The administration of Donald Trump was a throwback attempt, a purification attempt, of the previous era of the Protestant Reformation era, the era of the centrality of the nation-state. If we extrapolate from the redoubtable historian (and prophet), Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, the dawning era will not eliminate that, but will add something, or a great deal, to it. And that something is almost impossible to imagine at this point, as being something of the Kingdom of God. What it will add is both globalism, and a renewal of tribalism in Christianized forms, and it will combine the two. The meeting place will be the city.

Globalism is today something of the realm of the left, of George Soros, of all of those forces that are the antithesis of the conservative. But, the real initiator and owner of globalism is Jesus Christ, who is the global king. Along with Him, will be His bride. His bride is, of course, the Church (singular). But there is more in the typology of the Scriptures. She is also represented by the city, which is The New Jerusalem (Revelation 21-22). Cities now largely represent a secular ethos, and much of what we see in the actual cities of our time (or any time) is to be found not in the New Jerusalem, but that other city in the Bible and the book of Revelation, The Whore of Babylon (Revelation 18:1-20). The great tension of our time is going to be which city in the book of Revelation represents our actual earthly cities. Cities are going to acquire a new global significance. Our sky scrapers are either going to be great Towers of Babel or, they are going to represent great steeples pointing to the heavens.

The Old Testament, after the fall, is one covenant, but it has within it, many smaller subheadings of that covenant. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy made a career of developing this point and as an historian of genius, he demonstrated that much the same phenomena is likewise true in the Christian era. After Jesus ascended into Heaven, and sat down at the Right Hand of the Father, he commenced to rule the new world through a series of covenant renewals and even “revolutions” in this, His new era of the New Covenant.

Rosenstock traces these great movements in his master-work, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man. He points out (somewhere) that what is translated in the KJV of Ephesians 3:20 as “throughout all ages, world without end,” and in the NIV as “throughout all generations, forever and ever,” is literally translated as “the generations of the age of the ages.” The New Covenant is The Age of (smaller) Ages within it. God updated and glorified that covenant on many occasions through-out the Old Covenant; once the New Covenant was established, He does the same thing. We are now in “the age of ages.” The Old Covenant was finally completely eclipsed and ended with the destruction of Jerusalem, and the descent of the New Jerusalem, hovering over the earth at the very end of the book of Revelation, as world headquarters of the church on earth. The New Covenant will end with the 2nd coming of Christ, and the Last Judgment. But between descent of the New Jerusalem and today, there have been many updates and glorifications, new “ages” that have come in the “age of ages.” This is what constitutes the heart of world history in the Christian era.

When God creates a “new world” in a covenant update or renewal, the heart of the old world still remains. Each new era contains all the seeds and fruits of the last one, but the new covenant is more glorious and better than the preceding one, while adding something new and more glorious, and it enfolds the prior covenant within it, in a better way. So, for example, when God raised up Luther, who was used to create a new world, the Roman Church did not disappear. It is still with us. Indeed, one could argue that Luther saved the Roman Church. Apart from the Reformation, Rome would have rotted into oblivion. They were forced to regenerate, find renewal, find new mission in a Reformation world. So, as one segment, the Jesuits, as one of the world’s most vigorous mission agencies were born, and carried the Roman Church to the New World and everywhere. Rome was renewed in universities and in a thousand other ways, and is still a world-wide power.

Rosenstock-Huessy sees the forward movement of Christian history following a trajectory that can be traced by moving backwards through the Bible. He traces six universal revolutions in Western Christian history, with the addition of the “half revolution“ achieved in America. Each one can be tied to a portion or pericope of Scripture. They are:

1. The Investiture Controversy in which the Pope (Gregory VII, about the year 1000 AD) limited the power of kingdoms by claiming the power to determine the ordination of clergy, bishops, and abbots, and to even bring judgments upon and to kings and kingdoms. And, the Pope in declaring universal authority, also created ground whereby kingdoms that eventually became Europe, could actually be born, and grow under his tutelage. The church, thus brought the power of the Last Judgment itself to bear on present history by looking back into time from the end and making determinations. Oddly, it was the Last Judgment that gave birth to the Western world (Revelation 20:11-15)

