the notion that ethnicity confers spiritual rank while recognizing that Christ’s authority extends over every people and every nation.

One Race, Many Nations, and the Question of Culture

Scripture does not divide humanity into races. It speaks of nations, tribes, tongues, and families. Paul told the Athenians that God made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place (Acts 17:26). That verse denies any plurality of human stocks and affirms that distinct nations, with real boundaries, are God’s own arrangement rather than an accident to be abolished. The modern notion of race, a handful of biologically distinct human kinds, is a recent invention, not a biblical category.

This takes a distinctly Reformed form. Total depravity levels everyone. If every human being is radically fallen and unable to save himself, no people possesses moral altitude over another. Israel is the one nation in history with a genuinely divine ancestral claim, and Israel was told repeatedly that the ancestry secured nothing. Paul writes that not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel (Romans 9:6). John the Baptist warned his hearers not to presume to say that they had Abraham as their father (Matthew 3:9). If a bloodline could not purchase standing for Israel, it purchases standing for no one.

Separation along racial lines is, to use a plain word, silly. It sorts people by a category Scripture does not use, one the bearer did not choose and cannot change. But it is not only silly, and Scripture does not treat it as merely foolish. When Peter withdrew from the table along ethnic lines, Paul opposed him publicly and said he was not in step with the truth of the gospel (Galatians 2:11–14). That was a gospel matter.

Culture is a different question, and a legitimate one. A nation is not merely a population inside a border; it is a people with a shared language, law, custom, memory, and worship. Those things are real and worth preserving, and a nation that loses them has stopped being that nation in all but name. Concern for cultural continuity is not a disguised racial concern.

The reason one question is legitimate and the other is not comes to this: a culture is something a person can be converted into, and an ancestry is not. A nation resting its identity on culture is open in principle to any newcomer willing to take it up; a nation resting its identity on blood is closed by definition. Grounding national identity in culture is not a gentler form of ethnic nationalism; it is what rules ethnic nationalism out.

Scripture shows the process. Ruth was a Moabitess, from a people under explicit covenantal exclusion (Deuteronomy 23:3), and she told Naomi, “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God,” culture and worship together. She ends in the line of David and in the genealogy of Christ. Rahab likewise. The sojourner laws assume the same movement. The stranger is treated as the native-born (Leviticus 19:34), and Exodus 12:48 is explicit: the sojourner who would keep the Passover must first be circumcised, and then he shall be as a native of the land. The door is open, one comes through it, and that costs something and takes time.

Two guards are needed. If culture is being used as a polite substitute for ancestry, it is the same error in better clothing, and I reject it in that form as well. And questions of how many a nation can absorb, and how quickly, belong to prudence and civic capacity rather than to human worth, which is what keeps them from collapsing back into what I have just rejected.

No tribe outranks another before the throne of God, and no bloodline buys the mercy seat. Christ alone is King, and His kingdom gathers people from all nations.

Next week: theonomy, and why a standard for civil justice requires a political order willing to acknowledge the God who gave it.

Above All Rule — part 4 of 7:

1. The Authority That Does Not Stop at the Church Door
2. Are We Building, or Are We Waiting to Leave?
3. When a Christian People Makes Laws
4. No Bloodline Buys the Mercy Seat (you are here)

Later parts in this series have not been published yet. They will appear here as they are released.

Above All Rule #3: When a Christian People Makes Laws

Part three of seven. Having argued that Christ’s authority reaches the civil order, and that our eschatology shapes what we believe is worth attempting under it, I come now to the term most likely to end a conversation before it starts. The criticisms of Christian nationalism raised at the conference deserve serious consideration, and I want to grant what should be granted before I say where I differ.

Christian Nationalism and the Christian Character of a Nation

The conference included substantial criticism of Christian nationalism. Some of those concerns deserve serious consideration.

There is a legitimate danger in confusing national identity with Christian identity, treating the nation as though it were the church, or using Christianity as a tool for political ambition. The church is composed of believers from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation. No earthly nation can claim to exhaust the identity of the people of God.

There are also legitimate concerns about coercion, religious liberty, nominal Christianity, and the temptation to use state power to accomplish what only the Holy Spirit can accomplish.

However, I believe we must distinguish between these dangers and the broader question of whether a nation can, or should, order its public life according to Christian principles. The fact that Christian nationalism can be distorted or abused does not, by itself, establish that a nation should refuse to acknowledge Christ or that Christian principles should be excluded from civil government.

Christian nationalism is a term used to describe a variety of positions, and those positions should not all be treated as interchangeable. Ethnic nationalism dressed in Christian language is not the same thing as a conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord over civil rulers and that His moral law is relevant to public justice.

Nor is the belief that a nation should acknowledge Christ necessarily a belief that the church and state should become one institution.

My own position begins with a relatively straightforward observation: If a population becomes substantially Christian in its convictions, worldview, and practice, it is entirely natural that its laws and institutions will increasingly reflect those convictions. I would go further: I believe a society ought to evaluate its public life according to the truth of God’s revelation rather than treating Christianity as relevant only to private belief and personal conduct.

Laws are not created in a cultural vacuum. They reflect the moral assumptions, priorities, and beliefs of the people who make them. A society that comes to embrace Christianity deeply and broadly will inevitably begin to express that transformation in its understanding of justice, family, education, public morality, and civil responsibility.

If a population is significantly Christian and seeks to live righteously, why would we expect its public institutions to remain fundamentally unchanged? Why would we expect a Christian majority to regard its deepest convictions as relevant to personal conduct but irrelevant to the collective life of the nation?

