WAS JESUS ANTI-NATIONALISTIC?

Progressive Christians regard Jesus as one of their own, a citizen of a borderless world:

* Progressive Christians have long held the conviction that the whole Christian-America-thing is actually anti-Christian. Christianity has an implicit anti-nationalist bent. Jesus actively resisted the nationalist aspirations of his followers, which made him a disappointment to them — and ultimately cost him his life (initially!). https://www.onfaith.co/…/4-ways-christian-fundamental…/33537

Was Jesus an anti-nationalist? Admittedly, He was inclusive of all who would come to Him (John 6:37). However, He did not initiate them into a borderless existence but into the Kingdom of God.

This Kingdom is a Kingdom set apart from the rest of the world. It is exclusive but inclusive of any who will come. It is also a Kingdom with stringent requirements and boundaries:

* “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” (Matthew 6:33)

Nor is this Kingdom universal but particular, for a particular people who would enter it:

* "Strive to enter through the narrow door. For many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able.” (Luke 13:24)

Consistent with the particularism of His Kingdom, Jesus only prayed for a particular group of people:

* “I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for those whom thou hast given me; for they are thine:” (John 17:9 ASV)

However, the Progressive will respond:

* Jesus was teaching about a spiritual kingdom not a physical nation with physical borders.

However, Jesus consistently affirmed the particularism of the Old Testament against progressive universalism. Likewise, He did not teach that we have equal responsibility for all parents but affirmed our overriding responsibility for our own parents (Matthew 15), children, and family (Matthew 24:43).

This was a particularism reaffirmed by Jesus' authoritative commentators, the Apostles:

* But if any provideth not for his own, and specially his own household, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever. (1 Timothy 5:8)

Let's return to the particularity of nations and nationalism. We are not saying "God and Nation," as Progressive Christians allege. God and nation are clearly not equals. Instead, everything is under God - family, friends, and patriotism.

However, there is a Biblical place for patriotism, at least for Christ-honoring expressions of patriotic concern.

If we are to have an overriding love and concern for our wives, children, and even our block association or neighborhood, it is certainly not illegitimate to have an overriding and particular concern for our nation.

This does not mean that we shouldn't have a love and concern for other families and nations. However, if love does not start at home, it is not love. It is something inhumane and unnatural, and therefore, had to be sustained by threat and even genocide, as we have seen in every communistic, universalistic experiment.

Besides, if we fail to show a particularistic love for our own wives and children, jealousy and bitterness will arise. Consequently, the best way to love our communities is to start by loving our own families. By doing this, we will create an army of love-emissaries.

Likewise, the Church has, in so many ways, proved to be a vehicle of mercy to its community. How? By loving first on the inside and then those on the outside.

Jesus had opposed an ungodly form of nationalism, one which self-righteously looked down on the other peoples. However, He never spoke against nationalism per se.

Ken Wilbur, Albert Einstein, and World-Centrism

What is ethical? - Compassion that stops at our own household or a compassion that embraces the entirety of nature? Albert Einstein associates a self-centered and myopic compassion with an “optical illusion of …consciousness,” ethical “delusion” and “prison”:

• A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated form the rest, a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Why should we widen “our circle of compassion?” Einstein insists that ethics restricted to “personal desires” is “delusion,” a failure to see reality as it truly is. Indeed, the concept of “delusion” suggests that there is a condition of “non-delusion,” a higher truth that trumps and transcends a narrow preoccupation with our needs and comforts. However, if this is the case, what is the basis of this higher moral reality, and how do we know that we are actually tapping into it? Perhaps instead, the highest truth is nothing more than the survival-of-the-fittest – me and my genes first! How can I be sure that this represents “delusion?”

New Age guru Ken Wilbur expresses Einstein’s ethics in terms of the stages of “moral development”:

• As we look at infants at birth, they have not yet been socialized into the culture’s ethics and conventions. This is called the pre-conventional stage. It is also called egocentric, in that the infant’s awareness is largely self absorbed. But as young children begin to learn their culture’s rules and norms, they grow into the conventional stage of morals. This stage is also called ethnocentric, in that it centers on the child’s particular group, tribe, clan, or nation, and it therefore tends to exclude care and concern for those not of one’s group. But at the next major stage of moral development, the post-conventional stage, the individual’s identity expands once again, this time to include a care and concern for all peoples, regardless of race, color, sex, or creed, which is why this stage is also called world-centric.

Even if Wilbur is correct about the stages, why should the final stage – world-centrism – represent an ethical improvement over the former stages? The later isn’t necessarily the best, no more than senility is an improvement over adolescence. Perhaps the first two stages might contribute more positively to the evolution of the human race? If there are no universal, immutable, and authoritative moral absolutes – fixed standards of judgment – who can say that self-fixation or the survival-of-the-fittest is morally wrong?

If world-centrism represents a positive step in “moral development,” is there a rationale for this judgment? Perhaps it’s better for our families to be centered upon their immediate needs? And perhaps our purported concerns about the world are simply the reflection of our own psychological need to demonstrate our moral superiority over those of the first two stages? I can’t help thinking of world-centric communism. While expressing flowery idealistic concerns about the world did more to decimate the world than had any other philosophy.

Usually, world-centrism is erroneously defended by pragmatic appeals to its possible benefits for the entire world. Appeals are made to protecting the environment and limiting warfare, starvation and disease worldwide.

However, this argumentation secretly assumes the very thing that it is trying to prove – that “warfare, starvation and disease” are evils, which need to be eradicated or at least reduced. The argumentation fails to answer what makes these things or anything “evil.” Consequently, pragmatic argumentation is deceptive. It rejects the need for transcendent moral absolutes, while it secretly appeals to them and their condemnation of certain “evils.”

There is no way that pragmatic considerations (science, for example) by themselves can coherently call for a moral response. As the skeptic and philosopher David Hume observed, we cannot logically go from what “is” (pragmatism and science) to what “ought to be” (morality). They are separated by an impassable God-created gulf.

Einstein insists that because of “delusion,” the self-centered are missing a vital piece in the puzzle. However, how does Einstein know that they are deluded? We can’t make such a judgment unless we are certain about a fixed moral reality, transcendent moral absolutes – truths that transcend my myopic needs - and an embrace of the Creator, Sustainer and Enforcer of these absolutes. Without this Creator, there can be no basis for transcendent moral absolutes – the very thing needed to declare “world-centrism” superior to “self-centrism.” Without this Creator and His moral absolutes, no one can tell me that their morality is any bit superior to my own. We are left with nothing more than molecules-in-motion.

Without this higher standard, there is no basis to judge one action as better than another. It would be like a math teacher grading math exams without answers that are absolutely correct. Trying to do so without this absolute standard would be disingenuous.

Some might try to appeal to our common moral intuitions as a basis to make such judgments. However, this just passes the buck to another insubstantial source. The question still remains:

• Why should I trust my moral intuitions as an authoritative basis to judge, especially in view of the fact that my feelings change and are largely a reflection of my culture and upbringing? What makes them any more authoritative than the intuitions of the murderer?

Indeed, most of us feel that we are our neighbor’s keeper, but if this feeling is merely a chemical-electrical cerebral reaction, why then heed it? Is there any connection between feeling and moral truth? Not if a superior Being hasn’t designed this glorious connection!

Consequently, I am world-centric because God – the unchanging, all-wise and loving Source of all truth - is world-centric. Jesus taught that we should regard everyone as our “neighbor” and treat them accordingly. This is where the buck stops –absolutely!