2. The end did not come, even though the Last Judgment was upon us. The end could not come as long as anti-Christ did not appear, and he could not appear while the Pope was vigilant, and the church was established. The Pope, and the great preaching orders of the medieval period elongated history, and staved off the end. As long as the papal throne was occupied, the anti-Christ could not come (Gospels and New Testament)

3. Luther brought a complete revolution by declaring that the anti-Christ had come, and the anti-Christ was the Pope! Thus, the end of the world. But Luther also initiated a new world in 1517. Luther was the great proponent of Paul (over against Peter) and Pauline theology, and Paul was also the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophet who has a greater presence than the king, and talks back to the king. At one point, Fredrick of Saxony offered Luther protection. Luther answered back that he did not need Fredrick’s protection and instead offered Fredrick his protection. Rosenstock says, “The voice of the prophet speaking to the kings of Israel, the voice of Paul speaking before the governors of Rome, was made a public institution of the German nation when Luther offered Frederick his protection.” (Out of Revolution, 389). Thus, we move, with this Pauline witness back to the Old Testament prophets.

4.  Cromwell announced Britain to be a new Israel, and pushed us further into the Old Testament, and back to the Mosaic era. By executing the king, he moved the world back to the time of the Judges.

5.  The discovery and establishment of the new world, and America, takes us back to Noah, whose ark landed in a new world, and it was a world of “nature,” and it initiated an era of “natural law.”

6. The French Revolution takes us all the way back to the Garden of Eden. The French Revolution believed it was recreating an unfallen paradise. While this is an anti-Christian sentiment, it belongs to the Christian era, albeit as a rebellion from it. Even in rebellion, it cannot escape.

7. And finally, the Russian Revolution of 1917 takes us all the way back to Genesis 1:1-2a. The Bolsheviks aspired to entirely recreate the world, and exult in “eternal revolution,” the state of Genesis 1:2: “the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep.” We have entered the era of trusting to the chaos, and taking a dip in the chaos to recreate all things. Again, the Bolsheviks were anti-Christian, but they could not escape the Christian era, even in everlasting revolt, revolution, and chaos. The 20th century was not only politically, but also scientifically dominated by the ultimacy of chaos, as Darwinism attempted to give a new creation story.

We have come to the beginning of the Bible. We have moved from the medieval world being shaped and formed by the incursion of the Last Judgment into history (artistically culminating in Dante’s Divine Comedy), to the very beginning of the Bible in the creation of formless matter. There is nowhere left to go backwards. Where to now? Let me make a suggestion that can carry us beyond where Rosenstock left us when he published his great book in 1939. We now return to the very end of the Bible, and perhaps human history will take us through the book again, landing in new and diverse places. I would suggest that now, we move to the one pericope that is beyond the Last Judgment, the last great city of God, the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21-22.

II

Luther’s and Cromwell’s settlements are still with us, even through subsequent revolutions. Part of the Reformation and post Reformation settlement was the nation-state, and the rise of denominations. Republicanism and democracy were expressions of new Protestant political maturity, largely overtaking monarchy everywhere, and a unified church gave way to many denominations. The Republican and parliamentary nation-state is central to the Protestant era. And with it have been national expressions that have embodied tyranny, but have still maintained nation-state status.

But we are now entering a new era, the era of city connected globalism. Cities have achieved vast, new importance, and cities have global, and not just national connections. They also embody within them, the new tribes, the new small groupings of almost infinite variety. We are now a global world connected by cities, and the great war is the conflict between the city as The Whore of Babylon vs. the city as The New Jerusalem. This is both why gender is a new, front-line issue, and points to the central symbolism that will also give rebirth to marriage, the biotic family, and fatherhood, the breakdown of which constitute the sociological crisis of our time, and the source of almost all of our social ailments. The New Jerusalem is a glorious lady whose husband is King Jesus. The Whore of Babylon could be a male homosexual, a gender-fluid bi-sexual, a lesbian.

