Seven Things in summary
1/ God is the sole source of authority
No state, government or other institution has authority over us unless it is exercised with our consent, a consent that we can withdraw, and acknowledges that it is accountable to us through law.
2/ The Gospel gives us a discipleship, a way of life and a Christian culture
The gospel gives us Scripture, the wisdom that comes through the experience of our fellow Christians and our own well-discipled conscience. The nation and its political culture are formed from Christian culture and require the constant renewal of that culture. Christian culture requires constant renewal through the lives, and through the public witness and the worship, of Christians.
The gospel has resulted in a vast informal covenant of Christian culture, which has given us a very high view of human sovereignty and the rule of law. This culture crumbles away when it is not renewed by Christian public worship.
3/ There is an anti-gospel
The gospel is imitated, and the imitations are offered as alternatives to the gospel, easier ways to the same end, the hope of human autonomy. We have to contrast the gospel with the anti-gospel, the culture of life with the culture of death.
4/ There is a contest between the gospel and the anti-gospel
The gospel raises man, gives him the hope of reaching maturity, and provides him with the company and the discipline by which he may endure the apprenticeship that will enable him to grow up into this maturity. All other rival versions take away this hope, leave him without the discipline or the company that would enable him to aspire to self-mastery, so that he remains foolish, frustrated and angry.
The gospel made our public institutions, but these have separated themselves from the gospel and are now turning away from public service to the sole pursuit of power, totalitarianism disguised by agendas and ideologies. The gospel re-affirms the truth of their vocation and warns the powerful of the consequences of this betrayal of the hopes of man. This takes place in public confrontation and contest between the gospel set out by Christian witnesses and all the representatives of all rival ideologies and institutions.
5/ Each of us has to become aware of this contest
Each of us has to become aware of this contest, and take measures to protect ourselves.
We may defend ourselves by learning and internalising for ourselves the whole experience of God’s people, given to us in the Scriptures. We do this in the worship in which the assembly of Christians give their public witness, in which those Scriptures are read and sung to the nation. There is no substitute for the experience we receive through the bible and through the worship that brings us into confrontation with the envious and aggressive rival powers of the age.
6/ We may have to resist the ideological and cultic demands of state and corporations.
We have to say that God only is the source of authority. All exercise of power must keep to its proper calling, which is to serve the common good. It must acknowledge its limits and remain modest. When it does not, its claims expand until it is making absolute claims on us, and compelling our obedience and punishing our autonomy.
We may have to refuse and resist the demands made on us and endure the consequences of doing so. We may talk through these pressures and threats, and our responses to them, and must make it possible for other Christians to do the same. We must pray publicly for those who are being persecuted, and for those who have overstepped their powers who are persecuting them.
7/ Public Worship
Our public worship is our public speech. You have to meet together in one place with other Christians and raise your voices together, singing and giving thanks to God, praying and lament as Christians have always have done. Our worship of God in Christ is the best thing we can do for our society and nation.
Seven Things
1/ God is the sole source of authority
The gospel is the source of life. The life we have, we have received from God through Jesus Christ, and from no other source. God gives us the promise of a future, in which we live with him, and through him, with one another. This is the gospel that has makes us human and that keeps us civil. It alone can bring us salvation, deliver us from death, and give us the unbroken life that God intends for us. It alone has created, and can sustain the culture of consent out of which the modern world has emerged. The gospel promises us that life, and Christ supplies it to us and defends it against all rivals.
Christianity is the blessing of God to us and so it is religion of life, and creates a culture of life. But there is another religion, the cult of death, which is the reverse of that blessing. It intends to undermine and remove the blessing. The Life Cult is honest, because it tells us what it is, but the Death Cult conceals what it is. It does not want us to realise that it is a cult, so we are not able to decide against it and defend ourselves from it. It does not present itself as a religion, that is, as a single package, which we can believe and follow, hides behind many claims, which are all claims to power. They present themselves in terms of our personal well-being, of our health, our safety and security, in terms of measures to increase our efficiency, to save whatever is under threat, to manage the economy and bring back growth. These are all claims to power, made by people, by institutions and governments, and behind them, by forces that acknowledge no limits and do not respect us because they do not fear God. The drive for limitless power is what the Death Cult is. It cannot bring life, so it hates everything that has life, and so only works to take life away. It exercises power through destruction. All our institutions were founded by Christians, but whenever they separate themselves from the gospel, they turn into the opposite of what they were, and become destructive.