This does not mean that whatever a Christian majority supports is automatically just, or that every Christian conviction translates directly into a civil statute. Christian political judgments must themselves be tested against Scripture, and the proper scope of civil authority must be considered carefully. Nor can a government manufacture genuine Christianity through legislation. It cannot.

Rather, my argument is that a society shaped by Christianity will naturally have political consequences, and that a society ought not to regard those consequences as illegitimate merely because they arise from Christian convictions. A society shaped by Christianity will not make the same moral and political judgments as a society shaped by secular humanism, materialism, or another competing worldview.

The question is not whether a society’s dominant worldview will influence its laws. It will. The deeper question is which worldview ought to shape them, and by what standard its laws should be judged. I believe that standard must ultimately be grounded in God’s truth, with civil government exercising its authority within the responsibilities God has assigned to it.

Next week: the objection that matters most, and why no ancestry has ever purchased a standing before God.

Above All Rule — part 3 of 7:

1. The Authority That Does Not Stop at the Church Door
2. Are We Building, or Are We Waiting to Leave?
3. When a Christian People Makes Laws (you are here)
4. No Bloodline Buys the Mercy Seat

Later parts in this series have not been published yet. They will appear here as they are released.

Above All Rule #2: Are We Building, or Are We Waiting to Leave?

Part two of seven. Last week I argued that Christ’s authority extends over the nations and not merely over private belief. What a Christian expects of the future, however, largely determines what he thinks is worth building in the present, and so the argument has to pass through eschatology before it can go anywhere else.

I write as a postmillennialist, and I want to say plainly where that puts me and where it does not.

Eschatology Matters: Are We Building, or Are We Waiting to Leave?

One of the speakers made an observation that I found particularly significant: our eschatology shapes how we approach nationalism, government, and the Christian’s responsibility in public life.

I agree. What we believe about the future of Christ’s kingdom inevitably influences what we believe Christians should be doing in the present.

I approach this question as a postmillennialist. I believe Christ reigns now, that the Great Commission will accomplish what He intends it to accomplish, and that the gospel will have a profound and extensive effect on the nations before Christ returns. I do not expect the church’s historical trajectory to be one of inevitable worldwide defeat, with Christian faithfulness consisting primarily of holding on until we are finally removed from the scene.

That conviction fundamentally shapes how I think about Christian engagement with society.

If we believe the gospel will progressively transform peoples and nations, then Christian political and cultural engagement is not an embarrassing distraction from the real work of the church. It is one of the areas in which the consequences of discipleship must be considered. Christians should be thinking about what faithful obedience looks like in government, law, education, family life, economics, and every other sphere of human responsibility.

The Great Commission is not a command to retreat from the world while waiting for an escape. It is a command to make disciples of all nations and teach them to obey Christ. The Lord’s Prayer does not teach us to ask that God’s will be done on earth only until things become sufficiently bad for us to leave. It teaches us to pray for His kingdom to come and His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.

This is where I find myself sharply at odds with forms of eschatological thinking that encourage Christians to view cultural decline as inevitable, political faithfulness as largely futile, and the rapture as the ultimate solution to the world’s problems.

If we have already decided that the nations must inevitably descend into greater rebellion until Christ removes His people, it becomes difficult to sustain a compelling vision for long-term Christian institution-building. Why invest in the transformation of a society if we fundamentally expect that society to deteriorate beyond recovery? Why labor for the discipling of nations if our practical expectation is that the nations will remain comprehensively hostile to Christ until the very end?

I recognize that not every premillennialist reasons this way. Many work faithfully in their churches, communities, and professions, and many affirm the importance of evangelism, discipleship, and public service. Nor does belief in a future rapture, by itself, establish that someone is indifferent to the present world.

My criticism is directed at the fatalism that can accompany popular rapture-centered eschatology: the expectation that the world must grow progressively worse, that the nations will ultimately remain hostile to Christ, and that the church’s ultimate hope lies in being removed from the world rather than in the gospel’s progressive work of discipling the nations. When that expectation becomes the lens through which Christians interpret history, cultural decline can become something to anticipate rather than resist. Defeat becomes the expected outcome, retreat becomes easier to justify, and long-term investment in Christian institutions can seem almost futile. I believe that outlook deserves a serious theological challenge. If Christ has commissioned us to disciple the nations, we should be very cautious about adopting an eschatology that leads us to expect the enduring failure of that commission at the level of nations and cultures before He returns.

The hope of Christ’s return should produce faithfulness, not passivity. The certainty of final victory should strengthen our labor, not make it seem pointless. And the promise that Christ will consummate His kingdom should encourage us to work in the confidence that our labor in the Lord is not in vain.

Postmillennialism does not promise that every political campaign will succeed, that every generation will be more righteous than the last, or that Christians can usher in the kingdom through political power. It does, however, give us a reason to expect that the gospel can accomplish far more in history than merely preserving a remnant until the end.

I want Christians to think in terms of generations, not simply escape plans. I want us to build institutions, educate our children, disciple our communities, pursue justice, and consider what it would mean for entire societies to order their lives under the lordship of Christ.

We should not be preoccupied with predicting the date of our departure when Christ has given us work to do.

The question is not merely whether we are ready for Christ to return. It is whether we are faithfully carrying out the work He has commanded us to do while we wait.

Next week: what happens when a people substantially shaped by Christian conviction begins to make its laws.

Above All Rule — part 2 of 7:

1. The Authority That Does Not Stop at the Church Door
2. Are We Building, or Are We Waiting to Leave? (you are here)
3. When a Christian People Makes Laws
4. No Bloodline Buys the Mercy Seat

Later parts in this series have not been published yet. They will appear here as they are released.