On the Church as Cosmic Immune System

I. The God of Covenant

If we could travel back four millennia to a Canaanite hillside in the late afternoon, we might catch a glimpse of a weathered patriarch holding a gruesome vigil beside the bisected remains of a heifer, goat, and ram. We would see pools of blood on the ground, flies swarming over the carcasses. Nearby, a small pigeon and turtledove lie lifeless. The sun descends, first glowing fiery orange, then red. Ravens approach, seeking a meal of carrion. The man runs forward, waving his staff and shouting to drive them away. Exhausted, he drops to the ground beside the grotesque scene. His eyes close, and weariness overtakes him.

The man jumps to his feet, wide awake. Time has passed—we aren’t sure how much—but night has fallen and it’s hard to see. Have wild animals devoured his offering? He surveys the scene, and in the dim light it appears untouched. Then he gasps, transfixed. His squinting eyes are mere slits in a face frozen with shock and awe. A brilliant torch burning with billowing smoke passes slowly between the bisected remains of the animals. God’s presence moves through the carnage. He understands the symbolism. God is saying, “I will do anything to keep my promise to you. I’ll die before I break it.” Abram’s God never breaks a promise.

But Abram was a schemer and impatient. He would try to bring about God’s promise in his own strength, hurting himself and his family. No man, however great, can fulfill God’s promises apart from his direction, blessing, and provision.

This bloody meeting confirmed God’s promise that he would give Abram a son, an heir to all the material blessings he had accumulated. God sealed his promise with a covenant vow of self-imprecation—a ritual customary in Abram’s day in which each covenant party would walk between slain animals, effectively declaring, “Let this be done to me if I fail to keep my word.”^[1] But that night, the vow was one-sided. God made a promise that did not depend on Abram, so only God took on the vow of death.

Abram believed God, and his faith established a relationship that God marked with a covenant. Abram did not know the cost God would pay to keep his word, nor how far-reaching the promise would become. Yet from that day it grew, unfolding in his life and transforming him. Eventually, the promise would become too great for him and his family alone. It would bring an end to the tyranny of sin and death. In God’s covenant with Abram, the plan of God to redeem the whole world begins to take shape.

But that first covenant meeting was just the beginning of a story that would span decades. There were more meetings between God and Abram, all of them involving blood. And between the meetings, Abram would lose his way. In his anxiety for an heir, he fathered a child with a concubine. After all, a child with his wife, Sarah, seemed impossible—she was too old. But God did not abandon Abram. He confronted him about his lack of faith and intensified his promise. When God gives his word, he never walks away in disgust as a man might. He changed Abram’s name from exalted father to Abraham, meaning father of a multitude. God sealed Abraham’s clan with more blood—the covenant sign of male circumcision.

Despite his doubt, Abraham’s heir eventually arrived. What was impossible with man was possible with God. Sarah bore a child in her old age, and they named him Isaac.

Next, we see Isaac as a teenager. God visits Abraham again, and what he asks is inconceivable. “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering.” This has to be the most God has ever asked of a man—the ultimate sacrifice: blood, fire, and the annihilation of all Abraham believed God would do through him. But Abraham was ready to obey, having been prepared for this moment by decades of wrestling with God’s promise.

Once, he had tried to do what only God could do, but now he knew that God was good and would be faithful to his promise. He would obey even if it meant the annihilation of the covenant clan. Taking every step in faith, he began his journey to Mount Moriah, knowing God would turn evil into good somehow. In faith, Abraham and Isaac climbed the forbidding Mount Moriah. There they constructed an altar and arranged the wood. Then Isaac allowed Abraham to bind him. With a dagger raised in his trembling hand, Abraham was ready to plunge it deep into the heart of his son, his promised heir.

