“The kingship of Satan in the under world and upper world are Bible statements; his kingship in the world about us is a Bible fact confirmed by human testimony.”
C. F. Wimberly, Is the Devil a Myth (1913)*
It may be tactless to mention this on Holy Week, but I dislike the increasingly popular slogan “Christ is King!” The most obvious objection is that, if Christ is King, and we presently reside in his kingdom, Christ has a great deal to answer for. The problem of evil is a real problem, and it appears unreal only when one is well fed and comfortably toasting one’s toes before a fragrant fire.
Men in every other degree of terror, grief and vexation see that this world is under the thumb of the dark lord known as Satan. While this world certainly affords some highly suggestive flashes of beauty, love, and joy, the king of this world shows us who is boss by smashing these glimpses of eternity in fairly short order.
You may protest that Christ is King, in spite of all this terror, grief, vexation, and smashing; to which I can only reply that this is a hell of a way to run a kingdom. You may observe that all this terror, grief, vexation and smashing is for my own good, to which I can only reply that I hope you don’t scorch your little pink toes with that nice warm fire. You may point to Christ’s declaration, in John 16:33, that he had “overcome the world,” to which I can only reply that I have overcome many things from which countless others still painfully suffer.
Christ is not under the thumb of Satan, but Satan is undoubtedly King of this world.
That Satan is king of the underworld we know from Revelation 9, where we are told he rules as “king” over the demons of the “bottomless pit.” That Satan is king of the overworld we know from Ephesians 2:2, where he is called “the prince of the power of the air,” and said to have “the children of disobedience” for his subjects. That Satan is king of this world about us is implied by Ephesians 4:12, since he is, no doubt, supreme among “the rulers of the darkness of this world.”
The phrase “prince of the power of the air” is by some through ambiguous. The key to this riddle is found in the story of Job, in which we are told that the children of that unhappy man were crushed when “a great wind” flattened the house in which they were eating and drinking. This calamity came directly on the heels of the destruction of Job’s sheep and shepherds by “the fire of God . . . fallen from heaven.” But it was not God who unleashed that whirlwind and roasted those muttons.
It was the malicious meteorological menace who rules this world.
“And the Lord said unto Satan, all that he [Job] hath is in thy power . . . ” Job 1: 12
Job is, of course, the type of everyman, so everything that you and I have has been given over to the power of the Dark Lord. He is not king of our souls until we submit them, but he is certainly king of everything else.
I do not deny that there is a sense in which the slogan Christ is King is true, or that the slogan can cheer a faint heart in a dark place; but we must never forget the more immediate sense in which the slogan is untrue, or the danger to faith when cheap cheer is disappointed by the malice of Satan.
*) F. Wimberly, Is the Devil a Myth (New York: F. H. Revell Co., 1913), p. 104.
The Orthosphere 
It is theologically incorrect, but the utterance in question does have the pleasant effect of enraging all the right people — most especially The Kindly Ones. So there’s that.
Given all these supposed Hispanic Natural Conservatives (heh) ¡Viva Cristo Rey! FTW.
The Cristeros weren’t exactly known for their intellectual rigour. And they lost (not just to the PRI but also eventually to the Old Gods if current reports from Cartelistan are any indication). But armies of peasants need simple slogans. And the majority of the people on ‘Our’ side, are peasants. They need something both defiant and comforting for when they’re up against a wall.
¡Viva la muerte! perhaps? 🙂
The word slogan originally meant a battle cry, so a slogan is meant for the heart and not the head. If we take Christ is King as a Jacobite sense, and thereby challenge the legitimacy of the powers that presently call the shots, I suppose that is all good. But a battle cry should steel the heart for battle, not suggest that there is nothing to worry about.
I think you may be right about the dog returning to its vomit. Syncretism makes conversion easier, but also less lasting.
Been mulling this over a bit more and perhaps another problem is that Torba may be a good man, and an intelligent man, but clearly he’s rather a philistine. Homo Bassboatus.
Like it or not, one cannot now say or write ‘Christ is King’ without imagery of Torba and his army of good earnest lumpen proles coming along for the rhetorical ride.
It shouldn’t be a problem. But it is. How much that says about Torba and how much it says about me is left as an exercise for the reader.
Torba isn’t lumpen prole. The lumps are People of Walmart types.
BTW, if your religion’s theology requires a 120 IQ and 300 expository pages, then it’s not a religion.
i see it more as a “Christ is King of the Universe and hence, Christ should be the King of this world”. I don’t believe in separation of religion and state because each state has a official religion, a definition of good and evil upon which the laws are based. In our countries, liberalism is this religion. I prefer it to be Christianty.