To fill out where the new age in this age of ages is promising to develop, let us follow the contours of Scripture, now going the opposite direction, from the end of the book of Judges into the books of First and Second Samuel. The last judge in the book of Judges is Samson. Samson is a very odd figure. He is a judge not just of military might, but, as is well known, of superhuman strength. Through Judges, the long term trend is one of decline. Over and over, Israel fall into sin, into the worship of foreign idols, and God gives them over to their enemies. Then, the people cry out to God in their misery, and God raises up a champion who as a great military leader, once again delivers Israel. There is an uptick in Israel’s fortunes, but each deliverance is less complete than the last. When finally, God raises up Sampson as the final deliverer, he is significantly a superman. The meaning is clear. Israel is now so corrupt that it is impossible to raise a significant army. Therefore, Samson is a one-man army. That is why he represents the final deliverance of the judges, and God is going to renew the covenant by raising up an entirely different form, a glorified form of the covenant. God will raise up a king.

From the Samson narrative, the book of Judges comes to a close with two strange stories. For the first time, the repetitive phrase that Judges is noted for appears. “In those days, there was no king in Israel,” (Judges 17:6). It is repeated three more times, and the book closes with that phrase with this addition, which appears first in Judges 17: “and every man did what was right in his own eyes.” 

The first story is the story of the tribe of Dan establishing their own, private shrine, temple, priest, and religion, in competition with the true tabernacle of God in Shiloh. It is the story of a final, and corrupt, false religion being made an official cult in Israel.

The second story transpires in the city of Gibeah, which is a city of the Benjamites. To skip to the denouement, the men of the city gather round the house of a citizen who has given night’s shelter to a stranger and his concubine, and demand he be sent out that they might “know” him. I.e., they want to commit homosexual gang rape. Since that is deemed too shameful, the guest’s concubine is brought out and given to the men, and she is gang raped, all night long. In the morning when the man is to leave, she is dead.

The meaning of the second story, which concludes the book, and the era of the Judges, is that Israel has become Sodom and Gomorrah. Sodom earned its infamy as the city which desired to commit homosexual gang rape on two visitors to the city, who unfortunately for the inhabitants, turned out to be angels. The city was consequently destroyed in fire and brimstone. So likewise, the Benjamites are nearly destroyed by avengers from the other tribes of Israel.

The era of the Judges came to an end. Is it thus, the end of God’s dealing with Israel? No, it is the end of that covenant settlement with Israel. God will move on to entirely renew the covenant by now raising up a king. That is the story of I Samuel. After a false start with Saul, who is a Benjamite (whose hometown, by the way, is Gibeah), a lad from the tribe of Judah is chosen, and he (David) becomes the great king of Israel. He clears the land of Philistines, and makes possible the building of the Temple in the city of Jerusalem. He is also the great type of the Great King who will be his direct descendent, who will usher in the New and final covenant, and finally become the King of all the earth when he has ascended into Heaven and is seated at the Right Hand of the Father.        

The older order is the order of the nation-state, and the denomination. The recent emergence of Donald Trump in the United States was an attempt to renew the older vision by retarding, and exposing “the deep state,” which is the rancid dominance and control of the bureaucratic and to loosen the grip of its growing, web-like, and unaccountable existence. This was a good thing, just like reform in Rome was a good thing, but it is still not what the new world represents. We need the nation-state. The United States, and almost two hundred other states are central to global existence. But the nation state appears at this point not to be a self-renewing entity. If Donald Trump could not bring renewal to the nation state, probably no one can. I would suggest that its renewal can only come, as an aside, with a new vision, a new world, and from the smaller unit of the city.

Neither the nation-state, nor denominations, are going to disappear, any more than the tribes of Israel disappeared with the coming to the Davidic monarchy. But, like the tribes, they are destined to be of less significance as time moves on. For the first time in world history, the reality of the universal and global monarchy of Jesus is coming close to being a recognized and existential global reality. Jesus has been the King of the Earth since His ascension, but the recognition of this has not been global from that time to this. Now, it is upon us. And this King is also the Husband of His Bride, and now symbolized globally in the city.