Why would God ask a father to kill his son? It shatters our ideas about the love and goodness of God. But this harsh reality—Abraham and his son, a knife ready for blood, an altar of faith and consuming fire—is the foundation of Christianity. In faith, he risked all he held dear in this world. God had ordered the sacrifice, and only he could rescue both Abraham and Isaac. As Abraham held the knife raised above Isaac, creation shuddered and held its breath. Then God spoke. Abraham had passed the test. Instead of Isaac, God provided a ram caught by its horns in a nearby thicket for the sacrifice. Abraham’s radical trust in God was rewarded with a broader promise—not for his clan alone, but for the redemption of the entire cosmos.^[2] And as we will see throughout this story, that redemption always involves blood.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with killing. As a boy, I hunted small game, and stalking my prey was thrilling—stepping lightly, moving furtively, seeing without being seen. But I remember standing outside in the late-evening light, my small hand clutching a lifeless partridge. A few moments ago, it had been alive, but the crack of a .22 rifle had changed everything. The successful hunt was momentarily gratifying, but I was somber as I held a sharp knife in my hand. My Dad said, “What you kill, you clean.” So it became my job to turn the bird into food for our dinner table. Depending on animal life for food requires an intimate kind of violence. Another’s life and blood enables mine to flourish.

The exchange of life for life is, and should be, troubling. It reminds us of our own mortality and raises ethical questions about what justifies the killing. So you will not be surprised that I am troubled by the blood flowing through the Old Testament narrative. This bloody business between God and man is confusing. Does God have a fixation with blood and death? To answer that question, we need to travel even further back, to when the world was new.

We watch as God asks a guilt-ridden young man, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.”^[3] The first son has murdered his younger brother—sin’s ultimate consequence has been realized. Blood was spilled, but God stepped into the moment and did not shrink from its horror.

In its first generation, the human family was already a wreck. The pattern that would recur throughout history was established: bloodshed, power, and exploitation would repeat generation upon generation. Cain’s parents disobeyed God, ignoring the cost, but they paid it. Death followed disobedience.

Adam and Eve did not die instantly, but gradually—first spiritually and then physically—their vitality drained away. When they found Abel’s dead body in the field, they must have been devastated beyond comprehension. They had seen dead animals, but never a dead person. Their son, the image of God,^[4] lay on the ground slowly returning to dust, emptied of his lifeblood.

Bloodshed was the result of sin, but it would also fulfill God’s promise to bless all the nations of the world. Near where Abraham had offered Isaac thousands of years earlier, God himself would become a sacrifice. Mount Moriah was now Jerusalem’s focal point—the temple mount. But just outside the city walls, Jesus of Nazareth would bleed to death on a hilltop cross. As he breathed his last, night came early. An earthquake shook the ground, and God tore the temple curtain that separated him from man. We can see the smoke billowing and the fire blazing as God walks between Abraham’s cloven carcasses. God is saying, “I have done exactly as I promised.” And the redeemed people of the covenant would work as agents of God to neutralize evil and promote good, preserving and healing our decaying cosmos.

So we see ourselves as God sees us—designed for relationship with him and bearing his image. Yet pushing him aside, we mar that image. We long for eternal life but chase empty pleasures and temporal success that will never touch the cosmic emptiness within us. We were built to be embraced in the arms of our loving Creator and destined for eternity with him, but we are reduced to dust and empty dreams. Delusions of grandeur can never mask the ultimate reality: we are dead spiritually, and our mortality is chasing us down in the streets.

II. The New Creation Inaugurated

Since the transgression of Adam, the color has drained from daily life, and those attuned to our predicament live with a sense of finality. Though life is filled with small pleasures, it is short, and the grave awaits us all. Yet God loves us so much that he became a man. In his incarnate nature, heaven joins with earth. In Jesus Christ we see the future of a cosmos restored and united with God. He once was not a man, but now he is both God and man. It was a one-way trip that reveals his deep desire to redeem mankind and all of creation. He is God, but he has experienced all our weaknesses firsthand and lived without sin, undoing its curse. Thanks to him, abundant living has not been lost forever.

After a short ministry, Jesus died at only thirty-three. According to the Bible, he is the spotless Lamb of God^[5] who has borne all our sins, personal and corporate. He rose from the dead on the third day^[6], and now he offers us eternal life through simple trust in him. This is usually presented as the full gospel story, but it is only the seed from which the good news grows. His resurrection cannot be simply mentioned—it must be celebrated. He has defeated death, and this guarantees our future resurrection. If we miss this fact, we empty the gospel of its hope.

