What is a nation?

As the debate over the united nations of Europe floods our media, Jim Sayers asks a pertinent question.

2016 is the year for the  people of Britain to think hard about nationhood.

As we head towards a referendum on Britain’s EU membership on 23 June and as the outcome of this could precipitate a further independence referendum in Scotland, it is vitally important to think through how the Bible defines nationhood.

Not only that, the arrival of unprecedented numbers of refugees in Europe from Syria and many other troubled countries raises questions of integration and identity that we seem unready to address.

Part of God’s plan

In the contemporary Christian mission conversation there is plenty of talk about global cities and of how people from so many nations can be reached in them. Missionaries go to serve in another country but do not learn the indigenous language because local people also speak English (after a fashion). We talk about ‘global mission’ and riding the wave of globalisation and all its benefits without realising that something very precious is being lost: the biblical concept of nationhood.

I want to argue here that the nations in Scripture are part of God’s creation plan, that they are central to the ‘great commission’ and that they will still have their place in the New Creation. Therefore we had better make sure that we understand nation-hood correctly in a biblical framework.

The problem we have is that, for over 200 years, Christians in the West have allowed their understanding of nationhood to be shaped by the categories of the secular Enlightenment. The American and French revolutions gave us the ‘nation-state’, a concept defined by political power, national borders and citizenship, where the ‘body politic’ is sovereign. The focus of a nation’s life is its government, its economy and the boundaries of its jurisdiction. Watch the news today and the whole bulletin will follow that agenda, evidence of the limited things that matter in a secular society. The biblical concept of nationhood is much richer and to recover it we need to return to the Book of Genesis.

Genesis 10–11 – a balanced account of nations

When we read Genesis 1–11, chapters 10-11 get very little attention. Christians in the West tend to read these chapters through secular individualist spectacles and the nature of human identity as defined in nations is so often missed. (To prove this, check any reformed Systematic Theology sitting on your shelves.)

These two chapters tell us how to understand the world as a patchwork of nations. First, Genesis 10 lays out a table of the nations descended from the sons of Noah. There is plenty going on here. Some nations were named after an individual, such as Gomer, and others were known by a more generic plural such as the Jebusites, showing that different nations are shaped by different histories and ancestor myths. We know many of the nations listed because they feature in the Bible’s storyline.

Yet while the origin of the Philistines is explained in 10.13, as a nation they did not exist at this point, nor (significantly) did Israel, while other nations in the table disappear from view. So the Table of Nations is telling us that nations emerge from other nations and begin to prosper, but can just as quickly decline and die. The Table of Nations gives us an account of the early world as filled with classifiable, known nations. This was always God’s plan for the world.

Secondly, the Table of Nations also contains an important fourfold formula in 10.5, 20, 31. ‘These are the sons of… by their clans, their languages, their lands and their nations.’ It acts in the same way as the ‘evening/morning’ phrase in Genesis 1, adding structure and grandeur to the Table. But, most of all, it defines what a nation is. Each formula lists three elements that constitute the final element, a nation.

‘Clan’ suggests the idea of blood line, and each clan member would know their family line. There is no less interest in family history today and where someone from another nation marries into the family line, they enrich that line but become part of it, as Ruth did (Ruth 1.16–17).

‘Language’ is also crucial to each nation, as it is the basis of a shared national conversation. If two people from opposite ends of the same island can have a shared cultural conversation and fully understand each other, then that defines the extent of one nation.

Finally, ‘land’ in the sense of a defined homeland is also crucial. As a nation shares one climate and learns to live in a way appropriate to that climate, so the land and climate will define their national character. Even when dispersed across the world, an ethnic minority will have a love for their homeland and it will continue to define them.

So these three elements, clan, language and land, are used in Genesis 10 to define the biblical concept of nationhood. What is more, 10.32 says that this definition serves all the nations of the earth that spread out after the flood to fulfil the creation mandate. It is universally normative for our understanding of nationhood.

No mention of race

Also, there is no mention of ‘race’ in Genesis 10. Race is not a biblical concept but comes from the Enlightenment and is another concept that needs to be rethought. Genesis 10 teaches the unity of the human race.

Implicit in Genesis 10 is the idea that the nations, in spreading across God’s earth, were also intended to worship him. Genesis 11 records what happened when they rejected the worship of God. They replaced it with a great idol, the building of the utopian city of Babel (Babylon), a demonstration of the hubris of empire and the oppression that goes with it.

By their own dominance, the tower builders tried to build their dream, probably by the oppression of those who actually did the work, with one language to create one unified system that would proclaim the victory of the human race without God. They thought they could build a tower to the heavens and make a great name for themselves. But God had to come down to see it (what a come-down!) and he quickly frustrated their schemes by the confusion of language. God intervened partly to judge them for their evil, but also to stop the spread of that evil. They were scattered as an act of preventative grace, to return them to their creation mandate of filling the world with a diversity of nations. As there is unity and diversity in the Godhead, so we should expect a similar unity in diversity in his plan for many nations with many languages.

If we are to understand nationhood bibli-cally, we need to balance Genesis 10 and 11 carefully. We should not dismiss nationhood as the source of all the evils of nationalism, as it is clearly God’s plan for his world. At the same time, we must learn the stark lessons of Babel. Nations are good: they were created by God and are under his sovereign control. Nations are bad: they are captivated by self-centred pride and sinful ambition that builds empires of arrogance and oppression. As Don Carson puts it: ‘this side of the fall this world is simultaneously resplendent with glory and awash in shame.’

