“When you start blending the gospel with nationalism, you don’t just confuse categories—you corrupt the message. The gospel isn’t about reclaiming a country; it’s about redeeming people.
This kind of distortion doesn’t stay contained. It ripples out—generation after generation—leaving behind a trail of disillusioned people who think Christianity is about moral superiority and cultural dominance instead of forgiveness and grace.
Lord have mercy.”
Tullian Tchividjian
Billy Graham Grandson
Former Presbyterian
1.) Blending the Gospel with Nationalism?
Yet isn’t this what Jesus did when He told his disciple to teach the nations to observe all things that Jesus had taught them?
These chaps keep using the word “Nationalism” like it is this poison rag that is inconsistent with the Gospel. Yet, the Gospel has every intent of having all nations owning Christ as Lord. After all, Christ must rule until all things are placed under His feet …. including nations.
This also demonstrates the age old Baptist type behavior of insisting that the Gospel is only an individualistic thing. The Gospel is to have no corporate or Institutional impact. Individuals can be saved, so the thinking goes, but not families, ethnicities, nations or cultures.
Indeed, I would go so far as to say that if the Gospel is not blended with a proper and biblical understanding of Nationalism, that it is NOT the Gospel.
2.) The Gospel is about redeeming individuals and reclaiming countries. Does Tullian really believe that the LORD Jesus Christ is not interested in reclaiming countries. What does Tullian do with the idea that the Gospel has the power to restore “wherever the curse is found?” I suspect that Tullian, and all people who talk like this own a pessimistic eschatology. If they are postmills (and Andrew Sandlin talks this way) then they have contradictions all over their eschatology.
3.) One wants to shake Tullian, and his ilk, and ask them why they are so opposed to Nations owning Christ and upon owning Christ weaving into their constitutions and law order the teaching and standards of Biblical Christianity. How could that possibly be a bad thing?
4.) Christianity can be both about forgiveness and grace as well as about moral superiority and cultural dominance. A Christian people who are part of a Christian nation should be morally superior to nations who are anti-Christ and should also have cultural dominance over them until such a time as they repent.
Now, if Tullian is talking about the self-righteousness that can come from those who do not understand themselves sinners saved by grace alone then of course that kind of moral superiority should be abominated and the culture that produces should NOT have dominance but a people believing that they are morally superior and so should have cultural dominance – only because of Christ’s favor – while they continue to embrace that they are simultaneously sinner and saint are to be celebrated. All Christians should strive for that type of moral superiority and cultural dominance. It is a righteous thing and not evil in God’s sight that the righteous should rule over the wicked Christ hater.