Without our future bodily resurrection, death wins. Even after his resurrection, death still feels like a victor every day. We numb ourselves to the horror of it, but the Christian looks beyond the harsh reality of death, knowing it is defeated. We may see immediate effects as we trust in Jesus for reconciliation to God, but the reality of our future resurrection is just as certain. We know our immediate need of forgiveness, but many of us do not grasp its future implications. The God whose immediate spiritual presence comes to us through faith has defeated death in all its dimensions. One day soon he will put everything right in a new creation that joins heaven and earth once and for all. What he did in his incarnate nature, he will do to the cosmos when he returns. Knowing this, we cannot spiritualize or minimize the bodily resurrection of Jesus. In its physical reality, it secures our hope of an everlasting life, free from death and corruption. He was first, but all who trust him will follow him into vibrant, fully embodied human life that will never die.

New creation happened first in Jesus’ tomb. There his decaying earthly body was consumed and transformed into a new, everlasting one—a body that still eats good food, laughs and celebrates with his friends, and yet one that passes through walls if it chooses. This new kind of body is the destiny of every Christian. When he returns triumphant and calls the dead to life, Jesus will make all things new. Until then, we experience a foretaste of the new creation, looking forward to its completion in confident hope. Jesus is risen, and we also will rise.

Personal faith in Jesus initiates our new creation. It begins spiritually, a foretaste giving us hope for his return and complete physical rebirth. As we wait, we nurture our faith through baptism, communion, scripture reading, prayer, and fellowship with other believers in the church. In Christ, the new creation is already here, partial but still substantial.

But the new creation is not a private affair—it is profoundly social and communal. We often overemphasize our individual salvation. Yes, Jesus loves you and me. He died for us. But in an even more real sense, he died for the church. He loves us collectively as a young man adores his bride. We are part of her, like a strand of her hair catching the sun or the wrinkle next to her eye as she smiles at her beloved. And yet our individual experience is important to him.

In the new birth, we receive the companionship of his Holy Spirit, who forms a new God-oriented character within us. This new life, though only a foretaste of what is to come, is very real. Sometimes we wrestle with the remnants of the old life, but the new one is working itself out in us, making us more like our Savior. We are never alone in this struggle. The Holy Spirit uses the church to shape us so others can see his salvation being worked out in us. The inner reality of our new creation will be revealed in our outer lives. We are always in progress and never fully realized, yet our new life cannot fail. God raises the dead, and he will transform our brokenness into beauty.

The Bible describes Jesus as the firstfruits of the new creation, firstborn from the dead, and our pattern and guarantee of an incorruptible eternal life—an embodied new creation.^[7] It began at his resurrection, but it is yet to arrive in its fullness. At his triumphant return, Jesus will join heaven and earth in an entirely new and beautiful world that is stunningly beautiful and strange, yet in some ways continuous with life as we know it today.

Though we live in the midst of the wreckage of a fallen cosmos infected by sin, red in tooth and claw,^[8] Christians do not conform to its harsh realities. Instead, our personal lives point toward the inbreaking hope of the new creation. Still, we are often tempted to conform to the norms of the fallen world in our personal morality. The cosmos runs on pragmatism motivated by self-interest. Sometimes it dupes us into living two lives: one guided by cold realism, and another featuring hope-filled prayer and worship. We cannot compromise. We are citizens of heaven even as it invades the fallen cosmos. We must live by that inbreaking reality—loving others and exercising uncompromising personal holiness. We live in this fading world as if the new one had already come.

III. The Immune System Principle

The fallout from the wreckage of our world leaves its imprint on all of us, one day at a time. Occasionally it cuts us deeply. Perhaps this is a blessing in disguise. We can only be satisfied by God, but our idolatrous bent would have us be satisfied with the world instead—if only it did not cut us when we hold it too tightly. The chaos of cosmic corruption leaves wounds that are not abstract: they come to us through flesh and blood—by the hands of family, friends, and enemies alike. As a seven-year-old child, I was assaulted by a bigger and stronger boy who hated my skin color. Face-down in the muddy playground, I felt more pain than I’d known the world could hold. I did not feel anger. The hurt was too all-encompassing. Only one thought floated to the surface: Why?