Two kinds of globalism exist. We find the first in Genesis 11 with The Tower of Babel, which represents the triumph of godless man in rebellion against the Living God. God placed a curse, and protection, on the builders by confounding their language, and making communication between them impossible, and then scatters them. This curse remains in place today, not only with a multitude of differing global languages, but other kinds of confusion of languages in all large institutions, hindering and limiting their growth. So, we find various agencies and bureaucracies each using differing operating procedures, manuals, and policy books, and being literally unable to communicate with each other. God limits global cooperation to limit the amount of evil that fallen man is capable of. However, we now see massive attempts to create new forms of globalism on the part of the fallen human race. Communism was a global ideology, and today, there is great desire to create global commercial empires.

I believe all of this is spurred precisely because the Dark Powers, the Devil and his minions, know that the church is reaching global dimensions, and a world-wide recognition of the universal monarchy of Jesus Christ is upon us. But Jesus Christ and His bride will be the triumphant ones in this contest.

The nation-state in the Western world is very much where the tribes of Israel were at the end of the book of Judges. The religion of humanism is now almost the officially ensconced religion of all left of center nation-states, including the United States. Gender confusion has also reached official and protected status in virtually all Western nation-states. The Supreme Court decision of Obergefell v. Hodges made gay marriage the law of the land in the United States. We are at the end of the era of the nation-state. God will renew His covenant with His church now, in a global way, and every city will begin the process of of being renewed in the image of the New Jerusalem, the Bride of Christ.            

I believe the era we are in is not the era of The Benedict Option, where we as the church withdraw from the world to the desert to preserve Christian civilization. Rather, I prefer The Francis Option, with Franciscans being the first order that was specifically a city order, called to bring the Gospel to the cities of Italy and Europe. Our cities now need to be converted, transformed, from centers of humanism and secular leftism to the typology of The Bride of Christ and The New Jerusalem. Denominations will not disappear, but will be of less importance, and the city itself will be the new principle of organization of many congregational expressions within the city. Every congregation, whether Baptist, Congregational. Methodist, Presbyterian, Catholic or Orthodox, will also be the church in the city, with every congregation working with every other.        

Impossible? God thrives on the impossible. It will be His work. It will be done.     


Richard Bledsoe is a Theopolis Fellow and works as a chaplain in Boulder, Colorado.

Next Conversation
Communion of Nations
Peter Leithart

The administration of Donald Trump was a throwback attempt, a purification attempt, of the previous era of the Protestant Reformation era, the era of the centrality of the nation-state. If we extrapolate from the redoubtable historian (and prophet), Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, the dawning era will not eliminate that, but will add something, or a great deal, to it. And that something is almost impossible to imagine at this point, as being something of the Kingdom of God. What it will add is both globalism, and a renewal of tribalism in Christianized forms, and it will combine the two. The meeting place will be the city.

Globalism is today something of the realm of the left, of George Soros, of all of those forces that are the antithesis of the conservative. But, the real initiator and owner of globalism is Jesus Christ, who is the global king. Along with Him, will be His bride. His bride is, of course, the Church (singular). But there is more in the typology of the Scriptures. She is also represented by the city, which is The New Jerusalem (Revelation 21-22). Cities now largely represent a secular ethos, and much of what we see in the actual cities of our time (or any time) is to be found not in the New Jerusalem, but that other city in the Bible and the book of Revelation, The Whore of Babylon (Revelation 18:1-20). The great tension of our time is going to be which city in the book of Revelation represents our actual earthly cities. Cities are going to acquire a new global significance. Our sky scrapers are either going to be great Towers of Babel or, they are going to represent great steeples pointing to the heavens.

The Old Testament, after the fall, is one covenant, but it has within it, many smaller subheadings of that covenant. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy made a career of developing this point and as an historian of genius, he demonstrated that much the same phenomena is likewise true in the Christian era. After Jesus ascended into Heaven, and sat down at the Right Hand of the Father, he commenced to rule the new world through a series of covenant renewals and even "revolutions" in this, His new era of the New Covenant.

