Eschatology of Politics

Scot McKnight of Jesus Creed made the best comment I have seen on the US presidential election on a Kingdom Roots podcast. He made it before the results were known.

There is a massive distortion. Increasingly, American Christians get all riled up, just as the rest of the United States does during the election season and they develop an eschatology of politics. That is the belief that if we vote in the right person, the world will change, or our government will change, or our nation will change in the direction that we think that it needs to go.

For eighteen months, the church has been massively distracted from the mission of God in this world, which is not the betterment of the United States, but the evangelization of the world and the edification of Christians in the local church and the church universal.

The churches have been massively distracted from their mission, because they have becomes, along with the world, obsessed with political process and a belief that if we get the right leader, our nation will be a better place. This is almost belief in a theory of redemption through political process. I find this to be disgusting theologically, and unrooted in the Bible.

More important it focuses us on the wrong thing, in political process as a means of redemption, and it prevents us from seeing that the true means of redemption is the cross and the resurrection of Jesus, and the locus of that redemption is the church…

We are de-confessing that world will only become a better place when it is redeemed through Jesus Christ.

Scot’s concern also applies to those who believe that electing the wrong person can send the nation to wrack and ruin. That is also an eschatology of politics.