2/ The gospel creates a way of life and a culture
As the gospel is heard and the Christian life lived, so a Christian culture is formed. The gospel tells us that we are made in the image of God, and so has it created a uniquely high view of the dignity of man. As a result we aspire to be independent, accountable, mature, unafraid, sovereign beings. We are given freedom, and Christian discipleship gives us the disciple to practice that freedom, to hang on to it, to use it well, which means use it in the service of those around us.
Religion – the Christian religion and no other – is the means by which we identify what is public, secular and therefore political. It is the means of the identifying what we have in common and then protecting public speech so we can deal with those concerns together.
This Christian culture has enabled generations to discover their identity through public service. Public service develops into political service, administration and government. Government is the outworking of the self-government of the many members of nation who understand that dignity comes through service.
It is the law, not the state, that is the source of authority. The law gains its authority from the political and moral culture of a nation, which comes from the gospel. The law is an expression of the sovereignty of the people formed by the gospel. The law therefore comes from Scripture and from the natural law of creation, both of them given by God. God is the ultimate source of law, as of all things. The nation is healthy when the state recognises that God, and not itself, is ultimate arbiter, and that the nation, with its long-accumulated wisdom expressed in its customs and culture, is the secular arbiter of law. God gives each of us sovereignty, so together as a nation we have authority to discover the law of God, the blessing revealed by the gospel.
This Christian culture that created our law and created this nation, and many other nations. This culture has also created an economy which has expanded around the world. This culture and nation exist only because of this Christian culture. When the gospel is heard, they thrive. When the gospel is not heard, they decay and die. Our culture and nation are dying. All the hospitals and schools and charitable institutions once founded and run by Christians have long been absorbed into central government. As people have demanded that government takes on more responsibility it has made greater claims about its own authority, and taken responsibility away from us. People give their own powers away, and so at our own request the state has demoted us from citizens to clients, customers and supplicants and so it has become our secular saviour. Even Christians have erected this idol and sustained this idolatry, unable to let go even whilst it has grown into a monster that hates them.
This Christian culture makes you a cultural Christian. It does not make you a Christian. For you to survive, and for that culture to survive, you yourself must take up your cross and become a Christian. You must be born again, be baptised into Christ’s passion and receive the promise of being raised with him at the resurrection of all. You must understand that this baptism makes you a member of his body, and makes you his witness, and it means that you have to receive the power of the Holy Spirit, be fed and equipped, and accompanied by those holy witnesses of all generations. Only so will you grow up, endure that service and be able to suffer the resentment of those who envy you, and so remain a disciple.
Our life depends on our preferring the culture of life, and the culture of Christianity therefore. It is for us to promote that culture that can regenerate our nation, adopt that discipline and learn those habits of mind that enable us to regard one another as equals and fellow members of nation, as political participants, and as bearers of the image of God. We may do this when we understand that that culture is not self-supporting. The culture, along with the political peace and economic prosperity that derive from it, must be constantly re-stated and renewed by the gospel. We regenerate our culture by our public worship of God. We cannot be cultural Christians, but must be actual witnesses and worshippers of God.
3/ There is an anti-gospel
There is the gospel and there is an anti-gospel, and there is a contest between the two. There is a shadow gospel, a pretend gospel. The true gospel is so admired and so envied that many imitations of it have spawned. All of them are images of the thing itself, but they are no more than imitations and fakes. None of them can do what the gospel does, for none of them can create life. They want to pass themselves off as less costly and demanding, and want to give you the impression of the same functionality. They claim to do what the gospel does, and yet they are lifeless. The anti-gospel creates an anti-culture, a culture of death.
The political class say that the political and the religious are two spheres, and that religion is a threat to freedom. But we say that the political and secular, the sphere of our mutual engagement, is generated and renewed by the religious resources of the Christian tradition, and that freedom, along with responsibility and self-discipline, comes from Christianity and can only be renewed by it.
Now we are at the turning of the time. If enough of our nation are determined to dismiss God, they will remove from the protection that the covenant has given us, our constitutionality will disappear and our nations will break up. They have taken for granted the advantages given by Christian culture. That protection has given us the priority of truth, the sovereignty of freedom, the dignity of the individual and the rule of law. None of this is given by nature; it is only given by the gospel, and if we dismiss the gospel, we remove ourselves from this political covenant that gives us truth, freedom, respect, justice and rising standard of living. Our elite has made a mistake, in taking this for granted. As a result, it will disappear, to be replaced by delusion, coercion, subjugation, violence and misery. We have done this to ourselves. We have not taken up this cross for ourselves, we have not received it and so have not passed it on, and the result is over so many years in the West each generation has become thinner and weaker. Few Christians are able to explain the purpose of this gospel, or make the connection between the gospel and Western and modern culture. few are able to see that modern culture may collapse as soon as there is no effectively vocal church to provide the public speech and so sustain that political culture of consent.
