1 Comment on “Language, Race and Nation

  1. A few thoughts

    1. ‘Nations’ and ‘nation states’ aren’t identical concepts (ask the Scots, for instance!) However, nations are broad overlapping concepts. Thus one can be Swiss and a Francophone (or Semitic and Jewish) and European. Am I English or British (or a bit Irish)? Do I have to choose?

    2. One can easily accept that nations will always be around and our nationality is part of who we are.

    3. One should therefore be aware of sins that are prevalent in our ‘nation’ in order to avoid them and to be humble and welcoming with the gospel to those of other nations.

    4. God has ordained nations as a response to human sin. I’m taking the Noahic genealogy here as descriptive rather than prescriptive. (I don’t think I can accept your split between something being ‘ordained’ or ‘occurring’ in your second point Peter.)
    5. All Christians, by virtue of their adoption by God, become citizens of another nation and their allegiance to this nation is to transcend their original nationalities so that their identity as citizens of the city of God bonds them closer to ‘foreign’ brethren than their own unconverted countrymen.
    6. We are to rejoice where churches contain (and consciously seek to contain) Christians of different nationalities as a foretaste of heaven and as a sign to a world fractured by nationalisms of the reconciling work of Christ in the gospel.

    Thank you for stimulating these thoughts.

    In Christ,

    John Foxe.

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