In the days and weeks that followed, I felt exposed and alone. Who knew when someone might be lurking behind a tree, waiting for a moment of weakness? I felt shame about my weakness and anger at the one who had hurt me. But I pushed it down, held it below my conscious mind, and eventually it disappeared—or so I thought. But anger always resurfaces and spills over.

I didn’t have the strength to retaliate. But even if I had, retaliation wouldn’t have achieved anything except to confirm another young man’s hatred for white people. Without forgiveness, the cycle goes on through retaliation: tit for tat. We need someone to absorb the evil. The cycle must stop. We are flooded by evil—so much that unless it is turned to good, we will drown in a flood of cosmic bile.

It was not until I was much older that I forgave my attacker completely. After years of carrying shame and fear, I had come to a breaking point. I was angry at God and could not see that he loved me. How could a good God let me experience so much violation when I was young and innocent? More memories had surfaced. Before the playground assault, a neighbor had molested me. Afterward, someone I loved and trusted violated me even more deeply.

My forgiveness breakthrough came when I understood the pain Jesus of Nazareth suffered as he carried my sins on the cross. He died for me. When I understood the crucifixion of Jesus, I was able to accept my own suffering and offer it to him in gratitude. After all, it was nothing compared to his.

He began his ministry with the words, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”^[9] These words have confused many of us ever since. Only three years later, he died, and though his disciples claimed he rose from the dead, he left no trace of a political, messianic kingdom. Instead, he appeared briefly to his followers, spoke with them, ate with them, and disappeared.

Were his disciples a deluded band of followers who based their lives on a hallucination of their risen Lord? That is unlikely. After all, most of them gave their lives for the belief he was the Messiah. The gospel narratives paint a picture of sane, questioning followers who were convinced that Jesus was physically resurrected. Initially, we see them as fearful, skeptical followers, devastated by their loss and unlikely to expect or believe in his resurrection from the dead. Then he appeared to them, but some doubted. When the apostle Thomas saw him, he demanded to touch his wounds to verify his bodily reality.^[10] The disciples were just like us—unwilling to be deceived—especially regarding the life or death of one they loved and with whom they had ministered for three years. This resurrected Christ was the Jesus of Nazareth they knew. He walked through walls, and yet he sat down and ate with them. This is not an account of emotions at fever pitch, heightened by wishful thinking, not a super-spiritual reality-denying delusion. It is concrete, corporeal, earthly interaction between the disciples and their risen Lord.

What of the behavior of the disciples? If this were a case of wishful thinking and self-delusion, we would expect them to shrink from their belief once the hard realities of persecution and suffering set in. But they lived as victors carrying out a mission given by God, certain they would succeed. They were confident because they believed Jesus had authority and had delegated it to them. After all, he had told them so just before he crossed into heaven: “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.”^[11] So they went, heads held high, proclaiming what they had received and paying the ultimate price for their willing obedience. The kingdom had come. It didn’t look like everyone had expected. It wasn’t political, and it wasn’t just for the Jews.

Much blood and ink have been spilled over the question, What is the kingdom of God? But it doesn’t need to be complicated. The answer, as I see it, is both simple and profound. The kingdom of God is new creation. The old creation is fallen and subject to corruption, death, and decay. The new creation reverses the curse of sin. Jesus died on our behalf and rose to defeat sin once and for all. At his resurrection, he transmuted his mortal body into an incorruptible, everlasting one. Death has no hold on him, and he promises the same to those who trust him.

The first act of new creation—the resurrection—undid the curse of Adam’s sin. Jesus has a new body that is the prototype of our future eternal and incorruptible, glorified bodies. This truth grounded the Apostle Paul when he quoted the prophet Hosea, “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”^[12] God’s kingdom has begun on earth. As in the garden of Eden, death came first spiritually, then physically, so in the kingdom, life comes first spiritually, then physically. Christians, though mortal, will all be fully alive when heaven and earth are united. At the return of Christ, what is true of him alone will be true of the entire cosmos. There will be no sin or suffering, and evil will be undone.