Rosenstock traces these great movements in his master-work, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man. He points out (somewhere) that what is translated in the KJV of Ephesians 3:20 as "throughout all ages, world without end," and in the NIV as "throughout all generations, forever and ever," is literally translated as "the generations of the age of the ages." The New Covenant is The Age of (smaller) Ages within it. God updated and glorified that covenant on many occasions through-out the Old Covenant; once the New Covenant was established, He does the same thing. We are now in "the age of ages.” The Old Covenant was finally completely eclipsed and ended with the destruction of Jerusalem, and the descent of the New Jerusalem, hovering over the earth at the very end of the book of Revelation, as world headquarters of the church on earth. The New Covenant will end with the 2nd coming of Christ, and the Last Judgment. But between descent of the New Jerusalem and today, there have been many updates and glorifications, new "ages" that have come in the "age of ages." This is what constitutes the heart of world history in the Christian era.

When God creates a "new world" in a covenant update or renewal, the heart of the old world still remains. Each new era contains all the seeds and fruits of the last one, but the new covenant is more glorious and better than the preceding one, while adding something new and more glorious, and it enfolds the prior covenant within it, in a better way. So, for example, when God raised up Luther, who was used to create a new world, the Roman Church did not disappear. It is still with us. Indeed, one could argue that Luther saved the Roman Church. Apart from the Reformation, Rome would have rotted into oblivion. They were forced to regenerate, find renewal, find new mission in a Reformation world. So, as one segment, the Jesuits, as one of the world's most vigorous mission agencies were born, and carried the Roman Church to the New World and everywhere. Rome was renewed in universities and in a thousand other ways, and is still a world-wide power.

Rosenstock-Huessy sees the forward movement of Christian history following a trajectory that can be traced by moving backwards through the Bible. He traces six universal revolutions in Western Christian history, with the addition of the “half revolution“ achieved in America. Each one can be tied to a portion or pericope of Scripture. They are:

1. The Investiture Controversy in which the Pope (Gregory VII, about the year 1000 AD) limited the power of kingdoms by claiming the power to determine the ordination of clergy, bishops, and abbots, and to even bring judgments upon and to kings and kingdoms. And, the Pope in declaring universal authority, also created ground whereby kingdoms that eventually became Europe, could actually be born, and grow under his tutelage. The church, thus brought the power of the Last Judgment itself to bear on present history by looking back into time from the end and making determinations. Oddly, it was the Last Judgment that gave birth to the Western world (Revelation 20:11-15)

2. The end did not come, even though the Last Judgment was upon us. The end could not come as long as anti-Christ did not appear, and he could not appear while the Pope was vigilant, and the church was established. The Pope, and the great preaching orders of the medieval period elongated history, and staved off the end. As long as the papal throne was occupied, the anti-Christ could not come (Gospels and New Testament)

3. Luther brought a complete revolution by declaring that the anti-Christ had come, and the anti-Christ was the Pope! Thus, the end of the world. But Luther also initiated a new world in 1517. Luther was the great proponent of Paul (over against Peter) and Pauline theology, and Paul was also the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophet who has a greater presence than the king, and talks back to the king. At one point, Fredrick of Saxony offered Luther protection. Luther answered back that he did not need Fredrick’s protection and instead offered Fredrick his protection. Rosenstock says, “The voice of the prophet speaking to the kings of Israel, the voice of Paul speaking before the governors of Rome, was made a public institution of the German nation when Luther offered Frederick his protection.” (Out of Revolution, 389). Thus, we move, with this Pauline witness back to the Old Testament prophets.

4.  Cromwell announced Britain to be a new Israel, and pushed us further into the Old Testament, and back to the Mosaic era. By executing the king, he moved the world back to the time of the Judges.

5.  The discovery and establishment of the new world, and America, takes us back to Noah, whose ark landed in a new world, and it was a world of “nature,” and it initiated an era of “natural law.”

6. The French Revolution takes us all the way back to the Garden of Eden. The French Revolution believed it was recreating an unfallen paradise. While this is an anti-Christian sentiment, it belongs to the Christian era, albeit as a rebellion from it. Even in rebellion, it cannot escape.

7. And finally, the Russian Revolution of 1917 takes us all the way back to Genesis 1:1-2a. The Bolsheviks aspired to entirely recreate the world, and exult in “eternal revolution,” the state of Genesis 1:2: “the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep.” We have entered the era of trusting to the chaos, and taking a dip in the chaos to recreate all things. Again, the Bolsheviks were anti-Christian, but they could not escape the Christian era, even in everlasting revolt, revolution, and chaos. The 20th century was not only politically, but also scientifically dominated by the ultimacy of chaos, as Darwinism attempted to give a new creation story.