Being non-American, I did not know the slogan, although the Cristero slogan “Viva Cristo Rey!” is similar. Then, I saw how the usual suspects said that this English slogan was an expression of ethnic hate. Then I saw leaders from my church (the Catholic Church) trying to justify that a traditional Christian slogan was hateful. This is how destroyed Christianity in my country: protesting each time any Christian said something Christian in public. At the same way, all kinds of blasphemiea and attacks are done against Christianity every day and nobody bats and eye. No, I don’t refer to “Allahu Akbar” or “Buddha is the way”, but something along the way that “Christians are a bunch of retarded and pedophiles”. That is ethnic hate, not professing your faith.
Seeing all this, now I feel like saying “Christ is King” every ten seconds. After alll, Messiah means King.
There may be some truth to the charge that “Christ is King” is a slogan of Christian Nationalism. It could mean that Christ is superior to all other religious teachers, and therefore his teachings are superior to all other religious teachings. I don’t see how a professed Christian could think otherwise, but some apparently do. As you say, the official doctrine would seem to be that all religions are equal (which logically means equally false), but Christianity is less equal than the others.
Perhaps my Reformed brother Alan may weigh in at greater length, but the bottom line is: God is sovereign over all, and His kingdom is already breaking into this world, but not yet fully here – we talk about the already / not yet tension, and will one day be fully realized, after Judgment Day, when the New Heaven and the New Earth will be one.
Christ is King. His Kingdom is both here now and coming fully.
Yes, His Kingdom is not of this world. But it’s breaking into this world, and coming fully.
Why not proclaim it. Christ is King!
I may be obtuse, but it seems to me that Christ’s kingdom is withdrawing from this world. The churches are weak, there is no popular awakening, and even nominal Christianity is disappearing from from public life. As I wrote a few days ago, most of the Western elite has gone beyond the halfway house of hypocritical Christianity, and every probable replacement elite is non-Christian. I think we must beware of mistaking wishful thinking for faith.
I don’t dispute any of that.
Very true in the West.
But the church is growing elsewhere.
In any case, even in the West, faithful churches do thrive.
God is growing His kingdom in this world, even if it isn’t always clear to us.
It’s a point of Reformed doctrine, and why we Reformed in particular, along with some Lutherans and Baptists, claim Christ is King.
The church is growing quantitatively in some places, although I am instinctively suspicious of all such numbers. I also wonder why these masses have not turned out any great luminaries. Where there are millions of Christians, one would expect one or two great leaders, saints, theologians, artists, etc. I’m too tired to look up the numbers, but there are probably more Christians in Nigeria than there were in Europe at the time of the Reformation, and yet I know of nothing remarkable coming out of Nigeria. I take St. Augustine’s view when doctrine and experience seem opposed.
Replying to JM, Christianity may be dying, but Resurrection is baked into the cake of Christianity, from the start. I don’t know how it will happen but I don’t think God will abandon everything forever.
Not forever. But we have to get through tomorrow to make it to forever. Talking to a friend yesterday, I said I feel like a man living at a high latitude in late November, Everyone assures me that summer will come again, and I don’t disagree, but I think our immediate problem is our severely depleted woodpile.
i feel the same. Death comes before resurrection, and that is not a nice thing.
Christ Himself also said “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven,” which would otherwise seem pretty clear but apparently is not.
Again, I think it’s difficult to get Christian metaphysics to make sense outside of a Christendom. It’s like saying Christianity is important, but not that important. If you try to square the circle by saying the wholly irredeemable world is Satan’s proving ground for who gets to Heaven, do we sin by making it easier? Should we be making it harder? Should we be birthing souls who may fail the test into it?
This is the “camouflaged nihilism” I wrote about the other day. It is pretending to profess something which, if true, is more important than anything else, but then actually handling it in careless half-assed way. Imagine a man who told you the box he was holding was filled with percussion caps and dynamite, and who then proceeded to spin said box on the end of his finger.
There is a doctrine in Evangelical circles, and perhaps elsewhere, that Satan gained ownnership of the World when Adam fell. Nowhere does Scripture say this…
“…and let him have dominion…”
“Heaven is the Lord’s, and the Heaven of heavens, but the Earth hath He given unto the children of men.”
Bu Paul tells us, “…to whom you yield your members as servants to obey, his servants you are…”
He is the god of thid world because the inhabitanis obey him. Jesus is the rightful king, then.
I like the passage where Paul says we are ambassadors. We get to tell people – diplomatically where possible – that the King will be by shortly to sort things out and that includes you so shouldn’t you address this asap?
I don’t mean to be obstinate, but I gave three scriptural statements that support satanic rule. I readily grant that there are passages that indicate this is not the case. So we are left, at best, with scriptural ambiguity. I say “at best” because Satan was not bluffing when he tempted Christ in the wilderness. Otherwise, Christ would simply have laughed at him.
Does your view on “Christ is King” have any implications for the pre-millennialist, post-millennialist, or amillennialist views of the end times? It strikes me that your view would accord with a pre-millennialist view, but I’m assuming you aren’t a pre-millennialist, so I’m wondering whether I’m off base to even frame it that way?