The kingdom is here now in the spiritual life of believers, but it is not yet fully realized. The faithful obedience of Christians who choose to live according to the dictates of this now-and-not-yet kingdom testifies to its reality. The early disciples gave their lives for its reality, and so do many contemporary Christians.

We live in the present according to the reality of the future. Confident in the return of Christ and the redemption of the cosmos, we can accept abuse and ridicule, and by the grace of God we can return forgiveness and love—not responding in kind. This is what God asks of us. Though we sometimes fail to live this way, we still hold it as our standard. We are responsible to live in the pattern of Jesus, returning good for evil.

Jesus spoke in parables that sometimes mystified his followers. But when he spoke about good and evil, he was direct and clear. Turn the other cheek. When ridiculed, respond with kindness. Go the extra mile^[13] to serve those who hate you. And in the most contrarian teaching of all, Jesus told his followers to love those who hate them.^[14] These commands ring like a church bell from the tallest steeple of the world, but often fall on deaf ears. They are the laws of a kingdom radically different from our world order of power, prestige, control, and dominance. But living in this new reality draws the blessings of the future new creation into the present. In obedience to Jesus, we experience his radical grace transforming evil into good, illuminating our darkness and healing our wounds.

Jesus bore our perversion, despair, and rebellion on the cross. He has become our mediator so that we can approach God without fear. At the cross, Jesus instituted the new covenant in his blood. God walked between the bloody pieces of Abram’s slain animals. He bore the cost of all our covenant breaking. At his resurrection, he demonstrated his role as the second Adam,^[15] the first of a new kind of humanity without sin. He merged divinity with humanity, reversing the sin and hostility that had kept us apart. He rose again as the first act of new creation grounded in his new covenant.

As Jesus Christ bore our sins, we are to bear with the sins of the world, enduring them. We are to be an immune system, absorbing and neutralizing evil. Jesus paid the cost of our covenant breaking, removing it. He bore it himself, enduring the full cost. His blood was the blood of the new covenant. He is the guarantee of his faithful willingness to save all who trust in him, because he already paid the cost of our covenant-breaking ways. He promised to give his life by walking between the animals Abram laid out for him, and he kept his word. Like any metaphor, this comparison has its limits, but it captures something essential about how Christians are called to function in a broken world.

We Christians follow his example. Like him, we must absorb the sins of others, letting them stop with us. We turn the other cheek^[16] without retaliation. But accepting evil and returning good is not a human work. It is only possible through the power of the Holy Spirit within us, so it is dependent on our spiritual growth. We nurture the growing presence of God within us by reminding ourselves that Christ has already defeated sin and death. We encourage ourselves by remembering that we share in his new creation life now, and seeing that reality, we are not easily seduced by the appeal of taking matters into our own hands. Rather than demanding that we are avenged, we neutralize evil by forgiving it. By the grace of God and the power of his Holy Spirit, evil can stop with us. The church is called to be the immune system of the cosmos.

IV. Living the Paradox

Seeking Justice

How then are we to deal with those who sin against the powerless, the poor, children, and women? Surely we must work for justice, even if it is partial. Our attempts at justice should be good-faith attempts to create the sort of justice only God can provide. When we make arrests, gather evidence, and put transgressors in the dock, we point to the ultimate justice that is yet to come in the new creation. Yet when seeking justice, we must remember our role is not purely retribution but the absorption and neutralization of evil. Perhaps the personal and communal contexts are both at play here. As individuals, we respond to evil with good. As a community we do the same, but without minimizing the evil that has been done. We work for justice for those who have been wronged without demanding our own satisfaction.

We can pursue justice without retribution or vengeance, and without hatred for the perpetrator. We experience the sins of others, feel the painful effects, and yet love the offenders. We alternate, because of our corruptible nature, between offender and offended. We hurt others as we have been hurt. Our occasional loss of faith in action may give us the humility we desperately need. Without it, we could never take in the sin of others and refuse to pass it on.