God may leave us. The gospel and the church will continue in other parts of the world, but in Britain and Europe, and these countries and their peace will be replaced by loss of the politics of consent, economic breakdown, civil strife, demographic collapse, and then by a slave society living under totalitarianism.
4/ There is a battle going on
There is a battle going on, over your head and all around you. It is a battle for you. You are the prize they are fighting for. Christ wants you. Satan wants to take you away from Christ. You are vulnerable until you realise this. If you do not take precautions, you will soon be swallowed up by those who want to take your dignity, freedom and life away from you. Each side intends to recruit you, so you must either fight with Christ, and so for your own life, or against Christ, and so against your own survival. This battle is between God who loves you, and the devil who hates you. It is spiritual, but it is fought through many different arenas, so that it may seem sometimes domestic and intergenerational, emotional, mental, psychological, intellectual, financial and economic and public and political. You have so many ways of losing this battle, and only one way of winning and surviving. If you realise that Christ has fought, and is fighting, for you, and you so say so and publicly give thanks, you will survive.
When you tell us that you don’t believe in God this is not a sign of independent thought. It only tells us that their propaganda has worked on you, conveniently for them. The line that you are convinced is your own, an expression of your own independent thought, has been repeated and drilled into us by the political class over many generations. Even without being a Christian, you are a beneficiary of Christian culture, as you are even when you deride the gospel and belittle Christians. The political class has told us generation after generation that those who confess God are ignorant and unworthy people. You may have submitted to them, and tell us that you don’t believe in God, but this is only because you believe them instead, and believe that they will reward your loyalty to them.
But it is not ignorant to insist that the powerful may not set themselves in God’s place as our judges, and that it is not for them to decide that we may not be their judges. Our fathers held the powerful to account, and the gospel is how they did so, and we should do the same. It is our essential public service to tell the powers-that-be emphatically that they are not our masters. They have always told us that we have no God just so that they themselves could take God’s powers and use them against us. They don’t want to be interrupted. Nevertheless, it is our job to interrupt them, and to tell whoever, both the powerful and the powerless, that God is the one true source of life and truth, and of all power and authority, and he is the guardian of our dignity and sovereignty.
5/ Discipline and discipleship teaches us freedom and responsibility
The gospel brings service and responsibility, and through them comes freedom. Freedom is learned and exercised through the discipline, and so through the practice of self-control and restraint, that comes with discipleship.
The contest is between the culture of freedom that results from the gospel, and the culture of power and force. The culture of freedom creates a space in which a people are able to take each other seriously, listen and speak, debate, agree and disagree, achieve consensus, and make decisions so that policies are formed, solutions are found and settlements emerge. The culture of freedom creates this constitutional way of life, in which everyone understands that everyone else is a participant, a voice and can offer their input, or dissent, refuse, and withhold their permission. It is a slow orderly anarchy, in which enough order emerges to keep most people just about satisfied most of the time. It is not top-down, but an emergent order. This is not the government taking all decisions for us. This is not powerful men deciding that we are too immature to decide for ourselves and doing everything they can to make us even more dependent and childish.
The culture of freedom exists only as long as people, shaped by Christian discipleship, insist on the dignity of each other person. We are taking part in the contest between the culture of freedom and wide political participation, and the culture of authoritarianism. It is a contest between consent and coercion, between independence and submissiveness, between the political culture of sovereign people, and surrender to the culture of death. We have to make this distinction between the culture of life, and turn to it, and the culture of death, and turn away from it.
If you do not protect yourself with the protection God’s gives you, you will be picked off, assimilated. Worse than that, you will be turned into an advocate of some self-declared new and improved version of Christianity and, though you may still consider yourself a Christian, you exercise your powers against those Christians who have not been absorbed. Or you may believe that you have grown beyond Christianity. It doesn’t matter which. You are now swapping the gospel, for misleading abbreviations of it, offering half-truths in place of the whole catholic and apostolic truth, and of course you are doing the opposite of what the Holy Spirit intends you to do, and so you working against him. You are now a threat to those around you.