We have come to the beginning of the Bible. We have moved from the medieval world being shaped and formed by the incursion of the Last Judgment into history (artistically culminating in Dante’s Divine Comedy), to the very beginning of the Bible in the creation of formless matter. There is nowhere left to go backwards. Where to now? Let me make a suggestion that can carry us beyond where Rosenstock left us when he published his great book in 1939. We now return to the very end of the Bible, and perhaps human history will take us through the book again, landing in new and diverse places. I would suggest that now, we move to the one pericope that is beyond the Last Judgment, the last great city of God, the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21-22.

II

Luther’s and Cromwell’s settlements are still with us, even through subsequent revolutions. Part of the Reformation and post Reformation settlement was the nation-state, and the rise of denominations. Republicanism and democracy were expressions of new Protestant political maturity, largely overtaking monarchy everywhere, and a unified church gave way to many denominations. The Republican and parliamentary nation-state is central to the Protestant era. And with it have been national expressions that have embodied tyranny, but have still maintained nation-state status.

But we are now entering a new era, the era of city connected globalism. Cities have achieved vast, new importance, and cities have global, and not just national connections. They also embody within them, the new tribes, the new small groupings of almost infinite variety. We are now a global world connected by cities, and the great war is the conflict between the city as The Whore of Babylon vs. the city as The New Jerusalem. This is both why gender is a new, front-line issue, and points to the central symbolism that will also give rebirth to marriage, the biotic family, and fatherhood, the breakdown of which constitute the sociological crisis of our time, and the source of almost all of our social ailments. The New Jerusalem is a glorious lady whose husband is King Jesus. The Whore of Babylon could be a male homosexual, a gender-fluid bi-sexual, a lesbian.

To fill out where the new age in this age of ages is promising to develop, let us follow the contours of Scripture, now going the opposite direction, from the end of the book of Judges into the books of First and Second Samuel. The last judge in the book of Judges is Samson. Samson is a very odd figure. He is a judge not just of military might, but, as is well known, of superhuman strength. Through Judges, the long term trend is one of decline. Over and over, Israel fall into sin, into the worship of foreign idols, and God gives them over to their enemies. Then, the people cry out to God in their misery, and God raises up a champion who as a great military leader, once again delivers Israel. There is an uptick in Israel's fortunes, but each deliverance is less complete than the last. When finally, God raises up Sampson as the final deliverer, he is significantly a superman. The meaning is clear. Israel is now so corrupt that it is impossible to raise a significant army. Therefore, Samson is a one-man army. That is why he represents the final deliverance of the judges, and God is going to renew the covenant by raising up an entirely different form, a glorified form of the covenant. God will raise up a king.

From the Samson narrative, the book of Judges comes to a close with two strange stories. For the first time, the repetitive phrase that Judges is noted for appears. "In those days, there was no king in Israel," (Judges 17:6). It is repeated three more times, and the book closes with that phrase with this addition, which appears first in Judges 17: "and every man did what was right in his own eyes." 

The first story is the story of the tribe of Dan establishing their own, private shrine, temple, priest, and religion, in competition with the true tabernacle of God in Shiloh. It is the story of a final, and corrupt, false religion being made an official cult in Israel.

The second story transpires in the city of Gibeah, which is a city of the Benjamites. To skip to the denouement, the men of the city gather round the house of a citizen who has given night's shelter to a stranger and his concubine, and demand he be sent out that they might "know" him. I.e., they want to commit homosexual gang rape. Since that is deemed too shameful, the guest's concubine is brought out and given to the men, and she is gang raped, all night long. In the morning when the man is to leave, she is dead.

The meaning of the second story, which concludes the book, and the era of the Judges, is that Israel has become Sodom and Gomorrah. Sodom earned its infamy as the city which desired to commit homosexual gang rape on two visitors to the city, who unfortunately for the inhabitants, turned out to be angels. The city was consequently destroyed in fire and brimstone. So likewise, the Benjamites are nearly destroyed by avengers from the other tribes of Israel.