But justice demands more of us. Jesus taught that it was better for an offender to be drowned than to allow them to repeatedly sin by misleading or taking advantage of a child.^[17] Here we see a broader principle of justice. Jesus expected us to forgive, to let the evil end with us, but he also expected us to do everything in our power to prevent repeat offenses of the same kind. Love for the offender and for the victim requires us to put a stop to sin emphatically and to forgive it completely. This all sounds very challenging and high-minded, but what does it look like in practice?

A recent and striking example comes from Erika Kirk, whose husband Charlie Kirk was assassinated on September 10, 2025, while speaking at Utah Valley University. At his memorial service eleven days later, before tens of thousands of mourners, she publicly forgave Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old charged with the murder. “That young man,” she said through tears, “I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it’s what Charlie would do.”^[18]

Yet her forgiveness did not mean the absence of justice. Prosecutors charged Robinson with aggravated murder and announced they would seek the death penalty—though Erika herself opposed capital punishment in this case. Here we see the immune system principle in action: she absorbed the evil personally, refusing to pass on hatred or demand vengeance, while the community pursued justice through proper legal channels. The evil stopped with her, even as the machinery of justice continued its necessary work. Her witness had ripple effects—actor Tim Allen, moved by her example, publicly forgave the drunk driver who had killed his father over sixty years earlier. This is how the church functions as an immune system: one act of courageous forgiveness can neutralize evil and inspire others to do the same.

Seeking the Welfare of the City

I am a political outsider. My Mennonite upbringing taught me that a Christian must pray for their country and serve others practically. Political engagement was taboo. We were to be salt and light—the quiet in the land who embody the love of Christ through our faithfulness and hard work.^[19] I did not question this emphasis when I was young, but as I grew intellectually and thought critically, our disengagement and passivity seemed out of sync with the biblical narrative, which is full of high-stakes political engagement and reveals a God invested in world affairs, not distant from them.

I dug deeply into our Christocentric theology and soon realized we weren’t standing on solid ground biblically. We thought the cross of Jesus Christ sanitized the troubling stories of warfare and bloody sacrifices. It was as if we said, “Jesus died to end all that Old Testament carnage.” That is partially correct. But the God of the New Testament is no different from the God of the Old. This came home to me when I read the Book of Acts and encountered the story of Ananias and Sapphira.^[20] There on display is the old theme of sin and death, and God meting out the death penalty. The dying and forgiving God revealed in Christ is also the avenging God. While he wants peace, he accepts no substitute for the real thing. Real peace, shalom, can only come when things are set right. It flows from justice.

Christians are not called to remove themselves from the world, but to be different in our relationship to it. We must be agents working for the good of our communities and the world as a whole. We are salt that seasons and preserves the world around us. But salt is useless unless it’s applied. We are called to be light, and so we must shine brightly enough to be seen. Reading these simple metaphors in Matthew’s gospel^[19:1] convinced me, yet again, that my well-meaning upbringing had missed something vital. Jesus assumed his followers would be actively engaged in their political context. We are called to be distinct, but intermingled.

My abdication of political responsibility came from quietism, but another form is more prevalent today: millennial escapism. If God will destroy this world at the end of time, why are we trying to improve it? Those who accept this belief can make peace with exhausting the world’s resources because it’s a temporary spaceship and not really our home. But the New Testament teaches of Christ’s return and a new earth that joins with heaven. Creation itself will be redeemed from the curse of sin, and everything will be put right. This should cause us to question the validity of a complete destruction of planet Earth—a creation God called good and that he intends to redeem along with us. While I believe the new creation can repair the ill effects of our mismanagement of our resources, living in hope of the new should enable long-term thinking and genuine stewardship of all we own, including our planet. No, we cannot succeed in creating perfect justice, shalom, and environmental health until Jesus returns. But refusing to work for these good ends simply because we cannot achieve perfection is like a Christian refusing to pursue personal holiness until Christ returns. We must do what we can.