We have lived under the blessing of God and so under the covenant. We have been sheltered by it for so many hundreds of years, that we assume that it will always be there. But it won’t. That culture is crumbling away and its protection is being taken away from us by forces that despise us. If our regime insists in rejecting God and dismantling the culture that has arisen through the gospel, God may give us what that regime demands. He will hear its prayers. God will let our political class have the consequences of their action, the consequences of which he has long protected them from. The culture of life is preserved by the God of life, but so is our freedom to shun that culture and pursue the culture of death. If our leaders continue to spurn the covenant and its protections, they will no longer have them. God who has held back the anti-culture of decay and the force of demotions will hold them back no more. When we allow our leaders to dismiss the covenant, seven other spirits push their way in and destroy the culture that once made us strong.
6/ We may have to resist the ideological and cultic demands of state and corporations
We should keep a proper distance from the state. You may have to refuse and resist the demands made on you. You are a Christian. God has made you his witness. As long as it is renewed by the gospel, you have a mind of your own. You are therefore able to conclude for yourself that our leaders have claimed too much, have lost their way, and do not have authority they claim. You may have to decide that the state has become an enemy of the people it once claimed to serve. You may have to decide that the state has just become a mob that must be withstood. You only have to stand, and give no sign of fear. It is a monster that is all fury, but which has no courage and no staying power.
You may have to decide that the particular circumstances in which you are being forced and tormented are not significant. They are not challenging you for the reasons they claim. It is not a matter of your own failings, as they claim, so the particular charges they bring against you may be irrelevant. They are frightened, despairing, angry people, fleeing from God, and determined to humiliate and silence whoever does not join in with them. They think that directing all responsibility and all blame at one individual will absolve them, and that punishing a single scapegoat and will make each member of the mob safe again for a while. The institutions of the state are this mob. You may decide that you can do no more than have pity on them, and though they cannot hear you, you can declare that God is witness to all this. Whenever the mob becomes enraged against you, you may look up over their heads and see that the Lord is always directly before you.
You have a conscience. You have a mind of your own. You may have to use it. You may simply have to say, ‘Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.’ The state is not your friend. You may have to follow your conscience and go the other way, against the crowd, into unpopularity and into constant wrangling with your employer and every institution. The government no longer speaks with one mind and a reliably meritocratic public service intention. It is now many rival forces, some more or less rational, others inadvertently or even deliberately obstructive and destructive. We may to conclude that they are deliberately doing what is destructive and we cannot be their enablers, and will not pay the taxes that make this possible, that we will not be complicit.
The government may not be your friend anymore. That is the possibility we have to consider and we have to allow one another to say this. We have to listen to one another reservations, weigh up and make decisions, perhaps even the decision to withhold our consent, and to say that we can no longer be members of this political fix, and that we are conscious objectors. Over many centuries Christians in the UK have been regarded as dissenters and nonconformists.
We cannot give the state or any political party or institution unconditional obedience. Our governments cannot cede their jurisdiction to any international institution, whether claiming to secure our peace, our defence, our health, or our human rights. Such institutions represent the attempt supplant our own governments and to acquire an unaccountable power over us, exercised from outside our own territory, without consideration of our sovereignty and without reference to our culture and law. The worship of God is all that keeps our public political life modest, limited, truthful, rational and liberal. To worship God is to ensure limited government with a high view of our individual sovereignty. Not to worship God is to allow unlimited government and diminish personal sovereignty. The worship of God is all that keeps a nation political and secular, and prevents it from becoming ideological, cultic and absolutist. Not to worship God is to worship other gods, and to remove our own God-given dignity and autonomy.
7/ Public Worship
Our public worship is our public speech. It is the best thing we can do for our society and nation. You have to meet together in one place with other Christians and raise your voices together. You have to pray and lament as Christians have always have done, and by singing and giving thanks to God.
Our public worship is our public speech. It is the best thing we can do for our society and nation. You have to meet together in one place with other Christians and raise your voices together. You have to sing what Christians have always sung. You can save your own life by singing. Sing and you and your culture and declare what Christians it is only your voices.
Singing is saying what is true, but doing it in unison. By standing and singing with others we show that the forces that want to split us up are powerless. the power of God to reconcile us and unite us is more powerful than any other power. The worship of God makes us mature, self-controlled, responsible, social and civil. Only God makes it possible for us to become human, and the more we acknowledge that this is what God does for us, the more the glory he intends for humanity appears in us.
Have you seen this 50-page Catechism?
Part one is here –