Acts 2 – to every nation under heaven

The opening verses of Acts 2 have many clear echoes of Genesis 10–11. Indeed, the Table of Nations tradition that springs from Genesis 10 shapes many passages of Scripture.

It has been a commonplace to see Pentecost as the reversal of Babel, as though a curse was lifted, but this is actually not the case. The distinctions between nations and barriers of language remain after Pentecost, but Pentecost demonstrates that the Holy Spirit is bound by none of them and can work in the hearts of people in any nation through any language.

If Pentecost had been the reversal of Babel, it would have had to have included the beginning of a new global language, so that ‘the whole earth had one language and the same words’ (Genesis 11.1) but the opposite happened. For one brief revelatory event the apostles were able to speak in many indigenous languages and the gospel was clearly heard in every language present. As the Dutch missionary Hinne Wagenaar says, the effect of Pentecost is to work away from the dominant centre to the peripheries: ‘In this new community of the Spirit, all that is peripheral, small and unspectacular will have a central place.

The gospel cannot be imposed on others in the garb of a dominant culture; it needs to be translated!’ Just as the nations were scattered after Babel to fulfil their creation mandate, so the great commission of Acts 1.8 begins in Jerusalem and spreads to all nations. The gospel does not obliterate national identity. Rather, it honours nations, great and small, by being translated into their language and becoming part of their culture. Indeed, in Acts 2.9 –11 Luke sets out a mini Table of Nations to emphasise the priority of nations in world mission.

As an account of the church’s mission, Acts doesn’t focus primarily on cities, though they are important. Luke uses a detailed ethnogra-phy of nations because the gospel must reach all nations, nation by nation, cherishing the language and culture of each nation.

Revelation – you will be my peoples

As we look towards Christ’s return, do nations still matter? They matter intensely in the Book of Revelation, so surely they should matter to us. John adapts the fourfold formula of Genesis 10 and uses it seven times in Revelation, each time in a slightly different form.

‘Land’ is replaced by ‘people’, a term that suggests national solidarity. He uses the formula to speak of the church as redeemed ‘from every tribe and language and people and nation (5.9; 7.9), to describe the nations of the world under the dominion of the beast and Babylon (11.9; 13.7; 17.15), and to express the universal nature of the church’s witness to the world, calling them to worship God (10.11; 14.6). 14:6 as the ‘great commission’ of Revelation puts the stress on going ‘to every nation.’ The world is still populated by nations and each one must be reached on its own terms.

Are nations are going to fade away in the New Creation? If so, the concept of nation-hood is outdated and should be abandoned, but not according to Revelation. The vision of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21-22 is a place of nations and peoples, and they all belong to God.

There is a variant reading in Revelation 21.3 and the ESV marginal reading is probably the most reliable: ‘He will dwell with them, and they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them as their God.’ It is more likely that a scribe tried to amend this phrase to conform to OT usage (‘his people’), in which case the original is saying something breathtaking. In the New Creation we will all be God’s peoples together, united in the worship of God and the Lamb but still many nations. The kings of the earth will ‘bring their glory’, the ‘glory and honour of the nations’, into the new city (21.24-26). I take that to mean that everything in our cultural and national lives, including many languages which have been used to glorify God on earth, will carry over into the New Creation.

Finally, John tells us in 22.2 that the leaves of the tree of life ‘were for the healing of the nations’. This is not individual healing, though that will happen. It is explicitly the healing of the nations. Sin destroys nations and pits them against each other, so that they descend into conflict and war, or break up and die.

This vision of healing suggests that the redeemed from all nations will dwell together in peace, each nation enjoying a well-adjusted national life alongside other nations and peoples, just as God designed us to do. Nations are part of the New Jerusalem.

What does this mean for us?

This biblical understanding of nationhood has huge implications for us today. As we approach the EU referendum, we have to examine our motives: do we want to be part of the EU because we believe the ‘anti-nationalist’ narrative that says nations are a thing of the past, or do we want to see the EU reformed back into a community of nations? Do we want to leave out of a sense of nationalist superiority that blames Europe for everything, or out of a desire to operate quietly as one of many nations in the world? Our motivations in the current debate need to be tested by Scripture.

Similarly, in a Scottish referendum, what motivations drive both the Nationalist and Unionist sides of the debate? Is it a patronising superiority on the part of Unionists, or a hatred of Westminster on the part of nationalists? Or is it a genuine desire on the part of Unionists to see the Union flourish, and on the other side a desire on the part of nationalists to see Scotland as a self-governing nation in its own right? In both debates we should question our motives, and banish attitudes and motivations that are unbiblical.

Mission to the world

But the bigger consideration for us as Christians should be the importance of nationhood in our mission to the world. Our mission is to take the gospel to every nation, with a commitment to translate the gospel into the language of that nation, and express it in a way that will be correctly understood in that culture.

We must avoid the error of the lowest common denominator, where we think that the way the gospel is presented in the English-speaking ‘West’ will work in any and every nation. We must not skimp on language study, because people listen, and believe, and worship God best in their heart language.

Humility and criticism

Every nation is to be valued and understood biblically. It doesn’t mean that any culture is above criticism, but it does mean that the incomer must bring the gospel with humility, looking to learn, to understand, to honour what is good, trying not to impose the sins of their own culture while being willing to read the Bible alongside nationals and hear together what it says as it demands change in that particular culture.

The gospel is for every nation, and the Holy Spirit can work in every nation. Nations are still at the heart of the plan of God.