Over the last decade, I’ve been dismayed by the polarity and outrage that charge our culture and can begin to sway my emotions. It’s become so prevalent that if I hear someone talking and begin to feel any anger or outrage, I stop myself and ask, “Who is gaining from manipulating my emotions?” We are being played constantly. Though over half of Americans believe truth is relative, we live like the old prophets in the conviction of absolute truth, of goodness and evil, and our infallible grasp on it. But, sadly, we cannot seem to agree about the nature of good and evil itself. On the right, transgenderism is a great evil, while the left sees it as a great good. Abortion is murder, says the right. Easy access to abortion is an inalienable human right, says the left. Leftists seem to ground their absolute claims on the sovereignty and wisdom of the state, and the right looks to the founding of our country and past that to the authority of Christian scripture. We are at an impasse. But when we see these polarities, we must not despair. Our calling is not to win the argument through force of will, but to absorb the anger on both sides, speak truth clearly, and refuse to perpetuate the cycle of outrage while advocating for the truth. We must trust that, in the new creation, truth will finally be a settled matter. We can rest in that hope.

V. Christian Political Engagement

The church as cosmic immune system doesn’t retreat from political life—it transforms it. But this transformation looks radically different from conventional political engagement. We must neutralize evil rather than propagating it. When we refuse to retaliate, we provide space for God to turn evil into good, but we are not passive. We must demolish harmful ideas that assert themselves against the knowledge of God. When others call evil good, we do not let it stand. The high-stakes give and take of political discussion is not a justification for toxic behavior. We must not ignore the line between political argumentation and personal vitriol.

We are not meant to be weak. Our model is Jesus, who was strong and kind, able to express anger, yet loving. Once, he even used a whip to drive moneychangers from the temple grounds.^[21] He confronted the Jewish leaders publicly, but never stopped loving them. He despised their pretense and called them to repentance. Like him, we must confront ideologies with truth and point out societal corruption and hypocrisy. If a political party advocates for poisonous ideas, we might want to call them a “brood of vipers,”^[22] as Jesus did the Pharisees. But Jesus used prophetic language because he was a prophet, and no Christian holds that office in the Old Testament sense. When we condemn ideologies and political agendas, our fallen nature will tempt us to demonize rather than correct the people who hold them. Resorting to ad hominem attacks will close the door to meaningful dialogue and harden opposition to the truth.

Jesus never crossed that line, because he knew what was in every person’s heart and confronted it with truth. He was unapologetic about his direct and sometimes angry discourse, yet Nicodemus, a leader from the opposing party, felt comfortable approaching him privately.^[23] Jesus showed him respect, gave him a hearing, and told him he needed a complete change of heart. In private, he spoke gently. In public, he spoke emphatically. He hated how the Pharisees misled the people and wept over their refusal to submit to God, yet he treated Nicodemus with respect. This exemplifies a much misunderstood principle we all must emulate: tolerance.

We should debate and demolish arguments, but beware how our radical commitment to truth can arouse our outrage and provoke discourse that demeans others.^[24] Christians are called to love ally and opponent alike, and only true tolerance makes this possible. I have often heard the adage, Hate the sin, and love the sinner. It has implications for the public sphere. Just as we tolerate private sins, we must also tolerate the false arguments that oppose us. We hate and demolish false ideology, but we love the ideologist.

We do well to remember that ideology, especially our own, often becomes idolatry—it is the political man’s substitute for true religion. We can elevate our founding documents and political platforms to the level of revealed truth. But we betray our call to hope in the new creation when we believe the ultimate fate of our nation rests in political victory. Our true hope is to be found in the eventual full lordship of Jesus Christ over a redeemed cosmos. Reforms based on a biblical ideology can be instrumental for good, but political concerns must never be our ultimate aim. We are building for a different kingdom, an eternal one, in which the only thing that matters is knowing our Creator.

At this moment, we are the church militant against evil on all sides, but our confidence is in the future return of Christ and the church triumphant. On that day, Jesus will conquer evil, and all its victories will be brought to nothing. So we live in hope, certain that the victorious Jesus will invade the present to preserve our fading world and to give us a foretaste of the permanent glory to come.

Harvey A. Ramer

Harvey tells the truth about living by faith when faith feels hard. As an essayist from central Florida, he explores how doubt and trust can coexist, how work can serve calling, and how ordinary struggles become places where God shows up. He offers coaching conversations for successful professionals wrestling with the question: If I'm so successful, why do I still feel empty?