For some, Christianity is as American (or German, or English…) as apple pie (or strudel, or crumpets…)
However, as the early church looked at fervent displays of patriotism in their day, they saw an irreconcilable conflict between nationalism and Christianity. Here are five citations from church fathers that draw our attention to the conflict between nationalism and Christianity which sees the universal, borderless kingdom of God as one’s central allegiance.
1.
Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius was a turn of the fourth century church father from North Africa who was a professor of rhetoric and eventually the tutor of Constantine I’s son Crispus. In his Divine Institutes, he wrote of man as a creation of God unlike the animals since they are naked and defenseless, but we must survive by our wisdom and feelings of kindness to one another. “Therefore,” Lactantius wrote, “kindness is the greatest bond of human society; and he who has broken this is to be deemed impious, and a parricide. For if we all derive our origin from one man, whom God created, we are plainly of one blood… Therefore they are to be accounted as savage beasts who injure man; who, in opposition to every law and right of human nature, plunder, torture, slay, and banish.”
In other words, the mindset that separates mankind into races, nations, and conflicting interests is utterly contradictory to the Christian teaching of one humanity which derives its existence from one God.
2.
Irenaeus, the second century Turkish bishop from the south of France, was reflecting here on a now mostly forgotten reading of Deuteronomy 32:8-9 which saw God as dividing the nations at the tower of Babel and placing them under the authority of angelic beings which became corrupted. It was these angels which Paul described as the “powers and principalities” which Christ disarmed at the cross (Colossians 2:15), making a new nation from many peoples and delivering us from the power of evil national spirits. Those who insist upon national and ethnic identities are not under the one kingdom of Christ, but are still under the authority of corrupt angels. This is explained in greater detail in my book Fight the Powers: What the Bible Says About the Relationship Between Spiritual Forces and Human Governments.
3.
Lactantius also wrote in his Divine Institutes of those who spoke of the virtue of putting “the interests of our country as in the first place” as really intending “the inconveniences of another state or nation;” in other words:
“to extend the boundaries which are violently taken from others, to increase the power of the state, to improve the revenues,–all which things are not virtues, but the overthrowing of virtues.”
Is it virtuous to take away “the union of human society,” “innocence,” “the property of another,” and, most of all, “justice?”
Lactantius therefore concluded:
“How can a man be just who injures, who hates, who despoils, who puts to death? And they who strive to be serviceable to their country do all these things: for they are ignorant of what this being serviceable is, who think nothing useful, nothing advantageous, but that which can be held by the hand; and this alone cannot be held, because it may be snatched away.”
4.
The third century bishop Cyprian of Carthage, in his first epistle to Donatus, wrote of humanity’s violence toward one another: of roads blocked up by robbers, of seas beset with pirates, but also of “wars scattered all over the earth with the bloody horror of camps.
“The whole world is wet with mutual blood; and murder, which in the case of an individual is admitted to be a crime, is called a virtue when it is committed wholesale. Impunity is claimed for the wicked deeds, not on the plea that they are guiltless, but because the cruelty is perpetrated on a grand scale.”
To put it plainly, we do not escape the condemnation due to a killer simply because our killing is done in a military uniform or because we cheer on the violence from the sidelines while draped in our nation’s flag. The fact that murder is performed systematically on a grand scale does not mean it is morally praiseworthy, though this is the assumption we make when we cheer on our nation’s bloody conflicts.
5.
The second century North African bishop Tertullian, in De Corona (On the Military Crown), spoke critically of those who held their Roman citizenship in high regard with pomp and circumstance. Instead, he exhorted his Christian readers to remember that “you are a foreigner in this world, a citizen of Jerusalem, the city above. Our citizenship, the apostle [Paul] says, is in heaven.”
Many of the above citations are from A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs, available from Amazon here.