The era of the Judges came to an end. Is it thus, the end of God's dealing with Israel? No, it is the end of that covenant settlement with Israel. God will move on to entirely renew the covenant by now raising up a king. That is the story of I Samuel. After a false start with Saul, who is a Benjamite (whose hometown, by the way, is Gibeah), a lad from the tribe of Judah is chosen, and he (David) becomes the great king of Israel. He clears the land of Philistines, and makes possible the building of the Temple in the city of Jerusalem. He is also the great type of the Great King who will be his direct descendent, who will usher in the New and final covenant, and finally become the King of all the earth when he has ascended into Heaven and is seated at the Right Hand of the Father.        

The older order is the order of the nation-state, and the denomination. The recent emergence of Donald Trump in the United States was an attempt to renew the older vision by retarding, and exposing "the deep state," which is the rancid dominance and control of the bureaucratic and to loosen the grip of its growing, web-like, and unaccountable existence. This was a good thing, just like reform in Rome was a good thing, but it is still not what the new world represents. We need the nation-state. The United States, and almost two hundred other states are central to global existence. But the nation state appears at this point not to be a self-renewing entity. If Donald Trump could not bring renewal to the nation state, probably no one can. I would suggest that its renewal can only come, as an aside, with a new vision, a new world, and from the smaller unit of the city.

Neither the nation-state, nor denominations, are going to disappear, any more than the tribes of Israel disappeared with the coming to the Davidic monarchy. But, like the tribes, they are destined to be of less significance as time moves on. For the first time in world history, the reality of the universal and global monarchy of Jesus is coming close to being a recognized and existential global reality. Jesus has been the King of the Earth since His ascension, but the recognition of this has not been global from that time to this. Now, it is upon us. And this King is also the Husband of His Bride, and now symbolized globally in the city.

Two kinds of globalism exist. We find the first in Genesis 11 with The Tower of Babel, which represents the triumph of godless man in rebellion against the Living God. God placed a curse, and protection, on the builders by confounding their language, and making communication between them impossible, and then scatters them. This curse remains in place today, not only with a multitude of differing global languages, but other kinds of confusion of languages in all large institutions, hindering and limiting their growth. So, we find various agencies and bureaucracies each using differing operating procedures, manuals, and policy books, and being literally unable to communicate with each other. God limits global cooperation to limit the amount of evil that fallen man is capable of. However, we now see massive attempts to create new forms of globalism on the part of the fallen human race. Communism was a global ideology, and today, there is great desire to create global commercial empires.

I believe all of this is spurred precisely because the Dark Powers, the Devil and his minions, know that the church is reaching global dimensions, and a world-wide recognition of the universal monarchy of Jesus Christ is upon us. But Jesus Christ and His bride will be the triumphant ones in this contest.

The nation-state in the Western world is very much where the tribes of Israel were at the end of the book of Judges. The religion of humanism is now almost the officially ensconced religion of all left of center nation-states, including the United States. Gender confusion has also reached official and protected status in virtually all Western nation-states. The Supreme Court decision of Obergefell v. Hodges made gay marriage the law of the land in the United States. We are at the end of the era of the nation-state. God will renew His covenant with His church now, in a global way, and every city will begin the process of of being renewed in the image of the New Jerusalem, the Bride of Christ.            

I believe the era we are in is not the era of The Benedict Option, where we as the church withdraw from the world to the desert to preserve Christian civilization. Rather, I prefer The Francis Option, with Franciscans being the first order that was specifically a city order, called to bring the Gospel to the cities of Italy and Europe. Our cities now need to be converted, transformed, from centers of humanism and secular leftism to the typology of The Bride of Christ and The New Jerusalem. Denominations will not disappear, but will be of less importance, and the city itself will be the new principle of organization of many congregational expressions within the city. Every congregation, whether Baptist, Congregational. Methodist, Presbyterian, Catholic or Orthodox, will also be the church in the city, with every congregation working with every other.        

Impossible? God thrives on the impossible. It will be His work. It will be done.     


Richard Bledsoe is a Theopolis Fellow and works as a chaplain in Boulder, Colorado.

-->

To download Theopolis Lectures, please enter your email.

CLOSE